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Two-parent households should be a policy goal

theatlantic.com

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Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal

#221

Post by aidenn0 »

KMag wrote: post #216
aidenn0 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to infer that from your original comment, but the point is that neither my sister nor I can reach my parents in a single day of driving[1], and my wife can't reach her in-laws in a single day of driving. My in-laws are very close now, but at this point we are caring for them more than they are caring for our kids. 1: I'm considering a full day of driving as 12 hours here. Different people tend to disagree…

> neither my sister nor I can reach my parents in a single day of driving[1], and my wife can't reach her in-laws in a single day of driving. Are you just saying you and your wife have similar driving speed and endurance, or are your wife's in-laws different people from your parents?

Too late to edit, but it's my sister who can't reach her in-laws in a single day of driving.

Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal

#222

Post by rsync »

fasthands9 wrote: post #68

I can't read the whole article but remember learning in the past that children of widows have outcomes more similar to two-parent households than divorced parent households. This would seem to suggest the divorce is more of a signal of family/status than something which is driving bad outcomes. At the same time, I do think people have gone a bit too far in their want to not give anyone shame. Yes - some shame is not…

"At the same time, I do think people have gone a bit too far in their want to not give anyone shame."

I have said something like this for years now.

Specifically, I have said:

"I don't know how much shame should be employed in a society but I suspect it is not "none"".

Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal

#223

Post by hollerith »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #219
hollerith wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument under consideration is that if our social lives are too different from those of our ancestors in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, that will lead to widespread mental-health problems like addiction and suicide. (The study of existing hunter-gatherers is relevant because we cannot go back in time and study our ancestors in detail.) Your "I'd rather be born as a random person in modern society t…

Hunter-gatherer societies do not represent some ideal state that we should strive for, but rather a particular societal adaptation to the environment at the time. We live in a different environment (one that I have zero interest in destroying in favor of trying to recreate some imagined ideal from prehistory), so the naturalistic fallacy is what has no place here.

The naturalistic fallacy: because something (e.g., marriage) has been part of life for so long, it must be good.

The hypothesis we are entertaining here: things that humans have no experience with over evolutionary timescales tend to be bad for us. Ice cream for example, has more sugar, fat and salt than anything humans had access to until very recently; evolutionarily speaking, we have no experience with it. Ditto alcohol and heroin.

Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal

#224

Post by landoftheice »

abeppu wrote: post #171

I find it interesting/surprising that the word "divorce" never appears in this article. My understanding was that the divorce rate also was lower for college-educated people. I'm also surprised by lack of mentions of family planning -- are single parents without college educations actively choosing to be parents or tripping into it? But overall, this seems circuitous. The author acknowledges that inequality is both a…

[dead]

Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal

#225

Post by ryanwaggoner »

hollerith wrote: post #223
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hunter-gatherer societies do not represent some ideal state that we should strive for, but rather a particular societal adaptation to the environment at the time. We live in a different environment (one that I have zero interest in destroying in favor of trying to recreate some imagined ideal from prehistory), so the naturalistic fallacy is what has no place here.

The naturalistic fallacy: because something (e.g., marriage) has been part of life for so long, it must be good. The hypothesis we are entertaining here: things that humans have no experience with over evolutionary timescales tend to be bad for us. Ice cream for example, has more sugar, fat and salt than anything humans had access to until very recently; evolutionarily speaking, we have no experience with it. Ditto a…

That may be the hypothesis that you are entertaining, but that’s not the comment I was responding to.

Nor is it a particularly well-formulated or convincing hypothesis, your cherry-picked examples notwithstanding. We don’t have evolutionary-timescale experience with medicine, electricity, the written word, or democracy either. How we think prehistorical people groups may have arranged their societies is almost completely irrelevant for modern policymakers, which is what this article is actually about. We have a long list of better ways to make this decision than “Hmm, well, how do uncontacted Amazon tribes of a few dozen people structure things? Perhaps we should just copy that in our nation of 300 million people?”

Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal

#226

Post by ZoomerCretin »

> To give disadvantaged children better futures, policy makers should promote widespread employment and economic security among a wider segment of the population—particularly non-college-educated men.

And therein lies the problem. We've seen for years how every call for minimum wage increases or labor rights is met with "You're only worth what the market will bear. If you want more money and better treatment, you'd better make yourself worth more to the market!", yet when the shoe is on the other foot, and the labor market favors workers, policymakers treat it as an _emergency_ requiring immediate correction. Unemployment expansion was cancelled at the state level (despite evidence that people on unemployment assistance find work faster), employers strongly resisted any call for wage increases or working condition improvements, opting to whine "No one wants to work anymore" to anyone who would listen, and the Federal Reserve started hiking rates as quickly as it could despite little evidence that inflation was caused by anything other than supply chain difficulties.

The unspoken yet universal policy preference of our governments is to weaken and impoverish workers to the greatest extent possible to ensure enough of us are compliant and desperate enough to take any job at any wage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K1tqDyN4xE

Tim Gurner was recently excoriated for saying the quiet part out loud from the perspective of the rich and powerful: "The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment" so we can have less "arrogance" from workers.

Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal

#227

Post by erik_seaberg »

baq wrote: post #92

People don't want to have children because: 1) they can't afford it, or 2) they don't have a reasonable apartment/home (same thing as 1. really) 3) they don't want to give up their lifestyle 4) they're genuinely afraid the future is dystopian and dark (which is rather interesting since I can't imagine a future more dystopian than one without children) So if you want to fix the society to want to have children again y…

Prefer capital? Raising children used to double as an investment in the family farm. With a little luck they made self-sufficiency easier rather than harder.

Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal

#228

Post by bradlys »

PopAlongKid wrote: post #5
michaelleland wrote: post #2

The tax credits for married people here in the US seem to be part of this type of policy, no?

There are no U.S. tax credits per se for married vs. unmarried taxpayers. Depending on the relative incomes of two spouses, there can be a so-called "marriage penalty" or "marriage reward" from combining two incomes on a joint return, but that alone probably has very little impact on whether people choose to get or remain married. In fact, a large chunk of existing tax law deals with all the possible combinations of…

The tax penalty (which is very real for many SV and NYC earners) is one reason I’ve decided to never get married. The other being that the insane one-size fits all contractual aspects of marriage that cannot be changed.

A vengeful judge and spouse can easily wreck one’s finances unfairly.

Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal

#229

Post by codexb »

dragonwriter wrote: post #177
codexb wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UBI UBI still incentivizes divorce. It offers unconditional financial support to single mothers. > Abuse We're talking about no-fault divorces. Divorce, with cause, has always been legal -- abuse, neglect, abandonment, sterility, addiction -- there have always been ways to deal with these issues. More than half of all children will be raised in divorced households. The idea that 50% of fathers are abusing the child…

> UBI still incentivizes divorce. It offers unconditional financial support to single mothers. No, it is neutral on divorce, because the support is unconditional. > More than half of all children will be raised in divorced households. Will be... when? And where's the evidence? The entire increase in single-mother families from the 1970s to 2019 was driven by the increase in parents who never married, not an increase…

> No, it is neutral on divorce, because the support is unconditional.

Any government support subsidizes divorce. You are ignoring the fact that in the default state, without UBI (or government assistance), divorce would be naturally disincentivized because of the added financial burden on the caretaker. It substitutes the government as the provider instead of the father. It's precisely what the entire article is about.

> No one said that all divorce was due to abuse

You used it as a red herring to claim that divorce shouldn't be disincentivized. The fact that there are valid cases for divorce doesn't negate that fact that even in those cases there should be massive disincentives against it and that the overwhelming majority of divorces today likely should not be allowed because there is no valid reason for them. There's a lack of awareness about how destructive broken households and families are to children and society.

Re: Two-parent households should be a policy goal

#230

Post by iteratethis »

dagw wrote: post #126
anon291 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is ample evidence that boys and girls with fathers do better.

Ample evidence that boys and girls do better with a father and a mother, compared to just a mother. Are there studies that show that two mothers are worse than a mother and a father (or just a father for that matter, if we believe that the male role model is significant factor).

I don't have the studies at hand but did come across research articles earlier that suggest that girls are only mildly affected in a female-only parenting situation whilst boys are strongly affected.

It makes sense as they have no male role models. Not at home and close to none in most of their schooling trajectory.

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