Oh and by the way, repealing no-fault divorce laws will literally get women KILLED. Especially when combined with the rest of the package deal of regressive nostrums recommended in this article. Seriously.
When no-fault divorce was introduced, it was believed it will REDUCE divorce rates - but instead, it led to their explosion, with many more children being raised in single parent households while probably saving quite a few women from abusive relationships.
In hindsight, if people saw what it would cause they would have probably hadn't voted for it.
On the other hand, I am not confident as the author is that abolishing it would boost marriage rates.
First, without intensive conservative cultural propaganda, I would wager many women would simply choose not to get married.
Second, I think he overstates the impact of no-fault divorce in marriage rates. Most men do not think ahead that 'I won't get married because I don't want to lose half my wealth' (some of the men today do, but the men of the 70s or 80s weren't).
His theory absolutely fails to explain Japan's very low TFR and divorce rate (yes, birth pills were not available, but abortion and sterilization were), or Iran's fertility rate fall in the 1980s and 1990s, after the Islamic Revolution.
TL/DR version: To increase birthrates, decrease gender equality, decrease women’s rights (reproductive and otherwise), and increase the gender wage gap dramatically. By force if necessary. (Or simply outright force people to get and stay married as early in life as possible.) And…Voila! Bonus points for outright banning (younger) women, and mothers of all ages, from the workforce.
In other words, there is NO ethical way to raise birthrates more than very marginally, at least not in a modern or even semi-modern society. Thus, I could never, ever advocate doing any of the above.
But truly growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, which eventually kills its host. It’s almost like Gaia is trying to tell us something…
Stopping women from being leeches on men and artificially raising their success rates (at the expense of men) is not unethical, quite the opposite actually.
Furthermore, happiness is largely subjective, and also largely an inside job as well. But suicide is a cold, hard fact, and suicide rates for women have, until very recently, actually trended downward since the 1960s, during the better part of the era of the “paradox of declining female happiness” (which largely spared much of Europe).
What would real gender equality look like? With today’s higher productivity compared to 50 years ago, both men and women would have had to work no more than 10-20 hours per week if wages had kept up with productivity, and had housing not been made artificially scarce by zoning and other Machiavellian machinations by the moneyed elites.
Women are already killing themselfs anyway. While happiness is a subjective thing it can be measured and has declined, married people are happier and marriages used to be happier.
The wage-productivity gap is a myth. Median incomes have actually increased by a lot and jobs in wich productivity greatly increased have seen large gains, where incomes have truly "stagnated" is in industries where productivity has not risen by much.
Housing regulations were not pushed by "financial elites", what are you on about?
Not really, because people of today have more demands as part of a 'normal lifestyle'.
For example, in the vaunted 1950s, the average size of a new home was 983 square feet and a household size of 3.37 people. In the 2010s, the average size of a new home was 2,392 square feet and a household size of 2.59 people.
Also, the inequality growth is real, but overstated because it ignores premiums.
The author's suggestion of pulling money out higher education is a good one, but it must be coupled with reversing Griggs vs Duke Powers (which forbid employee tests with disparate impact, and led to corporations having large HR personnel and requiring college degree for many jobs).
Your idea of reduced workweeks (maybe 30 hours as normal, and 60 as maximum as the first step) is also a sound one coupled with other pro-union measures.
OK, maybe there is an ethical way to do it, namely using very generous carrots rather than sticks to encourage more procreation, but it would require printing a LOT of money to do it. And also accepting that a good chunk of the new births, at least at the margin, will be out of wedlock as well, and/orto same sex couples. Two things that most conservatives would likely majorly cringe at. And even then, the effect size would likely be disappointing to the forced birthers.
Even shorter TL/DR version: when you force humans (or any other species, save perhaps for giant pandas) to mate in captivity, especially early in life, they will have more offspring.
That is, force women (either by law or circumstances) to be utterly dependent on men, in other words, so they don’t have a choice in the matter. Women are just brood mares, after all. Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud. Of course, that would thus make men…WORK HORSES. LOL
I admire and am fairly convinced by the research here. But I abhor the conclusion that the only way to revive fertility is to resurrect patriarchy. Surely there must be a way of combining gender equality with demographic sustainability? At the very least, isn't it worth *trying* to do this?
The entire Overpopulation FAQs page is basically a robust collection of short essays dedicated to answering questions about population dynamics, overpopulation, and population control. I hope that you'll find the whole page interesting since we seem to share the same interest.
I will admit I don't find your narrative fully compelling, and the idea that birth control pills and legalization of abortion was central in the drop of fertility makes more sense to me.
Japan may have only legalized the pill in 1999, but abortion (1990 abortion rate is 37.4/100 births) and sterilization (maybe 7% of women chose sterilization?) were already available. It also has very low divorce rates, and still its TFR has been very low for decades.
Also, the fertility rates have been free falling in Iran after the Islamic Revolution between 1981 and 2003 (from over 6 to less than 2). How do you explain this?
You say that marriage bust was result of rising female empowerement, however in reality the drop was very quick. Is gender gap really good explanation? Isn't it just publication of Population bomb and anti-natalist movement?
Brilliant, really enjoyed this article and have re-read a couple of times.
I’m curious what caused this sudden boom in male income and educational attainment from the 1930s? It seems like there was some very sudden shift in what men were doing all over the western world.
I’m just guessing, but could it be that the jobs these economies were producing were particularly benefiting men over women? I’m thinking automobile manufacturing and other heavy manufacturing production type work. This might explain some of the educational attainment with employer sponsored programs?
Another thing that explains both the baby boom AND the marriage boom: the birthrates falling in the decades prior to it. Think about it: the falling birthrates during the 1920s and 1930s resulted in a shortage of younger women relative to slightly older men in the 1950s. That led to men wanting to marry sooner than later so they would not lose in the game of “musical chairs”, and younger women had thus more bargaining power relative to slightly older men. And is axiomatic that starting to have kids at an earlier age results in more kids being born in total. Then, the reverse happened when the Baby Boomers came of age in th 1960s and 1970s: a surplus of younger women relative to slightly older men. Men predictably “played the field” as a result, because they could, and that helped kickstart not only the sexual revolution but also second wave feminism, and a later marriage pattern that resulted in lower birthrates. (The Pill only added to this.)
A less pronounced version of the 1950s’ gender ratio happened in the 1990s, with vaguely similar but much more muted results, as the culture had also permanently changed back then since women actually had civil and reproductive rights by then. And the 2000s and 2010s saw largely equal gender ratios, but the kinds of men in higher demand by women were becoming scarce due to structural changes in the economy, thus a repeat of the 1960s and 1970s pattern.
And with birthrates so low for so long, the 2030s will come to resemble the 1950s in terms of gender ratios once again. Ergo, a largely self-correcting cycle.
Put another way, this can also be seen as a tacit admission that absolute monogamy is really not natural as it were, since, to quote the execrable Jordan Peterson, it has to be "enforced". It is practically an axiomatic law of nature that there are three kinds of monogamy: strict, lifelong, and universal. Pick two out of three.
No society in all of recorded history has been able to achieve all three for very long. Not without a safety valve, at least. Something always has to give. Even Orthodox Jews, arguably the most monogamous people in history, still allow a convenient escape hatch for men (but NOT women): quick and easy unilateral divorce. And historically, until fairly recently women and children were left high and dry after divorce, often utterly destitute. Perhaps that was what Jesus Christ was getting at esoterically when he *allegedly* prohibited divorce at that time (which is of course open to interpretation through contemporary lenses). But such prohibition only kept women trapped in the gilded cage of patriarchy, albeit a somewhat "kinder, gentler" variant.
And to all who claim to disagree with me: come on. You KNOW deep down in your heart or hearts that I am at least largely right about this. Perhaps that was the true esoteric meaning of Matthew 5:27-29. A sort of reductio ad absurdum, basically. Most people, then and now, are in fact quite hypocritical and pharisaical about anything to do with sex, it seems.
Regarding the fourth figure on single and married men's and women's income.
"Another mechanism is that children and a family are a powerful motivator for men, who make up almost all of the right tail of hard workers, innovators, and entrepreneurs that drives economic growth."
This is undoubtedly true, but I wonder if this graph really illustrates that it is the men that distinguish themselves financially from women who are able to get and stay married.
This would support the later observation that the Baby Boom was the result of young women seeking wealth and status by attaching themselves to higher-status young men.
I would recommend reading "Does Marriage Really Make Men More Productive?" by Korenman and Neumark, 1991. Here's a JSTOR link if you have access: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/145924.pdf
Conclusion paragraphs are below (apologies for the bad formatting):
First, hourly wage premiums paid to married men are large and persist even when detailed human capital controls (such as actual labor market
experience) are included in wage equations.
Second, marriage premiums seem to arise slowly, resulting more from
faster wage growth for married men as compared to never-married men than from an intercept shift associated with any particular marital status This finding suggests that an appropriate specification allows for a rela-
tionship between marriage and wages that varies according to the number of years a man is married.
Third, taking as our "true" model a specification that incorporates a
"years married" effect, comparisons of cross-sectional and fixed-effects
estimates indicate that selection on the basis of fixed unobservable char-
acteristics accounts for less than twenty percent of the observed wage
premium.
Fourth, data drawn from a company personnel file indicate that the
marriage wage premiums persist even within a single firm, for a relatively
homogeneous group of occupations (managers and professionals). The
marriage premium appears to be due to the location of married workers
in higher paying job grades within the company, rather than to married
workers receiving higher pay than single workers within the same job
grades.
Finally, married workers in this company receive higher performance
ratings from their supervisors. These higher performance ratings increase
their promotion chances, allowing them to enter the higher paying job
grades. When we controlled for supervisor performance ratings, how-
ever, the marriage promotion premium disappeared.
Although these findings do not represent a tightly constructed test of
a theory of marital pay differentials, they do lend greater support to some
hypotheses than to others. In particular, selection of men into marriage
on the basis of wages, wage growth, or other wage-enhancing characteris-
tics receives little support as an explanation of the observed marital pay
premiums. Wages rise after marriage, fixed-effects estimates of marriage
premiums in properly specified wage equations are nearly as large as their
cross-sectional counterparts, and in the sample and period we studied,
unmarried men's wage growth appears unrelated to the probability they marry.
Reading this reminded me of Thomas Sowell arguing that married men make more because their wives help them to manage their domestic and social lives, allowing them to focus on their careers. It makes sense that a man who has this kind of partner would be doubly motivated to provide.
This is the most important article I have read in recent memory. It identifies a huge social problem and offers solutions.
Nice one!
Oh and by the way, repealing no-fault divorce laws will literally get women KILLED. Especially when combined with the rest of the package deal of regressive nostrums recommended in this article. Seriously.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/27/us/no-fault-divorce-explained-history-wellness-cec/index.html
But women are just means to an end, and the end justifies the means, right Machiavelli? (Or should I say, Gilead?)
Every policy has tradeoffs.
When no-fault divorce was introduced, it was believed it will REDUCE divorce rates - but instead, it led to their explosion, with many more children being raised in single parent households while probably saving quite a few women from abusive relationships.
In hindsight, if people saw what it would cause they would have probably hadn't voted for it.
On the other hand, I am not confident as the author is that abolishing it would boost marriage rates.
First, without intensive conservative cultural propaganda, I would wager many women would simply choose not to get married.
Second, I think he overstates the impact of no-fault divorce in marriage rates. Most men do not think ahead that 'I won't get married because I don't want to lose half my wealth' (some of the men today do, but the men of the 70s or 80s weren't).
Not just that, but it seems that the real decrease in marriage rates is the consequence of the reduction of shotgun marriages after pills and abortion became available: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-mothers-not-married-technology-shock-the-demise-of-shotgun-marriage-and-the-increase-in-out-of-wedlock-births/
His theory absolutely fails to explain Japan's very low TFR and divorce rate (yes, birth pills were not available, but abortion and sterilization were), or Iran's fertility rate fall in the 1980s and 1990s, after the Islamic Revolution.
''When no-fault divorce was introduced, it was believed it will REDUCE divorce rates "
Believed by whom?
TL/DR version: To increase birthrates, decrease gender equality, decrease women’s rights (reproductive and otherwise), and increase the gender wage gap dramatically. By force if necessary. (Or simply outright force people to get and stay married as early in life as possible.) And…Voila! Bonus points for outright banning (younger) women, and mothers of all ages, from the workforce.
In other words, there is NO ethical way to raise birthrates more than very marginally, at least not in a modern or even semi-modern society. Thus, I could never, ever advocate doing any of the above.
But truly growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, which eventually kills its host. It’s almost like Gaia is trying to tell us something…
Stopping women from being leeches on men and artificially raising their success rates (at the expense of men) is not unethical, quite the opposite actually.
Furthermore, happiness is largely subjective, and also largely an inside job as well. But suicide is a cold, hard fact, and suicide rates for women have, until very recently, actually trended downward since the 1960s, during the better part of the era of the “paradox of declining female happiness” (which largely spared much of Europe).
What would real gender equality look like? With today’s higher productivity compared to 50 years ago, both men and women would have had to work no more than 10-20 hours per week if wages had kept up with productivity, and had housing not been made artificially scarce by zoning and other Machiavellian machinations by the moneyed elites.
Women are already killing themselfs anyway. While happiness is a subjective thing it can be measured and has declined, married people are happier and marriages used to be happier.
The wage-productivity gap is a myth. Median incomes have actually increased by a lot and jobs in wich productivity greatly increased have seen large gains, where incomes have truly "stagnated" is in industries where productivity has not risen by much.
Housing regulations were not pushed by "financial elites", what are you on about?
Not really, because people of today have more demands as part of a 'normal lifestyle'.
For example, in the vaunted 1950s, the average size of a new home was 983 square feet and a household size of 3.37 people. In the 2010s, the average size of a new home was 2,392 square feet and a household size of 2.59 people.
Also, the inequality growth is real, but overstated because it ignores premiums.
The author's suggestion of pulling money out higher education is a good one, but it must be coupled with reversing Griggs vs Duke Powers (which forbid employee tests with disparate impact, and led to corporations having large HR personnel and requiring college degree for many jobs).
Your idea of reduced workweeks (maybe 30 hours as normal, and 60 as maximum as the first step) is also a sound one coupled with other pro-union measures.
OK, maybe there is an ethical way to do it, namely using very generous carrots rather than sticks to encourage more procreation, but it would require printing a LOT of money to do it. And also accepting that a good chunk of the new births, at least at the margin, will be out of wedlock as well, and/orto same sex couples. Two things that most conservatives would likely majorly cringe at. And even then, the effect size would likely be disappointing to the forced birthers.
Even shorter TL/DR version: when you force humans (or any other species, save perhaps for giant pandas) to mate in captivity, especially early in life, they will have more offspring.
That is, force women (either by law or circumstances) to be utterly dependent on men, in other words, so they don’t have a choice in the matter. Women are just brood mares, after all. Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud. Of course, that would thus make men…WORK HORSES. LOL
I admire and am fairly convinced by the research here. But I abhor the conclusion that the only way to revive fertility is to resurrect patriarchy. Surely there must be a way of combining gender equality with demographic sustainability? At the very least, isn't it worth *trying* to do this?
Here's an interesting question: Was Western fertility *eugenic* during the Baby Boom era?
I've written a list of recommendations for boosting Western fertility rates as well: https://zerocontradictions.net/FAQs/overpopulation-FAQs#boosting-western-fertility
The entire Overpopulation FAQs page is basically a robust collection of short essays dedicated to answering questions about population dynamics, overpopulation, and population control. I hope that you'll find the whole page interesting since we seem to share the same interest.
I will admit I don't find your narrative fully compelling, and the idea that birth control pills and legalization of abortion was central in the drop of fertility makes more sense to me.
Japan may have only legalized the pill in 1999, but abortion (1990 abortion rate is 37.4/100 births) and sterilization (maybe 7% of women chose sterilization?) were already available. It also has very low divorce rates, and still its TFR has been very low for decades.
Also, the fertility rates have been free falling in Iran after the Islamic Revolution between 1981 and 2003 (from over 6 to less than 2). How do you explain this?
I seriously doubt that many men refuse to get married because they fear they are going to lose half their wealth in a divorce (well, young men growing up now may do, but men in the 70s or 80s didn't). It seems to be that a much better explanation for the drop in marriage rates is the much smaller number of shotgun marriages after abortion and contraception became available: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-mothers-not-married-technology-shock-the-demise-of-shotgun-marriage-and-the-increase-in-out-of-wedlock-births/
Finally, I seriously doubt that inequality hasn't increased in the US.
I recall that in the book you cite, the author includes healthcare expenditure as welfare, which is preposterous.
You say that marriage bust was result of rising female empowerement, however in reality the drop was very quick. Is gender gap really good explanation? Isn't it just publication of Population bomb and anti-natalist movement?
Brilliant, really enjoyed this article and have re-read a couple of times.
I’m curious what caused this sudden boom in male income and educational attainment from the 1930s? It seems like there was some very sudden shift in what men were doing all over the western world.
I’m just guessing, but could it be that the jobs these economies were producing were particularly benefiting men over women? I’m thinking automobile manufacturing and other heavy manufacturing production type work. This might explain some of the educational attainment with employer sponsored programs?
Another thing that explains both the baby boom AND the marriage boom: the birthrates falling in the decades prior to it. Think about it: the falling birthrates during the 1920s and 1930s resulted in a shortage of younger women relative to slightly older men in the 1950s. That led to men wanting to marry sooner than later so they would not lose in the game of “musical chairs”, and younger women had thus more bargaining power relative to slightly older men. And is axiomatic that starting to have kids at an earlier age results in more kids being born in total. Then, the reverse happened when the Baby Boomers came of age in th 1960s and 1970s: a surplus of younger women relative to slightly older men. Men predictably “played the field” as a result, because they could, and that helped kickstart not only the sexual revolution but also second wave feminism, and a later marriage pattern that resulted in lower birthrates. (The Pill only added to this.)
A less pronounced version of the 1950s’ gender ratio happened in the 1990s, with vaguely similar but much more muted results, as the culture had also permanently changed back then since women actually had civil and reproductive rights by then. And the 2000s and 2010s saw largely equal gender ratios, but the kinds of men in higher demand by women were becoming scarce due to structural changes in the economy, thus a repeat of the 1960s and 1970s pattern.
And with birthrates so low for so long, the 2030s will come to resemble the 1950s in terms of gender ratios once again. Ergo, a largely self-correcting cycle.
Put another way, this can also be seen as a tacit admission that absolute monogamy is really not natural as it were, since, to quote the execrable Jordan Peterson, it has to be "enforced". It is practically an axiomatic law of nature that there are three kinds of monogamy: strict, lifelong, and universal. Pick two out of three.
No society in all of recorded history has been able to achieve all three for very long. Not without a safety valve, at least. Something always has to give. Even Orthodox Jews, arguably the most monogamous people in history, still allow a convenient escape hatch for men (but NOT women): quick and easy unilateral divorce. And historically, until fairly recently women and children were left high and dry after divorce, often utterly destitute. Perhaps that was what Jesus Christ was getting at esoterically when he *allegedly* prohibited divorce at that time (which is of course open to interpretation through contemporary lenses). But such prohibition only kept women trapped in the gilded cage of patriarchy, albeit a somewhat "kinder, gentler" variant.
And to all who claim to disagree with me: come on. You KNOW deep down in your heart or hearts that I am at least largely right about this. Perhaps that was the true esoteric meaning of Matthew 5:27-29. A sort of reductio ad absurdum, basically. Most people, then and now, are in fact quite hypocritical and pharisaical about anything to do with sex, it seems.
Great article! Now the next step is gaining enough power to implement these policies...
Regarding the fourth figure on single and married men's and women's income.
"Another mechanism is that children and a family are a powerful motivator for men, who make up almost all of the right tail of hard workers, innovators, and entrepreneurs that drives economic growth."
This is undoubtedly true, but I wonder if this graph really illustrates that it is the men that distinguish themselves financially from women who are able to get and stay married.
This would support the later observation that the Baby Boom was the result of young women seeking wealth and status by attaching themselves to higher-status young men.
I would recommend reading "Does Marriage Really Make Men More Productive?" by Korenman and Neumark, 1991. Here's a JSTOR link if you have access: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/145924.pdf
Conclusion paragraphs are below (apologies for the bad formatting):
First, hourly wage premiums paid to married men are large and persist even when detailed human capital controls (such as actual labor market
experience) are included in wage equations.
Second, marriage premiums seem to arise slowly, resulting more from
faster wage growth for married men as compared to never-married men than from an intercept shift associated with any particular marital status This finding suggests that an appropriate specification allows for a rela-
tionship between marriage and wages that varies according to the number of years a man is married.
Third, taking as our "true" model a specification that incorporates a
"years married" effect, comparisons of cross-sectional and fixed-effects
estimates indicate that selection on the basis of fixed unobservable char-
acteristics accounts for less than twenty percent of the observed wage
premium.
Fourth, data drawn from a company personnel file indicate that the
marriage wage premiums persist even within a single firm, for a relatively
homogeneous group of occupations (managers and professionals). The
marriage premium appears to be due to the location of married workers
in higher paying job grades within the company, rather than to married
workers receiving higher pay than single workers within the same job
grades.
Finally, married workers in this company receive higher performance
ratings from their supervisors. These higher performance ratings increase
their promotion chances, allowing them to enter the higher paying job
grades. When we controlled for supervisor performance ratings, how-
ever, the marriage promotion premium disappeared.
Although these findings do not represent a tightly constructed test of
a theory of marital pay differentials, they do lend greater support to some
hypotheses than to others. In particular, selection of men into marriage
on the basis of wages, wage growth, or other wage-enhancing characteris-
tics receives little support as an explanation of the observed marital pay
premiums. Wages rise after marriage, fixed-effects estimates of marriage
premiums in properly specified wage equations are nearly as large as their
cross-sectional counterparts, and in the sample and period we studied,
unmarried men's wage growth appears unrelated to the probability they marry.
Great to know.
Reading this reminded me of Thomas Sowell arguing that married men make more because their wives help them to manage their domestic and social lives, allowing them to focus on their careers. It makes sense that a man who has this kind of partner would be doubly motivated to provide.
Do you have a twitter?
Yes. https://twitter.com/arctotherium42