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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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You might see some effect from rolling back no-fault divorce.

I actually think this is one of those "can't put the genie back in the bottle" situations. If we went back to requiring cause for divorce today I suspect what would not happen is a return to traditional marriage. What would happen instead is marriage rates would crater. My impression is understanding of the downsides of this arrangement are well known and lots of people, women especially, would not be interested in risking it.

Women are not the people you need to convince to get married - men are.

But that said, I don't think "requiring cause for divorce" is really what the trad people want - that's one component of it, but it still wouldn't fix the problems with marriage as it exists now. I think you can make a compelling case for bringing traditional marriage back, but just taking bits from it and the modern equivalent piecemeal seems to me like it could create some horrific outcomes.

That is certainly the stereotype but I'm not sure how true it is. According to Pew (at least back in 2020) fewer single women than single men (in every age group) were looking for a relationship of any kind, though a larger fraction of single women were looking for a committed relationship than single men. More recent data shows an even further decline among singles looking for relationships, though mostly among single men.

women are not the people you need to convince to get married — men are

Is that true? The research is that men benefit more from marriage and are much, much more likely to remarry if a marriage ends (in death or divorce). I can't find polls for first marriages/singles but I'd be curious how they relate.

How do men benefit more from marriage and what research are you referring to?

Keeping in mind that men are uniquely screwed over by divorce/family courts and that ~80% of divorces are intiated by women (of the top of my head).

Divorces being initiated by women would support the claim that it's not men who need to be convinced to be married. The benefits I was referring to was married men living longer, reporting higher life satisfaction, etc, than single men (the opposite direction was true of married women)

Being screwed over by family courts is only relevant if you're having kids with someone, and in that case being married/not married is irrelevant, as not being married to the mother of the child you are claiming paternity for doesn't release you from child support payments or grant you more visitation rights.

it's not men who need to be convinced to be married

I agree with you on this point

(the opposite direction was true of married women)

I straight up don't believe this unless you have a source.

Being screwed over by family courts is only relevant if you're having kids with someone

Alimony and asset splits can be and often are brutal to the husband even if no kids are involved. Kids just make it worse.

Sorry, but it's one study cherry-picked by the Guardian that just so happens to fit their political bias and serves as good clickbait fodder.

The article even implicitly admits if flirs in the face of most research.

Other studies have measured some financial and health benefits in being married for both men and women on average, which Dolan said could be attributed to higher incomes and emotional support, allowing married people to take risks and seek medical help.

I'm sure it could. Almost sounds like there's benefits to being married.

Also I would add that 'happiness' is a fleeting and imprecise measure in my opinion. I think modern society puts far too much emphasis on hedonia rather than eudaimonia.

This article was amended on 30 May 2019 to remove remarks by Paul Dolan that contained a misunderstanding of an aspect of the American Time Use Survey data.

This doesn't fill me with confidence.

To add to your objections: I've read this Guardian article before and it is citing Paul Dolan, who has made claims that have already been extensively debunked elsewhere. Even Vox, one of the most left-leaning outlets available, called it out as misinformation. You are pretty much correct to doubt the entirety of the article.

I want to first deal with the portions of the Guardian article that were stripped out just as an exhibition of the quality of research you can expect from Dolan. The offending sections are: "Married people are happier than other population subgroups, but only when their spouse is in the room when they’re asked how happy they are. When the spouse is not present: fucking miserable." And: "The study found that levels of happiness reported by those who were married was higher than the unmarried, but only when their spouse was in the room; unmarried individuals reported lower levels of misery than married individuals who were asked when their spouse was not present." You can see both of these claims made in an archive of the page on 25 May 2019 here.

There are a few reasons why this claim is bad, but the main thing which destroyed his argument was pointed out by economist Gray Kimbrough, who noticed that the source which Dolan was drawing from actually does not actually include any of this information. The error Dolan made was to interpret the categories "Married - spouse present" as "spouse is in the room" and "Married - spouse absent" as "spouse is not in the room". In reality, what "spouse absent" refers to is married people whose partner is not living in their household. So even assuming that the difference is statistically significant (despite the fact that no such statistical analysis is conducted), all Dolan actually found was that married people whose spouses don't live with them are unhappier than married people whose spouses live with them. What's even funnier is that the data also shows slightly higher levels of happiness in the "married, spouse not present" category than for the never married or divorced categories, which casts even further doubt on his claim. This is an honestly astonishing error that should have never been made, and it casts quite a bit of doubt on Dolan's competency.

When Dolan was made aware of this, he retracted the statement, and so did the media outlets that published it (like the Guardian). However, the other claims made in the Guardian that weren't retracted are just about as tendentious and questionable, as Kimbrough notes in a follow-up thread. He got a copy of Dolan's book, and looked through it to see his sources. And the errors are truly legion.

To start, the claim that still appears in the current version of the Guardian article that married women die sooner than if they never married apparently is not supported at all in Dolan's book. Furthermore, the idea in the article that women's health is "unaffected" by marriage (which already contradicts the idea that women die sooner) is also not supported. In the book, Dolan cites articles claiming that they prove that there "really do not appear to be any health-related reasons to marry if you are a woman", but Kimbrough demonstrates that the sources he uses do not actually support this claim - they cite other studies stating that the health benefits that accrue to women from marriage are less than those that accrue to men, but they do not support the idea that marriage is void of health benefits for women. Furthermore, there are abundant reasons to doubt this weaker claim that marriage benefits men's health more than women's health, but I'll get to that later.

Next, Kimbrough attacks the claim that the healthiest and happiest population subgroup are women who never married or had children. He states: "The ATUS lacks data on ever having children, but I can compare never/ever married with and without children in the household. This doesn’t back up his claim." As evidence, he posts a table that features ATUS data. This table presents mean happiness broken down by sex, marital status and childlessness (a 0-6 scale is used here). Never married men without kids have a score of 4.1, never married men with kids have a score of 4.2, and married men, kids or without, have a score of 4.3. Never married women without kids have a score of 4.2, and every other category of women (never married women with kids, as well as married women, kids or without) has a score of 4.4. Kimbrough then posts more ATUS data displaying happiness over the life course by gender and marital status, which shows that if anything married men and women both are slightly more happy than their unmarried counterparts, and that married men and women's "happiness levels" look fairly similar. He concludes that "[T]here does not appear to be evidence supporting any of the dramatic claims in the press. While one has been retracted, I believe that all of them should be retracted and corrected."

That's Kimbrough's criticism covered. Now, to tackle the weaker claim that "the health benefits of marriage unequally accrue to men and women", I'd like to note that the findings on that certainly do not all point in one direction, and furthermore there are often problems when trying to establish causation here. Is it that marriage grants benefits to health, or is it the case that people with good health are more likely to get married? Could the difference found between men and women be partially explained by a selection effect? Trying to prove causation is not a trivial task, and in order to actually assess this, you'd ideally need longitudinal data. Many of the studies about the health effects of marriage are simply not methodologically suited to prove that the improved health is caused by marriage alone.

For example, I have tracked down one of the studies shown in Kimbrough's screenshot of the articles which Dolan cites, the ones that try to argue that men get more health benefits from marriage than women. The study in question I've looked at is Litwak and Messeri (1989), which uses "information on age, gender, race, and marital status of decedents 25 years or older at time of death who died from one of the 176 rated causes in 1980".

The authors attempt to estimate the effect of marital status on mortality, stating "Effects of social supports were estimated from ratios of single to married mortality rates for each rated cause of death broken down by age-gender-race groupings of decedents. ... Denominators for the mortality rates were based on 1980 United States census counts for single and married persons in each of the corresponding age-by-gender-by-race sub-groups. Mortality ratios greater than 1 indicate that marriage conferred protection. Ratios about 1 indicate that marriage confers little benefit, while ratios less than one indicate that married individuals were more likely to die from a specific cause." They find ratios greater than 1 for both men and women, indicating mortality is lower among married men and women. They also find that mortality ratios are higher for men.

Now, this doesn't seem like a particularly compelling methodology. If you are just seeing how the mortality rates for a given year differ between the married and unmarried, it seems clear to me that this methodology does not really allow you to distinguish between an actual effect of marriage on mortality vs. selection effects. The authors also do acknowledge this limitation, stating that "Other problems with these data are the lack of a measure of health status and limited socioeconomic measures. Thus our data may reflect a spurious effect of an unmeasured antecedent cause such as poor health. Poor health might lessen chances of marriage and increase mortality at the same time". While I would say it's likely that marriage does have some genuine effect, the difficulty of distinguishing between the two means that their conclusion (that the mortality-reducing benefits of marriage are greater for men than women) ends up being suspect. And while the authors note that some studies controlling for health status do still find an effect of marital status on mortality, this runs into the opposite problem that you might then be factoring out legitimate health effects of marriage which then have an impact on mortality. Isolating the effect of marriage using this data isn’t easy.

As an aside, even if I assume that the health benefits of marriage are greater for men than for women, this might not be because marriage privileges men, but because men are less likely to be able to find social supports outside of the marital unit and thus depend more on the social supports offered by marriage. In other words, it need not be reflective of married male privilege, instead it could be showing unmarried male disadvantage. Divorces being mostly instigated by women might not be because marriage is bad for them, but because they are less emotionally dependent on it and are thus less committed to the union. Also, being less invested offers you superior negotiating power. So even if we agree on that finding, there need not necessarily be agreement on what it implies.

There's so much more I could be writing about this, but in short, this Guardian article is terrible.

EDIT: added more

I don't think that either of those claims really defeat the argument being made - but I didn't provide any evidence myself so good enough. I think that men being more likely to remarry reflects the difference in "relationship market value" between the two. Men who are high quality enough to have already married and then lost a wife to disease or accident are much more valuable than women who already have children and other obligations, who are most likely going to have a harder time finding a partner.

That marriage is good in the longer term for men is a more difficult question, and one that I don't think you can really quantify statistically - but even if you did, saying that it would be optimal for men to marry doesn't actually make them more likely to marry. You could apply the same logic to drug addicts - being a heroin addict is extremely bad for your quality of life, and the optimal decision is to stop being a heroin addict immediately... but we don't actually see that happening and heroin addicts still exist.

I should have specified further that not only do men remarry more, they also express a desire to remarry more. This could of course be a sour grapes type situation where women claim to not want to remarry because they're aware they'd have difficulty doing so if they wanted it.

In any case, if anyone has statistics about desire for a first marriage among men vs women it would be interesting to see numbers.

I really don't think it is possible to get a statistical answer for this - there's also the hypothesis that women get married to secure resources, and a divorced woman still has access to her partner's resources and hence does not actually need to remarry (while the man, who is no longer getting any action, does need to get into a new relationship to meet his needs). There are a lot of confounding factors, although if there is real and rigorous data on this I'd love to see it.

Trads don’t like social engineering anyways, and they mostly just have a revealed preference for favoring people who do things the right way(according to them).

Trads don’t like social engineering anyways

Are you sure? Traditional social structures are a form of social engineering and I'm pretty sure the trads are very big on those.

That’s a fair point.