Technology shock, fewer shotgun marriages, and the rise in unwed births (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Technology shock, fewer shotgun marriages, and the rise in unwed births (1996)

brookings.edu

37 pointsBostonian60 comments

I don't think all of this is solely due to "reproductive technology." I believe a cultural shift in values and mores took place via mass media (TV, music, movies, magazines, newspapers, education[1]) that played a strong role in changing behavior to allow more unwed births and less shotgun marriages.

[1]education as a form of mass media in terms of it's ability to communicate ideas

Whoa, I am out of the loop/information.

> By 1990 the [out-of-wedlock birth] rates were 64 percent for Black infants, 18 percent for whites.

WOW, so in 1990, 64% and nearly 20% of births of those groups were (ok, we are grouping here and it might not be totally true) fatherless?

I mean, I have a relative with a out-of-wedlock birth, but dad is being a dad and they just do not want to get married right now. I wonder if those stats from way back took those cases into account? Still, those numbers seem pretty high. Am I out of touch?

Given that the only out-of-wedlock birth you know is not in fact fatherless, why do you assume that almost all out-of-wedlock births are fatherless?

I think it's more likely that people just aren't getting married.

Me and my two brothers are all out of wedlock births...to two parents who have been happily unmarried for over 30 years.

I literally was not assuming that. That was part of my question... I wonder if they take into account the ones that are NOT fatherless, just not getting married.

As you say, just because you aren't married doesn't mean you aren't a nuclear family, and even if you aren't married it doesn't mean there's no father.

For the U.S. in 2020, "Percent of all births to unmarried women: 40.5%" https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/unmarried-childbearing.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_absence#United_States

> Based on the 2018 U.S. Census Bureau 11 million single parent households, 80% of them are fatherless, breaking down to 1 in every 4 children born; totaling a percentage of 81.5%. Out of that 81.5% that were raised by single mothers, 34 % were poor, 26.8 % were jobless the entire year, and 30.3 % suffered from food insecurity; ⅔ of theses families were white, ⅓ were black, and ⅓ were Hispanic defined. It did not take into account the 53% of American Indians and Alaskan Natives as well as the 17% Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders children recorded within these single parented homes.

Those racial numbers are correct, but might be misleading if not looked at in the context of the population size of each race. It's an issue that cuts across all races though: a quarter of white children, a quarter of hispanic children, and nearly 3 quarters of black children are currently born to single mothers.

Yep, it's a very serious issue with no easy answers.

If you control for income, though, out-of-wedlock birth rates for black and white mothers are now very similar, though. “Our Kids” by Robert Putnam is a good summary.

Is this cause or effect? Unmarried motherhood has a very high correlation with poverty but I always assumed that poverty was the effect, not the cause.

I suspect it's a both/and situation, depending on the situation.

Tax and benefits wise it is usually a mistake to get married and if you are already near the survival minimum it can be a horrible mistake.

They're lower than the current statistics, but overall births are going down and yet the fertility rate of married women is much higher than the fertility rate of unmarried women. It's a complicated picture.

There are likely lots of cohabiting parents but also lots of families with various levels of paternal involvement.

The statistics obscure more than they show, I think.

> and yet the fertility rate of married women is much higher than the fertility rate of unmarried women. It's a complicated picture.

Doesn't sound complicated to me? People think of "get married and have kids" as a single, atomic life stage. People not only wait to have kids until they get married; they wait to get married until they're ready to have kids.

But really, it's not that either of those is the blocking factor per se; rather, they just don't identify yet as being "an adult" of the kind that gets married and has kids — i.e. they don't think that they're yet at the maturity+stability threshold that they observed the previous generation of "adults" as having while growing up. (One crucial factor in that model per the current generation modelling on the previous generation: "can I buy a house to have a family in?" Keeps getting more out-of-reach!)

Until they pass this threshold into whatever their mental-schema-model of adulthood entails, they will probably continue to think of themselves as "a young adult" — a very accessible concept in our culture — even well into their 30s. "Young adults" don't get married or have kids; they just work for a living, have fun in the evenings, and try to find someone to cohabitate with. As long as people identify more closely with the "young adult" schema they've built than the "adult" schema, the "young adult" things are all they'll do.

Once they do pass this threshold and identify as "an adult", though, they're fine with doing the things that "adults" do.

(One thing that makes this narrative/hypothesis compelling, to me, is that in cultures that place an emphasis on religion + family values + etc, where there isn't really a concept of a "young adult", people are much more willing to both get married and have kids as soon as they're teenagers — because by doing so they aren't skipping a societally-glorified "young adult" stage, but rather just stepping into the stage they expect to come next after teenagerdom: "adulthood".)

Interesting. If we correct for this factor (increase of proportion of out of wedlock births), how does the dynamic of fertility of married vs unmarried women look like over years? Is it still decreasing, or is the whole decrease of overall fertility is explained by increase of proportion of unmarried women? If so, decline in fertility is not a bad thing at all.

For context on coauthors , Janet Yellen is the former Fed chair. George Akerlof is a Nobel Prize winning economist and Yellen’s husband. They have one son, who is also an economist.

Yes, the author list is one of the most notable things about the article!!

It's also striking how they basically just go out and grab onto the third rail with their bare hands. Yes, they try to be dispassionate, but it's amazing that Janet Yellen was willing to go out on a limb and write publicly about these topics at all.

Men don't marry because they can. Women don't get pregnant or when pregnant, choose freely to give birth or not, because they can.

A lot of stuff in life is hard to explain if you look for reasons why people are doing it, but becomes a lot easier if you look for reasons why they didn't do it before, or don't do it in other place we are comparing with. A lot of stuff happens simply because it becomes possible, because there is no need to look for motivation: there was always a motivation, it's just there wasn't a possibility.

Changes in people's migration patterns is even a brighter example. Almost all of the change is defined by possibility: the will of people to move from where they are going from to where they are going to, always existed, it's just until a certain point they couldn't do that.

"But poverty stayed the same"

Computers gave us enormous productivity as they ramped up by orders of magnitude in Moore's Law. Where did that productivity go? Well, wages are stagnant, but who has made a LOT of money since? Oh right, the wealthy. This was most prominent in the 1990s as we moved from 66Mhz to a gigahertz in CPU speed, to say nothing of disk space, RAM, networks, the internet, etc.

So if birth control restricted kids and the amount of labor that they required, and suddenly everyone has two job parents, but they poverty stayed the same...

Here's an exercise for the reader:

So TO WHOM did the money/productivity gain go?

This seems interesting, but I'll admit I'd prefer to read a more recent analysis -- a few decades of extra data have to be useful in terms of picking out significant factors.

This is fascinating. I think that unwed births also likely decrease family size because it is a struggle to support based on one parent in the household. Thus those with out of wedlock births may be more likely to have small families.

It often feels like we as a society have sort of entered into a weird territory with a lot of these liberal changes. The societal structures that have worked in the past, while you may not like them, did work. We have sort of removed a lot of that previously structure that worked, for logical reasons of course, but we haven't really replaced it with structures that work equally well. Thus we have the very low fertility rate we have now.

The problem with social progress is that we do not really do it understanding the consequences long term. And then we run into these issues. I am not sure we can fix the problems these changes have brought with them faster than the demographic advantage can switch to those still are religious/conservatives who do not have similar dropping fertility rates.

Fertility wins in the end, not anything we write or reason about abstractly, no matter how logical or elegant those arguments may be.

I think because fertility wins in the end, political philosophies that are in competition over the long-term (decades or longer), need to take that into account, or they lose by default as their adherents decrease.

> Fertility wins in the end

I’m not sure this is actually true.

In the USA, identification as Christian is decreasing and identification as “nothing in particular”, “agnostic”, and “atheist” is increasing. This is in spite of the fertility differences noted

I think philosophies tend to look ‘inherited’ most often in stable societies, with low geographical mobility and low penetration of outside ideas. I don’t think todays society fits that bill.

> In the USA, identification as Christian is decreasing and identification as “nothing in particular”, “agnostic”, and “atheist” is increasing

In general atheist is projected to decrease around the world as a share of the population and that is primarily because of low fertility among atheists.

For example, here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-pr...

> I think philosophies tend to look ‘inherited’ most often in stable societies, with low geographical mobility and low penetration of outside ideas.

I didn't mean to imply they're inherited, but if anyone adopting a particular philosophy has as a result low fertility, it is a very hard philosophy to grow as it constantly needs new converts. It isn't self regenerating.

The issue with this analysis is that culture isn't genetic. A steady stream of people coming from high birth rate cultures are going to be adopting these modern lower birth rate cultures. Especially if they are intrinsically appealing or if they offer social benefits (e.g. higher education, business opportunities, etc).

> The issue with this analysis is that culture isn't genetic.

I didn't say it is genetic or mean to imply it is.

> A steady stream of people coming from high birth rate cultures are going to be adopting these modern lower birth rate cultures.

Yes. People from high fertility cultures who move and adopt a different cultural norm, usually adopt the same fertility as well. This happens constantly to immigrant populations who move to Western nations. Western nations are sort of population sinks for the rest of the world.

> It often feels like we as a society have sort of entered into a weird territory with a lot of these liberal changes.

I feel like you could write this sentence at almost any point in modern history.

> The societal structures that have worked in the past, while you may not like them, did work.

Worked for whom exactly? Almost laughable how people from different backgrounds would have a VERY different opinion on this. Basically any minority, whether that be gender, racial, or religious among other oppressed groups.

> Fertility wins in the end,

Wins in what way? The continued existence of the human race? I think we're seeing a slow down in birth rates for a number of reasons, but heres a few big ones amongst my circles:

- anxiety/fear of the present, leaving no time to consider having offspring - anxiety/fear of the future being enjoyable and/or inhabitable for offspring - a focus on enjoying the present as opposed to striving for a better tomorrow for offspring

If political philosophies care at all about fertility they better start looking at it holistically and not purely from a breeding standpoint, because otherwise people will wise up to being treated like birth & labor livestock.

> I feel like you could write this sentence at almost any point in modern history.

I think so. And I think that most cultural innovations fail the fertility test. This isn't a new phenomenon.

> Worked for whom exactly? Almost laughable how people from different backgrounds would have a VERY different opinion on this. Basically any minority, whether that be gender, racial, or religious among other oppressed groups.

I am merely making the argument that conservative approaches to societal structures, regardless of the specific values, tend to more tried and true as they have been around a long time. Basically if a societal structure is old, it has likely passed the fertility test.

New structures of society I think often do not pass the fertility test and thus can be more temporary and slowly die off and are replaced by more conservative structures which do.

> If political philosophies care at all about fertility they better start looking at it holistically and not purely from a breeding standpoint, because otherwise people will wise up to being treated like birth & labor livestock.

Yes, this is a good point. I think that modern day liberalism is sort of facing a reckoning here with fertility. And I fear it may not pass the test. And we will see Western liberalism start to decay as more conservative branches of society start to out number it and proclaim that this brand of liberalism philosophy has failed - you can see this in a lot of conservative messaging. I mention this because it is something I can see happening, not because I want it to happen.

How do you conceive of these societal structures? What would a wealthy society, where people have more choice over their outcomes, have to do to put these “societal structures” in place?

It seems a lot of those previous societal structures came into being because of the limitations of previous lives. Couples got married at 20 and had kids because there weren’t really other options on how to live a life.

Should we make it illegal for women to work? Tax single people over the age of 30? You blame liberalism but it seems the entire goal of liberalism is decentralized decision making and personal freedom. Are those things bad? It sounds to me like your suggesting modern society is centrally controlled.

> How do you conceive of these societal structures? What would a wealthy society, where people have more choice over their outcomes, have to do to put these “societal structures” in place?

I think Japan is a wealthy society that has become pretty much completely atheist and this is what its future demographics are projected to be (this is the first link I found on Google, but there are many others that are similar):

https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/japan-population

Japan is unique in that it doesn't really allow for much immigration, so it is just going to shrink without much internal competition between different competing cultures.

> It seems a lot of those previous societal structures came into being because of the limitations of previous lives. Couples got married at 20 and had kids because there weren’t really other options on how to live a life.

Very true.

> Should we make it illegal for women to work? Tax single people over the age of 30? You blame liberalism but it seems the entire goal of liberalism is decentralized decision making and personal freedom. Are those things bad? It sounds to me like you're suggesting modern society is centrally controlled.

I am not saying I know the solutions, but I think we are not explicitly trying to find good ones in a way that will work. In many ways the current abortion debate is about reversing population trends, but this is sort of a crude hammer based approach derived from religious teachings, rather than being modern about it. I worry that this is generally how things will be solved in our society, not proactively by liberals but reactively by conservatives who advocate a religious solution. And this will happen increasingly as liberals become further out numbered because they do not have the fertility rates that religious conservatives have.

> And this will happen increasingly as liberals become further out numbered because they do not have the fertility rates that religious conservatives have.

While your argument is intuitively correct it seems like there are forces working against it. Religiosity has been declining in America. I wonder if there's sort of a cultural inequality that can occur. Religions have as strong cultural influence, but most pop culture is dominated by a secular liberalism. I imagine that secular libertal pop culture has a strong impact in religious communities. Either you choose to give up your religion, or you just realize you just don't want to live in whatever limited small town way that your religious upbringing necessitates. The stronger the progressive cultural forces, the more people born into religion that don't end up being conservative or religious long term. That along with liberal immigration policies may outweigh the birthrate impacts.

> The societal structures that have worked in the past

I think you are vastly over-estimating these "societal structures". You don't clearly define them but based on conservative ideology they represent a temporary family and economic structure that really only existed in some parts of the USA and only for the recent past. "Marriage" in the pre-1900s outside the educated rich class that got written about was more or less "start living together". No licenses or ceremonies. Family structures got strange. People left their spouse and children by moving west or across the pond.

The supposed problems can be easily solved with money. Free childcare (including funding for better worker pay, better facilities, training more caregivers, etc). Universal healthcare. Universal after school care. 18 year tax credits for having kids. Free training on parenting techniques and discipline. Mail every new parent a "baby box" with useful things. Mandate lactation rooms. Mandate parental leave. Mandate emergency paid leave (eg kid got sick so stayed home).

Conservative ideology as practiced in the USA is more about the super rich not wanting to pay taxes or be told what to do (eg environmental or safety regulations) so by definition it is not an ideology capable of solving many problems. Everything else is a smoke screen to corral the rabble ("liberal" ideology has shibboleths used for similar purposes). The best modern US conservatives can do is eventually ban all family planning to attempt to force as many kids to be born to unhappy poor people as possible because that's "free" (though look for anything early childhood or child education related to see severe funding cuts if they're successful).

Reminder that I'm saying this is what the super rich funding conservative movements want, not what actual conservatives want. If you pill supposed liberal and conservative voters they're much more closely aligned on policies and desired outcomes than the news would have you believe. But implementing any of those things needs money and regulations so it's out of the question.

> I think you are vastly over-estimating these "societal structures". You don't clearly define them but based on conservative ideology they represent a temporary family and economic structure that really only existed in some parts of the USA and only for the recent past. "Marriage" in the pre-1900s outside the educated rich class that got written about was more or less "start living together". No licenses or ceremonies. Family structures got strange. People left their spouse and children by moving west or across the pond.

Okay. I am fuzzy with pre-1900s families in North America.

> The supposed problems can be easily solved with money. Free childcare (including funding for better worker pay, better facilities, training more caregivers, etc). Universal healthcare. Universal after school care. 18 year tax credits for having kids. Free training on parenting techniques and discipline. Mail every new parent a "baby box" with useful things. Mandate lactation rooms. Mandate parental leave. Mandate emergency paid leave (eg kid got sick so stayed home).

This makes sense and would love to see it. I think it isn't going to come to the US any time soon... probably will come to other countries first and maybe it can be proved out and then come to the US after many decades.

> Conservative ideology as practiced in the USA is more about the super rich not wanting to pay taxes or be told what to do (eg environmental or safety regulations) so by definition it is not an ideology capable of solving many problems. Everything else is a smoke screen to corral the rabble ("liberal" ideology has shibboleths used for similar purposes). The best modern US conservatives can do is eventually ban all family planning to attempt to force as many kids to be born to unhappy poor people as possible because that's "free" (though look for anything early childhood or child education related to see severe funding cuts if they're successful).

Yup. I can not disagree with this, as it sort of seems to be the general direction.

The "technology shocks" were legal abortion and increased use of contraception, especially the pill. One of the co-authors, Janet Yellen, is Biden's Treasury secretary.

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