Money is a huge stressor in relationships. Misogyny is still a huge thing (to my utter surprise honestly). Abuse, etc. Options for financial stability to escape these things I would suspect to contribute as well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22609334-our-kids
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50124402-the-upswing
One thing I want to mention here is that it seems that social effects come before economic effects. People go through social change and then the economics follow later. That’s the one thing I would take away from the books/talks. Somewhat ironic to many here.
This belief is oddly common, considering it has no basis in reality. The share of adults living in households with sub-middle-class incomes has only grown by 4% since 1971.[0] The share of adults living in upper-class households grew by more (5%)! And this even as the number of single-adult households has soared[1], reducing the average number of earners per household!
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america... [1]https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2011/12/14/barely-...
1 - https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2... 2 - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
That “flat” wage is accounting for inflation according to your own link. So not only would a single earner be doing just as good today as back then, adding a second income means they are raking in twice the spending power as back then.
The only thing that has changed are expectations. People want way bigger houses, nicer cars, computers, smart phones, more meat, dental care, better medical care, etc. Worst of all (from a financial perspective), they want both of their average kids to spend 4 years at an expensive university.
Expensive only because it's been allowed to become expensive. Decades ago it was normal for a good university to be nearly free or at least quite affordably by the student working part time to pay their way.
> dental care, better medical care
People "want" health care. I mean of course, but it's not a whim, it's a basic necessity. Which like the university, was very affordable to nearly everyone decades ago.
Not sure people want bigger houses either, every housing topic on HN is full of desire for smaller apartments to get built.
Here's a few graphs that show this more explicitly: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/gregschoofs/how-much-co...
Your data only represents "married couples with children under 18"--a (shrinking) minority of households. By definition it does not account for the dramatic rise in single-adult households.
Less individual freedom, greater direct economic dependency on others in your group, and also the threat of ostracization, excommunication, and destitution if you go against its rules. Basically, there are extremely high cost/stakes associated with going it on your own.
But on the other side there are also good things that come from greater direct interdependency, like perhaps less individual alienation and a greater sense of shared purpose, and access to community resources when you follow the prescribed rules.
E.g. money gets shielded by community institutions (such as local religious organizations) that are harder for elites to steal from than individual peasants, and then those act as a kind of social safety net in hard times. Extended families/clans build social bonds through e.g. marriage and baptism, and help each-other.
Often there are severe social problems in rural peasant societies: alcoholism, domestic violence, seasonal migrant labor keeping people away from home much of the year, corruption, ..., but people have also learned to be tough vs. some kinds of outside threats. But large waves in the world economy (or a large natural disaster or the like) also can overwhelm those defenses.
However these come at the expense of many liberties (i.e. religious) that are held as important in the more developed world. It's not clear that loss of such personal liberties would be an improvement in developed societies, even if it reduced the nominal divorce rate.
When there is a trade off, who should get to make the decisions about where to strike the balance?
A significant proportion of people in the US seem to pine for the days when homosexuality was taboo and illegal, women could be beaten or raped by their husbands (and children by their fathers) and it was treated as no one else’s business, non-white people were kept out of the neighborhood and interracial marriage was frowned on if not illegal, pre-marital sex was encouraged for men but made women into “sluts”, middle/high school students received no education about basic human biology/anatomy, rape victims were forced to deliver their rapists’ babies, most professional jobs were reserved for white men, etc. But hey, low divorce rates!
New normal can easily be pervasive dysfunction. When dysfunction becomes pervasive, it is also perceived as normal by people inside that society.
> The notion that social anomie, abuse and violence is a simply unescapable "fact" about late modern societies is baseless.
These were not so much anomies as taboo to talk about if it is happening to you. They were seen as private issues that should have stayed private and if you did talked about it, you was the bad one. Nevertheless, some statistics are available - for example domestic murders. Those went down. Some anonymous statistics. People who went through it in the past and did talked about it, their children remembering and talking about it later. The way domestic violence is portrayed in media - whether it is shown as something justifiable and ok or not.
When I was child, there was no domestic violence around me. Then I grew into adult and people started to talk more openly in front of me. Turned out, there was in fact domestic violence among adults I knew as child ... except I was protected from it.
Whether it qualified as "epidemic" I don't know.
Seriously, people of all classes were also willfully blind to sexual abuse for years and that includes abuse by priests.
Not really. This was a big part of why people were so vicious during the Protestant Reformation. You don't just have people buried up to their necks and then trampled by horses because you disagree about points of scripture.
But (b) sure this also applies to upper middle class people across “the West” as of not very long ago. It’s not that every household was full of abusers, but it was treated by the public as a private matter, not talked about, and much more widespread than publicly recognized.
Public opinion tells us little about real-world behavior. The whole point of OP is that the upper-middle class liberal elites are not practicing what they preach to the rubes and proles.
My claim is that “low divorce rates” historically often masked widespread abuse and unhappiness in stressed (even broken) marriages which were continued due to social pressure, not always for the best.
* * *
As for the article, this causal claim is wildly speculative bullshit:
"The educated class decides cohabiting partnerships are just as valid and important as marriage. And they also believe it’s okay to walk away at a moment’s notice from a cohabiting relationship. ¶ Poor and working-class people follow suit. To the detriment of themselves and their children."
The problem working-class people have is not bad “elite” role models, but a lack of money and good stable jobs, limited parental leave, a lack of cheap childcare options, a corrupt and exploitative criminal justice system, etc.
The supporting evidence presented in TFA is some papers about how people find newspaper op-eds persuasive, are impressed by qualifications when reading public policy recommendations, and choose their high heel shoe height based on local trends when moving to a rich neighborhood; extrapolating from this to young working-class parents separating from their partners because “elites” say it is okay is a ridiculous stretch. Especially when the young women directly quoted said clearly why they broke up. Occam’s razor says we should listen to what they say instead of inventing some secret reason without any direct evidence.
> When there is a trade off, who should get to make the decisions about where to strike the balance?
Of course the Supreme Court when concerning anything involving the government making an establishment of any religion.
The US isn't Saudi Arabia. As much as it's any American's right to practice the religion of their choosing, it's not in any religion's right to deny any individual - even in their religion - their individual liberties, or to impose their religion upon a person of another or no religion.
There is nothing wrong with religion as a framework for teaching people about their social obligations, but it's hardly the only way to achieve that.
For so-called poorer countries, they are differently structured. It's tough to compare their family units with our rich nations.
But that’s exactly the point! Prior to the 1960s revolution in social norms, families in poor countries weren’t structured all that differently than ones in the US.
I’m no Reaganite, but the fact is that the stuff the old “family values” conservatives said is pretty much the same thing my Asian immigrant parents told me growing up.
Meanwhile, the data shows that Asian Americans who grow up in the bottom 20% have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 20% as adults. For white kids it’s just 11%. That’s a really big coincidence to hand wave away.
The crazy successful asian immigrants are mostly those who came recently, and who are bluntly the best and brightest of Asia coming to America for a better life due to US policy attracting the very best. Just like the above conversation, you only think of one slice of data to arrive at your conclusion.
Men who don’t feel connected to a clear path of ascension become desperate and often either dangerous or losers.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the increasing number of men who feel they have “fallen off the path”. Could be scary
They will probably seek revenge against the social norms and classes which alienated them. History tends to repeat itself.
You can make a fair argument that the bottom 50% haven’t gotten their share of productivity growth, but that doesn’t explain why social indicators among the bottom quantile have gotten so much worse.
It's grown for every group used in that breakout, but while it breaks out the upper income groups on relatively fine categories, it groups the bottom half as one category.
(It's useful for the graph's original purpose of discussing top-weighted inequality, it's not useful for the argument you are trying to make with it.)
And education, housing, and health costs has sky-rocketed, number of "essential services" to pay for (mobile phone, internet, severan "rentier" subscriptions) has increased, while job stability and availability for working and middle class has plummeted...
But yes, the top 10%, the types to usually post at HN, never had it better.
I agree the top 10% have poor insight into what life is like for everyone else, but that cuts both ways. I think there’s a real misperception of what income is necessary to maintain a similar quality of life to the past.
Because Germany doesn't treat non-college graduates working class people as "losers".
Germany also has a quite solid social protection, not a cut throat environment where tons of people are a medical bill away from homeless.
Neither does the United States? Not sure where you're getting this idea from. Most people I know revere trades as they're a known way to make great money without a degree. And, anecdotally speaking, I've managed to get great jobs as a software engineer without a degree. We treat non-college graduates who don't try to ascend above retail or fast-food as losers - and for good reason.
What?! The labor market has been so strong over the past decade that economists started to wonder if previous paradigms no longer apply (i.e. Phillips curve).
How does the gutting of the middle class harm stability of working class families?
yes, this is why I couldn't quite be convinced of the thesis being proposed here. Or at the very least, they way they try to describe the "marketing" of being in a faithful marriage runs counter to the reality. While the situation of "deadbeat dad becomes alcoholic, won't get jobs, and cheats" is not an uncommon cause of divorce, the more common narrative pushes it as a liberation of women's right. Less about a man breaking away to be free and more about a woman not being trapped.
That above deadbeat stereotype has more become the "violent domestic abuser" type as of late. So divorce is a way to turn an absolute nightmare of a situation into emotional stability in exchange for what will likely be financial hardship. It turns a bad into slightly less bad, not a potentially patchful good into a bad.
Or at least, that's how society markets it. I don't have hard sources and admit these are just the notions I feel have risen over 3 decades of media consumption.
> It used to be high-status to hold a job and take care of your family. Not so much anymore.
As though it’s ever been considered high-status to have crap pay and deal with abusive bosses and coworkers. Ask the really high-status people whether it was.
You need recordings to be able to review interactions for who is more in the right, telling the employee they need to turn off FB and get on with work seems like it management would say it’s reasonable and worker might say it’s overbearing.
> Lack of money is certainly a contributing cause, as we will see, but rarely the only factor. It is usually the young father’s criminal behavior, the spells of incarceration that so often follow, a pattern of intimate violence, his chronic infidelity, and an inability to leave drugs and alcohol alone that cause relationships to falter and die.
Without seeming to make any sort of connection that poverty is a causative factor in every single one of these. Poor people are more likely to commit crimes of desperation. Poor people are over-policed when compared to middle-or-upper class people. Poverty makes it more difficult to escape domestic abuse. (Idk about the infidelity one). Drugs & alcohol are maladaptive coping methods that many people use to escape the reality of their daily lives - which are much worse when you're poor.
But y'know, that doesn't fit into his worldview that the dissolution of "family values" is the root cause of all this.
You know what I saw in rich kids?
Lots of drug use, stealing, petty vandalism and violence.
I just rarely saw them suffer any consequences for it.
"Crime" is a function of poverty in so much as those punished for committing it are poor.
People don't need money, but they desperately need sense of agency and entertainment and lack of money makes fulfilling those core needs in legal and moral manner super hard.
You will find across many eras and cultures in the last two millennia that the poorest members of the society are the most vulnerable members of society and the most likely to be punished for committing crimes. If you still don't believe me, read this paper for an in-depth analysis that controls for many factors: https://web.worldbank.org/archive/website01241/WEB/IMAGES/IN...
Laws are made by those with power. In today's society, power comes in large part from wealth - that's the foundation of capitalism. The objective of capitalism is to accrue capital, and our laws and police system are set up to protect the wealthy and their wealth.
That's why graffiti is punishable by ten years in prison. Stealing a week's worth of groceries can mean years in prison. In contrast, the penalty for illegally evicting a renter, rendering them homeless, is about two or three months rent, and no prison time.
Not even close to accurate, unless you're running off with a cartful of steaks, which might push you into criminal territory. Most shoplifting is not even a misdemeanor, just a civil infractions. Criminal charges require hundreds or thousands of dollars and usually multiple offenses to get more serious than probation.
I imagine this explains the correlation between poor minority neighborhoods during the crack epidemic or between the depressed rural areas and the opioid epidemic now.
I suggest reading the book "Manufacturing Consent" to get an understanding of how expectations are shaped by mass media.
Just like there was a concerted effort to create public support for war (WW1/WW2/Vietnam/etc.), there are concerted efforts to shape public opinion and create expectations within our broader culture about morals/values/etc. Sometimes it's explicit, and often times it's implicit and picked up via signaling cues (i.e. high status reporter says X, to go against X would mean no more invites to fancy dinner parties)
The last conclusion is a little off. Everybody who expresses any opinion is describing "his perspective of what the world thinks, based on his interactions, based on what he chooses to read, listen to, etc". That doesn't mean they can't also coincide with a general trend, for example "societal expectations" at large.
The glaring piece missing from this analysis is the psychology of the young men themselves.
Raising two young men myself, I’m blown away by how powerful cultivating intrinsic motivation is. My eldest just went from constant gaming/sleeping/hiding in his room to working a full-time job, launching a side hustle, and enrolling in classes.
Yes, my modeling & encouragement mattered. But the fulcrum was him accepting that living up to other people’s expectation in high school had left him tired, depressed, and lost.
The author has clearly identified that young man lack a goal worthy of their efforts.
He’s just completely ignored intrinsic motivation and the power of cultivating it.
I don’t think that’s an accident. I think our entire approach to young men as a society ignores the fundamental power of their interests.
For me it felt like the title would reflect reality better if it was rephrased to "Society has nothing to offer to young men and they respond by not pursuing anything."
With that said, the tasks are going to come on hot and heavy sooner than you expect. I didn't have homework in grade school. At all. My kids had mountains of homework. Giving them too much to manage on their own, while telling you not to manage it for them, would seem like a cruel joke, but I don't know any other answer.
Also, you could be more disciplined than I was about my own chores. I didn't need to clean the bathrooms every week at the same time, but maybe had I set up a schedule like that, it might have modeled better habits in my kids. Or maybe not. ;-)
I think effective social commentary is mostly grounded in the personal, the specific, and the (thoughtfully) statistical. Otherwise it's very easy just to project one's biases onto a complicated picture. E.g., consider whatever it is that people think is "ruining the kids" these days. In the 1700s, you know what was ruining the kids? Novels: https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/01/20/an-18th-century-mo...
It's similar to how arguments about "what God wants" go wrong. Researchers showed that when people talk about what their god wants, they're unconsciously consulting their own preferences: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/creating-god-i...
With broad social argument, it's easy to introduce all sorts of fallacy. Humans aren't really equipped to reason intuitively about things at this scale. Especially if the point is to persuade and/or entertain, simplifying into broad "logical" arguments can paint false pictures. Andrew Gelman wrote about this today: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/04/24/the-perils...
Honestly, I don't think people are "better" at that (if such a fuzzy construction can have a useful meaning). But I do think they are more careful with it because it's harder to get right and more easy to visibly get it wrong. It's fine with me if expecting more concreteness just drastically reduces the total amount of social commentary. Even if it dropped by 99%, we'd still have more than we needed.
He doesn't provide any data to reflect what society's expectations are. Those are just his thoughts.
That's a big distinction.
In a fascinating 2012 paper titled Sexual Economics, Culture, Men, and Modern Sexual Trends, the psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs wrote:
“Although this may be considered an unflattering characterization…we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex, and perhaps not a great deal more. (One of us characterized this in a previous work as, ‘If women would stop sleeping with jerks, men would stop being jerks.’) If in order to obtain sex men must become pillars of the community, or lie, or amass riches by fair means or foul, or be romantic or funny, then many men will do precisely that.”
Especially the quote where an agreement that stability is important was interpreted as agreement that marriage is important.
Rayiner: have you looked at the demographic pyramid in South Korea, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, or urban China recently? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/So...
Or if we want to talk about places where “traditional family values” (i.e. opposition to women’s rights) poll very high, how about the demographics of Russia?
The demographic decline in “a handful of European countries” is substantially a matter of time since industrialization, access to birth control, urbanization, female literacy, amount of immigration, housing prices, etc. more than ethnic/cultural/religious origin, and it is going to land on everywhere else in the world (USA, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, ..) soon enough.
I googled "stability of cohabiting couples". This led me to Wikipedia [1]. From there I hit the 2002 CDC report "Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage in the United States" [2]. That provides the following statistic:
"The probability of a first marriage ending in separation or divorce within 5 years is 20 percent, but the probability of a premarital cohabitation breaking up within 5 years is 49 percent. After 10 years, the probability of a first marriage ending is 33 percent, compared with 62 percent for cohabitations."
I wondered if that had changed since 2002, so I hit Google Scholar and searched for articles after 2010. A 2020 article discussed cohabitation broadly. I scrolled down and found a 2018 article [3]. (There's an ungated PDF elsewhere if you need it.) They look at 8 countries including the US. Their findings: "cohabiting couples who do not subsequently transition to marriage... consistently have the highest predicted probabilities of separation within 5 years." Some of the gaps between cohabiting and married couples disappear if you control for (e.g.) education and other demographics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohabitation#Likelihood_of_spl... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/02news/div_mar_cohab.htm [3] https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/55/4/1389/167...
I heavily dislike the illusionary idealism from some for something that can be quite a lot of work. The state of marriage is pretty much not relevant though. At least in my opinion.
The average human being has 1.99 eyes.
Why can't broader family structures be considered, and be stable?
No one knows how other models work. However, note that "stable" comes from the data. Maybe other models are stable, maybe they're not. Without data, it's simply unknown.
Stable home environment = GOOD biological parent until child becomes adult (if other GOOD parent dies, not leaves)
Leaves = child trauma, parent BAD = child destructive behaviour
One GOOD parent dies = child trauma, but lesser extent
GOOD = morally, respect, supportive, nice, kind, good-feel stuff
/eli5
Lesson: Marry not for looks, but personality eg. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard
I'm not at all sexually frustrated like most men and yet I still feel all of the same things.
I mean clearly psychology is a lot of "our area of study observes X and attributes Y as a part of theory Z". It's not a hard science where objective, absolute, undeniable measurements can be made.
But it's not some random dude just pontificating about social structures on the internet.
By your measure we should just throw all the great philosophers works in the toilet because "that's their perspective".
Over time, I have reflected and shifted this perspective. That reflection centered around the question the author hasn’t asked himself yet: who creates these expectations? It’s always some loose definition like “society” or “elite”, or some other handy wavy grouping of people.
But, to be clear, those expectations are coming from the author. That’s his perspective of what the world thinks, based on his interactions, based on what he chooses to read, listen to, etc. He's not describing anyone but himself.
I found that if I find myself projecting onto social norms, society, or some other loose definition of “they”, what I’m really doing is projecting a part of myself that I haven’t been honest about yet.