11 ms·

“Marriage promotion” is a destructive cargo cult

98 points by goblin89 13y ago

Crito 13y ago
This may be the sleep deprivation talking, but the wiki page for "marriage promotion" is damn near incomprehensible, the article is even worse, and furthermore the article seems to assume background on both it and some recent discussion that has apparently been taking place over it. As far as I can divine, it is some sort of idea about giving extra welfare benefits to married people, or withholding them from single people? Is this currently happening? Is anybody that is advocating it anybody that I should care about? Am I missing something that makes this a HN-worthy topic (if it's just general intellectual interest stuff, that's fine, but I can't tell if that is the angle here or not)?
- mooism2 13y ago
  In the UK it is called the Married Couple's Tax Allowance. http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/incometax/married-allow.htm http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/incometax/married-allow.htm It means I pay at least £304/yr more in tax than I would if I was married. Whether you should care about UK tax policy, I don't know.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    As of 2000, the Married Couple's Tax Allowance in the UK only applies if one of the spouses were born before April 6th 1935.
    - ronaldx 13y ago
      For the moment, yes, but it's a headline policy of the governing party to reintroduce it for all married couples.
    - mooism2 13y ago
      Well that's me told. I thought the Tories had brought it back.
- kaybe 13y ago
  Germany gives you the 'Ehegattensplitting' (spouse splitting?), which allows you to tax both incomes according to the tax bracket of the mean. If one partner earns a lot less than the other, you're looking at a lot of money here.
  - judk 13y ago
    The US has the same, except it doesn't work out so generously for the top ~2% of households (earning more than ~$500k/yr)
  - nullc 13y ago
    Here is a visualization of the tax policy (married vs not) in the US system: http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/marriage_penalties_chart.png http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/... If the German policy just lets you use the mean it sounds like it would be free of the effect of creating a penalty for marriage for equal incomes that the US has.
- VLM 13y ago
  I got a great nights sleep so I'll try a short TLDR. Lots of socioeconomic stats are better for married people than single people, therefore some cargo cult believers swap cause and effect and have been pushing marriage as a path out of poverty, also social/economic mobility in the modern USA is a downward-only random function, and social class is stratifying, which makes marriage significantly more risky in the future than in the past, and more so for poor people than (whats left of the) middle or upper classes. Classic hacker themes of confusing cause and effect. Also any time you mention "cargo cult science" all the Feynmanites ears perk up. Also classic hacker theme of extrapolation of past performance into inappropriate future conditions is a disaster. Someone with a lot more time on their hands could take classic hacker themes like the abov and turn them into traditional fairy tales / fables / morality tales, which is unintentionally (probably) what the linked article is doing. I think a smart lawyer with a smart marketing guy could create something like a marriage with all the good parts and none of the bad parts. A little far fetched for a HN startup idea. Something like a small business combined with power of attorney for each co-founder. The marketing guy has the fun task of convincing women that decades of princess fairytale weddings was all a bunch of bull and they really want this newfangled contract.
  - al2o3cr 13y ago
    For fun, note that the same logic fail that produces "marriage will make you richer" also readily produces "marriage will turn you white", which oddly enough even the cargo-culters aren't willing to push. :)
- _delirium 13y ago
  As far as I can tell, the proximate cause of the discussion was a speech a few weeks ago by Marco Rubio, a Republican Senator and seen as a rising star in the party. For the 50th anniversary of LBJ's "War on Poverty", he argued that the biggest thing the government could to do reduce poverty is to promote marriage: http://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=958d06fe-16a3-4e8e-b178-664fc10745bf http://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?... This seems to have produced some revived discussion of a more general initiative by some conservatives (especially social conservatives) to shed the "conservatives don't care about the poor" perception by arguing that certain conservative social policies are in fact poverty-reduction mechanisms, and should be renewed with vigor. Promoting two-parent families is one of the main ones that's seen as a "win-win" strategy: conservatives can put forth a poverty-reduction strategy that also aligns with their other views, allowing them to back away from the more hardline (and favored by the libertarian wing) view that poverty-reduction is just not the government's business at all, while also avoiding a "liberal" approach to it. Here's a recent column from someone favorable towards the position: http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/is-marriage-promotion-possible/ http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/is-marriage-prom..., who also wrote a book proposing a kind of "new conservative" politics that aims to reposition conservatism as addressing the concerns of the working class: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307277801/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0307277801&linkCode=as2&tag=zzggm-20 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307277801/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    You can go a bit further back. For the past few years, there has been a lot of talk about correlation between income inequality and various negative social outcomes. Recently, a number of economists have discovered that if you run the exact same analysis but substitute single motherhood for inequality, you get much stronger correlations. For example: http://www.economics21.org/commentary/great-gastby-curve-revisited-part-1 http://www.economics21.org/commentary/great-gastby-curve-rev... Now the argument which economist sorts are actually making is a more complicated one - an argument by contradiction. Specifically, if (a) inequality mongers believe their analysis is valid and (b) single motherhood is a bigger factor than inequality according to the analysis, then it logically follows that those inequality mongers should focus their efforts on the bigger problem (single motherhood). But obviously an argument by contradiction is too complex for the political process.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  Yeah, this is bad. Great political commentary, but god-awful HN fodder. We pay people to have babies, so people have babies. We create a financial reward for people not to marry, so they don't marry. Film at 11. This entire discussion is just regurgitated political arguments from the 60s, and not much has changed, frankly, except the destruction of the family unit and social fabric in poor families. This author wants to make the case that society is to blame (Gee, never saw that one coming) and that we should all strive to be more compassionate and understanding. He does so by some weird idea that marriage is a contract and that by looking at statistics the other side is confusing correlation with causality. Then he rambles into the idea that promoting marriage for stability is getting things ass-backwards. You can draw your own conclusions here looking at 2 thousand years of history. So there's not much here except for a long apologia for programs that never worked, but it's definitely damned long-winded. All part of a larger narrative in the states regarding income inequality and the poor, which is how the left plans to split the country, continue the divisiveness, and get their guys elected for the next few years or so. So really just more of the same stuff you can find on any politics site. I have no idea why it's reached such prominence on HN.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    Are you saying that the political left wing are planning to raise issues of income equality and the poor and claim that there is an unfair division in society? Well, this is incredible news, and I must say, highly unexpected.
  - pekk 13y ago
    People have babies for reasons which are not at all unique to this place or time, and will have them anyway. People marry or don't marry for reasons which are also independent of governmental policy.
    - anonymoushn 13y ago
      Just to be clear, your stance is that paying people to do something will have no impact on the number of people who choose to do it?
- Spooky23 13y ago
  I think the basis is that if you are poor and have children, there is a sharp penalty for being married, as household income limits for public assistance rule out homes with two working. There were a few folks profiled in our local paper who actually divorced after having surprise triplets in order to qualify for WIC and Medicaid subsidies for the kids. The effect of these policies is pretty clear, especially among African Americans. Statistically, they were the most married population pre-LBJ. Today, not so much.
ronaldx 13y ago
My housemate works as a marriage registrar. I just asked him what percentage of marriages in our local area are primarily for visa exchange purposes. He said "a majority". I think this article makes an assumption that it's normal/preferable to get married. It misses the fact that there are now very few reasons for a happy, two-earner household with children to actually get married. Marriage papers are in no way a required part of a stable and loving relationship. People don't often get married today unless there's some real political benefit to them: inheritance is becoming less important and free movement of labour is now one of the major motivators.
- kenjackson 13y ago
  The amount if paperwork required to get married is quite small, compared to something like buying a car. The overall cost of getting married is small. The signal if one person in the relationship refuses to get married is probably strong. If both people refuse to get married it is a non issue, but I suspect that is still not the norm.
  - pekk 13y ago
    The cost of getting married isn't small when you include the probability and cost of divorce. (Or the consequences of not getting a divorce when everyone is miserable and fighting)
    - beagle3 13y ago
      Those costs are associated with a civil union. In most western countries, and in many states, having had kids together and/or a joint bank account is enough to have the same divorce consequences in separation. More info in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage
      - Crito 13y ago
        Only 9 states still have common-law marriage, most that have historically recognized it have since thankfully abolished it. Of course if you have kids, you still have to worry about child support, which can be very problematic in several states, but that is a whole other can of worms.
etanazir 13y ago
It is typically more efficient to share spaces like a kitchen than for each to have their own.
- vidarh 13y ago
  That is a reason for shared living spaces, not for marriage.
- VLM 13y ago
  Carried to its logical extreme you end up with some kind of polyamorous tribe. Not that I'm complaining.
Flimm 13y ago
The comments on that article are definitely worth reading.
twoodfin 13y ago
Thus post seems to be arguing against programs that would push people into marriages they'd otherwise avoid via financial or other incentives. I read the "marriage promotion" agenda more charitably: Marriage is hard. Financial pressures make it harder. Reduce those pressures and more marriages are likely to be successful. And while I can't cite research here, the author himself acknowledges that a successful marriage is a desirable state for many people. He emphasizes the additional risks involved — What if your inlaws get sick? — but the addition of an earner/caretaker/constant companion also provides a hedge against a variety of existing economic, health and social risks.
- pekk 13y ago
  Why is it more important to subsidize successful marriages than successful lives in general?
busterarm 13y ago
Not entirely unrelated to the discussion, it's the usual time of year where I get furious about the large financial penalty that I pay the government for being single and without child. I want to punch any public figure in the face who thinks "promoting marriage" is a good idea because "promoting marriage" is already a cultural institution signed into law. I've already worked out the math: If I could manage a cheap enough birth or adoption, I would save a significant amount of money by having a crotchfruit. Of course the former requires a willing co-conspirator. I used to work with a guy who made $14/hr and his wife didn't work and they had 7 kids. For years I couldn't understand how he could possibly make ends meet until I looked at the tax credits he was getting and understood that "economies of scale" kind of works for feeding and clothing children. Edit: Rayiner, since it won't let me reply to you on a dead topic. Married people can and do cheat on their taxes all the time. I know at least a dozen married couples where both file as single and only one claims the dependents. As for social security, the future there is looking pretty grim and the intergenerational continuity concept breaks down (and already has) when an unusually large older generations' votes and financial means allow them to skew the balance in their favor. This idea that I'm selfish because I haven't had kids yet is one that makes me angry and the linked article actually touches on many of the reasons...to the effect of: "because you were born poor and haven't been able to become successful enough to be desirable to mate with, you deserve to continue to be poor."
- rayiner 13y ago
  For a lot of people, getting married results in a tax penalty nor a benefit. As for not having kids, our society subsidizes you, not the other way around. In direct ways, kids will grow into adults that pay your social security and medical taxes that you draw on when old. Even without such programs, our economy is built on assumptions of intergenerational continuity. The Facebook stock in your 401k is priced assuming there will be continued generations of 13-25 year olds to sell advertising to. Finally, raising and educating a kid that contributes more to society than they consume is, for the time being until everything is automated, an act that generates a large positive externality to society.
- kbenson 13y ago
  Married people can and do cheat on their taxes all the time. I know at least a dozen married couples where both file as single and only one claims the dependents. Married people are allowed to file separately, and the law is that only one can claim each dependent. Maybe I'm misinterpreting your statement, but I'm not sure how that's cheating on taxes. the intergenerational continuity concept breaks down (and already has) when an unusually large older generations' votes and financial means allow them to skew the balance in their favor. How does that break down intergenerational continuity? This idea that I'm selfish because I haven't had kids yet You seem to be making this very personal. I'm not sure where you get that from the official sources. Simply put, having a younger generation is beneficial to society. It's also a strain on those families that decide to have children. As a society we subsidize them because they provide a long-term benefit. I've already worked out the math: If I could manage a cheap enough birth or adoption, I would save a significant amount of money by having a crotchfruit. Of course the former requires a willing co-conspirator. I suspect you are vastly underestimating the actual costs of children. For example, the cost of daycare (unless you want to forego one of your incomes) is ~$1000/month where I live. Additionally, the requirements for certain jobs are not longer acceptable, which limits opportunities to some degree. If you are needed to help raise children at home, working for a startup that requires long hours or a job that has you away from home for significant time most likely won't work out well for either your personal or professional life, take your pick.
rayiner 13y ago
This is an unpopularly conservative concept, but I think the mainstream view of social welfare ignores the importance of family structures in maintaining social order in poor societies. Its hard not to look around here in Wilmington and not see the gang prevalence as being connected to the power vacuum that results from crumbling family authority. Also, I've begun to resent people who say single parenthood is just as good. Single parents shouldn't bear the social stigma they have in the past, but going as far to say that having one parent is just as good as two both ignores the empirical evidence and common sense. If I left my wife tomorrow, my daughter would have the same outcomes? Really?
- pekk 13y ago
  What does "crumbling family authority" result from? And are you positive that is an accurately described root cause and not a symptom?
deleted 13y ago
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- deleted 13y ago
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midas007 13y ago
A friend of mine has a great idea about how to approach marriage: don't unless you've dated for several years AND want to have (or already have) kids. If either condition fails, don't. Just don't.
- _delirium 13y ago
  That's pretty common in my social circles. Could just be a Scandinavian thing, but mostly people get married when some legally relevant change in their lives is coming up. The two most common are having kids, or moving to another country where visa issues might be more complex if you're unmarried. It's not the only time people get married, and I do know married couples who don't have kids and don't plan to move abroad. But most of the couples I know who don't fall into those categories (including some who've been together for many years) haven't gotten married. To be honest even a number with kids haven't gotten married, despite still being together and raising the kids together.
seanhandley 13y ago
Take this discussion to MumsNet or something? I don't see how it's befitting Hacker News.
andyl 13y ago
Marriage is an anachronism - a form of oppression at odds with the consumer society that we worship. Hey - time for my Soma!
patrickg_zill 13y ago
The thing is, that marriage (Marriage 1.0) of say 50 years ago, is not the same as marriage today (Marriage 2.0). The laws and societal norms are different. So it is not clear then, if the incentives to be married have changed (I think they have, based on my observation); if some part of the "math" is different, then, that would explain why the marriage rates are different.
maerF0x0 13y ago
It surprises me that such a logical author thinks that good marriages have much (if anything) to do with picking the "right person" so to speak. It seems to me that: 1) Its damn near impossible to guess at what a person will be like 10-50 years from now. On some level its a crap shoot, and marriage is about learning to love whom they become. Hopefully that plays out on both sides of the coin (each spouse continues to love whom the other becomes). 2) "Good" and "Bad" marriage mostly has to do with how people fight/interact (see stuff by John Gottman). People will always fight over money, kids, laundry duties etc, but their satisfaction in the relationship will have more to do with how they fight, than what they fight over. 3) Individuals have total control over whom they fall in love with. IIRC the cascading brain chemicals involved with love that override logic from occurring properly: http://www.mikelee.org/the-science-of-love-chemicals-and-romance.html http://www.mikelee.org/the-science-of-love-chemicals-and-rom... .
yetanotherphd 13y ago
I agree that statistical correlations of marriage with various outcomes are very weak evidence of a causal effect. However, I hope that people will apply this logic to ideas that come from both the left and right, e.g. the NYC ad campaign against teen pregnancy. The same applies to the general principal that the government should not promote particular lifestyle. If girls want to get pregnant at 18, how is that any more the government's business than if they want to not get married?

98 points by goblin89 13y ago

Crito 13y ago

This may be the sleep deprivation talking, but the wiki page for "marriage promotion" is damn near incomprehensible, the article is even worse, and furthermore the article seems to assume background on both it and some recent discussion that has apparently been taking place over it. As far as I can divine, it is some sort of idea about giving extra welfare benefits to married people, or withholding them from single people? Is this currently happening? Is anybody that is advocating it anybody that I should care about? Am I missing something that makes this a HN-worthy topic (if it's just general intellectual interest stuff, that's fine, but I can't tell if that is the angle here or not)?

mooism2 13y ago
In the UK it is called the Married Couple's Tax Allowance. http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/incometax/married-allow.htm http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/incometax/married-allow.htm It means I pay at least £304/yr more in tax than I would if I was married. Whether you should care about UK tax policy, I don't know.
- vidarh 13y ago
  As of 2000, the Married Couple's Tax Allowance in the UK only applies if one of the spouses were born before April 6th 1935.
  - ronaldx 13y ago
    For the moment, yes, but it's a headline policy of the governing party to reintroduce it for all married couples.
  - mooism2 13y ago
    Well that's me told. I thought the Tories had brought it back.
kaybe 13y ago
Germany gives you the 'Ehegattensplitting' (spouse splitting?), which allows you to tax both incomes according to the tax bracket of the mean. If one partner earns a lot less than the other, you're looking at a lot of money here.
- judk 13y ago
  The US has the same, except it doesn't work out so generously for the top ~2% of households (earning more than ~$500k/yr)
- nullc 13y ago
  Here is a visualization of the tax policy (married vs not) in the US system: http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/marriage_penalties_chart.png http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/... If the German policy just lets you use the mean it sounds like it would be free of the effect of creating a penalty for marriage for equal incomes that the US has.
VLM 13y ago
I got a great nights sleep so I'll try a short TLDR. Lots of socioeconomic stats are better for married people than single people, therefore some cargo cult believers swap cause and effect and have been pushing marriage as a path out of poverty, also social/economic mobility in the modern USA is a downward-only random function, and social class is stratifying, which makes marriage significantly more risky in the future than in the past, and more so for poor people than (whats left of the) middle or upper classes. Classic hacker themes of confusing cause and effect. Also any time you mention "cargo cult science" all the Feynmanites ears perk up. Also classic hacker theme of extrapolation of past performance into inappropriate future conditions is a disaster. Someone with a lot more time on their hands could take classic hacker themes like the abov and turn them into traditional fairy tales / fables / morality tales, which is unintentionally (probably) what the linked article is doing. I think a smart lawyer with a smart marketing guy could create something like a marriage with all the good parts and none of the bad parts. A little far fetched for a HN startup idea. Something like a small business combined with power of attorney for each co-founder. The marketing guy has the fun task of convincing women that decades of princess fairytale weddings was all a bunch of bull and they really want this newfangled contract.
- al2o3cr 13y ago
  For fun, note that the same logic fail that produces "marriage will make you richer" also readily produces "marriage will turn you white", which oddly enough even the cargo-culters aren't willing to push. :)
_delirium 13y ago
As far as I can tell, the proximate cause of the discussion was a speech a few weeks ago by Marco Rubio, a Republican Senator and seen as a rising star in the party. For the 50th anniversary of LBJ's "War on Poverty", he argued that the biggest thing the government could to do reduce poverty is to promote marriage: http://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=958d06fe-16a3-4e8e-b178-664fc10745bf http://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?... This seems to have produced some revived discussion of a more general initiative by some conservatives (especially social conservatives) to shed the "conservatives don't care about the poor" perception by arguing that certain conservative social policies are in fact poverty-reduction mechanisms, and should be renewed with vigor. Promoting two-parent families is one of the main ones that's seen as a "win-win" strategy: conservatives can put forth a poverty-reduction strategy that also aligns with their other views, allowing them to back away from the more hardline (and favored by the libertarian wing) view that poverty-reduction is just not the government's business at all, while also avoiding a "liberal" approach to it. Here's a recent column from someone favorable towards the position: http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/is-marriage-promotion-possible/ http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/is-marriage-prom..., who also wrote a book proposing a kind of "new conservative" politics that aims to reposition conservatism as addressing the concerns of the working class: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307277801/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0307277801&linkCode=as2&tag=zzggm-20 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307277801/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  You can go a bit further back. For the past few years, there has been a lot of talk about correlation between income inequality and various negative social outcomes. Recently, a number of economists have discovered that if you run the exact same analysis but substitute single motherhood for inequality, you get much stronger correlations. For example: http://www.economics21.org/commentary/great-gastby-curve-revisited-part-1 http://www.economics21.org/commentary/great-gastby-curve-rev... Now the argument which economist sorts are actually making is a more complicated one - an argument by contradiction. Specifically, if (a) inequality mongers believe their analysis is valid and (b) single motherhood is a bigger factor than inequality according to the analysis, then it logically follows that those inequality mongers should focus their efforts on the bigger problem (single motherhood). But obviously an argument by contradiction is too complex for the political process.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Yeah, this is bad. Great political commentary, but god-awful HN fodder. We pay people to have babies, so people have babies. We create a financial reward for people not to marry, so they don't marry. Film at 11. This entire discussion is just regurgitated political arguments from the 60s, and not much has changed, frankly, except the destruction of the family unit and social fabric in poor families. This author wants to make the case that society is to blame (Gee, never saw that one coming) and that we should all strive to be more compassionate and understanding. He does so by some weird idea that marriage is a contract and that by looking at statistics the other side is confusing correlation with causality. Then he rambles into the idea that promoting marriage for stability is getting things ass-backwards. You can draw your own conclusions here looking at 2 thousand years of history. So there's not much here except for a long apologia for programs that never worked, but it's definitely damned long-winded. All part of a larger narrative in the states regarding income inequality and the poor, which is how the left plans to split the country, continue the divisiveness, and get their guys elected for the next few years or so. So really just more of the same stuff you can find on any politics site. I have no idea why it's reached such prominence on HN.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  Are you saying that the political left wing are planning to raise issues of income equality and the poor and claim that there is an unfair division in society? Well, this is incredible news, and I must say, highly unexpected.
- pekk 13y ago
  People have babies for reasons which are not at all unique to this place or time, and will have them anyway. People marry or don't marry for reasons which are also independent of governmental policy.
  - anonymoushn 13y ago
    Just to be clear, your stance is that paying people to do something will have no impact on the number of people who choose to do it?
Spooky23 13y ago
I think the basis is that if you are poor and have children, there is a sharp penalty for being married, as household income limits for public assistance rule out homes with two working. There were a few folks profiled in our local paper who actually divorced after having surprise triplets in order to qualify for WIC and Medicaid subsidies for the kids. The effect of these policies is pretty clear, especially among African Americans. Statistically, they were the most married population pre-LBJ. Today, not so much.

ronaldx 13y ago

My housemate works as a marriage registrar. I just asked him what percentage of marriages in our local area are primarily for visa exchange purposes. He said "a majority". I think this article makes an assumption that it's normal/preferable to get married. It misses the fact that there are now very few reasons for a happy, two-earner household with children to actually get married. Marriage papers are in no way a required part of a stable and loving relationship. People don't often get married today unless there's some real political benefit to them: inheritance is becoming less important and free movement of labour is now one of the major motivators.

kenjackson 13y ago
The amount if paperwork required to get married is quite small, compared to something like buying a car. The overall cost of getting married is small. The signal if one person in the relationship refuses to get married is probably strong. If both people refuse to get married it is a non issue, but I suspect that is still not the norm.
- pekk 13y ago
  The cost of getting married isn't small when you include the probability and cost of divorce. (Or the consequences of not getting a divorce when everyone is miserable and fighting)
  - beagle3 13y ago
    Those costs are associated with a civil union. In most western countries, and in many states, having had kids together and/or a joint bank account is enough to have the same divorce consequences in separation. More info in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage
    - Crito 13y ago
      Only 9 states still have common-law marriage, most that have historically recognized it have since thankfully abolished it. Of course if you have kids, you still have to worry about child support, which can be very problematic in several states, but that is a whole other can of worms.

etanazir 13y ago

It is typically more efficient to share spaces like a kitchen than for each to have their own.

vidarh 13y ago
That is a reason for shared living spaces, not for marriage.
VLM 13y ago
Carried to its logical extreme you end up with some kind of polyamorous tribe. Not that I'm complaining.

Flimm 13y ago

The comments on that article are definitely worth reading.

twoodfin 13y ago

Thus post seems to be arguing against programs that would push people into marriages they'd otherwise avoid via financial or other incentives. I read the "marriage promotion" agenda more charitably: Marriage is hard. Financial pressures make it harder. Reduce those pressures and more marriages are likely to be successful. And while I can't cite research here, the author himself acknowledges that a successful marriage is a desirable state for many people. He emphasizes the additional risks involved — What if your inlaws get sick? — but the addition of an earner/caretaker/constant companion also provides a hedge against a variety of existing economic, health and social risks.

pekk 13y ago
Why is it more important to subsidize successful marriages than successful lives in general?

busterarm 13y ago

Not entirely unrelated to the discussion, it's the usual time of year where I get furious about the large financial penalty that I pay the government for being single and without child. I want to punch any public figure in the face who thinks "promoting marriage" is a good idea because "promoting marriage" is already a cultural institution signed into law. I've already worked out the math: If I could manage a cheap enough birth or adoption, I would save a significant amount of money by having a crotchfruit. Of course the former requires a willing co-conspirator. I used to work with a guy who made $14/hr and his wife didn't work and they had 7 kids. For years I couldn't understand how he could possibly make ends meet until I looked at the tax credits he was getting and understood that "economies of scale" kind of works for feeding and clothing children. Edit: Rayiner, since it won't let me reply to you on a dead topic. Married people can and do cheat on their taxes all the time. I know at least a dozen married couples where both file as single and only one claims the dependents. As for social security, the future there is looking pretty grim and the intergenerational continuity concept breaks down (and already has) when an unusually large older generations' votes and financial means allow them to skew the balance in their favor. This idea that I'm selfish because I haven't had kids yet is one that makes me angry and the linked article actually touches on many of the reasons...to the effect of: "because you were born poor and haven't been able to become successful enough to be desirable to mate with, you deserve to continue to be poor."

rayiner 13y ago
For a lot of people, getting married results in a tax penalty nor a benefit. As for not having kids, our society subsidizes you, not the other way around. In direct ways, kids will grow into adults that pay your social security and medical taxes that you draw on when old. Even without such programs, our economy is built on assumptions of intergenerational continuity. The Facebook stock in your 401k is priced assuming there will be continued generations of 13-25 year olds to sell advertising to. Finally, raising and educating a kid that contributes more to society than they consume is, for the time being until everything is automated, an act that generates a large positive externality to society.
kbenson 13y ago
Married people can and do cheat on their taxes all the time. I know at least a dozen married couples where both file as single and only one claims the dependents. Married people are allowed to file separately, and the law is that only one can claim each dependent. Maybe I'm misinterpreting your statement, but I'm not sure how that's cheating on taxes. the intergenerational continuity concept breaks down (and already has) when an unusually large older generations' votes and financial means allow them to skew the balance in their favor. How does that break down intergenerational continuity? This idea that I'm selfish because I haven't had kids yet You seem to be making this very personal. I'm not sure where you get that from the official sources. Simply put, having a younger generation is beneficial to society. It's also a strain on those families that decide to have children. As a society we subsidize them because they provide a long-term benefit. I've already worked out the math: If I could manage a cheap enough birth or adoption, I would save a significant amount of money by having a crotchfruit. Of course the former requires a willing co-conspirator. I suspect you are vastly underestimating the actual costs of children. For example, the cost of daycare (unless you want to forego one of your incomes) is ~$1000/month where I live. Additionally, the requirements for certain jobs are not longer acceptable, which limits opportunities to some degree. If you are needed to help raise children at home, working for a startup that requires long hours or a job that has you away from home for significant time most likely won't work out well for either your personal or professional life, take your pick.

rayiner 13y ago

This is an unpopularly conservative concept, but I think the mainstream view of social welfare ignores the importance of family structures in maintaining social order in poor societies. Its hard not to look around here in Wilmington and not see the gang prevalence as being connected to the power vacuum that results from crumbling family authority. Also, I've begun to resent people who say single parenthood is just as good. Single parents shouldn't bear the social stigma they have in the past, but going as far to say that having one parent is just as good as two both ignores the empirical evidence and common sense. If I left my wife tomorrow, my daughter would have the same outcomes? Really?

pekk 13y ago
What does "crumbling family authority" result from? And are you positive that is an accurately described root cause and not a symptom?

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midas007 13y ago

A friend of mine has a great idea about how to approach marriage: don't unless you've dated for several years AND want to have (or already have) kids. If either condition fails, don't. Just don't.

_delirium 13y ago
That's pretty common in my social circles. Could just be a Scandinavian thing, but mostly people get married when some legally relevant change in their lives is coming up. The two most common are having kids, or moving to another country where visa issues might be more complex if you're unmarried. It's not the only time people get married, and I do know married couples who don't have kids and don't plan to move abroad. But most of the couples I know who don't fall into those categories (including some who've been together for many years) haven't gotten married. To be honest even a number with kids haven't gotten married, despite still being together and raising the kids together.

seanhandley 13y ago

Take this discussion to MumsNet or something? I don't see how it's befitting Hacker News.

andyl 13y ago

Marriage is an anachronism - a form of oppression at odds with the consumer society that we worship. Hey - time for my Soma!

patrickg_zill 13y ago

The thing is, that marriage (Marriage 1.0) of say 50 years ago, is not the same as marriage today (Marriage 2.0). The laws and societal norms are different. So it is not clear then, if the incentives to be married have changed (I think they have, based on my observation); if some part of the "math" is different, then, that would explain why the marriage rates are different.

maerF0x0 13y ago

It surprises me that such a logical author thinks that good marriages have much (if anything) to do with picking the "right person" so to speak. It seems to me that: 1) Its damn near impossible to guess at what a person will be like 10-50 years from now. On some level its a crap shoot, and marriage is about learning to love whom they become. Hopefully that plays out on both sides of the coin (each spouse continues to love whom the other becomes). 2) "Good" and "Bad" marriage mostly has to do with how people fight/interact (see stuff by John Gottman). People will always fight over money, kids, laundry duties etc, but their satisfaction in the relationship will have more to do with how they fight, than what they fight over. 3) Individuals have total control over whom they fall in love with. IIRC the cascading brain chemicals involved with love that override logic from occurring properly: http://www.mikelee.org/the-science-of-love-chemicals-and-romance.html http://www.mikelee.org/the-science-of-love-chemicals-and-rom... .

yetanotherphd 13y ago

I agree that statistical correlations of marriage with various outcomes are very weak evidence of a causal effect. However, I hope that people will apply this logic to ideas that come from both the left and right, e.g. the NYC ad campaign against teen pregnancy. The same applies to the general principal that the government should not promote particular lifestyle. If girls want to get pregnant at 18, how is that any more the government's business than if they want to not get married?