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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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Reproducing relevant comment elsewhere:

Look at the graph in the link you shared that shows divorce rate by number of premarital partners. It shows that the divorce rate for women who had 2 partners exceeds that of women had 6-9!

There is a 10 percentage point difference for the arbitrary cut off of 4-5 and the maximum at 10+ partners. The difference between 4-5 and 6-9 is negligible, maybe 1 PP.

This makes the choice of 4-5 very hard to justify. After all, you should also rule out women who have had precisely 2 partners by the same logic.

Note that you also need to account for the fact that a minority of people divorce multiple times and drive up the average.

I've linked the image in question here.

/images/17482841643516097.webp

You also have to read these numbers through the different thresholds for getting married in the first place - the people with shorter previous relationships are propably less likely to get married in the first place, and so its more meaningful when they do - but that doesnt hold in the "intervention" condition of "why dont you consider those as potential wifes".

If men were very efficient in assesing divorce risk and chose to marry accordingly, you would expect this graph to go up in the beginning and then be flat, which is more or less what it does.

he people with shorter previous relationships are propably less likely to get married in the first place

IDK about this. People could be more likely to get married because they don't spend as much time dithering about it.

This graph isnt about getting married in a certain timeframe, its about getting married to a certain partner. There could still be some effect of that... though I notice now that the IFS data doesnt have age, so bodycount isnt necessarily about relationship length, as it would be for someone evaluating the mostly-similarly-aged women he might date. Note also that their table 1 shows the odds of marrying partner #n continually decining (beware the pooled fields).