This will be kind of skewed towards the wealthy, as marriages are becoming less obtainable by the lower classes.
I don't have a good answer for how to get the one without the other, but both are consequences of modern sensibilities.
In which case, the future belongs to societies where women don't work and birth control is stigmatized.
It could be that there is a reason why the world was dominated by large patriarchal societies other than some sort of accident of history.
If that's true, then a society with lots of gig jobs or work at home jobs might help alleviate the problem. There could be other creative solutions, like reimagining higher education to give people time to marry and have kids before college. Other approaches are also possible. Whatever the reason, the secular societies will need to scramble if they don't want the world of the future to be dominated by orthodox religious populations.
But I think in such ancient societies, the struggle is a little different. E.g. when you are being ravaged by wars and plagues, you need more than replacement level fertility. You need huge fertility that can recover massive population loss in a short period of time. After Hannibal decimated the population of Italy, Rome recovered remarkably quickly. They just made more Romans. Later on, that stopped working and they needed manpower from the provinces.
In modern societies, we've licked most of the other stuff and so can keep going much longer as fertility declines, to the point where we start noticing only when rates hit below replacement. Traditional societies would see population loss long before fertility rates fell below replacement.
This is essentially the advice of the "Princeton Mom": Find and marry your spouse in college. <https://www.today.com/popculture/marry-smart-princeton-mom-s...>
Even short of artificial wombs, there is a lot that can be done to help with this. The real issue isn't that women don't want to have kids at all, ever. It's that if they enter the labor force and work full time, usually it gets put off, often until it's not exactly too late, but at least too late to have as many children as you might have if you'd started earlier, bringing down the national birth rate because too many would-be mothers have aged out. There could easily be medical solutions to that focused on making pregnancy more viable in late middle-aged women. Better prenatal care, cheaper treatments for infertility. Even non-medically, it could just be more flexible working arrangements like you mentioned, work from home, better and cheaper daycare, more generous universal leave policies that don't single out parents, possibly something like sabbaticals that universities do but for commercial ventures, too. Mandatory paid gap years for people in their 30s even if they don't have children. A country that pulls that off could keep the economic advantage of having a larger workforce talent pool to draw from without sacrificing internal population growth.
Obviously, private employers can't bear that burden and it would need to be subsidized by the government, but if you really believe there would be significant national strategic advantages to doing this, then it should be subsidized by the government.
The hard truth is that it's not as expensive or complicated to encourage people having child but for some reason we are trying to do anything except for the things that actually matter: allowing parents that want to spend all their time with their new child this opportunity and allowing parents that can't be bothered to handle all the early mechanical aspects to avoid them.
Cheaper starter housing and for the US cheaper higher education would also help but I'm convinced those are lower priority than targeting the early years.
If a society is required to pay so much for something that used to come naturally through cultural forces, then it’s probably not sustainable.
So much? Singapore's GDP per capita is $60k per year so $5k per month. If $2 month's worth of GDP for 1 baby so an entire lifetime of a new citizen is a lot, then I don't even know what to say.
> for something that used to come naturally through cultural forces, then it’s probably not sustainable
Having kids sucks (your mileage may vary, but before ~2-3 years the investment >>> benefits for all but the most dedicated people out there). Kids used to be cheap labor, which is now illegal for good reasons and they could be abused at will for various things, which is also illegal for good reasons. They were also frequently born because women didn't have a say in the matter, which is also becoming illegal for good reasons.
It is sustainable, it just needs to be done properly and respectfully.
Not by treating women like broodmares and kids as slaves to be worked to death and beaten up by adults who don't have any other way to relieve stress.
For the 1/10 times at work where the person in power ends up having a meaningful relationship with an underling that you lose, you also have the 9/10 cases of sexual harassment that you lose too.
Needless to say, those are pretty big ifs.
I also think that culture does play a fair role. I was initially hesitant to marry (as a millennial) because a lot of my friends were being denied the ability to marry who they chose, so I wanted to stand with them and reject the institution. That, thankfully, has been resolved - but I can totally understand people who have mixed feelings on marriage.
Abstractly, marriage was a giant public act of consent due to the consequences of sex. Now, sex is decoupled from marriage, so the institution isn’t needed in secular culture.
Have seen it happen, and literally half of the couples in the 'good part of town' where I used to live which was populated almost exclusively by well educated white collar professionals were either going through it/at some stage of it, or were in a clearly abusive situation that might even have benefited from doing it - as long as they didn't wait for the other party to really screw them over by pulling the trigger first and alleging abuse or whatever.
A friends neighbor had been on the receiving end (along with their daughter) of literally years of verbal and emotional abuse from the wife for no apparent reason. She would go after neighbors too, if they dared to exist in her presence.
Both of them were lawyers. Last time I was over there a month ago, after an hour of it, he just begged her to stop screaming in the most pitiful voice I've heard a man ever use. So she yelled at him more for being so pitiful.
It's hard to really understand how terrible a prior trusted loved one can be until you've been on the other end of it. It's easy to assume it's because the other party did something wrong to deserve it too - but that is not usually the case in my experience. It's often lack of emotional regulation/healthy outlets for stress or life problems, usually reinforced by denial from the abuser.
The abusee often can't figure out how to escape or feels held hostage, sometimes also by denial at their own problems or inability to cope that lead them to that state of insecurity.
While marriage (the legal process) can magnify the upside, it can also dramatically magnify the downsides too, and make it MUCH MUCH harder to escape a bad situation for everyone.
It's quite a shit sandwich. Always has been near as I can tell.
Of course you can. You can know thyself and know thy partner and have the maturity to understand what you're getting into, and the ability to commit despite that. EG: I know there's 0% chance that my wife and I will get divorced, not because marriage is so easy but because we're both people who are able to work through difficulties towards a common goal.
It requires self-awareness and work.
You share this mindset with every divorced guy I know, including myself. Men just don't see it coming.
Women pull the trigger when they can't take it anymore.
Unfortunately, life can be complicated, e.g. family member went through undiagnosed schizophrenia for many years, one can imagine how that upset the marriage assumptions prior to the mental health issues.
I would assume serious mental health issues are the edge case in this scenario.
Basically, one of many things you can do - in any jurisdiction - is move all your assets to your private foundation and simply not pay yourself for the duration of the marriage, including what you personally make while in the marriage if anything. Non-profits can invest indiscriminately in anything so the money can keep growing and supporting almost anything you want.
During divorce proceedings you have pretty much nothing, except the history of earnings if any which indeed can be used to compute your alimony payments. But all your accumulation and assets are not in your name, so the alimony won't be consequential compared to the horror stories we've heard of ex-spouses having to check themselves into jail when they ran out of money to pay. Back to this plan, don't forget to load up on debt as a general lifestyle choice, way before the marriage has issues. Personally you should never have positive net worth, and there should also be a line of creditors such that anyone else has to get in line or fuck off.
Afterwards you can direct your foundation to pay you a hefty salary.
The purpose isn't to screw your spouse over, its to be judgement proof from all kinds of creditors (and maintain your standing in society as a philanthropist). That will include mitigating the folly of silly unlimited liability contracts such as marriage contracts. Simply put, the clauses could be better. Love, finances, much like a lawyer I don't really care about what emotional reasons people associate with marriage and those are always available whether you do 5 minutes of estate planning or not. In my perspective, removing the downsides allows for both spouses to focus on love or whatever they want to do together. Something more commonly associated with marriage, by at least one spouse.
"I donated everything to non-profits!"
You get to win through many life events here. A state judge will not be able to undermine the federal status of the non-profit. They do have discretion over the pre-nup agreement though. So if you have the money to make a ridiculously unsexy pre-nup agreement, you have the money to make a ridiculously sexy private foundation which gets to exist in subtlety.
If you are saving up for a downpayment on a house while your life is slipping away year after year and the whole goal is to leverage up with a spouse on a mortgage before you are an ineligible bachelor/ette, then this game has no applicability to you. There is nothing attractive about that game to me, at any earning level. Discussions about the top 10% or top 5% make no difference to me, because the circumstances are the same: wage workers that barely match the cost of living wherever they earn, slow accumulation, risks (health, employment, life events) that undercut growth simply because it takes too long. Better to just have, there is no profound message applicable because the message is that simple. There are almost too many advantages to just having.
How can a marriage be "less obtainable"?
There were 4 people at my wedding. It was only marginally more expensive than the paperwork.
A wedding can be whatever you want. It's not "unobtainable" unless you're treating it like a class-based measuring stick.
Seems to me two people with two incomes living in a 1 bedroom apartment is cheaper than one.
Nearly everything is cheaper when you're married: Insurance, taxes, meals, utilities.
What's less expensive as a single?
Having so many people with no lived experience means lower cultural forces behind asking them to participate in an expensive party, even though marriage is so good for raising children (which used to be the purpose of marriage).
Lived experience? Explain.
Historically marriage was seen not just as commitment between two people but between them and their community, and them and G-d. By committing to the marriage in a public, religiously-affiliated place, the couple is acknowledging their responsibility to those parties as well.
If nothing else, it makes the commitment stronger and creates greater incentives to work through issues rather than bail. You can think of G-d and community as additional "accountability buddies" here.
You can say that's stupid, and that it should simply be a commitment between two people and that's it - but you have to acknowledge that the rise of that idea is very correlated with the rise in the diverse rate.
It is interesting to see how conservative ideas are re-packaged to remain fashionable with the time.
I was lucky to be raised by extremely great parents who have never been married and nonetheless have stayed together for 40 years, without God looking over their shoulder.
Especially if you see what others are doing on social media, your mental model of the expense continues to inflate and the pressure to procrastinate grows.
... if you pair a high earner with a low/no earner
edit: changed "much" to "slightly"
But then we were both working and living in SF as engineers and I did my taxes on my own for the first time about 3 years in from graduate school. I was shocked that the penalty for being married vs. not was $3000. I immediately turned to my wife, and said, "split, and split the difference?". (She understood that I was joking.) And then I discovered that you can't fix it that way, you still get taxed at the same rate. Or did. That was 30 years ago. (We're still married, humor is important.)
But after that while working at Sandia I had a PhD friend getting married to another fresh PhD, and I did tell him, do take a look at the tax hit.