Not exactly. You want people to be able to irrevocably bind their future selves.
Not so, and this is an outrageous reading of what I have said. People will still be able to get divorces, just they will have to pay compensation if they are the party at fault. I didn’t irrevocably bind my future self when I rented my house, but if I break the lease I’ll have to pay compensation to the landlord.
Your comments above suggest that perhaps you don’t understand the state of law, at least in the UK.
This is generally currently possible subject to the normal limits on contracts that the society imposes… (e.g. you can’t contract to be a slave)...
No it isn’t, at least in the UK. All I want is for marriage to be subject to normal limits on contracts, not the special limits on contracts that apply only in the case of marriage. I say “damages in the case of breach” and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It’s so strange.
I would like to see some supporting evidence for that claim.
Note the sharp discontinuity after 1969. What happened then? Oh yes, the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, meaning you no longer had to prove fault to get a divorce (and divorce settlements were also not based on fault).
There is no sharp discontinuity around 1969. If you smooth out the weird peak around ww2 (which we expect was caused by ww2), the plot of divorces follows a fairly smooth exponential trend (which we expect due to population growth), until the late 70s (the tapering in the 80s is due to both declining marriage rates and a stabilizing divorce rate).
Again, note the collapsing marriage rate from the early 1970s. Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
Marriage rates really don’t start collapsing until the early 80s (they don’t drop below 1930s levels until 1981).
I would think for the story you want to tell, you’d want to compare divorce rates to the marriage rate, but it doesn’t hold up. Divorce rates were stable all through the 90s, but the marriage rate continued to plummet.
There is no sharp discontinuity around 1969. If you smooth out the weird peak around ww2 (which we expect was caused by ww2), the plot of divorces follows a fairly smooth exponential trend (which we expect due to population growth
Except population growth has been trivial over this period compared to the rise in divorces.
I would think for the story you want to tell, you’d want to compare divorce rates to the marriage rate, but it doesn’t hold up. Divorce rates were stable all through the 90s, but the marriage rate continued to plummet.
No. In my grandparents time, people were inculcated with the morality that divorce was awful and shameful. Hence when they started to liberalise divorce, few took advantage of it; social pressure was enough. But over time that social pressure weakened because informal mechanisms are weak compared to formal ones. Hence that social pressure gets harder and harder to maintain, and divorce looks more and more acceptable to the new generations. I think we have now bottomed out of that vicious cycle, but unfortunately it has meant a two-tier society, with the virtuous Vickies behaving themselves and keeping each other in check, and the other types reverting to the Somalia that Kennaway etc so fervently desire.
Except population growth has been trivial over this period compared to the rise in divorces.
The post WW2 baby boom lead to a boom in marriage-aged people in the 60s and 70s. You can see it on the second of the plots on the post you linked to- look how the total number of marriages is increasing between 60 and 72.
And my point isn’t that the rate of divorce wasn’t increasing, it was (though not as much as a plot of total divorces would have you believe, much better to plot the rates).
My point is that 1969 wasn’t a special year in the data. There is no discontinuity on the plots you linked to, and no discontinuity in the data.
Hence that social pressure gets harder and harder to maintain, and divorce looks more and more acceptable to the new generations.
This whole paragraph feels largely unresponsive to what I said. My point was that divorce rates stabilized in the late 80s, but marriage rates continued to fall. You can tell whatever story you want, but we have to agree on what the data is doing.
If whoever voted me down for this post, and the post previous in the thread would explain why I’d appreciate it.
In objective discussions about graphs, I feel like we ‘aspiring rationalists’ ought to be able to come to an agreement about the data in the graph (if perhaps not the causal story behind it), and downvotes for discussing the actual graphs linked to seem to me to be counterproductive.
If I’ve broken some social norm, I’d appreciate being explicitly told.
That is because the Church of England (or RCC, or pretty much any other major Christian denomination) told them so.
More precisely, what the RCC says is that there’s no such thing as divorce, and even if a judge purports to have cancelled your marriage, as far as God is concerned you’re still married.
a two-tier society, with the virtuous Vickies behaving themselves and keeping each other in check, and the other types reverting to the Somalia that Kennaway etc so fervently desire
I personally call this phenomenon “the Regressive Cost of Virtue” (virtue in the descriptive, not the normative sense). Too lazy to write a good comment on it, I’ll just quote myself from IRC.
People will have to pay compensation if they are the party at fault.
Everyone? Or do you just want enforcement of pre-nups?
I am still interested in your view on the basic nature of marriage. Is it, in its essence, a contract between two parties? To point to an obvious divergent view, Catholics view marriage rather differently.
but if I break the lease I’ll have to pay compensation to the landlord.
You voluntarily signed a contract to that effect. If there is no such contract (or no such clause in the contract), would you still owe compensation to the landlord?
I say “damages in the case of breach” and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It’s so strange.
Well then, let’s avoid fuzzy generalities and get down to brass tacks.
Alice and Bob are thinking of getting married. However Alice believes that men are philandering bastards who tend to screw everything that moves so she would like to protect herself against the possibility of Bob turning out to be precisely such a bastard.
In the world which you would consider just and fair, what would Alice and Bob do and what would the legal system have to accept?
It seems that you have in mind an enforceable contract whereby Alice and Bob agree that if any of them gets caught in the wrong bed, he or she will pay the other party ONE! MILLION! DOLLARS! or some other sufficiently painful sum.
I don’t see anything horrible about such a contract, but I’m curious what you think the contract-less default should be (Eve and Dick just got married without any specific contracts, Eve got drunk at a party and slept with her boss, what’s next?). I am also interested in the motivations of Alice in insisting upon such a contract—is it incentive or punishment?
Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
Sure, but I don’t see why that is “extremely unfair” and “leads to widespread suffering”. I see nothing wrong with low marriage rates.
Everyone? Or do you just want enforcement of pre-nups?
If you like, call it a pre-nup. In your terms, I want:
enforcement of pre-nups
Pre-nups to be valid over a much wider variety of terms.
I am still interested in your view on the basic nature of marriage. Is it, in its essence, a contract between two parties?
And I still don’t find this level of analysis helpful. Marriage means different things to different people, and has developed over millenia. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about its basic nature.
I don’t see anything horrible about such a contract, but I’m curious what you think the contract-less default should be (Eve and Dick just got married without any specific contracts, Eve got drunk at a party and slept with her boss, what’s next?).
I would propose that, for now, the contract-less default should be the status quo, because I feel like otherwise you would be upsetting fixed expectations by the back door. But of course existing married couples should be free to alter their marriage terms. After a while I think almost everyone will want a contract that makes the party at fault pay compensation; once that happens, it would make sense to switch the default, but not until then.
I am also interested in the motivations of Alice in insisting upon such a contract—is it incentive or punishment?
It is very hard for the rest of us to speculate as to the motivations of a fictional character you have created. But even if you disapprove of Alice’s motivations, it seems to me that you should respect her right to form a contract.
Sure, but I don’t see why that is “extremely unfair” and “leads to widespread suffering”. I see nothing wrong with low marriage rates.
The marriage rate collapsing isn’t “unfair.” Denying people the ability to form voluntary contracts is the unfair part. The marriage rate collapsing leads to widespread suffering because people want to get married, but feel they can’t because the institution is too unstable due to lack of precommitment. And hence you get soaring illegitimacy. The whole thing is a disaster.
What gives the game away is that I am talking about giving people more freedom, and I get this vitriolic pushback, and find myself constantly being strawmanned. I note that certain people viscerally hate the idea of discipline, stability, order, hard work and bourgeois values generally, and view long-lasting marriages as awful patriarchy. This is what’s lurking beneath it all.
I would propose that, for now, the contract-less default should be the status quo, because I feel like otherwise you would be upsetting fixed expectations by the back door. But of course existing married couples should be free to alter their marriage terms. After a while I think almost everyone will want a contract that makes the party at fault pay compensation; once that happens, it would make sense to switch the default, but not until then.
Adultery was harshly punished in the past. Even in the recent past, before the 70s, adultery was one of the few admissible reasons to obtain divorce, and lead to unfavourable settlement for the adulterous party. In the 70s, no-fault divorce laws were passed in most Western countries, and adultery was demoted to having little or no role in divorce settlements. Keep in mind that no-fault divorce laws weren’t imposed by dictators trying to destroy the fabric of society or something (*), they were passed with popular support by democratically elected governments, and there is no noticeable political pressure today to revise them, or even to make the type of pre-nup agreements you are referring to enforceable.
Your position largely used to be the default one in the past, and public opinion has been moving consistently away from it for the last decades. Holding an unpopular political position is legitimate, but what makes you think that public opinion would move back to it?
Uhm, are you sure you are not succumbing to the false-consensus effect?
Quite sure. To quote from another post I made in this thread:
I think that, right now, most people have no strong view on the subject. But I think that people are good at learning, and so, over time, they will imitate those marriages which prove the most successful, and which best signal future commitment. I could be wrong.
Basically, I think people radically and consistently underestimate the effects of institutional constraints and incentives, and assume that aggregate societal results are somehow “chosen.” So people tend to think that:
Our high rate of divorce is very bad
Changing the incentives to get a divorce has little or no effect on this.
Something just “magically” happened in the 1960s/1970s (“Kids today...”/”liberation!”).
If you enabled people to make binding commitments in marriage, I don’t think most people would leap out and take advantage immediately. Most people would just keep on with whatever they’re doing. But a small number of people would, and their marriages would be more successful and happier and long-lasting, and over time (decades) their behaviour would be imitated, and so on.
Keep in mind that no-fault divorce laws weren’t imposed by dictators trying to destroy the fabric of society or something, they were passed with popular support by democratically elected governments
Disagree about the popular support thing. In Britain, certainly, the Divorce Reform Act was passed with neither popular support nor opposition, just a public who didn’t particularly care. The people pushing for it were a small number of activists, who were also in favour of these social “liberalisations” like abolition of the death penalty, etc. Many of these “lilberalisations” were in fact quite unpopular. I think you greatly underestimate the institutional leeway available to politicians/regulators.
Holding an unpopular political position is legitimate, but what makes you think that public opinion would move back to it?
I don’t think my position is so much unpopular as it is low-demand. I think the UK government, at least, could easily pass the kind of law I favour, and no-one much would care. In fact I don’t think my position is ever likely to be in high demand, because most people don’t think incentives are particularly important.
Disagree about the popular support thing. In Britain, certainly, the Divorce Reform Act was passed with neither popular support nor opposition, just a public who didn’t particularly care. The people pushing for it were a small number of activists, who were also in favour of these social “liberalisations” like abolition of the death penalty, etc. Many of these “lilberalisations” were in fact quite unpopular. I think you greatly underestimate the institutional leeway available to politicians/regulators.
It seems to me that you are arguing that some small groups of activists somehow managed to manipulate the democratic governments of multiple countries in a short span of time, without the general public taking notice, despite the fact that this alleged manipulation affected in substantial (and significantly negative, in your opinion) ways the family life of many people. Sorry, but I don’t think this is a rationally tenable position.
It seems to me that you are arguing that some small groups of activists somehow managed to manipulate the democratic governments of multiple countries in a short span of time,
Yes. This is indeed the whole point of activism.
without the general public taking notice,
I never said anything of the sort. Perhaps I should take it as a compliment that people are determined to put words into my mouth, as it indicates they feel unable to argue with my actual position. In fact, of course, the public did take notice, but didn’t much care.
despite the fact that this alleged manipulation affected in substantial (and significantly negative, in your opinion) ways the family life of many people.
Yes, because the effect was attenuated, and was not seen as causally linked to the activity.
I’m afraid your model of political activity in democratic governments is rather faulty.
Perhaps I should take it as a compliment that people are determined to put words into my mouth, as it indicates they feel unable to argue with my actual position.
Or maybe it indicates that you are not being clear in arguing your position.
Yes, because the effect was attenuated, and was not seen as causally linked to the activity.
In another comment you claimed that divorce rates skyrocketed the very same year that no-fault divorce legislation was passed, now you are arguing that there was no immediate large effect. I’m starting to think that you actually don’t have a coherent position, and you just want to argue that “good old” conservative values are obviously desirable and therefore you have to handwave away the fact that public opinion is largely against them by pushing a quasi-conspiracist narrative.
Denying people the ability to form voluntary contracts is the unfair part.
Unless you want to argue for some extreme form of anarcho-libertarianism, you would concede that there are some types of voluntary contracts that it is in the public interest for the state to consider unenforceable. Selling yourself into slavery is the textbook example, but there are clearly many others.
I’m not saying that the type of pre-nup agreements that impose monetary compensation on adultery are necessarily in the same class of slavery or other forms of undesirable contracts, in fact, I have no strong intuitions either way.
What do you infer from the silence of people who hear what you’re saying, find it uncompelling but not particularly viscerally hateful, shrug, and go on about our business?
“care about” is a broad term. I certainly have opinions about it, but if you mean that I don’t have strong emotional responses to it, your inference is correct as far as it goes.
Pre-nups to be valid over a much wider variety of terms.
I don’t mean purely division-of-property contracts. Pre-nups are general agreements, they can be about anything the parties want to agree to.
And I still don’t find this level of analysis helpful.
Ah. I find your consistent refusal… illuminating :-)
After a while I think almost everyone will want a contract that makes the party at fault pay compensation
Do you, now? I don’t want such a contract, quite explicitly, too. Why do you believe that most people think like you and not like me?
But even if you disapprove of Alice’s motivations
I don’t approve or disapprove. I am interested in them.
Denying people the ability to form voluntary contracts is the unfair part.
Well, that’s the basic libertarian position. Given that you proclaim it, should I understand that you are in favor of gay marriage, a large variety of poly marriages, marriages between close relatives, etc? And that’s even before we get to a variety of more interesting contracts that don’t deal with marriage...
How do you feel, for example, about temporary marriages: Alice and Bob form a voluntary contract that they will be married for one year after which the marriage automatically dissolves and they are free to go their own ways..?
people want to get married, but feel they can’t because the institution is too unstable due to lack of precommitment.
Really? That looks like, um, let’s be polite and say “motivated cognition”. Can you provide evidence that supports this claim?
I am talking about giving people more freedom
That’s the thing, you see, it certainly doesn’t look like that to me.
Ah. I find your consistent refusal… illuminating :-)
What’s the basic nature of drinking alcohol? Is it really about changing your mental state? Or is it really about lowering your inhibitions? Or is it really about drowning your sorrows? Or something else? It’s a ridiculous question. It doesn’t have a single purpose, it has lots, and some people drink for one reason but strongly disapprove of another reason, or vice-versa.
Do you, now? I don’t want such a contract, quite explicitly, too. Why do you believe that most people think like you and not like me?
I think that, right now, most people have no strong view on the subject. But I think that people are good at learning, and so, over time, they will imitate those marriages which prove the most successful, and which best signal future commitment. I could be wrong.
But even if you disapprove of Alice’s motivations
I don’t approve or disapprove. I am interested in them.
She’s your fictional character. You tell me.
Given that you proclaim it, should I understand that you are in favor of gay marriage, a large variety of poly marriages, marriages between close relatives, etc?… [temporary marriage also]
Except for marriages between close relatives, I “favour” all of these things in the sense that I think they should be legal.
That’s the thing, you see, it certainly doesn’t look like that to me.
And I am much too polite to tell you what your position looks like to me.
What’s the basic nature of drinking alcohol? Is it really about changing your mental state?
Why, yes, it is, given that lowering your inhibitions and drowning your sorrows are exactly that. I don’t think it is a ridiculous question.
they will imitate those marriages which prove the most successful
I am guessing that you define a “successful marriage” as a “long-lasting marriage”. I would not agree with such a definition.
Let me also point out that people will imitate the lives which look the most successful to them. Such lives may or may not involve long-lasting marriages.
I “favour” all of these things in the sense that I think they should be legal.
Interesting. So you think both that temporary marriages should be legal and that marriages should be made to be longer and more painful to get out of.
And I am much too polite to tell you what your position looks like to me.
/me waves a magic wand… Poof! I invoke the magical name of Crocker and release you from the politeness spell! :-)
What’s the basic nature of drinking alcohol? Is it really about changing your mental state?
Why, yes, it is, given that lowering your inhibitions and drowning your sorrows are exactly that. I don’t think it is a ridiculous question.
So someone who drinks alchohol just because they like the taste is “wrong”? To me that’s just absurd. Marriage can mean a holy sacrament to a Catholic, a lifelong commitment to me, an excuse for a good party for my cousin, and many more things besides. There’s no true “nature” beside the meanings we give it.
Let me also point out that people will imitate the lives which look the most successful to them. Such lives may or may not involve long-lasting marriages.
This is true! Different people have different wishes and desires. That’s why people should have the choice. I think most people want a long-lasting marriage, and would take steps to achieve that. I could be wrong though, and if people want to stay with the status quo they would be free to do so. You on the other hand, refuse to discover whether you are right, and refuse to give people the choice.
So you think both that temporary marriages should be legal and that marriages should be made to be longer and more painful to get out of.
No, I do not think that marriages should be made more painful to get out of. If people want to, they should be allowed to make their marriages shorter and even easier to get out of. But of course you already know that, and are deliberately misreading me.
I … release you from the politeness spell! :-)
You appear to be labouring under the misapprehension that I show politeness out of respect for you. I assure you that is not the case. I am polite out of respect for me.
So someone who drinks alchohol just because they like the taste is “wrong”?
I don’t know of a single person who drinks alcohol because they like the taste. I know people who drink Bordeaux wines, or particular beers, or specific ports because they like the taste.
There’s no true “nature” beside the meanings we give it.
Oh, I did not ask about the eternal true Platonic nature. I asked what do you believe the true nature of marriage to be.
You on the other hand, refuse to discover whether you are right, and refuse to give people the choice.
Do I, really? You seem to lapsing into the agitprop vocabulary.
I am polite out of respect for me.
Allow me to have my doubts. People like that don’t drop hints how they would really destroy the opponent’s positions if only the limits of politeness did not hold them back...
Allow me to have my doubts. People like that don’t drop hints how they would really destroy the opponent’s positions if only the limits of politeness did not hold them back...
Once again you miss the point. I don’t think my arguments would gain any extra force if I was personally rude about you, or resorted to the type of deliberate misreadings you engage in. Everyone can see what your position is like, and we can all draw our own conclusions.
The way we all conduct ourselves leads others to conclude things, not merely about the weight of our arguments, but the content of our characters. That’s all.
Well, the discussion seems to have drifted into the more heat and less light direction. I don’t find your position convincing and no doubt you feel the same way about mine. Perhaps we should just accept that we disagree.
Again, note the collapsing marriage rate from the early 1970s. Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
I don’t think that’s the whole story. Marriage rates were declining in the 1970s and 1980s even in countries where divorce wasn’t introduced until later, such as Ireland or Malta.
(And intuitively, I’d be less reluctant to do something if it was easier to undo it, though YMMV.)
Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
Would social conservatives and social liberals please both attempt to explain and steelman/criticize this assertion? Because it has always been among my biggest gripes with the conservative account of why divorce is so bad. It just doesn’t seem plausible, especially given how over-optimistic most people are about the prospects of their marriage! And frankly, I’d be creeped out by people who start a marriage for affection or companionship and already think about enforcing loyalty. It might be rational in the abstract, but signals many troubling things about the individual, such as low trust and an instinctively transactional view of relationships. (Marriages for economic reasons probably need a whole different set of norms, such as a historically seen unspoken tolerance for adultery.)
I always understood falling marriage as being primarily linked to the rise in women’s education and economic independence. Now, reasonable people who think those are great things can disagree whether the decline of traditional marriage is a cost or a neutral consequence, but I’ve never had time for people who seek to pin the blame on deliberate and direct political subversion.
Sure, I don’t like how some liberals attempt to be contrarian and claim that all the changes in this sphere have actually been unreservedly wonderful and a worthwhile goal from the start.… but that’s a general problem of people wanting policies to have no downsides, and the other side’s logical leap from calling out the downside to denying the problem is always baffling. Liberals cheering for something as a triumph for the Wonderful Nice Liberal Agenda might be less evidence that it’s a triumph for the Degenerate Corrupt Liberal Agenda and more evidence that liberals like cheering. This should not inform one’s analysis of the material/economic factors.
Would social conservatives and social liberals please both attempt to explain and steelman/criticize this assertion?
So, it seems to me that there is a terrible disconnect between property-splitting during a divorce and the existence of no-fault divorce, making marriage a tremendously costly move for the wealthier of the two parties (especially if they’re male). If in order for Bob to marry Alice, he has to give her the unilateral option to take half of his things and leave, then marriage seems unwise.
In the era of fault divorce, Bob is safer- he needs to either break the contract, or can end the contract if Alice breaks it without having to transfer to her the same share of his possessions.
(I think that the collapse in marriage rates is seen at too coarse a level. If you look at marriage rates by class, you notice that the upper class is still living in the 50s and the lower class has collapsed. An explanation, that I buy, is that we no longer try to promote good citizenship and good living, and so unsurprisingly people answer the call of the short term, to their long term detriment.)
And frankly, I’d be creeped out by people who start a marriage for affection or companionship and already think about enforcing loyalty.
This reads like a status assertion to me, along the lines of “follow your dreams” being code for “I’m awesome enough that I can get ahead by following my dreams” or “I’m awesome enough that I get to set my job parameters.” Not caring about loyalty is code for “I’m going to be awesome forever, so it’ll always be in their interests to stay with me,” but far better to have insurance in case of worse, poorer, or sickness.
I always understood falling marriage as being primarily linked to the rise in women’s education and economic independence.
If so, then why are the educated women marrying more than uneducated women? [src]
The explanation, that I buy, is that we no longer try to promote good citizenship and good living, and so unsurprisingly people answer the call of the short term, to their long term detriment.
This makes sense if we assume marriage is causal for class. i.e. the people who don’t heed the call of the short term and do marry have better outcomes and end up higher class. Choosing marriages naturally sorts people into class, by this model.
Liberals would tell a story where things are reversed and class is causal of the pathology- they would say the economic changes that have occurred for the last few decades have increased ‘economic uncertainty’ for the lower class (for some measure of uncertainty.) which has lead to marital stress and divorce. Its also worth pointing out that in the lower classes divorce is usually less costly for the man (the wife is more likely to be working at a similar paying job, the man has less stuff to lose)
Personally, I found the book Red Families/Blue Families pushed me away from the first explanation and toward the second (full disclosure, this is part of a larger trend of me growing increasing liberal over the last decade and a half or so.)
I’ve edited the grandparent to say “an explanation,” because I don’t want to make the claim that this is a complete explanation. I very much agree that the prospects for marriage are significantly worse for the lower classes, for reasons both having to do with the shifting economic value of skills and the shifting costs of sex.
Liberals would tell a story where things are reversed and class is causal of the pathology- they would say the economic changes that have occurred for the last few decades have increased ‘economic uncertainty’ for the lower class (for some measure of uncertainty.) which has lead to marital stress and divorce.
There were many historical periods with much much greater economic uncertainty, they also had higher marriage rates.
Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
And frankly, I’d be creeped out by people who start a marriage for affection or companionship and already think about enforcing loyalty. It might be rational in the abstract, but signals many troubling things about the individual, such as low trust and an instinctively transactional view of relationships. (Marriages for economic reasons probably need a whole different set of norms, such as a historically seen unspoken tolerance for adultery.)
Well, perhaps I should start by saying that I don’t like distinction you draw between “affection and companionship” and “economic reasons.” The two are implicitly entwined. I will attempt to flesh out my position.
You don’t need marriage for “affection and companionship,” at least in the short term. You can just hang out. But most people want more than that. They want to build a life together. That involves making costly investments that will only bear fruit over time (e.g. buying a house, raising children, pension plans, etc). That involves making irreversible compromises—e.g. a shared circle of friends means you will have to be friends with people you wouldn’t otherwise be friends with, and not friends with people you would otherwise like to be; same goes with shared hobbies, etc. That involves specialization—perhaps one spouse will give up paid employment, or only work part-time. And so on.
But the problem with all these decisions is that they can lead to time-incompatible incentives. If Alice gives up work for a while to raise children while Bob focuses on his career, then ten years later Alice will be less pretty, less employable, and more dependent on Bob. Bob, meanwhile, can much more easily walk out on the marriage and start again. What’s to stop Bob reaping the benefits of Alice’s sacrifices, then checking out of the marriage?
And realistic people know that they won’t necessarily be thrilled with each other for every moment of their marriage. They will have rows, they will have disagreements, there will be times when the grass seems greener elsewhere. So you may find my attitude creepy, but I find your attitude evil—I think it’s quite wrong to go into a marriage without thinking about how to make sure it lasts. It’s partly about Alice making sure that Bob stays loyal to her, otherwise she’s wasting her time building a life with him. But it’s also about Bob(wedding) making sure that Bob(10 years later) stays loyal to Alice, otherwise he’s wasting his time. And vice versa.
So when you put the two sides of the problem together, you see it’s quite tricky. But at the same time, it’s super-rewarding if you can pull it off. Some people try to work around it to make the incentives less time-incompatible (e.g. women having children later) but this itself has its costs. The best solution is if Alice and Bob can bind their future selves to the marriage like Odysseus binding himself to the mast; that way they can both truly commit to the marriage, secure in the knowledge that the other party will too. And that will, paradoxically, mean that they create the best shared life together, and so will have least reason to leave the marriage.
But if, instead, Alice and Bob can’t bind their future self, then they can’t trust each other. Maybe Alice can trust Bob(wedding), but Bob(10 years later) is a different person—yes, people change during marriage, but not necessarily in ways their partner can control or predict. So because they can’t commit to the marriage securely, they won’t make the same kind of costly investments in their shared life. Which means their marriage will be worse, which means they will be more tempted to divorce, and so on in a vicious circle.
You don’t need marriage for “affection and companionship,” at least in the short term. You can just hang out.
Except that in pre-1970s cultures, er..., ‘affection and companionship’ outside marriage were, er..., frowned upon, to the point that when people were caught doing ‘affection and companionship’ they were sometimes made to get married at gunpoint by each other’s parents. (Hell, there even are anecdotes about 20freakin′14 I could tell for that matter, though not as bad as that.)
I’d be much less against unbreakable marriage if it was something the bride and groom spontaneously chose to do, clearly demonstrating tht they know what they’re doing, without any social stigma for not doing so.
That involves making costly investments that will only bear fruit over time (e.g. buying a house, raising children, pension plans, etc).
That’s also an argument against at-will employment: it is much harder to make plans for the future if my employer could fire me at any time for any reason or no reason. And yet people who oppose at-will employment tend to support divorce and vice versa. This suggests that their opposition is more due to Green vs Blue politics than on anything directly rational.
(My own view is that employment contracts which cannot be unilaterally terminated without just cause should be allowed but not required, and ditto with marriages; of course employees who want such a contract would probably end up paid less than those who are OK with at-will employment, for obvious demand-and-supply reasons.)
If Alice gives up work for a while to raise children while Bob focuses on his career, then ten years later Alice will be less pretty, less employable, and more dependent on Bob.
That sounds like a very bad idea to me: for example, what if Bob dies? or turns out to be a violent psychopath, even if he managed to hide it until the wedding? My inner libertarian says that so long as Alice freely chose to marry Bob that’s her own problem and she shouldn’t be protected from herself, but my inner paternalist isn’t that sure.
Bob, meanwhile, can much more easily walk out on the marriage and start again. What’s to stop Bob reaping the benefits of Alice’s sacrifices, then checking out of the marriage?
So, in terms of David Friedman’s classification of “love”, “trade” and “force” in The Machinery of Freedom, you say that “love” can’t be reliable in the long term, and I agree, but why is force better than trade? I think it may be better if Alice gave something to Bob so that he won’t want to check out of the marriage.
And realistic people know that they won’t necessarily be thrilled with each other for every moment of their marriage. They will have rows, they will have disagreements, there will be times when the grass seems greener elsewhere.
Yes. And yet some couple stay together for years, even decades, without getting married. Why can’t we trust present Alice and present Bob’s determination about whether the current crisis is temporary, rather than relying on past Alice and past Bob’s (probably unrealistic, especially given their age) assessment that all future crises would be?
Some people try to work around it to make the incentives less time-incompatible (e.g. women having children later) but this itself has its costs.
And yet places where women have children later don’t look that much worse to me. ISTM socioeconomical effects would largely swamp biological effects due to maternal age. (Search this for “maternal age”.)
Bob(10 years later) is a different person
Yeah, that’s not exactly an argument for making him accountable for Bob(10 years earlier)’s mistakes.
(Of course, I do not endorse the present-day US system where I hear someone who unilaterally walks out of a marriage can be entitled to a sizeable fraction of the other spouse’s property and future income.)
I don’t know who you’re arguing against, but it certainly isn’t me.
As I’ve stated Oh, at least a dozen times in this thread, I don’t want all marriages to be unbreakable. I just want people to be able to set the terms of their marriages as they see fit. No-one should be forced to remain in a marriage they don’t want to, but people who break marriage contracts should have to pay damages according to the terms of that contract, just as I can’t be made to live somewhere I don’t want to, but I will have to pay damages if I break the lease.
It isn’t force over trade. Contracts are trade. People must be held to the terms of their contract(or damages) or there is no trade.
So, you choose not to address the grandparent’s point about social stigma, and you want to add other ‘optional’ binding agreements which may themselves have social pressure pushing people to adopt them.
If you want people to find the process of divorce unpleasant, you can rest assured that most of them probably do.
So, you choose not to address the grandparent’s point about social stigma, and you want to add other ‘optional’ binding agreements which may themselves have social pressure pushing people to adopt them.
I didn’t think the grandparent made any point about ‘social stigma’ worth addressing. But, to be clear:
You don’t have any right to your neighbours’ good opinion.
If doing X would upset (or please) your neighbours, your choice (not) to do X is still voluntary. It just means you’re facing a trade-off. Welcome to adulthood.
More generally, I don’t think that social approval/stigma are bad things. They are the glue that binds civil society together. I can’t help notice that people when people speak negatively of social pressure, they never apply that critique generally. Should there be less social stigma against racism? Less social stigma against harassment? Suddenly, they’re not so sure.
If you want people to find the process of divorce unpleasant, you can rest assured that most of them probably do.
Actually, my focus is on making marriage more pleasant.
More generally, I don’t think that social approval/stigma are bad things. They are the glue that binds civil society together. I can’t help notice that people when people speak negatively of social pressure, they never apply that critique generally. Should there be less social stigma against racism? Less social stigma against harassment? Suddenly, they’re not so sure.
I’m a lot happier with social stigma when it attaches to acts and fades in proportion to time distance from the act, at some rate inversely proportional to severity, rather than attaching to immutable properties (whether or not they derive from some act). If I hypothetically get plastered and vomit strawberry Jello shots and half-digested guacamole all over my friend’s expensive Persian rug, chances are my friends are going to give me a lot of shit about it, and to be a little more cautious about inviting me to parties for a while… but I do not thereby become Gest the Puker, then and forevermore. Divorce has traditionally not had this property.
I might make an exception for crimes on the level of murder or rape, on the grounds that those are so severe that the stigma shouldn’t vanish in a normal lifetime. (Though on reflection, I doubt I’d think much less of him if my grandfather revealed that he’d killed a man in his youth.) But if we’re going to be treating marriage as a civil contract like any other, then breaking it is a civil matter, not something on that level.
If doing X would upset (or please) your neighbours, your choice (not) to do X is still voluntary. It just means you’re facing a trade-off. Welcome to adulthood.
For some value of “voluntary”, sure. Likewise, for some value of “voluntary” if I point a gun at you and ask you to do something, your choice whether to do what I ask or be shot is voluntary.
For better or worse, marriages as presently constituted in the West are not commercial contracts, but legal, social, and (optionally) religious arrangements conferring certain statuses on the partners in the eyes of the law, society, the relevant religious bodies, and each other. If you want a marriage contract such as you describe, there’s no point in complaining that marriage contracts as they exist are not that. It would take a legal historian to say authoritatively, but I am not sure they ever have been. There are various similarities and differences, but they are different entities.
What you would have to do instead, is design a contract such as you would wish a marriage contract to be, and consult with lawyers to see if it can be done in a manner that would be recognised by current law and practice as a valid contract incurring damages for its breach. If you find that it cannot be done, then you would have to agitate for such changes to the law as would be necessary to recognise it.
If that’s too big a job for one person, you could combine with others, register a domain—realmarriage.org is available—and begin a movement.
What you would have to do instead, is design a contract such as you would wish a marriage contract to be, and consult with lawyers to see if it can be done in a manner that would be recognised by current law and practice as a valid contract incurring damages for its breach.
Isn’t that what pre-nups are?
I don’t know to which extent the courts will be willing to enforce the “damages” portions, but pre-nups are valid contracts and fulfill much of the needs you’re pointing to.
Possibly, but pre-nups aren’t valid in some jurisdictions (the UK, for example).
Some other issues have occurred to me regarding the redesign of marriage contracts. If a marriage contract is to be simply an ordinary contract in the framework of contract law, then several issues arise, which Salemicus and others of like mind might not want. What, if anything is to distinguish a “marriage” contract from any other, if it can be drawn up between any two (or more) people of legal age to enter into contracts? If the contract says whatever the parties wish it to say, is there any longer such a thing as “marriage”? How shall “marriage” be defined for such purposes as widows’ pensions, the line of succession in intestacy, etc.?
Any contract can be varied or voided instantly by common agreement of the parties, because no third party has any legal standing to object. Thus marriage “contracts” of this sort would make divorce by mutual agreement instant. (If there is no other ground than decision to separate, it takes 2 years in the UK.)
The only alternative is to reform the law of marriage itself. This is not to say that it cannot be done, but it would be a long row to hoe.
The entire concept of marriage is that the relationship between the individuals is a contract, even if not all conceptions of marriage have this contract as a literal legal contract enforced by the state. There’s good reason to believe that marriages throughout history have more often been about economics and/or politics than not, and that the norm that marriage is primarily about the sexual/emotional relationship but nonetheless falls under this contractual paradigm is a rather new one. I agree with your impression that this transactional model of relationships is a little creepy, and see this as an argument against maintaining this social norm.
I always understood falling marriage as being primarily linked to the rise in women’s education and economic independence.
BTW, the total marriage rate by year is a metric that can be easily confounded by tempo effects: if in a country all people born until 1950 married at 20 and all people born since 1951 married at 30, the marriage rate between 1971 to 1980 would be exactly 0 but (neglecting the mortality of twentysomething) no cohort would be any less likely to ever get married than another.
I see that as evidence that marriage, as currently implemented, is not a particularly appealing contract to as many people as it once was. Whether this is because of no-fault divorce is irrelevant to whether this constitutes “widespread suffering.”
I reject the a priori assumptions that are often made in these discussions and that you seem to be making, namely, that more marriage is good, more divorce is bad, and therefore that policy should strive to upregulate marriage and downregulate divorce. If this is simply a disparity of utility functions (if yours includes a specific term for number of marriages and mine doesn’t, or similar) then this is perhaps an impasse, but if you’re arguing that there’s some correlation, presumably negative, between number of marriages and some other, less marriage-specific form of disutility (i.e. “widespread suffering”), I’d like to know what your evidence or reasoning for that is.
Look at the following graph of divorce over time. [...] Again, note the collapsing marriage rate from the early 1970s. Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
I’m not sure what point are you trying to make with these graphs. If people were allowed to make binding pre-nup agreements that penalized adultery would there be more marriages? Less divorces? More happiness? None of these things seem obvious to me.
I say “damages in the case of breach” and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It’s so strange.
Pattern-matching is often rational in politics just because it’s so cheap, as long as the pattern makes sense in the first place. I’m sorry, but the pattern of reactionary rhetoric about marriage has these very deliberate connotations. People who discuss this tend to discuss punishing sinners (vicariously so), not holding rational economic actors accountable for damages on underrecognized-but-valid contracts.
Credibly dissociate yourself from people you don’t want to be pattern-matched to, and show that you understand the reasoning by which your audience opposes them (in this case, for example, Salemicus should at least acknowledge that at-fault divorce can—to put it mildly! - increase underlying gender inequality without any explicitly gendered provisions), and that you’re not going to defend them in that particular battle. Leftists do it all the time, to the extent that they have the opposite problem of not being able to unite while agreeing with each other on 95% of everything.
But there’s no-one who advocates dragging people off in chains, slavery, etc. This isn’t pattern-matching me to some well-known group (in which case I agree, I should distinguish myself). Instead, this is just deliberately straw-manning.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by “punishing sinners”—but I assume you mean treating adultery as not just a breach of contract, but a tort. Well, damages for a tort are also financial.
As for “underlying gender inequality”—you’ll notice that no-one else has brought that up in this thread. Perhaps that is the “reasoning by which [my] audience opposes” me”, but if so I’d prefer that people actually advanced that reasoning, rather than that being their double super-secret baseline position, and their public one being a lot of straw-manning and nonsense. Alternatively, it may be that the “underlying gender inequality” argument is yours and yours alone, and you are projecting.
Not so, and this is an outrageous reading of what I have said. People will still be able to get divorces, just they will have to pay compensation if they are the party at fault. I didn’t irrevocably bind my future self when I rented my house, but if I break the lease I’ll have to pay compensation to the landlord.
Your comments above suggest that perhaps you don’t understand the state of law, at least in the UK.
No it isn’t, at least in the UK. All I want is for marriage to be subject to normal limits on contracts, not the special limits on contracts that apply only in the case of marriage. I say “damages in the case of breach” and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It’s so strange.
Look at the following graph of divorce over time.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/jan/28/divorce-rates-marriage-ons
Note the sharp discontinuity after 1969. What happened then? Oh yes, the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, meaning you no longer had to prove fault to get a divorce (and divorce settlements were also not based on fault).
Now look at the marriage rate:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/resources/gmr_tcm77-258471.png
Again, note the collapsing marriage rate from the early 1970s. Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.
There is no sharp discontinuity around 1969. If you smooth out the weird peak around ww2 (which we expect was caused by ww2), the plot of divorces follows a fairly smooth exponential trend (which we expect due to population growth), until the late 70s (the tapering in the 80s is due to both declining marriage rates and a stabilizing divorce rate).
Marriage rates really don’t start collapsing until the early 80s (they don’t drop below 1930s levels until 1981).
I would think for the story you want to tell, you’d want to compare divorce rates to the marriage rate, but it doesn’t hold up. Divorce rates were stable all through the 90s, but the marriage rate continued to plummet.
Except population growth has been trivial over this period compared to the rise in divorces.
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44549000/gif/_44549854_uk_pop_226.gif
No. In my grandparents time, people were inculcated with the morality that divorce was awful and shameful. Hence when they started to liberalise divorce, few took advantage of it; social pressure was enough. But over time that social pressure weakened because informal mechanisms are weak compared to formal ones. Hence that social pressure gets harder and harder to maintain, and divorce looks more and more acceptable to the new generations. I think we have now bottomed out of that vicious cycle, but unfortunately it has meant a two-tier society, with the virtuous Vickies behaving themselves and keeping each other in check, and the other types reverting to the Somalia that Kennaway etc so fervently desire.
The post WW2 baby boom lead to a boom in marriage-aged people in the 60s and 70s. You can see it on the second of the plots on the post you linked to- look how the total number of marriages is increasing between 60 and 72.
And my point isn’t that the rate of divorce wasn’t increasing, it was (though not as much as a plot of total divorces would have you believe, much better to plot the rates).
My point is that 1969 wasn’t a special year in the data. There is no discontinuity on the plots you linked to, and no discontinuity in the data.
This whole paragraph feels largely unresponsive to what I said. My point was that divorce rates stabilized in the late 80s, but marriage rates continued to fall. You can tell whatever story you want, but we have to agree on what the data is doing.
If whoever voted me down for this post, and the post previous in the thread would explain why I’d appreciate it.
In objective discussions about graphs, I feel like we ‘aspiring rationalists’ ought to be able to come to an agreement about the data in the graph (if perhaps not the causal story behind it), and downvotes for discussing the actual graphs linked to seem to me to be counterproductive.
If I’ve broken some social norm, I’d appreciate being explicitly told.
That is because the Church of England (or RCC, or pretty much any other major Christian denomination) told them so.
And you don’t think that the King’s example was enough?
So, do tell. What’s wrong with divorce?
More precisely, what the RCC says is that there’s no such thing as divorce, and even if a judge purports to have cancelled your marriage, as far as God is concerned you’re still married.
David Brooks Says
I personally call this phenomenon “the Regressive Cost of Virtue” (virtue in the descriptive, not the normative sense). Too lazy to write a good comment on it, I’ll just quote myself from IRC.
Everyone? Or do you just want enforcement of pre-nups?
I am still interested in your view on the basic nature of marriage. Is it, in its essence, a contract between two parties? To point to an obvious divergent view, Catholics view marriage rather differently.
You voluntarily signed a contract to that effect. If there is no such contract (or no such clause in the contract), would you still owe compensation to the landlord?
Well then, let’s avoid fuzzy generalities and get down to brass tacks.
Alice and Bob are thinking of getting married. However Alice believes that men are philandering bastards who tend to screw everything that moves so she would like to protect herself against the possibility of Bob turning out to be precisely such a bastard.
In the world which you would consider just and fair, what would Alice and Bob do and what would the legal system have to accept?
It seems that you have in mind an enforceable contract whereby Alice and Bob agree that if any of them gets caught in the wrong bed, he or she will pay the other party ONE! MILLION! DOLLARS! or some other sufficiently painful sum.
I don’t see anything horrible about such a contract, but I’m curious what you think the contract-less default should be (Eve and Dick just got married without any specific contracts, Eve got drunk at a party and slept with her boss, what’s next?). I am also interested in the motivations of Alice in insisting upon such a contract—is it incentive or punishment?
Sure, but I don’t see why that is “extremely unfair” and “leads to widespread suffering”. I see nothing wrong with low marriage rates.
If you like, call it a pre-nup. In your terms, I want:
enforcement of pre-nups
Pre-nups to be valid over a much wider variety of terms.
And I still don’t find this level of analysis helpful. Marriage means different things to different people, and has developed over millenia. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about its basic nature.
I would propose that, for now, the contract-less default should be the status quo, because I feel like otherwise you would be upsetting fixed expectations by the back door. But of course existing married couples should be free to alter their marriage terms. After a while I think almost everyone will want a contract that makes the party at fault pay compensation; once that happens, it would make sense to switch the default, but not until then.
It is very hard for the rest of us to speculate as to the motivations of a fictional character you have created. But even if you disapprove of Alice’s motivations, it seems to me that you should respect her right to form a contract.
The marriage rate collapsing isn’t “unfair.” Denying people the ability to form voluntary contracts is the unfair part. The marriage rate collapsing leads to widespread suffering because people want to get married, but feel they can’t because the institution is too unstable due to lack of precommitment. And hence you get soaring illegitimacy. The whole thing is a disaster.
What gives the game away is that I am talking about giving people more freedom, and I get this vitriolic pushback, and find myself constantly being strawmanned. I note that certain people viscerally hate the idea of discipline, stability, order, hard work and bourgeois values generally, and view long-lasting marriages as awful patriarchy. This is what’s lurking beneath it all.
Uhm, are you sure you are not succumbing to the false-consensus effect?
Adultery was harshly punished in the past. Even in the recent past, before the 70s, adultery was one of the few admissible reasons to obtain divorce, and lead to unfavourable settlement for the adulterous party. In the 70s, no-fault divorce laws were passed in most Western countries, and adultery was demoted to having little or no role in divorce settlements.
Keep in mind that no-fault divorce laws weren’t imposed by dictators trying to destroy the fabric of society or something (*), they were passed with popular support by democratically elected governments, and there is no noticeable political pressure today to revise them, or even to make the type of pre-nup agreements you are referring to enforceable.
Your position largely used to be the default one in the past, and public opinion has been moving consistently away from it for the last decades.
Holding an unpopular political position is legitimate, but what makes you think that public opinion would move back to it?
(* Well, the Soviet divorce law of 1918 arguably was.)
Quite sure. To quote from another post I made in this thread:
Basically, I think people radically and consistently underestimate the effects of institutional constraints and incentives, and assume that aggregate societal results are somehow “chosen.” So people tend to think that:
Our high rate of divorce is very bad
Changing the incentives to get a divorce has little or no effect on this.
Something just “magically” happened in the 1960s/1970s (“Kids today...”/”liberation!”).
If you enabled people to make binding commitments in marriage, I don’t think most people would leap out and take advantage immediately. Most people would just keep on with whatever they’re doing. But a small number of people would, and their marriages would be more successful and happier and long-lasting, and over time (decades) their behaviour would be imitated, and so on.
Disagree about the popular support thing. In Britain, certainly, the Divorce Reform Act was passed with neither popular support nor opposition, just a public who didn’t particularly care. The people pushing for it were a small number of activists, who were also in favour of these social “liberalisations” like abolition of the death penalty, etc. Many of these “lilberalisations” were in fact quite unpopular. I think you greatly underestimate the institutional leeway available to politicians/regulators.
I don’t think my position is so much unpopular as it is low-demand. I think the UK government, at least, could easily pass the kind of law I favour, and no-one much would care. In fact I don’t think my position is ever likely to be in high demand, because most people don’t think incentives are particularly important.
It seems to me that you are arguing that some small groups of activists somehow managed to manipulate the democratic governments of multiple countries in a short span of time, without the general public taking notice, despite the fact that this alleged manipulation affected in substantial (and significantly negative, in your opinion) ways the family life of many people.
Sorry, but I don’t think this is a rationally tenable position.
Yes. This is indeed the whole point of activism.
I never said anything of the sort. Perhaps I should take it as a compliment that people are determined to put words into my mouth, as it indicates they feel unable to argue with my actual position. In fact, of course, the public did take notice, but didn’t much care.
Yes, because the effect was attenuated, and was not seen as causally linked to the activity.
I’m afraid your model of political activity in democratic governments is rather faulty.
Or maybe it indicates that you are not being clear in arguing your position.
In another comment you claimed that divorce rates skyrocketed the very same year that no-fault divorce legislation was passed, now you are arguing that there was no immediate large effect.
I’m starting to think that you actually don’t have a coherent position, and you just want to argue that “good old” conservative values are obviously desirable and therefore you have to handwave away the fact that public opinion is largely against them by pushing a quasi-conspiracist narrative.
Unless you want to argue for some extreme form of anarcho-libertarianism, you would concede that there are some types of voluntary contracts that it is in the public interest for the state to consider unenforceable.
Selling yourself into slavery is the textbook example, but there are clearly many others.
I’m not saying that the type of pre-nup agreements that impose monetary compensation on adultery are necessarily in the same class of slavery or other forms of undesirable contracts, in fact, I have no strong intuitions either way.
What do you infer from the silence of people who hear what you’re saying, find it uncompelling but not particularly viscerally hateful, shrug, and go on about our business?
I infer that you don’t particularly care one way or the other about the discussion. Should I infer something different?
“care about” is a broad term. I certainly have opinions about it, but if you mean that I don’t have strong emotional responses to it, your inference is correct as far as it goes.
I don’t mean purely division-of-property contracts. Pre-nups are general agreements, they can be about anything the parties want to agree to.
Ah. I find your consistent refusal… illuminating :-)
Do you, now? I don’t want such a contract, quite explicitly, too. Why do you believe that most people think like you and not like me?
I don’t approve or disapprove. I am interested in them.
Well, that’s the basic libertarian position. Given that you proclaim it, should I understand that you are in favor of gay marriage, a large variety of poly marriages, marriages between close relatives, etc? And that’s even before we get to a variety of more interesting contracts that don’t deal with marriage...
How do you feel, for example, about temporary marriages: Alice and Bob form a voluntary contract that they will be married for one year after which the marriage automatically dissolves and they are free to go their own ways..?
Really? That looks like, um, let’s be polite and say “motivated cognition”. Can you provide evidence that supports this claim?
That’s the thing, you see, it certainly doesn’t look like that to me.
What’s the basic nature of drinking alcohol? Is it really about changing your mental state? Or is it really about lowering your inhibitions? Or is it really about drowning your sorrows? Or something else? It’s a ridiculous question. It doesn’t have a single purpose, it has lots, and some people drink for one reason but strongly disapprove of another reason, or vice-versa.
I think that, right now, most people have no strong view on the subject. But I think that people are good at learning, and so, over time, they will imitate those marriages which prove the most successful, and which best signal future commitment. I could be wrong.
She’s your fictional character. You tell me.
Except for marriages between close relatives, I “favour” all of these things in the sense that I think they should be legal.
And I am much too polite to tell you what your position looks like to me.
Why, yes, it is, given that lowering your inhibitions and drowning your sorrows are exactly that. I don’t think it is a ridiculous question.
I am guessing that you define a “successful marriage” as a “long-lasting marriage”. I would not agree with such a definition.
Let me also point out that people will imitate the lives which look the most successful to them. Such lives may or may not involve long-lasting marriages.
Interesting. So you think both that temporary marriages should be legal and that marriages should be made to be longer and more painful to get out of.
/me waves a magic wand… Poof! I invoke the magical name of Crocker and release you from the politeness spell! :-)
So someone who drinks alchohol just because they like the taste is “wrong”? To me that’s just absurd. Marriage can mean a holy sacrament to a Catholic, a lifelong commitment to me, an excuse for a good party for my cousin, and many more things besides. There’s no true “nature” beside the meanings we give it.
This is true! Different people have different wishes and desires. That’s why people should have the choice. I think most people want a long-lasting marriage, and would take steps to achieve that. I could be wrong though, and if people want to stay with the status quo they would be free to do so. You on the other hand, refuse to discover whether you are right, and refuse to give people the choice.
No, I do not think that marriages should be made more painful to get out of. If people want to, they should be allowed to make their marriages shorter and even easier to get out of. But of course you already know that, and are deliberately misreading me.
You appear to be labouring under the misapprehension that I show politeness out of respect for you. I assure you that is not the case. I am polite out of respect for me.
I don’t know of a single person who drinks alcohol because they like the taste. I know people who drink Bordeaux wines, or particular beers, or specific ports because they like the taste.
Oh, I did not ask about the eternal true Platonic nature. I asked what do you believe the true nature of marriage to be.
Do I, really? You seem to lapsing into the agitprop vocabulary.
Allow me to have my doubts. People like that don’t drop hints how they would really destroy the opponent’s positions if only the limits of politeness did not hold them back...
Once again you miss the point. I don’t think my arguments would gain any extra force if I was personally rude about you, or resorted to the type of deliberate misreadings you engage in. Everyone can see what your position is like, and we can all draw our own conclusions.
The way we all conduct ourselves leads others to conclude things, not merely about the weight of our arguments, but the content of our characters. That’s all.
Well, the discussion seems to have drifted into the more heat and less light direction. I don’t find your position convincing and no doubt you feel the same way about mine. Perhaps we should just accept that we disagree.
I don’t think that’s the whole story. Marriage rates were declining in the 1970s and 1980s even in countries where divorce wasn’t introduced until later, such as Ireland or Malta.
(And intuitively, I’d be less reluctant to do something if it was easier to undo it, though YMMV.)
Would social conservatives and social liberals please both attempt to explain and steelman/criticize this assertion? Because it has always been among my biggest gripes with the conservative account of why divorce is so bad. It just doesn’t seem plausible, especially given how over-optimistic most people are about the prospects of their marriage! And frankly, I’d be creeped out by people who start a marriage for affection or companionship and already think about enforcing loyalty. It might be rational in the abstract, but signals many troubling things about the individual, such as low trust and an instinctively transactional view of relationships. (Marriages for economic reasons probably need a whole different set of norms, such as a historically seen unspoken tolerance for adultery.)
I always understood falling marriage as being primarily linked to the rise in women’s education and economic independence. Now, reasonable people who think those are great things can disagree whether the decline of traditional marriage is a cost or a neutral consequence, but I’ve never had time for people who seek to pin the blame on deliberate and direct political subversion.
Sure, I don’t like how some liberals attempt to be contrarian and claim that all the changes in this sphere have actually been unreservedly wonderful and a worthwhile goal from the start.… but that’s a general problem of people wanting policies to have no downsides, and the other side’s logical leap from calling out the downside to denying the problem is always baffling. Liberals cheering for something as a triumph for the Wonderful Nice Liberal Agenda might be less evidence that it’s a triumph for the Degenerate Corrupt Liberal Agenda and more evidence that liberals like cheering. This should not inform one’s analysis of the material/economic factors.
So, it seems to me that there is a terrible disconnect between property-splitting during a divorce and the existence of no-fault divorce, making marriage a tremendously costly move for the wealthier of the two parties (especially if they’re male). If in order for Bob to marry Alice, he has to give her the unilateral option to take half of his things and leave, then marriage seems unwise.
In the era of fault divorce, Bob is safer- he needs to either break the contract, or can end the contract if Alice breaks it without having to transfer to her the same share of his possessions.
(I think that the collapse in marriage rates is seen at too coarse a level. If you look at marriage rates by class, you notice that the upper class is still living in the 50s and the lower class has collapsed. An explanation, that I buy, is that we no longer try to promote good citizenship and good living, and so unsurprisingly people answer the call of the short term, to their long term detriment.)
This reads like a status assertion to me, along the lines of “follow your dreams” being code for “I’m awesome enough that I can get ahead by following my dreams” or “I’m awesome enough that I get to set my job parameters.” Not caring about loyalty is code for “I’m going to be awesome forever, so it’ll always be in their interests to stay with me,” but far better to have insurance in case of worse, poorer, or sickness.
If so, then why are the educated women marrying more than uneducated women? [src]
This makes sense if we assume marriage is causal for class. i.e. the people who don’t heed the call of the short term and do marry have better outcomes and end up higher class. Choosing marriages naturally sorts people into class, by this model.
Liberals would tell a story where things are reversed and class is causal of the pathology- they would say the economic changes that have occurred for the last few decades have increased ‘economic uncertainty’ for the lower class (for some measure of uncertainty.) which has lead to marital stress and divorce. Its also worth pointing out that in the lower classes divorce is usually less costly for the man (the wife is more likely to be working at a similar paying job, the man has less stuff to lose)
Personally, I found the book Red Families/Blue Families pushed me away from the first explanation and toward the second (full disclosure, this is part of a larger trend of me growing increasing liberal over the last decade and a half or so.)
I’ve edited the grandparent to say “an explanation,” because I don’t want to make the claim that this is a complete explanation. I very much agree that the prospects for marriage are significantly worse for the lower classes, for reasons both having to do with the shifting economic value of skills and the shifting costs of sex.
There were many historical periods with much much greater economic uncertainty, they also had higher marriage rates.
Well, perhaps I should start by saying that I don’t like distinction you draw between “affection and companionship” and “economic reasons.” The two are implicitly entwined. I will attempt to flesh out my position.
You don’t need marriage for “affection and companionship,” at least in the short term. You can just hang out. But most people want more than that. They want to build a life together. That involves making costly investments that will only bear fruit over time (e.g. buying a house, raising children, pension plans, etc). That involves making irreversible compromises—e.g. a shared circle of friends means you will have to be friends with people you wouldn’t otherwise be friends with, and not friends with people you would otherwise like to be; same goes with shared hobbies, etc. That involves specialization—perhaps one spouse will give up paid employment, or only work part-time. And so on.
But the problem with all these decisions is that they can lead to time-incompatible incentives. If Alice gives up work for a while to raise children while Bob focuses on his career, then ten years later Alice will be less pretty, less employable, and more dependent on Bob. Bob, meanwhile, can much more easily walk out on the marriage and start again. What’s to stop Bob reaping the benefits of Alice’s sacrifices, then checking out of the marriage?
And realistic people know that they won’t necessarily be thrilled with each other for every moment of their marriage. They will have rows, they will have disagreements, there will be times when the grass seems greener elsewhere. So you may find my attitude creepy, but I find your attitude evil—I think it’s quite wrong to go into a marriage without thinking about how to make sure it lasts. It’s partly about Alice making sure that Bob stays loyal to her, otherwise she’s wasting her time building a life with him. But it’s also about Bob(wedding) making sure that Bob(10 years later) stays loyal to Alice, otherwise he’s wasting his time. And vice versa.
So when you put the two sides of the problem together, you see it’s quite tricky. But at the same time, it’s super-rewarding if you can pull it off. Some people try to work around it to make the incentives less time-incompatible (e.g. women having children later) but this itself has its costs. The best solution is if Alice and Bob can bind their future selves to the marriage like Odysseus binding himself to the mast; that way they can both truly commit to the marriage, secure in the knowledge that the other party will too. And that will, paradoxically, mean that they create the best shared life together, and so will have least reason to leave the marriage.
But if, instead, Alice and Bob can’t bind their future self, then they can’t trust each other. Maybe Alice can trust Bob(wedding), but Bob(10 years later) is a different person—yes, people change during marriage, but not necessarily in ways their partner can control or predict. So because they can’t commit to the marriage securely, they won’t make the same kind of costly investments in their shared life. Which means their marriage will be worse, which means they will be more tempted to divorce, and so on in a vicious circle.
Except that in pre-1970s cultures, er..., ‘affection and companionship’ outside marriage were, er..., frowned upon, to the point that when people were caught doing ‘affection and companionship’ they were sometimes made to get married at gunpoint by each other’s parents. (Hell, there even are anecdotes about 20freakin′14 I could tell for that matter, though not as bad as that.)
I’d be much less against unbreakable marriage if it was something the bride and groom spontaneously chose to do, clearly demonstrating tht they know what they’re doing, without any social stigma for not doing so.
That’s also an argument against at-will employment: it is much harder to make plans for the future if my employer could fire me at any time for any reason or no reason. And yet people who oppose at-will employment tend to support divorce and vice versa. This suggests that their opposition is more due to Green vs Blue politics than on anything directly rational.
(My own view is that employment contracts which cannot be unilaterally terminated without just cause should be allowed but not required, and ditto with marriages; of course employees who want such a contract would probably end up paid less than those who are OK with at-will employment, for obvious demand-and-supply reasons.)
That sounds like a very bad idea to me: for example, what if Bob dies? or turns out to be a violent psychopath, even if he managed to hide it until the wedding? My inner libertarian says that so long as Alice freely chose to marry Bob that’s her own problem and she shouldn’t be protected from herself, but my inner paternalist isn’t that sure.
So, in terms of David Friedman’s classification of “love”, “trade” and “force” in The Machinery of Freedom, you say that “love” can’t be reliable in the long term, and I agree, but why is force better than trade? I think it may be better if Alice gave something to Bob so that he won’t want to check out of the marriage.
Yes. And yet some couple stay together for years, even decades, without getting married. Why can’t we trust present Alice and present Bob’s determination about whether the current crisis is temporary, rather than relying on past Alice and past Bob’s (probably unrealistic, especially given their age) assessment that all future crises would be?
And yet places where women have children later don’t look that much worse to me. ISTM socioeconomical effects would largely swamp biological effects due to maternal age. (Search this for “maternal age”.)
Yeah, that’s not exactly an argument for making him accountable for Bob(10 years earlier)’s mistakes.
(Of course, I do not endorse the present-day US system where I hear someone who unilaterally walks out of a marriage can be entitled to a sizeable fraction of the other spouse’s property and future income.)
I don’t know who you’re arguing against, but it certainly isn’t me.
As I’ve stated Oh, at least a dozen times in this thread, I don’t want all marriages to be unbreakable. I just want people to be able to set the terms of their marriages as they see fit. No-one should be forced to remain in a marriage they don’t want to, but people who break marriage contracts should have to pay damages according to the terms of that contract, just as I can’t be made to live somewhere I don’t want to, but I will have to pay damages if I break the lease.
It isn’t force over trade. Contracts are trade. People must be held to the terms of their contract(or damages) or there is no trade.
So, you choose not to address the grandparent’s point about social stigma, and you want to add other ‘optional’ binding agreements which may themselves have social pressure pushing people to adopt them.
If you want people to find the process of divorce unpleasant, you can rest assured that most of them probably do.
I didn’t think the grandparent made any point about ‘social stigma’ worth addressing. But, to be clear:
You don’t have any right to your neighbours’ good opinion.
If doing X would upset (or please) your neighbours, your choice (not) to do X is still voluntary. It just means you’re facing a trade-off. Welcome to adulthood.
More generally, I don’t think that social approval/stigma are bad things. They are the glue that binds civil society together. I can’t help notice that people when people speak negatively of social pressure, they never apply that critique generally. Should there be less social stigma against racism? Less social stigma against harassment? Suddenly, they’re not so sure.
Actually, my focus is on making marriage more pleasant.
I’m a lot happier with social stigma when it attaches to acts and fades in proportion to time distance from the act, at some rate inversely proportional to severity, rather than attaching to immutable properties (whether or not they derive from some act). If I hypothetically get plastered and vomit strawberry Jello shots and half-digested guacamole all over my friend’s expensive Persian rug, chances are my friends are going to give me a lot of shit about it, and to be a little more cautious about inviting me to parties for a while… but I do not thereby become Gest the Puker, then and forevermore. Divorce has traditionally not had this property.
I might make an exception for crimes on the level of murder or rape, on the grounds that those are so severe that the stigma shouldn’t vanish in a normal lifetime. (Though on reflection, I doubt I’d think much less of him if my grandfather revealed that he’d killed a man in his youth.) But if we’re going to be treating marriage as a civil contract like any other, then breaking it is a civil matter, not something on that level.
For some value of “voluntary”, sure. Likewise, for some value of “voluntary” if I point a gun at you and ask you to do something, your choice whether to do what I ask or be shot is voluntary.
For better or worse, marriages as presently constituted in the West are not commercial contracts, but legal, social, and (optionally) religious arrangements conferring certain statuses on the partners in the eyes of the law, society, the relevant religious bodies, and each other. If you want a marriage contract such as you describe, there’s no point in complaining that marriage contracts as they exist are not that. It would take a legal historian to say authoritatively, but I am not sure they ever have been. There are various similarities and differences, but they are different entities.
What you would have to do instead, is design a contract such as you would wish a marriage contract to be, and consult with lawyers to see if it can be done in a manner that would be recognised by current law and practice as a valid contract incurring damages for its breach. If you find that it cannot be done, then you would have to agitate for such changes to the law as would be necessary to recognise it.
If that’s too big a job for one person, you could combine with others, register a domain—realmarriage.org is available—and begin a movement.
Isn’t that what pre-nups are?
I don’t know to which extent the courts will be willing to enforce the “damages” portions, but pre-nups are valid contracts and fulfill much of the needs you’re pointing to.
Possibly, but pre-nups aren’t valid in some jurisdictions (the UK, for example).
Some other issues have occurred to me regarding the redesign of marriage contracts. If a marriage contract is to be simply an ordinary contract in the framework of contract law, then several issues arise, which Salemicus and others of like mind might not want. What, if anything is to distinguish a “marriage” contract from any other, if it can be drawn up between any two (or more) people of legal age to enter into contracts? If the contract says whatever the parties wish it to say, is there any longer such a thing as “marriage”? How shall “marriage” be defined for such purposes as widows’ pensions, the line of succession in intestacy, etc.?
Any contract can be varied or voided instantly by common agreement of the parties, because no third party has any legal standing to object. Thus marriage “contracts” of this sort would make divorce by mutual agreement instant. (If there is no other ground than decision to separate, it takes 2 years in the UK.)
The only alternative is to reform the law of marriage itself. This is not to say that it cannot be done, but it would be a long row to hoe.
The entire concept of marriage is that the relationship between the individuals is a contract, even if not all conceptions of marriage have this contract as a literal legal contract enforced by the state. There’s good reason to believe that marriages throughout history have more often been about economics and/or politics than not, and that the norm that marriage is primarily about the sexual/emotional relationship but nonetheless falls under this contractual paradigm is a rather new one. I agree with your impression that this transactional model of relationships is a little creepy, and see this as an argument against maintaining this social norm.
BTW, the total marriage rate by year is a metric that can be easily confounded by tempo effects: if in a country all people born until 1950 married at 20 and all people born since 1951 married at 30, the marriage rate between 1971 to 1980 would be exactly 0 but (neglecting the mortality of twentysomething) no cohort would be any less likely to ever get married than another.
I see that as evidence that marriage, as currently implemented, is not a particularly appealing contract to as many people as it once was. Whether this is because of no-fault divorce is irrelevant to whether this constitutes “widespread suffering.”
I reject the a priori assumptions that are often made in these discussions and that you seem to be making, namely, that more marriage is good, more divorce is bad, and therefore that policy should strive to upregulate marriage and downregulate divorce. If this is simply a disparity of utility functions (if yours includes a specific term for number of marriages and mine doesn’t, or similar) then this is perhaps an impasse, but if you’re arguing that there’s some correlation, presumably negative, between number of marriages and some other, less marriage-specific form of disutility (i.e. “widespread suffering”), I’d like to know what your evidence or reasoning for that is.
I’m not sure what point are you trying to make with these graphs.
If people were allowed to make binding pre-nup agreements that penalized adultery would there be more marriages? Less divorces? More happiness?
None of these things seem obvious to me.
Pattern-matching is often rational in politics just because it’s so cheap, as long as the pattern makes sense in the first place. I’m sorry, but the pattern of reactionary rhetoric about marriage has these very deliberate connotations. People who discuss this tend to discuss punishing sinners (vicariously so), not holding rational economic actors accountable for damages on underrecognized-but-valid contracts.
So what are you supposed to say if you want to hold rational economic actors accountable for damages on underrecognized-but-valid contracts?
Credibly dissociate yourself from people you don’t want to be pattern-matched to, and show that you understand the reasoning by which your audience opposes them (in this case, for example, Salemicus should at least acknowledge that at-fault divorce can—to put it mildly! - increase underlying gender inequality without any explicitly gendered provisions), and that you’re not going to defend them in that particular battle. Leftists do it all the time, to the extent that they have the opposite problem of not being able to unite while agreeing with each other on 95% of everything.
But there’s no-one who advocates dragging people off in chains, slavery, etc. This isn’t pattern-matching me to some well-known group (in which case I agree, I should distinguish myself). Instead, this is just deliberately straw-manning.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by “punishing sinners”—but I assume you mean treating adultery as not just a breach of contract, but a tort. Well, damages for a tort are also financial.
As for “underlying gender inequality”—you’ll notice that no-one else has brought that up in this thread. Perhaps that is the “reasoning by which [my] audience opposes” me”, but if so I’d prefer that people actually advanced that reasoning, rather than that being their double super-secret baseline position, and their public one being a lot of straw-manning and nonsense. Alternatively, it may be that the “underlying gender inequality” argument is yours and yours alone, and you are projecting.