In the pre-historic world...we don't have a very good picture of what romantic partnership looked like. There is at least significant evidence of non-monogamous multi-male and multi-femal sexuality...with the insanely high levels of human sperm competition being among the most significant in my mind. But the details are non-obvious.
In the historic, agricultural world, we have a pretty good picture of what romantic partnership looked like. Man works 90 hour week to grow food to feed family. Woman works 90 hour week to clean house, cook food. Kids work 30 hour weeks to help...or else GTFO of the way, and play until they're grown enough to help. Childrearing past 2 isn't even a topic, because no one has time for it, and the kids raise themselves. The economics of the arrangement + the economics of childbirth work together to make females subservient.
Between 1900 and 1970, the world changed dramatically. The number of hours required to feed the family shifted from 90 down to near 10 (Still dropping). The number of hours *required* (fast food, appliances, TV dinners, etc.) to clean/cook/etc. dropped from 90 down to near 10. And the economics of chastity are destroyed by the Birth Control Pill. So the weekly total number of labor hours that used to be needed by a family used to be around 180 (there are 168 hours in a week)...and now it's near 20. Children have historically raised themselves, with very minor input from the adults...and now they go to school, which is equivalent to no (parental) adult input.
What is the modern (dyadic) function of the agricultural institution of marriage? At the higher end of the socioeconomic spectrum...the addition of a high-end male makes a huge difference to the income stream. At the lower end? Current incentives may well make the addition of a male to a single-woman's life economically negative.
The economics and game theory are going to win over time...regardless what anyone wants to happen. The question is what result does the game theory want (ooh, look, personification *and* telelology)?
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But the economics and game theory aren't fixed things in themselves, they are determined by political choices. Why do current incentives arguably make the addition of a male to a single-woman's life economically negative? Because that's the way the benefits system works. Change the benefits system (back), the economics changes. Similarly, the introduction of no-fault divorce has been a game-changer, and that's an entirely political decision. In other words, I think you are dramatically overestimating the economic fundamentals and dramatically underestimating the contingent factors. "Results of political decisions" isn't exactly the same as "what some people want to happen," but it's close.
Test: Your theory would predict that both now and in the future, there would be little difference in rates of marriage, divorce, illegitimacy, etc, between countries at similar levels of economic development.
When it comes to marriage, my conservative, "don't break it," senses go off. We know its worked for most of civilization, and that it seems very fundamental, so messing with it seems very dangerous. It's a pandoras box.
At the same time, it's clearly falling apart given new incentives. So something new is needed. Throwing some marginal changes at the wall, seeing what sticks, and reiterating seems in order.
One thing I would also keep in mind is the marriage market isn't the same as buying toothpaste. You don't get to try a new one every week. You make one big decision in your whole life, maybe a do-over with a high failure chance if your lucky. Let's just say its not a perfect market.
When I talk to a lot of single moms it goes something like this, "it seemed great at the time, but I regret it in retrospect. Like how binge drinking is fun when you do it and you regret it afterward." People let their emotions take over in the heat of the moment, they don't necessarily do a whole lot of cost benefit analysis of how decisions effect them over their lifetime. We can talk about revealed over stated preferences, but I often wonder how much we can really trust the decision making of most people in this market. Paternal, I know, but my guess is if your daughter brought home some thug and said she was having his kid you would tell her she is too young and emotional to make such decisions.
Other questions:
1) In a polygamous society, how do you handle all the excess males? What do they do if they can't secure mates?
2) How does a winner take all mating market effect human action? How does it affect political and social institutions? Is it steady state, or does it undo itself?
3) Is your model "fertility competitive" or will you eventually be overwhelmed by a higher fertility society.
btw, left something in the other thread, i think its my last reply
Salem,
Absolutely...the low-income male-add failure is primarily a political problem. Or, at least it started that way. Right now, I'm drifting towards the structural problems model of Arnold Kling...where I don't know that even if you abolish the bad law, things get better.
On the other hand...I'm pretty sure that AFDC and welfare for moms are nearly completely untouchable politically here or in any other rich country in the world. Because people don't like the idea of kids starving. And I think that those two are the programs that are the core of the bad news.
Anon,
I think that we're not breaking it. The question is "What facts about the world make marriage a good idea". The answer is roughly: "Poor people Farming".
The problem with marriage is that marriage is a solution to a relatively specific problem...and the problem has changed.
Salem,
I forgot to say: good call on no-fault divorce (and alimony) as another driver.
However...my assertion is that no fault divorce is a consequence of the failure of the divorce economic model, not the other way around.
In terms of what drives marriage, I think the you are missing out on a few things:
(1) Things equal, people like having reliable sex. Women don't seem to prefer much variety; men have to trade off variety for reliability, but there's still room there for marriage to win.
(2) Jealously makes anything other than pairs problematic for many or most people. Also I will point out that the very existence of jealously is indicative of something like marriage in the EEA. So those hunter-gathers had some need for "marriage".
(3) Economically, even if we only need whatever, 10 hours/week to maintain a household, sharing that with a partner means you get another 5 hours/week of free time. That's not nothing.
(4) Economically, even if the average work needed in/out of the house now is only 10 hours per week, that's not what most people actually work. Rather, the productivity of a tiny number is off the charts; the vast majority are little or no more productive than before. So we see that the median household works something like 40-80 hours per week outside the home, and another small number in the home. A minority work zero outside and 10 or whatever in.
(5) Having two parents around does seem to have some good effect on kids. (I am not completely convinced that the observed good effect of fathers is more than a mere gene-correlate, but I think there is some evidence of at least a small effect beyond genetic.) So both parents have some (if not huge) incentive to stick to help their kids be all that they can be.
Aretae,
Something else is different from pre-agriculture too. The development period on human beings in longer. Your expected to raise a kid till 18, or 22 for college, or 25 for grad school, or 30 to be a doctor, etc.
I could get into a long debate on this, but it does seem the two parent method of raising kids is superior to the one parent method. So mechanisms that allow for two parents to stay together and raise children as a family are important to society.
There are lots of other differences too. Do we really need to get into them? I don't think peoples answer to modern mating questions should be: "just go back to whatever we think we had before agriculture." The world is very different then before agriculture. Some aspects of that lifestyle might map well to out monkeybrains, but you can't just recreate those circumstances one for one.
Lastly, and my opinion may differ here, but I'm not sure current generation happiness is the most important good (despite the current generation have the power regardless of what's good). What may make us happy could be terrible for the next generation. The monkeybrain is mostly about doing what makes you feel good, not what makes others feel good. Especially strangers, the unborn, etc. Monkeybrain worship and setting up all of our institutions for the sole goal of satisfying monkeybrain impulses isn't necessarily the best way to go. We sometimes have to appease the monkeybrain's power, but we shouldn't let it control us.
Made a final reply in other thread, tried to pair down topics at hand.
1. I don't disagree with any of y'all about the effect on the kids. However...methodological individualism says...you look at the actors to see what the path is. The kids aren't the actors.
2. I'm not arguing that there are no benefits to marriage. I've been married for almost 10 years now...and have been looking to find someone to marry that I would
trust to raise kids for probably 25 years. It just took 15 years to find one that was otherwise compatible. And divorce / one-parent households is the strongest environmental predictor I know of for bad stuff.
3. Jealousy is one line...sperm competition is the other. The absurdly high level of sperm competition in humans is a cue that multiple men had sex with the same woman in the same (short) time frame...it at least balances out the jealously line, and in my assessment, over-balances it.
4. The auxiliary benefits to marriage beyond the economic are nice...but remember, marriage has substantial costs too. What we need are reasons that will put us over the hump. I think that we've crossed the threshold where the costs exceed the benefits on average, for BOTH sides...as evidenced by the PUA/MRA line, and by the anti-marriage feminist line. Of course, there is variance.
My fundamental line remains:
I think that a dispassionate analysis makes it fairly clear that the average incentive to be married ...which used to be huge...has (a) dropped massively, and (b) *may* now be negative for the average person of both genders. That said...what should we prepare for?
Aretae,
1) If we are asking, "where is this going?" then I agree completely. We are going to marriage w/ cheating for the upper middle class and no marriage for the poor. With the ever shrinking middle class in between. As for the long run eugenic/dysgenic effects I'll leave those aside.
2) If we are asking, "is this the right way to be going?" then there is much more of a debate. Once you settle that you can determine if there are any reasonable effects you can have on #1 that are likely to actually happen. There may be none.
I'm at the point where I think new ideas need to be tried, without completely abandoning the existing structure. Of course, that's a whole other blog post.
"That said...what should we prepare for?"
You mean individually?
Anon,
I'm mostly talking factual/predictive claims...NOT what I'd like. 'Cuz what I like is relatively unimportant to how the world turns.
I/we ... general...what should we be thinking about in terms of social organization so as to be better prepared for the future.
Aretae,
In that case, its going to vary from person to person. Obviously, you did pretty much the exact right thing in your situation. For others, its different.
For young men I think the best advice is:
1) By default, don't get married. However, if you meet an exceptional girl and think it can work, do it.
2) Wear a rubber, try to make sure she is on the pill as well.
3) Learn some game, but don't go crazy.
Hmm...I buy your assertions of what's happening to the economics, but here's another frame that makes uses the same logic and makes just as much logical sense. In the past, people were not economically very productive and Malthusian forces kept them poor. However, now that we somehow broke free of this cycle, people don't have to work nearly as hard to survive. Clearly, people have an incentive to invest less time and effort in work and education preparatory to work.
The sheer crazy-soundingness of blogs like Early Retirement Extreme and Mr. Money Mustache demonstrate how far this is from true.
AC,
Our basic food/shelter needs are somewhat irrelevant in the first world. Even in terms of basic needs, access to medical care trumps all, and that will always be subject to rationing of some kind (either through patents and monopolies, or through things no discovered because there are no patents).
People mostly status jockey amongst each other, because that's who we are. No matter what level of wealth we have there is a limited quantity of respect, mating success, social success, etc. The iron law of pussy holds that it will always be 50% of the population, for instance. People living in the projects have food and shelter, and yet I think we all agree they have miserable lives.
I've even seen studies showing the Amish are happier then the worlds richest billionaires. I'm not sure wealth buys everything, as Aretea puts it. I think its very useful in terms of getting out of extreme poverty, and after that the effects are still unknown.
Marriage is a serious problem in US culture today which could evolve into an existential one unless we ratify a marriage 3.0 that is viewed as a good deal by both reasonable men AND women. Groups that don't actually reproduce themselves...don't.
Jehu,
"We" is a group of individuals. Those individuals have their own motivations. Fairness is only one of them, and it's usually a luxury.
The mating marketplace is fundamentally different then the others. Its so high stakes. Giving up your seat on the bus is one thing. Permanently raising a child with inferior genes...man, that is heavy. I can see how you'd crush society to avoid that.
Aretae, twice now you've characterized human sperm competition as "absurdly" high. Why do you think that? It does not match my model of things, which is that women cuckold men relatively infrequently.
Seems to me that even very moderate levels of cheating by women should induce a fair amount of sperm competitive adaptation in men. So another thing I guess I am wondering about here is, if we measure say ejaculate volumes or whatever, and look at the them by species, what should we predict for humans?
Leonard,
I seem to remember that testing determined that something between 10% and 33% of children had biological fathers other than the nominal father.
But more interesting...sperm competition. Humans have, by weight, the most impressive combination of testes size, ejaculate volume, sperm count, dick size, dick shape (for competitor sperm cleaning), and sex-duration, and female sexual utterances seen in any animal full stop.
The chimp and bonobo levels of frequent, fairly indiscriminate sexuality has not equipped those species with as effective of tools to do sperm competition as it has equipped us. And bonobos will have sex with anything that moves of any gender or species.
While body dimorphism measures (1.3x between females and males) place humans as moderately polygynous...anything having to do with sperm levels, dick size, etc. has pre-agricultural women as more libidinous than bonobos.
Probably it's somewhere in the middle...but the idea that monogamy is "natural" to the species is more or less dead.
An even more impressive note about sperm competition is that it is highly evolutionarily expensive to have giant dicks and insane amounts of sperm production. SO... societies that have managed to control women better (the Chinese win) have very rapidly (4000 years) had their testes size/ ejaculate volume/ dick size fall substantially. Chinese men have half(!!!) the ejaculate volume / sperm count as black men, because in the absence of sperm competition, all those features which are metabolically expensive, tend to vanish.
Leonard,
The book treatment of that is "Sex At Dawn" by Ryan...which is a one-sided look, but it demolishes the historical near-monogamous female. My best discussion of the book is probably here. Comments also good.
Aretae,
Sex at Dawn is loaded with plenty of questionable science and conclusions. I agree none of those faults deny the basic thesis "monogamy is unnatural," but the authors take their book way father then that and the evidence just doesn't go as far.
Anonymous,
I don't care terribly much about equality---at least by modern standards. What I do care about is having a next generation and generation beyond that. To do that---to make the center hold---there needs to exist a type of marriage contract that is viewed as beneficial by at least a large segment of both men and women. Those men and women are individuals, I agree, and thus I want the deal to be sufficiently 'good' on both sides that society doesn't feel required to browbeat people into 'taking one for the team'.
Anon,
No disagreement with SAD...if you read the book as just a deadly attack on the "naturally monogamous or close" line...you're pretty much where I come from.
And I'm the target audience... what with polyamorous marriage and all...
Jehu,
The next generation may not be in the equilibrium. We may have a situation where, on the average, people just don't have an incentive to breed. This is happening across the first world, in all sorts of cultures and legal systems. Self extinction may be the new normal.
When we talk about evolution, people too often think the purpose is to bread. But breeding is a secondary effect. The purpose is pleasurable stimuli. The stimuli correlate with breeding because of evolution. If you get smart enough to trick the stimuli, you break the link to breeding. High IQ may be its own evolutionary dead end.
Anonymous,
Yes, you could say that right now we're selecting for human beings that are resistant to contraception and value children as such, independent of the pleasure in producing them.
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