The Divorce Colony (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Divorce Colony (2015)

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59 pointsdaddy_drank45 comments

It would be interesting to read a charitable case for why divorce was prohibited . We see it written up as women being forbidden from owning land, or perhaps without a marriage, not being recognized as full people with the freedom to own it. It probably had some rational basis beyond cruelty and was likely about incentives, like reducing the reward for spouses to kill each other for inheritances. Maybe it was the epiphenomenal result of just not producing weak societies that get overrun by neighbouring ones that leveraged specialization and progress over short generations. If it were true that children are growth and wealth, we stop growing when we stop producing them, and simply die off.

Arguably, the incentives for marriage today are misaligned and probably socially bad, as rationally, the best prospective partner to marry is the one who will provide for the most advantageous divorce. The article is a quaint slice of life, but it overlooks the demographic reality underlying it.

For a long time, the prevention of divorce was intended to protect women. It meant partners can't just be thrown aside if a better deal comes along. Eventually, of course, it became a trap for women (and men). Nowadays, unless you're religious, marriage is essentially just a socioeconomic winner trophy.

> Nowadays, unless you're religious, marriage is essentially just a socioeconomic winner trophy.

That is unnecessarily cynical. Civil marriage provides several conveniences for the participants: it establishes a default common property structure (so there are no tax consequences for pooling earnings or for who pays the bills each month, or common ownership of assets, especially useful in the case where one dies); if one is injured or sick the other has the authority to sign hospital paperwork etc; handling the legal mechanics of kids (from picking them up from school to paying fees etc) and so on. It also provides some hysteresis in a long term relationship (which will always have disagreements), again especially useful in the case of kids.

Sure, this is a bloodless justification, but is t that the domain of civil law? Yes, you could laboriously set those things up individually if you want, but the bundle is more convenient and takes care of things ahead of time.

And it’s voluntary. If you don’t want a marriage, don’t have one.

> no tax consequences for pooling earnings or for who pays the bills each month

I'm not aware of any tax consequences for splitting bills, or for one person paying bills while the other doesn't, or for any such scheme. I'm also not aware of any problem with pooling money. At any rate, I've had joint account owners on my savings account and never had any tax issue. I suppose hypothetically in some situations that it might count as a gift (I do not believe most would) and exceed the gift tax limit, but I doubt anyone ever has paid taxes for this.

> handling the legal mechanics of kids (from picking them up from school to paying fees etc)

Both parents have parental rights whether or not there is a marriage. There's nothing extra marriage provides legally here.

As far as I can tell, the civil benefits of marriage are almost entirely limited to inheritance/estates and hospital paperwork. It's also usually the only way to get someone on your health insurance. Generally, there's not even any tax benefits (except in specific cases with specific credits YMMV, or sometimes if one spouse doesn’t work.)

In fact, in the US, there are situations where marriage is a penalty: See old people divorcing because one needs expensive long term care, and Medicaid only takes over after all the marriage's assets have been completely drained.

Aside, I'd like to point out that some of the important aspects of marriage are things that cannot be accomplished by pure private contract, because the existence of the relationship puts obligations on third parties to recognize it. (Much like another special case, power of attorney.)

So if anyone says that government should not be involved in marriages/civil-unions/whatever, they're really talking about removing important features from the institution as well.

> And it’s voluntary. If you don’t want a marriage, don’t have one.

Tell that to Australia and New Zealand where de-facto relationships (legally equivalent to marriage) occur automatically when you've been living together for 3 years or so. Some people can fall into it unaware but I know of people who intentionally dumped their partner just before the time limit to protect their property.

I don't know why it works like this but it seems like whoever wants marriage for people in general wants it more than each individual participant does, so it might be for a societal rather than individual benefit.

also in some EU countries, living together establishes rights and obligations with regards to property, inheritance and financial support.

A theory I saw is divorce ban is to prevent women from switching husband.

And thus give men a reason to actually marry and have a life within women rules.

When divorce is too easy, then men avoid marriage and focus on random sex, since they aren't the ones that suffer the most if a random child happen.

I assume that in Europe and America the prohibition of divorce comes from Christianity, deriving from Matthew 19.

This is certainly where the modern religious justification comes from, but it was commonly prohibited except in extreme cases or for adultery among many peoples before Christianity: the early Roman Republic/kingdom, among ancient Germans, etc. Indeed one imagines that the social practices of the early Germanic peoples may have had more influence on 19th century norms than religion- theory is one thing, practice another. In a parallel universe without Christianity we might expect a similar social norm!

There's a straightforward line of reasoning for the benefit of any children if they exist: divorce is highly disruptive for the child, and should not be available except under extreme circumstances for much the same reason why people are forced to pay child support today. Likewise, one could imagine forcing marriage upon people for the benefit of any children born out of wedlock.

In fact, society could much more readily support children financially than it can provide a missing parent, so if anything it's a bit strange that we allow divorce or absent parents but require financial support.

This effect on a child aggregates up too. The result is a tribe/society issue of unguided kids who don't benefit from the stability, specialization, opportunity, and generational progress provided by a nuclear family. That said, however, if we use catholic countries as an example baseline for any implied evolutionary effect of forbidding divorce - they don't do too well against protestant nations, and particularly vs. anglicanism which was founded on divorce. British colonies vs. catholic Spanish and Portuguese colonies fair much better. Maybe marriage is a net positive, and the remarriage from divorce helps humans iterate faster.

An unamicable divorce can certainly be bad, but don't under-estimate how bad it is for a child to grow up in a marriage where both partners hate each other, but can't leave.

Forcing marriage seems like a terrible way to achieve the same thing.

It's actually amicable divorces which would most obviously be banned under such a justification. You're basically signaling to the child "I didn't hate your other parent, wasn't being abused, etc. I'm just choosing to abandon my family (you)".

Similar reasoning could justify adultery being a crime against your children.

Correct.

This is something Americans say, but we have empirical data that it’s not true. Compare poor Asian Americans, who have very low divorce rates (similar to rich Asians), to poor whites, who have very high divorce rates. Poor Asian kids have double or triple the chance of becoming upper middle class as adults compared to poor whites. Mormons, another group that emphasizes family stability, also have much higher economic mobility than other whites. As Charlie Munger used to say: figure out what works and then do it.

My parents are Asians who don’t get along, while my wife’s parents are white people who have been divorced three times each. Her parents are happier, but my life was easier and opportunities came much more readily. Divorce is a great way to turn a solidly middle class family into two financially struggling families, disrupt kids’ education, extra-curricular activities, social circles, etc. And it doesn’t end when the kids grow up, because that strain of financial resources continues into adulthood when parents come to depend on children.

Americans are rich enough where imposing those costs on their kids isn’t fatal. But imagine you’re in a third world village, and at the edge of survival to begin with. Your mom and dad are “no longer in love.” Dad leaves, and the mom and kids starve to death immediately. That’s why most traditional societies have strong norms against divorce.

> Compare poor Asian Americans, who have very low divorce rates (similar to rich Asians), to poor whites, who have very high divorce rates. Poor Asian kids have double or triple the chance of becoming upper middle class as adults compared to poor whites.

I'm not pro-divorce, but it's difficult to isolate just one variable here. There are numerous other cultural differences.

But attitudes about family are the thing Mormons and various Asian groups have in common, while diverging on most other respects.

“Various Asian groups” don’t have attitudes about family in common with even each other. Do you think Koreans and Filipinos (for example) think about family the same way?

Being the child of a first generation migrant seems to be good for social mobility. Being part of a exclusive clique with entrenched access to elite power might help too. Probably there are many factors.

Divorce is illegal in the Philippines, and South Korea doesn’t have unilateral no-fault divorce. I’m Bangladeshi, and my in laws include Taiwanese and Filipino families. Pretty much the only thing we have in common culturally is norms around marriage and divorce, and familial obligation.

And Mormons don’t have “entrenched access to exclusive power.” They’re a persecuted minority that was driven to the arid desert and managed to turn it into a thriving place.

> As Charlie Munger used to say: figure out what works and then do it.

I don't think that "upward social mobility" should be our only metric.

> But imagine you’re in a third world village, and at the edge of survival to begin with. Your mom and dad are “no longer in love.” Dad leaves, and the mom and kids starve to death immediately. That’s why most traditional societies have strong norms against divorce.

Most traditional societies don't have nuclear families, with 2.4 children and only two adults to raise them in the suburbs outside of a large city.

Children of divorce do worse on a wide range of wellbeing metrics: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240051/ (“Nearly three decades of research evaluating the impact of family structure on the health and well-being of children demonstrates that children living with their married, biological parents consistently have better physical, emotional, and academic well-being. Pediatricians and society should promote the family structure that has the best chance of producing healthy children. The best scientific literature to date suggests that, with the exception of parents faced with unresolvable marital violence, children fare better when parents work at maintaining the marriage.”)

Life is full of trade offs. No need to delude yourself into thinking divorce, in the typical case, isn’t a trade off between your well being and your kid’s.

I'm not aware of any traditional society which does not have a nuclear family at its core. Hence why marriage is such a big deal in traditional societies. Living close to the extended family or having close relations with other neighbors doesn't mean the core isn't a nuclear family. The only places where nuclear families are not that important are in primitive tribes.

Steel man one: controlling the social costs of mate competition. Struggling to find a wife? Start an affair with a married woman, persuade her to divorce her husband and marry you. If that is permitted then the happy husband has to guard against it all the time. That is a cost. By the exchange doesn't create more women; the gain to one man is exactly cancelled by the loss to the other. Socially it is net loss. Complications: the gain to the woman on finding a more suitable husband, the loss to the woman when the second man tires of her and divorces her and her first husband doesn't want her back. The distress of the children of the first marriage.

Exercises for the reader: (1)Gender swap the previous paragraph. (2)Add in the effects of alimony, child custody, and child support that we are willing to talk about. (3)Add in the dark side of child custody and support with women making false allegation to win custody and the money that comes with it.

Steel man two: Some people are so attractive that they have a choice of who to marry. Homo Economicus studies divorce law, and the effect of divorce incentives on mate choice is immediate. Normal people are influenced indirectly, by the marriages and divorces of parents, aunts, uncles, the parents of their friends, movies and novels about family life. Perhaps the eventual effect that filters through to normal people is the same as what Homo Economicus calculates so promptly, but with a lag of twenty to forty years.

Does a woman chose a dangerously sexy man, or a boring good provider? She doesn't ask the questions: what if he beats me? Trades me in for a younger model? Dies in a fight or motorbike accident? Bores me to despair? But all those scenarios play out in the romantic fiction she reads, and she knows which are the fantasy ones, and which are the ones that play out under real life divorce law.

If divorce is forbidden, people make safe choices. If divorce is permitted people take risks, and society gets to pick up the pieces. The usual argument in favour of divorce to end violent, unhappy marriages treats the rate of violent, unhappy marriages as exogenous. A rival argument is that the rate of violent, unhappy marriages is endogenous. The causal chain runs: permit divorce, more risky marriages, more violently unhappy marriages. Which leads to a tricky calculation: more bad marriages, but divorce ends a bad marriage, so many of the bad marriages as less bad because briefer. (complication: some of the safe-choice marriages turn out to be pretty bloody miserable)

That is not the correct calculation. There is inter-generational transmission of trauma; the children of bad marriages that break down, grow up to have bad marriages that break down. That adds another twenty to forty years of lag on the effects of changes to divorce laws filtering through.

Back in 1700 the considerations above would have been a little scandalous, because that way of thinking is atheistic. Say it out loud and people would think that you had read too much Thomas Hobbes. But they had a curious notion of providence, with faith in God being bolstered by the sense that He had handed down moral laws that worked out for the best. I think that they had their own ways of combining Theism and social-realism.

You touched on a major cultural conflict that exists in the west today - the competing interests of individual freedom and sustaining the society. Many old traditions that seem cruel or anti-freedom were/are really there to keep the society existing. Marriage and staying married is probably one of them for reasons you identified. Western society is already collapsing (birth rates below replacement level), perhaps partly because of easy divorce and other traditions being lost.

Another reason may be that most young men are unattractive to women and most old women are unattractive to men. So without any stable life-long partnership, people would make the most of their value in the attractive part of their life and leave the other part missing out emotionally (for men) and economically (for women) which probably isn't good for anyone.

Note this came out in 2015, and was posted here at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722467

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

The Divorce Colony - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10722467 - Dec 2015 (22 comments)

(year added above too)

Divorce is an excuse for hedonism.

> Divorce is an excuse for hedonism. Sometimes? Absolutely.

All the time? No. Depressingly often, it is to escape a person and relationship they desperately need to be free of.

I know and am related to several people who are divorced. It was not hedonism that drove the proceedings, but exasperation and pain.

EDIT after further consideration: And even if it is - so what? What business of that is yours?

Your defensiveness is to my point. Marriage is difficult. The idea of leaving for a series of inconveniences is a hedonistic ideal. There are cases where divorce is inevitable, but it's gotten absolutely ridiculous.

> EDIT after further consideration: And even if it is - so what? What business of that is yours?

Family policy creates externalities in society. As Lee Kuan Yew said in Singapore: Political_positions_of_Lee_Kuan_Yew (“I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters–who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use.”).

That’s coded as an “Asian” view, but until quite recently it was also the “American” view. The prosperous society in which we live, which was already in place by the mid-20th century, is the product of a mindset where it was taken for granted that state governments have plenary authority to regulate the “health, safety, welfare, and morals” of the people.

Can be, but for mature and established people it takes real will to restart from zero

When you get married, you are commiting to demonstrating that will to the best of your ability.

What an amazing read, about something I had no idea about.

It's such a different tale than what we deal with today, but the same thread. A group of people angry and upset at how other people run their lives, and more than willing to use the state to suppress and deny the others.

Today it's lgbtqia and pro-choice and non-white-people that the state is being coerced into hounding & frustrating, but it's the same wringing of hands scared forces, that can't recognize healthy bounds of what the state should do.

I'm glad to have run across this not-that-far-back bit of historical precedent. In my view, these struggles sap us so, and we would be so much greater if we could socialize better the improperness of using government to intrude on people's lives. Having a good historical basis, I hope, might help.

Having a completely different take on who the state is involved with hounding, I still agree completely. Whatever my disagreements with your views are, I regard the prospect of using political means to get my way to be abhorrent.

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