An Economic Model of the Rise in Premarital Sex and Its De-Stigmatization [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

An Economic Model of the Rise in Premarital Sex and Its De-Stigmatization [pdf]

jeremygreenwood.net

86 pointsnkurz60 comments

Interesting stuff, it's clear from this economics perspective that sexual behavior is tightly coupled to risks and societal influence. As birth control became more available, the risk of premarital sex went down dramatically. I think societal norms are slowly catching up with this, hence why "we" (i.e. Western nations) are more liberal now than say 70 years ago.

Here's a related thought experiment: could ever increasing divorce rates be explained similarly by risk? There is much less risk of divorcing now, women are about as financially independent as men, and it could be argued there is a greater safety net for single parents (e.g. [1]). This is interesting because it would imply that in the natural state of things, men's primary family purpose is/was as a provider/protector of some sort. So as that need diminishes, perhaps it shouldn't be the norm to expect everyone to get married.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Assistance_for_Needy_...

I agree with you but would quibble on one thing "women are about as financially independent as men"... I would say that women are about 70-80% as financially independent as men, due to the gender pay gap. That gap is even higher if you consider women's under representation in high paying jobs (e.g. tech).

However... That's light years better the past when women were essentially considered to be the property of their father or husband.

If you're going to name figures I think you ought to cite sources rather than just guessing.

He's alluding to the old 77% canard which has already been debunked. There's no pay gap between genders, the pay gap is between women who never married and women who have married at some point regardless of present status.

Something else he gets wrong is this "under representation in high paying jobs" canard. That's bad approximation again. The under-representation is in thing-oriented jobs versus relationship-oriented jobs. In Sweden, in all their equality, we still see mostly male engineers and mostly female nurses. It just happens that thing-oriented jobs pay more.

I'm assuming you're being downvoted for your flippant response, but you raise a good point.

I can't find the source, but an article was laying out that despite all of the social benefits offered to women in Scandinavian countries (child care, generous time off, etc) a lot of women were choosing not to work. That obviously skews the "pay gap".

I didn't downvote you, but I can see why others did. Unequal pay doesn't mean unequal independence.

I'm in debt with a middle class job. I'm just as financially independent (in the short term) as someone making $250k, or someone with no debt making 60% of what I do.

> I would say that women are about 70-80% as financially independent as men, due to the gender pay gap.

That pay gap is for all women, not unmarried women. Young unmarried women living in cities generally make more money than men.

The gender pay gap is a myth. Even major publications refute it http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/04/16/its-time-tha... http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023035327045794837...

That's not what it says at all.

Pulling quotes from the Forbes article:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, full-time working women earned 81 percent of what full-time working men earned in 2010... The wage gap statistic, however, doesn’t compare two similarly situated co-workers of different sexes, working in the same industry, performing the same work, for the same number of hours a day. It merely reflects the median earnings of all men and women classified as full-time workers.... the average full-time working man spends 8.14 hours a day on the job, compared to 7.75 hours for the full-time working woman

So yes. The wage gap is real. But no, it doesn't necessarily mean that women are paid less for the same work.

In the context of this conversation, about the financial independence of women that 81% figure seems entirely appropriate. It's fair to argue about the reasons for it, but that doesn't seem relevant to the facts relating the financial independence of women vs men.

> In the context of this conversation, about the financial independence of women that 81% figure seems entirely appropriate. It's fair to argue about the reasons for it, but that doesn't seem relevant to the facts relating the financial independence of women vs men.

The reasons for it are extremely relevant. If the pay gap is primarily a result of factors outside of an individual's control (e.g. sex discrimination) then it makes women less independent, but if all a woman has to do to make the same money as a man is to work the same job in the same way then she has the same level of independence, regardless of whether other women choose lower paying jobs.

Yes, you are probably right, and I take it back. The reasons probably are relevant, but only insofar as exploring how the gender pay gap effects risk.

Do some women take low paying jobs because they are often the primary caregiver for children?

Nevertheless, the pay gap is a fact.

> Do some women take low paying jobs because they are often the primary caregiver for children?

There are undoubtedly many different reasons, which mostly boil down to individuals making decisions to meet societal expectations even though the alternative choice(s) were equally available.

> Nevertheless, the pay gap is a fact.

The trouble is it's a misleading fact because people will assume the primary cause is employer sex discrimination when it isn't, which changes both the consequences of the pay gap and the solutions to reduce it.

> The trouble is it's a misleading fact because people will assume...

You can't blame facts for the ways in which they might be misinterpreted.

Besides, this is not a new idea. In my observation, people are now quite used to the idea that the pay gap is a result of a much broader social gender dynamic, and that employer discrimination is only one part of that picture.

Working longer hours increases your skill compared to someone working shorter hours. She'd have to work more retroactively.

Unfortunately, for many millions of women, even in western countries, this is still the case - treated as property.

> ever increasing divorce rates

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=divorce+rate+over+time...

not sure your premise is true.

As a response, marriage rates over time:

https://www.google.com/search?q=marriage+rates+over+time&sou...

the demonstrated decreasing marriage rate does not support the premise that divorce rates are increasing.

is your response relevant in some other way?

Divorce rates would tend to decrease if marriage rates decrease. Can't divorce if you aren't married.

Well..

On the first row of result images in the "divorce rate" search you posted there are 5 graphs. 2 of them measure "divorces per 1000 people", and 3 measure "divorces per 1000 marriages".

In the divorce per 1000 marriages case, it would appear to be independent of the marriage rate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-i...

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/marriage-isnt-dead-yet/

a) Divorce rates are actually decreasing b) They aren't independent of the marriage rate though (as the marriage rate is decreasing for the people most likely to get divorced)

But is there for example a higher chance of someone getting a 2nd divorce if they have a 2nd marriage? a 3rd divorce if they get a 3rd marriage?

I wonder when it starts to taper off

> Divorce rates would tend to decrease if marriage rates decrease.

I agree. That is happening. So the premise that divorce rates are ever increasing is incorrect as applied to the whole population and it is wrong as applied to the married population.

> Here's a related thought experiment: could ever increasing divorce rates be explained similarly by risk? There is much less risk of divorcing now, women are about as financially independent as men, and it could be argued there is a greater safety net for single parents (e.g. [1]).

Thought experiment? Isn't that what most people assume to begin with?

> This is interesting because it would imply that in the natural state of things, men's primary family purpose is/was as a provider/protector of some sort. So as that need diminishes, perhaps it shouldn't be the norm to expect everyone to get married.

On the other hand, nurturing functions have also to a degree been delegated to kindergartens, daycare and schools.

And divorce courts still seem to want that sweet dough from the primary income provider when a divorce does happen. Though that point isn't relevant to people who never get married to begin with. And I guess society changing doesn't stop lawyers to keep wanting money... or divorcees that benefit from the divorce courts.

>So as that need diminishes, perhaps it shouldn't be the norm to expect everyone to get married.

just look at Sweden. Strongest social net and government child support benefits - lowest marriage rate with highest rate of out-of-wedlock births(~60%).

>just look at Sweden.

Note also that in Sweden 60% of divorces are initiated by the woman, and that it's the men that suffer more from a divorce and suffer long-lasting severe negative effects on mental health.

Source: Gähler, Life after divorce: economic, social and psychological well-being among Swedish adults and children following family dissolution https://scholar.google.se/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl...

Unfortunately, it's coupled with short-term risks and probably doesn't accurately reflect the cost of high divorce rates, low birth within wedlock rates, and both parents working rates. While some people do make a single parent work, or both parents working with children work, there is a huge impact of divorce and single parents on their children. Those long term effects are not reflected as well by economic incentives in those situations.

As someone mentioned, looking at only divorce rates doesn't paint the clearest picture. The data isn't as consistent as I led on. It would be more accurate, and pretty much equivalent to the discussion, to cite the declining marriage rates.

Here's something interesting: bachelorhood is at an all-time high: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/bachel...

What's common in articles like these is the implicit assumption that:

> Men are bachelors because they're failing to mature, falling behind in school and the workplace, etc, etc

How about a more economic argument, like in this submission? Or rather, why not just ask a better question - why are they failing to mature? The answers would be something along the lines of: there are no incentives to do so.

If women don't need to get married as much (lower demand), their price (standards) must therefore increase. E.g. "I'm not really interesting in having a sweet right now, but if it's a mousse chocolate cake..." Maybe the price rises past the point where it's worth it to buy, from the male perspective. Also this means less and less men can compete.

I wonder if there's a similar thesis about why homosexuality is now well accepted in many societies. In Denmark for instance they pride themselves on being at the front of the sexual revolution as well as being free and open about gays. The change also happened at roughly the same time as De-Stigmatization.

I can't quite make out the analogy though. Why would there be an economic disincentive to be gay in the past, and how has it changed?

The historical social stigma against homosexuality, and the consequent high risk of losing your job or social position, probably kept many homosexuals in the closet who would have been open in a more permissive time.

Nowadays, since nobody is fired (at least in the West) for homosexual activities or relationships, the economic penalty is eliminated.

My state, Indiana, just made it legal specifically to fire or demote people because of their LGBTQ preference. That was in challenge to the recent Supreme court case regarding Hobby Lobby.

Point taken. I should qualify my statement to be "many parts of the West", then. It's pretty unlikely that a person would be fired for homosexuality in New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, for example.

It wasn't really a point; it was more a warning to stay away. And if you're here (Like I am), try to get out.

So how will the model be used? Isn't this important given that the conclusions in this paper could be stated by anyone thinking about the subject for ten minutes? Abstracts usually tell us about the paper and the reasons for conducting the research. This one does not.

The paradigm of woman as private property has been losing popularity, obviously. We have to recognize that the "newer" constructions of womanhood are not necessarily positive.

You seem to be implying that woman-as-property was better than what we have today. Presumably that is not what you meant. Perhaps an edit to clarify?

At the risk of being lambasted as a misogynist, I think he's referring to the current trend towards an informal return to harems, where a majority of women court a minority of men, and vice-versa. That just has to do with how we humans are naturally polygamous creatures and the sexual revolution has gotten rid of a lot of the societal factors keeping people in strict monogamy.

> strict monogamy

Honored more in the breach than the observance, in many households.

Is this a real thing or just your fevered imagination?

I wouldn't lambaste you for misogyny so much as complete inability to observe the reality around you. Can't think of any other explanation for your belief that the minority of men are able to have successful romantic relationships.

Female empowerment seems to share high correlation with the availability of contraceptives. For instance, countries where it is widely available, there is strong women's right and advocacy whereas in other countries, for religious or societal reasons, seems to lack it and women enjoy the same level of freedom and power in the 19th century.

This newfound glory of the female seems to have devastating impact on traditional familial values, where countries like South Korea and Japan have extremely low birth rates and marriages. In countries where fertility rate is not as severely impacted, divorce rate seems extremely high, leading to large number of offsprings raised with a single mom (as most custody ends up this way) and no male authority figure (shown to have negative effect on male offsprings). The single father who bears the grunt of the financial burden in low socioeconomic classes face higher chance of incarceration, harm and substance abuse. The single mom who make the living now must spend less time with her kids which has negative effects.

> There are 14 parameter values to determine, {β, ϕ, ζ, γ, δ, θ, ι, ω, μ, α, τ, λ, η, σ}.

Using Greek letters may follow in the economics tradition, but it is a pain for humans who need to match up symbols with concepts.

Using easily readable/recognizable variable names is one thing computer programmers got right. It's always frustrating to read mathematic or economic models that use symbols instead.

I'm sure there's a good reason for it, but I haven't heard it yet.

The reason is that it makes everything much more compact, which facilitates symbolic manipulation by reducing the space that symbols take, so that the differences between each step can be easily spotted, and in particular so that it’s easier to write down each step, which is especially important when working with pencil and paper.

The problem with short cryptic symbols comes when there are so many symbols that it’s hard to keep them straight, when symbol uses fall far from their definitions, when the same symbol is overloaded to mean different things, or when the author’s and the reader’s cultural conventions about symbols are different.

In a programming context, short variable names are extremely handy when either (a) the scope of the variable is limited, or (b) there’s a strong convention associating the name with the meaning, so that someone seeing the name knows immediately what it represents. For example, writing pi instead of circle_constant, writing i instead of loop_index, etc. tends to make code more readable rather than less.

Further, there are often conventions as to which symbols are used in which context.

For example, \phi and \psi (with subscripts) are commonly used as a basis/frame for a vector space, \delta commonly represents a difference of two quantities, \rho is typically a density and \gamma is a decay rate. (These examples are fairly physics-specific, but other fields have similar conventions.) So if notation is well chosen, the reader doesn't need to remember as much unique notation as one might expect.

I've read some computation-heavy processing using long-form variable names in code and it's not actually readable.

For parameter passing, long-form names make sense. For actual math? Not so much.

If you use the symbols that are used, frequently, you get better at using them. It's much like the way if you play a round of golf at a course that you're unfamiliar with, it's a lot harder to recall a shot-by-shot recap of your round than if you play the course regularly. The mind builds little registers for keeping track of the meanings of Greek letters if you use those little friends often enough.

I find your choice of analogy a little amusing. In these circles, I think more people would have significant exposure to dense mathematical notation than significant familiarity to a particular golf course.

Yeah, well, yeah. It just happens to be the only way that I've measurably and comparatively observed this sort of memory phenomenon in my personal experience.

Writing out long variable names while working on a mathematical model is like writing the same text with ten times the number of characters. It's neither elegant nor efficient.

Imagine you're playing around with variables and model configurations in complex mathematical terms, but one formula stretches over two pages and you always need to cross out and rewrite whole words.

we're not taking about homework but published paper.

i don't publish code at conferences with

   var x, j, i, ii, iii, i2, h, ji...

even though i find it pretty convenient when writing prototypes.

math people are just sloppy :)

There are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. - somebody

* somebody who knew what he was talking about.

Are you suggesting Greek letters are not suitable for human comprehension.

Presumably the poster would have about as much as a problem if the author picked the first 14 letters of the English alphabet.also, it is not a given that everyone knows the green alphabet, and it is harder to correlate symbols when you don't have familiarity and know the names of them.

I'm not sure that I would understand the green alphabet.

If you're going to be the kind of person who reads technical papers, you should also be the kind of person who knows the Greek alphabet, it's only got 24 letters and not all of them are generally used.

Just for the record, those aren't the first letters the Greek alphabet, nor are they in order, given that alpha is shortly after omega and both are near the center of the list.

I assume they follow some standard of usage in context, but I don't know enough about economics to know what they're normally used to represent.

It makes sense to use Greek letters for exogenous parameters so that we can use Latin letters for endogenously determined variables. The distinction between capitalized and uncapitalized letters is useful for a similar reason.

This makes economic formulae much more readable.

How would one go about learning this convention (and others like it), in the off chance that it was not completely obvious to the reader?

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