We are doing a disservice to our fellow man by not telling them this truth.
I'm not denying our moral agency, but it is often constrained by environment. Some people are lucky enough that virtuous choices are easier for them.
I completely reject the notion that wealth is at all a factor in the intelligence or educational success of a child. Wealth is just a correlation. Neither does national educational systems or policies have more than a tiny effect on education success.
What matters for educational success is the genetical and cultural material of the children. If they are born smart, or are brought up in families who value intelligence or brought up in cultures which value intelligence. Even poverty and schooling become small factors if the child has any of these foundations.
If I overstated my point, it's only because I was pushing back against the idea that education, employment, and a traditional family are equally attainable by all, and if someone has failed in any of these areas, it's because they lack virtue compared to other people (many of whom had more advantageous starting points in life, but supposedly that doesn't matter).
Or in simpler terms, "poor people are poor because they're bad and they deserve it". It's a sentiment that's been very useful for the ultra-wealthy class, and detrimental to everyone else, not just the poor.
Now there are many traditions around the world that works. Most cultures have man+women=family (as opposed to some form of polygamy), and there is reason to suspect this is important even if it isn't "in" to study why. (it isn't clear which non-traditional forms also would be fine and which would be a disaster)
Saying "poor are poor because they deserve it" is an accusation that I hear a lot more than I hear people who believe it. Some do believe it, but most accused of it do not and have better explinations of why they do things that the accusers don't like.
Not many people would openly say that poor people deserve to be poor. Those aren't the words that the parent commenter used, and maybe that wasn't even the intention. But this line of thinking can encourage people who feel this way, by giving their feelings a moral justification.
All I mean is, we should be empathetic toward people who have fewer resources than we do, and not be too quick to credit our accomplishments to our virtuous living.
Based on what, exactly? I think you have cause and effect inverted.
Picture two scenarios:
1. A loving unmarried couple, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or child bearing, lives in an affluent neighbourhood, in a rich country, have steady incomes, and decide to have a child. After ten years they decide “I love you so much. I don’t need a piece of paper to prove that, but let’s get married. It’ll be a great opportunity to connect our friends and family, and it’ll give us some legal and financial protection when one of us dies”.
2. In a poor neighbourhood, a woman who was mistreated all her life marries her high school sweetheart, who turn out to be abusive. He not only beats her, he rapes her regularly. Like too many victims of domestic violence, she’s afraid to move away. Eventually she becomes pregnant and has the child against her will.
Which of those do would produce the better outcome?
Being fatherless isn’t in itself the issue, but everything which came before to reach that point might be. There is a huge difference between not having a father because he abandoned you, or because he died, or because your mother as a single affluent woman with the means to do so decided to do in-vitro fertilisation.
I highly recommend “New Family Values”, by Andrew Solomon, to get a feeling for the different types of families which work. It goes way beyond “one mother, one father, married”.
https://andrewsolomon.com/books/new-family-values-audiobook/
But all that is irrelevant because what I posted above wasn’t an analogy. It was… A thought experiment? A purposefully exaggerated example? Anyway, not an analogy. Analogies compare two different things via a third thing they have in common, but here I used examples which are directly related to the subject matter. The point was to make it clear, via extreme but realistic examples, that correlation does not imply causation.
Statement: Statistically, seatbelts reduce the chances you’ll die in a car accident.
You: But, what if your car crashes into a lake and you get trapped underwater?
Statement: Statistically, richer people die less in a car accident.
You (or GP): get rich and survive car accidents!
Quantifying something doesn't explain it, it just... Quantifies it, deeper inspection is needed to understand what the statistics says.
You are prescribing what needs to be done based on something that is, ultimately, descriptive.
Now you need to do the qualitative research to understand what are the causes for it, it could be that marriage is a signal for stable relationships, in that case marrying doesn't matter but a stable relationship does (which is quite self-obvious, it's just an example). Marriage could also have tax implications in some countries, which in turn could help the average to better outcomes, so on and so forth.
The data on this is enveloping much more than just "marriage" as a virtue, or any other moral aspect of it, you are using the data to imply that marriage is virtuous and is the cause for better outcomes which doesn't hold by just quantification...
It's blindness by statistics, it's quite common when ascribing data as the sole truth. Data can guide you to investigate other aspects that will qualify why the data shows what it shows.
I have unfortunately not spent enough time at a university to follow this line of reasoning. Must be wild to be able to follow it. I'm of the yokel type that thinks if all data and tradition we have shows something works, then it's probably best to do the thing that works instead of trying things that we have no reason to think would work.
But in line with tradition, the underclasses in the west has always been the favourite laboratory for the cultural elites in the west.
Exactly, they correlate but there's nothing saying that just because traditionally it has correlated it means that getting married is the reason for it.
Traditionally only marriage was accepted as the means to form a family, even up to this day people will be shunned by their families for having kids out of wedlock, even in a loving relationship, don't you think being shunned by grandparents would also cause worse outcomes? Considering that some of these being shunned are also of younger age, less support from family members would mean worse outcomes.
Your data doesn't even discriminate about age groups, it's a blanket statement "marriage leads to better outcomes", leading to the question (which you could find data for): which groups? Are there other parameters/aspects that lead to better outcomes which are correlating with marriage rates? What about marriage exactly is causing better outcomes? It's not marriage itself since a lot of marriages end in divorce or an unhealthy home environment, so what is it?
Those are the insights that data can lead you into. Your take is just to do whatever has been done because it's been working, without even questioning why it might work, and what can be done to lead to better outcomes without requiring marriage.
> but we should continue to tell people that it's not necessary for them to do these things to have good outcomes as we have not done enough qualitative research to know what almost all of our forefathers have known, and it's best that people experiment more and see if maybe the right combination of unemployment, promiscuity and lack of education could not create equally good outcomes for them.
This is just moral grandstanding without substance, the world changes, traditions change (the tradition of marriage used to be about property, changing ownership of a woman from her father to her husband, for example), just blind belief in traditions is, at best, ignorant, and at worst produces this bigoted worldview.
You'd do much better if you believed in traditions while also questioning the "whys" behind it, at least to understand better why some tradition you believe might have created better outcomes, and how those processes can be applied outside of your tradition.
That is, if you are a good person and want everyone else to also have a better life even if living outside of what your view of morality is, and not only living life the way your morality prescribes to because that's, supposedly, the only way.
That's why I'm saying you have cause and effect in the wrong order: children issues are tied to one or both parents not caring about them, and a symptom of that was having children before marriage, when marriage was "the only way" to a family. Nowadays things are different, and you can totally be a functional family without signing any contract on paper.
If we ignore almost all of human history save for the past 50 years, then yes. If we redefine marriage to not mean what most humans that have ever used the word meant by it, then yes.
But why would we do these things? If you call all relations between two human beings marriage, you gain nothing, you just lose a word.
Marriage is a covenant between two people, a man and a woman, with God, and incidentally, this covenant, not a piece of paper, it's also a precondition for two people to live together and in harmony. It's a commitment by both people to focus not on themselves, but on the family unit and the wellbeing of that family unit.
> You can do so without being married and having children, and it's everyday more common.
Children of married parents still have better outcomes, and the lower income people are, the bigger the advantage of having married parents are.
By your definition, are we all unmarried or living in disharmony?
If we consider what the word meant up until about 50 years ago, then yes. If we consider the new definition, of "you signed a piece of paper given to you by the government, and gave it back to the government". Then, sure, you are married.
I'm not trying to insult you or denigrate you, but again, if we use the word marriage for all relations between two human beings, then we gain nothing, we just lose a word.
Do you hold the same position for marriages in other traditions - for example, Shintoism, indigenous belief systems, Hinduism, paganism, etc? Many such religions don't have the same concept of a marriage as a covenant with God, yet have existed for quite some time.
And we don't need to use the word marriage for all of them.
> The legal recognization by a church or government is one version, but not the key ingredient.
The covenant with god has been a key ingredient for centuries.
But that's the only word we have for "lifetime-committed couple recognized by some authority". The meanings of words change and evolve. Tough luck.
We could use the secular "civil union" for all marriages performed outside of a church. But that would be unnecessarily clunky and pointless ("I got civil union-ed this weekend, it was great!"). And then of course people married under other religious traditions would object to the use of the word "civil" so you'd have to qualify every other union accordingly - "Jewish union", "Muslim union", "Hindu union", etc. Why?
You're basically arguing against free speech. I don't understand who it's helping. If the distinction is that important to you, just spell it out when talking about your marriage ("I was married in a church"). Leave everyone else alone.
Actions have a value which are seven thousand times more worth than words, so the covenant with God is automatic in that situation even if the people are ignorant and have never heard of God.
Yes. That's the kind of attitude that can build toward peace & harmony, and to live & let live instead of the hate against nonuniformity often shown by the religious extremists. Whether they are Christian or anything else. Hate is hate.
When an unmarried couple is completely faithful to each other until death, regardless of any other family, there's no way the average religious marriage can compare in that regard.
Not even close, zero is still a very small number.
Statistics are pretty accurate here. With the rate of divorce and unfaithfulness so rampant in religious marriage, it's only become more of a gamble over decades and decades of direct observation and interacton.
IIRC some cultures have shunned the idea of gambling since prehistoric times.
Others have it inscribed in scriptures almost as old, but not universally adhered to by the "faithful" just yet.
And it's been a while . . .
In some cultures yes, but pair-bonding is a lot older than the idea of god
How strong is your commitment to this? If it's unflagging I think a lot of people can understand your disappointment then.
If you are well-acquainted enough with the USA, you are certainly aware that these have been one and the same for like . . . centuries now here.
Not just 50 years, what have you been doing about that the whole time?
Have you had any successful efforts to completely separate church & state yet, and have you even had 50 years to work on that so far?
It would be good to see a concrete sign that your advocacy is sincere.
If there's nothing so far, that is understandable, but most of us do not have 90 full years to figure this out, so no time like the present to get started.
Flagging is a powerful tool in this small duckpond. Instead of abusing it, you can use HN to learn self restraint, so that when you one day achieve power over other people in real life you have learnt not to abuse it.
That's only the wimps that have nothing worthwhile to add.
This seems pretty narrow-sighted and Christian-oriented.
50 years ago was 1975.
I'm pretty sure there are examples of formalized marriage about as old as historic records.
I'd think they would be the poster children for the two-week marriages that Hollywood is notorious for, but they aren't.
Even in the most barren wastelands, flowers can grow.
If a couple lives together in harmony and have children together, they are married.
but is the modern way better??? or people just don't want to be held accountable if things go south in traditional way????
All sorts of folks have lived in all sorts of places across time. Trappings and environments have varied. Attributing things to luck in and of itself is an illusion. There is nothing that is lucky or unlucky. You play the hand you are dealt.
It's obviously always possible to make the best of bad circumstances (and make the worst of good circumstances!) but it's easier to "win" when you're dealt a good hand.