It's truly not clear to me that the choice we made in America is the correct one. My wife's family is full of wonderful and loving people, they are suffering from our country's social dissolution (which has hit non-college educated people outside major metro areas especially hard). Nearly everyone is divorced, often several times over. Grandparents raise their grandchildren. Fathers are in some cases are absent entirely. Children grow up without stability. And now folks are getting close to retirement age with divorces having devastated their finances.
There was also a semi-hidden system of forced labour for those women that did have children out of wedlock. The "mother and baby" homes. The amount of abuse involved was horrific and the country is still untangling and confronting it decades later.
Be wary of changing a system where the abuse is borne silently because there is no way out for one that makes it visible and thinking that is worse because just now you can see it.
Divorce rates are on their way down in the West. The transition period is definitely rough, but eventually the cultural norms adapt.
I would be interested to see if you canvas the views of Bangladeshi women on the comparative systems.
Divorce rates are down, but so are marriage and birth rates. The "cultural norms" are "adapting," but don't appear to be adapting in a direction that combines modernity with population stability in a steady state.
Much of "the west" is now dependent on people from more traditional cultures (in Europe, Muslims, in the United States, Latinos). That's not an anti-immigration rant (I'm a Bangladeshi immigrant to the United States). My point is that anything we call a "successful culture" should probably be self-sustaining in the steady state. If divorce rates in the west are declining mainly because nobody is getting married (and nobody is having kids) then you don't actually have a successful culture. It might be great for all the freedoms it provides, but on its own it will cease to exist eventually.
In a way it's a sort of arbitrage. If everyone in the world acted like Germans, it would be nice for a while, but humanity would cease to exist. There is an illusion of sustainability that is being provided by people from traditional cultures--with their traditional views on marriage and child-rearing, etc.
To make matters worse, we now have instability in the wrong direction: population is predicted to grow for 50-100 years still, peaking at 11 billion.
The other variable is resource consumption per capita, both will need to go down after the current spurt to counter severe overpopulation problems globally.
> I also approach this problem as a regional economist specializing in migration, so I also think of the American population issue through the lens of population density comparisons.
Here’s the same view from Matt Yglesias, solidly left-wing journalist: https://wdet.org/posts/2020/09/24/90064-vox-matthew-yglesias...
Also Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-malthus-is-st...
Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce also however go with larger rates of domestic violence rates and no way out. That the perpetrators of those don't end up in jail does not make such society better behaved or less criminal/violent. Just tolerant of violence toward some people.
I grew up with my parents married. They were married before I was born and are still married now. That didn't and doesn't stop the abuse, the mistreatment, the violent rages, the substance abuse, the mental illness, or the cruelty. I wished every day State authorities would come take us away because the alternative couldn't possibly be worse than this. They never came and I never had the courage to tell anyone. I just had to suffer.
The system failed me badly, but it would have failed me worse if the authorities did come and said "well your parents are married and you have food to eat and a bed to sleep in. Looks good."
Kids end up in foster care for many reasons, and its not necessarily because their parents are violent and abusive. The ubiquity of single parenthood, for example, dramatically increases the risk that a child will end up in foster care if anything happens to the remaining parent. Likewise, in a society where divorce and single parenthood are ubiquitous, other members of the family are much less likely to be in a position to take in a child when something happens to his or her parents.
I'm not suggesting we do away with social workers who can check in on kids in abusive situations. To the contrary, if social workers weren't overwhelmed taking care of a large number of kids who are in challenging circumstances simply because their dad doesn't feel like being a dad, or for other mundane, solvable reasons, they would have far more attention and resources to devote to kids suffering from alcoholism, physical and sexual abuse, etc., in their families.
We've entered a transactional phase where your partner is supposed to show up perfect, well-adjusted and no work on your part for a healthy relationship is required. Not working? Ditch 'em and try again. That's the other extreme, sort of the exact opposite of staying due to social pressure with someone you hate and makes you unhappy, and it's also unhealthy.
Do you feel like there's a good way of measuring whether a relationship is worth saving or not?
kinda depends on what you're looking for in a relationship. all relationships take some level of effort and compromise to maintain. however you measure the "value" of a relationship, it has to at least be better than being single to be worth the trouble. I'd say a relationship is worth saving if a) both partners agree it is better than being single and b) both are willing to take on a roughly symmetrical share of the effort and compromise.
There used to be pro-familly policies in USA that basically assumed that is male is in the house, the male is responsible to be breadwinner. That meant that if there was make, woman would not get social support money on her nor on kid.
They were even quicker to kick unemployed male out due to that - his presence meant they risk support. It sucked, imo.
The argument about shame based "norms" keeping people together aside, it was in many places, quite literally the law that forced women to stay with their husbands.
Up until the 70s and later, in many US states it was:
* Legal to rape your spouse
* Legal to restrict a woman's access to contraceptives
* Illegal for a woman to abort an unwanted pregnancy, even due to rape or incest (the previous two combined with the first essentially stripping a women's autonomy to decide when and how many children to have)
* Illegal for women to work in certain careers/legal to discriminate on whether a woman was pregnant or had children
* Legal to prevent a woman from opening a bank account or line of credit without their husband's consent
This was more the case in some places vs others, but talk to an older women in the US what the culture was like for women then. The women's liberation movement happened in reaction to severe oppression and we absolutely should not consider reverting to a society before then.
EDIT: Yikes. I was curious about the norms in Bangladesh. I don't think Bangladesh should be held as an example for anything related to marriage.
https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/child-marriage/bangladesh/
> 59% of girls in Bangladesh are married before their 18th birthday and 22% are married before the age of 15.
> Bangladesh has the third highest prevalence of child marriage in the world, and the second highest absolute number of women married or in a union before the age of 18 globally – 4,382,000.
> 4% of boys are married before the age of 18.
So you wave aside my actual argument, about norms, then proceed to refute a straw man? Let’s posit that laws against spousal rape and gender discrimination are good things. Are those the only things that have changed in our culture and in the laws? Can we have laws allowing people to escape abusive marriages, while discouraging the vastly larger number of divorces that don’t involve those things?
More than half of Americans, including over 40% of Democrats, disagree with the proposition that “changing gender roles have made it easier for women to live satisfying lives.” https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/10/18/wide-partisan-gap.... By contrast, just 10% think that contraceptives should be banned. There is clearly a significant number of people who think the changes you list are good things, while disagreeing that all of the social changes that have happened are good.
There is in fact widespread discontentment about the status quo among women. Women report wanting more kids than they end up having. Women report wanting to get married but being unable to do so. Many women aren’t super thrilled about a culture where people call them “crazy” for wanting normal things like a marriage and kids at the biologically normal ages (20s) for having those things. (This is completely unsurprising, because women disproportionately bear the burdens of our social changes that have freed men from the responsibilities of fatherhood.)
As to Bangladesh—it’s a poor agrarian society that suffers from the problems endemic to poor agrarian societies. In particular, strong economic incentives to marry off girls. My dad, in fact, works on public health programs to discourage child marriage in Bangladesh. But there’s a pretty big gap between child marriage (something most Bangladeshis agree we should eradicate) on one hand, and normalizing and enabling pervasive divorce and out of wedlock childbirth on the other.
But on the flip side of all that, Bangladeshi society is at least somewhat functional despite crushing poverty. What would Bangladeshi villages be like if men could decide, like in America, that they don’t want the responsibilities of fatherhood and it was socially acceptable for them to abandon their families? The society would break down completely. Death and calamity would result, because unlike in America the government can’t afford to throw money at the social ills that would result.
And that’s exactly what we see in places like Chicago, but nobody who is allowed to speak can put 2 and 2 together. Except when Barack Obama mentioned it that one time, which was promptly forgotten.
He eviscerated your actual argument that Bangladeshi marriage norms are something to aspire, considering how they treat 60% of their under age 18 girls (but 4% of their boys).
As of Bangladeshi, look up their domestic violence reports and juvenile deliquency reports. The domestic violence is basically normal and accepted part of life. And we are taking about pretty severe stuff - murders, acid attacks, serious beatings. Juvenile deliquency is huge problem.
Death and calamity are Bangladeshi life pretty often, in particular if you are woman. And kids get to watch all that and are affected by all of that, creating cycle of trauma and violence.
It is not better for children to be with violent parent nor is ot good for them to see one parent attack the other. Yes, out of wedlock or divorce is better for them then domestic violence situation.
American crime rates went down considerably. So did juvenile violence rates, drug taking and alcoholism. And teenage pregnancies went down too. All the while divorces went up. Stop demonizing kids of single parents and for that matter Americans.
Also, American domestic violence rates went down. While the reporting of it went up as women can get actual help nowdays, so there is a point in doing it. These would not even count as crimes in many of "harmonious" families with taboo around divorce.
Also, in Americans crime statistics, murders are higher relative to other crimes, because of prevalence of guns. America is not perfect, but it's youth is way better then you make them be due to your strong bias against kids who had divorced parents.
The U.S. leads the world in the percentage of children raised in single parent families: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/12/u-s-childre.... Over 30% of kids don't live with both parents. There are a raft of statistically established negative consequences arising from the absence of both parents, ranging from trouble at school to criminal conduct, to obesity and depression: https://www.mnpsych.org/index.php%3Foption%3Dcom_dailyplanet....
(As to “bias against Americans.” On the issues of marriage and family, a lot of the things that are “normal” in America are deemed at best highly regrettable where I’m from. Now I’m as much of a flag waver as the next immigrant. But in this particular area I’m not convinced that Americans are on the right track.)