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Comment by blacksmith_tb | Hacker News Reader

It's a nice image, but there's no unsmashing that watch. You can decry the destruction of tradition, but good luck re-instituting it, those traditions developed in a different world, for example the extended families living together (to take care of children and the elderly) broke up as young people moved to where work was (and various institutions took over child- and eldercare, with varying degrees of success). I think it's too easy to say that pre-modern societies were automatically happier, they were more predictable, but certainly had plenty of people who didn't have a great time. The real question for us now is how do we want to go forward, not why can't we go back.

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First we reject this Whig History nonsense that history is an inevitable march forward. It is clear we have gone badly off course. We have chosen a future that is making people desperately unhappy. So we need to re-adopt things that were carelessly cast aside.

1. Women should use union power to demand proper respect from men. No more sex outside of marriage.

2. Make marriage laws much more strict. No more no-fault divorce. Marriage is a life-long commitment that people shouldn't be incentivised to bail out of - especially not with lucrative settlements.

3. Tar and feather feminists and all people perpetuating divisive gender ideology that makes partnership impossible.

4. Normalise full-time motherhood as a profession that the large majority of women will adopt for a time. No more trying to have it all while the children suffer.

5. Extreme penalties for all pornographers. Their product blights our lives and debases our society.

6. Zero income tax for any married woman who has had more than 4 children - a stroke of brilliance from the Hungarians.

There's just a few ideas for ways we could tip the scales in favour of marriage thus making men, women and children's lives far more happy and fulfilled.

I made a summary of your points:

1. Tell women how to live.

2. Take away personal agency.

3. Tar and feather anyone who supports gender beyond 'male' and 'female'.

4. Tell women how to live.

5. No pornography.

6. Financial incentives for large families. (Which, based on #4, also removes women from many long term careers.)

1. Women are not happy with the current arrangement - that's the point of this article. They have power to create change by demanding men raise their game. If they wish to.

2. If you make a public promise to stay with someone "'til death do you part" - that's your agency. Noone is forcing you to make these promises.

3. Feminists have cast the relations between men and women as a pseudo-marxist class struggle. The sexes shouldn't war with one anothers. We are partners in a common struggle.

4. Very few women have the option to take on full time motherhood. My wife and I are lucky, because my income is pretty good. Most women don't have that choice. Modernity has robbed women of this opportunity, and now sells their misery back to them as empowerment.

5. Indeed. It is extremely corrosive to relations between the sexes. The government can step in and protect the people, in the same way as health and safety laws are there to protect people from harm.

6. Women are currently heavily penalised for having large families.

We're here commenting on an article about a study that shows that the institution of marriage has been badly damaged, and it is emiserating people.

If you would like to, you can offer some suggestions on how to fix this. You can either be part of the problem, or part of the solution.

It doesn't have to be this way. What's your solution?

Increase minimum wage to $45/hr to match the loss in increased wages over the past 40 years. Then wives will have the choice whether to work or not because one person will be able to make enough for them, their spouse and children to live.

I can agree that change has made many people unhappy, possibly even most. What I can't agree with is the general suggestion that a forced return to an idealized past would correct that. Partly there's the 'forced' aspect which others here have reacted against. But primarily I think it's also unworkable - you can't just argue that people should change how they form families, if their social economic reality prevents them from living like that. I am also skeptical about the implication that we as a society should want larger families - population growth may be slowing in the developed world, but given our outsized ecological footprint, that seems like at worst a mixed blessing.

My point is that people react to incentives. At the moment the incentives are stacked up to keep people unmarried, childless and miserable. We have control over the incentives, so lets choose incentives designed to make people happy.

I can agree with that - also I think it answers to the 'forced' aspect better, instead of a law making marriages permanent, incentives that made people more willing to stay in them seem less intrusive (though personally I am unconvinced that would make individuals happier overall, or be an obvious social good).

From my own experience, my marriage went through a rough patch. Though for us, divorce is not something we believe is permissible in most cases. This forced us to work through our problems with the help of a therapist. With lots of hard work and time, we were eventually able to resolve all of our issues. Our marriage is now better than ever - we are happier, more intimate and better able to communicate than we ever were before.

Not having a exit hatch pushed us to persevere with our problems. I think if we had had less of a sense of comittment, then one or other of us would have bailed, and caused both of us and our kids a huge amount of suffering.

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