Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is an interesting and well thought out response but I have a few issues with it:

> Secular humanism, by contrast, emphasizes development of the self, and discourages social enforcement of moral norms

I don't think this statement is true. For example, secular society provides the legal framework that reinforces the social practice of marriage.

> single parenthood rates is the single factor most highly correlated with low economic mobility

Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility. Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44127459

> But we are often myopic about the benefits of social structures to the majority

If this means what I think you are saying (please correct me if I'm wrong) that we should turn a blind eye to the injustices fomented by a big religious institution like the Catholic church, because overall they appear to do more good than harm, I would 100% disagree.

The Mormon example is a bit of a weird one. Utah has a higher GDP per capita but I'm not sure you can ascribe that to religious practices. It might be just because Utah is better farmland than (say) Nevada. https://countryeconomy.com/countries/usa-states/compare/neva...

> For example, secular society provides the legal framework that reinforces the social practice of marriage.

Huh? The legal framework around marriage as it currently exists in the secular society of USA does exactly opposite. After no-fault divorce became an option, and as legally sanctioned child support system was set in place, incentive to get and stay married became much diminished.

> Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility. Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money.

If it was about wealth, the family structures in rural Bangladesh would be complete disaster, as the people there are much, much poorer than what passes as “poverty” in the States. Americans with income at federal poverty threshold enjoy material wealth that most Bangladeshi can only dream of, and that’s before you consider government transfers, which boost real consumption of poor Americans by 25-50% beyond what their wage income would allow them. Nevertheless, families in Bangladesh are strong, and families of poor Americans are highly dysfunctional. Why is it so?

Moreover, most poor Americans are poor precisely because their families are dysfunctional. In America, poverty among people who are married, have not had children before marriage, and who have a full time job (even minimum wage one) is very rare. It’s not poverty that causes dysfunctional families, it’s dysfunctional families that cause poverty.

> Utah has a higher GDP per capita but I'm not sure you can ascribe that to religious practices. It might be just because Utah is better farmland than (say) Nevada.

Given that agriculture contributes less than 1% to Utah GDP, I consider it highly unlikely to be relevant.

No-fault divorce and legally sanctioned child support were put in place to give women more choices. I don't think we need to return to a time where women and children are effectively chattel. The overall effect of these policies has been positive.

There is an untested assertion here that Bangladesh has better outcomes for marriages because the practise of religion is higher. Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2740706/

I'm not sure how far we are going to get trying to work out whether the chicken/egg situation regarding dysfunctional families and poverty in the US is causal. All we really know for sure is that poverty is a reliable cause of family breakdown.

We shouldn't force people to stay together because some religious folk think that piling further misery on unhappy people is OK.

> I don't think we need to return to a time where women and children are effectively chattel.

This is very much factually wrong description of the position of women in America before no-fault divorce. In fact, I consider the suggestion that women in America completely lacked agency before 70s to be rather reprehensible.

> Yet you should also see lower levels of violence against women in Bangladesh from all these happy families but it seems that isn't so.

I don’t think anyone argues here that family life in Bangladesh is better than in America in all aspects. Violence against women is obviously bad thing, just as all violence is. It is a good societal goal to reduce violence against any of its members.

At the same time, this is only one of the goals the societies might want to pursue. Often, you might encounter hard trade offs to make. For example, is it better to have a bit more violence, but much fewer children raised by a singe parent? Or, is it better to give the members of the society more choices, at cost of the society failing to choose to procreate, leading to ultimate decay and dissolution of the society in a few generations? One of the problems in the secular society in the US is failure to acknowledge these trade offs, and deciding that more choice of, less violence towards, and more workplace empowerment of women as always preferable at all circumstances.

If anyone thinks it is a straw man, just look at how responses to this comment will claim that I want to enslave women and promote violence towards them, which I of course do not, but the mere suggestion of the trade off existing, and potentiality of choosing something other than liberal women empowerment is an idea completely outside the overton window of secular, liberal discussion within educated, professional community.

I don't quite understand this argument. Are you saying this is all women's fault for wanting to participate in the workforce and leave bad relationships?

Thank you for proving my point.

You're welcome!

The incentives aren't specific to women though.

Suppose you were a stay at home dad married to a high earning wife. You then meet a new woman you find more attractive. Under most Western countries' laws you can divorce your wife for no reason other than you no longer find her attractive, and she has to pay you alimony and child support to maintain your lifestyle while you're dating your new, hotter partner.

What's the downside to you? Seems there isn't any.

It seems obvious that a system setup like that will increase divorces initiated by stay at home parents, and hence increase single parent households.

So, the no fault divorce system has to be absolutely perfect to be acceptable?

To be honest, I don't see anything wrong in your scenario. People fall out of love for lots of reasons, making them miserable by making it harder to split up doesn't seem like a particularly good solution to me. The scenario you've raised would have to involve a very emotionally shallow individual whom the other partner would be better off without anyway.

> whom the other partner would be better off without anyway

So you think half your future earnings is a reasonable price to pay to rid yourself of a shallow partner?

The scenario isn't fleshed out enough to make any judgment on that.

Is Shallow Hal doing the majority of the childcare? Do they need to find somewhere to live to perform that function?

In the general sense that a house husband should be treated like a stay at home mom in a divorce settlement, there is nothing at all wrong here.

> "So, the no fault divorce system has to be absolutely perfect to be acceptable?"

Didn't you just write in another post above "There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero."?

This is exactly the kind of refusal of admitting the existence of trade-off I was speaking of. To pursue a noble goal of reducing abuse and violence to zero, other noble goals are sacrificed. This sacrifice, while very real, is not acknowledged, because the narrative claims we can satisfy all of our goals perfectly at the same time. This might even be possible, but, quite apparently, not using the currently proposed approaches. Nevertheless, the narrative rejects the idea of admitting that the current approaches are anything less then perfect, because it would mean admitting the existence of the trade off.

> Poverty is a much bigger driver behind low economic mobility.

You can test this, by looking at economic mobility rates for bottom quantile kids who differ along other dimensions. And it’s not just right wing people noticing that these days: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/01/new-harvard-study-w...

> Of all the factors most predictive of economic mobility in America, one factor clearly stands out in their study: family structure. By their reckoning, when it comes to mobility, “the strongest and most robust predictor is the fraction of children with single parents.” They find that children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are significantly less likely to experience absolute and relative mobility.

This likely one of the reasons why Asian kids raised in the bottom 1/5 have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 1/5 as adults, versus 11% for white kids. Asians have by far the lowest rates of single parent families, across the income spectrum.

> Poor people in the west tend to have less stable family structures, it has nothing to do with social norms and everything to do with money. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44127459

Saying it has “everything to do with money” is a pretty remarkable assertion given that the single parenthood gap between classes is growing even as everyone gets richer in absolute terms, and is extremely low in countries that are very poor in absolute terms.

I’m not saying we should turn a blind eye to anything. But we should be cautious about undermining institutions and hierarchies that may be doing more good than harm because we’re only fixated on the harm. And education and cognitive elites should be especially careful not to project their own experiences rest of society.

Chetty also notes that his study can't be used to determine whether single parent families are a cause or an effect. Racial segregation and quality of schooling are also noted as being correlated with lower social mobility in that study.

I object to the notion that there is some acceptable level of violence and abuse we need to tolerate for the dubious good that any institution might claim. There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero.

> There is only one acceptable level of violence and abuse and that is zero.

You don't actually believe that because governments commit violent using their police and military and you accept that.

When did I say that was acceptable?

When you said tolerating any violence was unacceptable. It takes violence to protect people from violence.

That's quite a logical leap. Would you care to lay out the exact steps from somebody saying they find violence unacceptable, to asserting that they definitely support state sanctioned violence?

For the state to not tolerate any violence, it must prevent violence among its citizens and from foreign attackers. The only way we have that works is using violence to restrain criminals, or fight against enemy armies. We don't have any perfect safety shield that can protect everyone without harming the attackers, or to prevent people from doing violent acts without physically restraining them (violence).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com