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Comment by christophilus | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure everything stems from this. Marriage was not just for the wealthy and nobles in the Middle Ages, or in the 1800s or in subsaharan Africa, etc.

If it’s a matter of relative wealth disparity, there have been plenty of eras (probably the majority of recorded human history) in which the kings and nobles had a similar wealth gap to their poorest married subjects as we see today between the 1% and the 99%.

I’m not defending wealth disparity; simply suggesting there’s likely another cause for the marriage-rate collapse.

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> I’m not defending wealth disparity; simply suggesting there’s likely another cause for the marriage-rate collapse.

In the past that you're talking about, women were not allowed to be independent, i.e., own property or obtain jobs that could support a family. So women had little choice but to get married.

As long as non-marriage is a realistic choice for women, the marriage rates will never be as high as they were when society made women subservient.

>> In the past that you're talking about, women were not allowed to be independent, i.e., own property or obtain jobs that could support a family.

That is maybe half true or not true at all. Women could own property and could be somewhat independent. Queen Elisabeth owned a whole country in the 16th century. In general not only women but men as well had a duty to their families and had to do what their parents demanded of them. And marriage was high on the list of things parents expected from their children whether they were male or female.

I think the person you're replying to was using the US as context (given the theme of the article), but you are correct that in certain regions of the world, women's rights to property ownership and inheritance were protected.

> Queen Elisabeth owned a whole country in the 16th century.

That's one women, and a strange example to cite, because my comment was in response to a discussion about the disparity of wealth ("kings and nobles had a similar wealth gap to their poorest married subjects as we see today between the 1% and the 99%). Obviously, queens have no trouble raising successful children, but that doesn't help anyone else in society. (It should be noted, however, that Elizabeth I was the so-called "Virgin Queen" who had no children.)

>> That's one women, and a strange example to cite

Why? She an example of a very well known women completely in charge of a future empire in the 16th century. I thought it was clear there were also untold numbers of ordinary women who were also completely in charge of their own households from ancient times till modern age. It is kind of hard to give an example of a woman nobody would know.

> I thought it was clear there were also untold numbers of ordinary women who were also completely in charge of their own households from ancient times till modern age.

I don't think that's clear.

As for recent history, here's some US labor force participation data from 1948 to the present. Notice the stark contrast at the beginning. https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/03/women-in-the-labor-f...

Well…

The reason for marriage collapse is lack of well paying manufacturing jobs.

The American Economic Institute - https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180010

Brookings Institute study - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-marriage-gap-the-impa...

Which might be fine if after that men went home and took over traditional female tasks like cooking, cleaning and childcare. But they didn’t, and instead women ended up bringing in the money and having to do everything else while the husbands played video games and didn’t contribute. This resulted in women getting rid of the husband so they didn’t have an extra kid to take care of.

So then this creates a viscous cycle where the single woman will raise boys without a father role model, and those boys will go onto become poor husbands etc?

This kind of feels like part of the problem here.

But if the father is terrible and just another mouth to feed idk if any better

You can’t survive or support a family with a single income these days.. It’s required for both partners to work.

Been doing it for more than 15 years.

Where there is a will, there is a way.

You certainly can, but going by the numbers most people can’t.

In what sense? Where are the people starving to death? Most people seem to be able to do just fine on zero incomes.

Can’t see the goalposts anymore, where are they?

>>>> You can’t survive or support a family with a single income these days.

The issue for most is likely student loans impacting buying power.

>can't

Won't. Some can't, but we can't tell how many.

You absolutely can. Our family does and many of my friends do. They aren’t all wealthy people.

It isn’t always a choice, but often it is. Many people can live on one income but choose a lifestyle that requires two.

Do you live in an area with high international demand for housing?

Not all of the US is a hot spot for high paid immigrants, yet. Displacement is a real thing. Not everyone can change states or nations to make the finances work out.

Luckily in the US you can choose to live wherever you want. If you’re priced out of a neighborhood, you can choose to live somewhere else.

You can also choose how many and why type of cars to have, what food to eat, how much to spend on vacations, etc.

Hell, you can even choose where and what you do for work! What a country!

Many people will choose higher spending power with two incomes rather than take a step down to live on one.

You are agreeing in a weird way. Yes, in America if you live somewhere that other people want to live, then you have to move or take on two incomes. That was my point, that because US real estate has become an attractive investment over the past decades and the growth and current size foreign capital outweighs the average American family’s purchasing power which results in: people resort to two incomes, wait to start families, have fewer children when they do have children, etc…

I am not sure how it is in US but sharing a bit from my perspective (living in EU):

The (mental) cost of moving is sometimes hard. Here are only two main things:

- you lose your support system (friends, family)

- you lose your time (and maybe cost) saving tricks/knowledge (where to go to buy things, medicine, …)

All these are not impossible to solve but they are way harder for single parent family.

You are free to live any where but most people live near jobs. Great rhat you can get a 10k house in Detroit… bad cause there are no jobs.

> bad cause there are no jobs.

Yet Detroit's unemployment rate is 3.8%. For comparison, New York's unemployment rate is 4.6% and San Francisco's unemployment rate is 4.0%.

> You can also choose how many and why type of cars to have

See that's an interesting example. In most places in the US[^1] you have no realistic choice but to have at least 1 car per adult in the household. That's not quite the full extend of choice for "how many cars" one would wish for.

> what food to eat

Have you heard of "food deserts"?

[^1] this is false in a few places that were not bulldozed in the 1960s and still allow for non-car centric life. These places tend to have very high cost of living because they're desirable.

A few years back when I worked in a downtown office in a suburban metro, my wife would often drop me off/pick me up and then she'd have the car all day. Other times I'd bike. When only one person works outside the home, you have more flexibility.

We also lived in what was barely not a food desert at that time, and we walked to the grocery store all the time. "Food desert" can mean it takes 10 minutes to walk to the store. Like for a low income urban census tract it means 0.5 miles. We go on afternoon walks 3-5x that every day.

Don’t let the reality that this was in response to a statement that implied a universal reality that it’s impossible to raise a family on a single income be lost on you.

I’m the sole breadwinner, my wife and I have six kids, and I don’t make fantastic money for being a developer ($60,000/year- took a haircut for this role for the 100% work from home). We make it work.

there is a hair in your comment that probably should not be there...

no, haircut is now a phrase that doesn't only apply to hair due to the flexibility of human language =)

To be fair, this is mostly a consequence of women entering the workforce. Not that that’s bad, but it’s an unintended consequence that companies were then able to convince workers to work for less because people could survive on it still.

Yeah see I think that’s part of the wealth being sucked into the 0.1%

"To be fair..."

If you leave this out of your response, do you believe that you're still conveying the same message?

I do.

This assumes they competed for the same jobs, is that true ?

Why didn’t women entering the workforce lead to growth and more jobs being created ?

Because it’s not about the jobs, it’s about what salary people will settle for.

If a family had to make X to live comfortable before, now you can do so with each of you making half that as long as it adds up to X. People shouldn’t settle for less, but they do even if only a few percent… where before people didn’t to the same degree because it had more immediate impact.

This in turn is one of the several market forces that has contributed to deflated wages.

Exactly.

Manufacturing jobs used to exist.

Manufacturing jobs used to exist in high numbers.

Manufacturing jobs that didn’t require a high school education existed in high numbers.

Manufacturing jobs that paid well and provided a pension and didn’t require high education existed in high numbers.

That's an argument that should be increasing the number of dual parent households. If a family could be supported on a single income, then abandoning your family would have fewer consequences and thus seemingly more likely.

No, what you would expect to see is a drastic decrease number in the number of children born. People are choosing not to have families at all.

In late 1960 we peaked with somewhere around 47% of households having children. It is now around 26%

In 1990 the number of married couples in the US started to flatline even though the population is up 40% since then.

You're correct, but that's an orthogonal effect. The cost of raising children is definitely lowering the number of children.

But it also should put pressure on parents to stay together once the children are conceived.

A substantial reason for that is cultural change though. You can’t close to double the supply of something without expecting the price to go down (probably by something close to half).

Marriage was not just for the wealthy and nobles in the Middle Ages, or in the 1800s or in subsaharan Africa, etc.

In the Middle Ages, children were an investment. You fed them and clothed them and raised them for just a few years before they started to pay off. As soon as they were physically able to walk and listen to instructions, children began to work, usually on the family farm.

This human capital that a couple could grow themselves made marriage and child-rearing a highly profitable activity. It led to generational wealth, which marriage existed to secure and apportion.

This is no longer true in modern city life. Children are a luxury good, not capital. They don’t produce any wealth for their parents. They simply consume enormous resources until they move out and start their own independent lives.

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