How does a “flat lining” of wages of cause family stability to go down? And how do you explain high levels of family stability in countries that are much poorer?
> And how do you explain high levels of family stability in countries that are much poorer?
Less individual freedom, greater direct economic dependency on others in your group, and also the threat of ostracization, excommunication, and destitution if you go against its rules. Basically, there are extremely high cost/stakes associated with going it on your own.
But on the other side there are also good things that come from greater direct interdependency, like perhaps less individual alienation and a greater sense of shared purpose, and access to community resources when you follow the prescribed rules.
In some places people have centuries of social-structure adaptation to deal with the stress of being systematically oppressed (by local elites, colonial overlords, ...).
E.g. money gets shielded by community institutions (such as local religious organizations) that are harder for elites to steal from than individual peasants, and then those act as a kind of social safety net in hard times. Extended families/clans build social bonds through e.g. marriage and baptism, and help each-other.
Often there are severe social problems in rural peasant societies: alcoholism, domestic violence, seasonal migrant labor keeping people away from home much of the year, corruption, ..., but people have also learned to be tough vs. some kinds of outside threats. But large waves in the world economy (or a large natural disaster or the like) also can overwhelm those defenses.
I think we agree that many pro-social structures exist in poor and socially rigid societies.
However these come at the expense of many liberties (i.e. religious) that are held as important in the more developed world. It's not clear that loss of such personal liberties would be an improvement in developed societies, even if it reduced the nominal divorce rate.
I agree there is a trade off, but let’s explore this a bit further. Who decides how much they value religious liberty compared to lower divorce rates? Decisions about these trade offs tend to be imposed from the top, by the elites. 2/3s of Americans still disagree with the Supreme Court ruling banning school prayer.
When there is a trade off, who should get to make the decisions about where to strike the balance?
In many places “low divorce rate” is a euphemism for widespread sexual assault, domestic violence, and total lack of women’s individual rights. You get young women handed off from father to husband as effectively chattel. Women have no choice but to put up with that when they don’t have any viable social/economic alternatives, but it’s overall pretty unpleasant and oppressive.
A significant proportion of people in the US seem to pine for the days when homosexuality was taboo and illegal, women could be beaten or raped by their husbands (and children by their fathers) and it was treated as no one else’s business, non-white people were kept out of the neighborhood and interracial marriage was frowned on if not illegal, pre-marital sex was encouraged for men but made women into “sluts”, middle/high school students received no education about basic human biology/anatomy, rape victims were forced to deliver their rapists’ babies, most professional jobs were reserved for white men, etc. But hey, low divorce rates!
Do you seriously think that this is a good description of how the upper-middle class in the West behaves? Because by and large, that's what we're talking about in this thread wrt. low divorce rates. The notion that social anomie, abuse and violence is a simply unescapable "fact" about late modern societies is baseless. You're describing pervasive dysfunction, not a "new normal".
> You're describing pervasive dysfunction, not a "new normal".
New normal can easily be pervasive dysfunction. When dysfunction becomes pervasive, it is also perceived as normal by people inside that society.
> The notion that social anomie, abuse and violence is a simply unescapable "fact" about late modern societies is baseless.
These were not so much anomies as taboo to talk about if it is happening to you. They were seen as private issues that should have stayed private and if you did talked about it, you was the bad one. Nevertheless, some statistics are available - for example domestic murders. Those went down. Some anonymous statistics. People who went through it in the past and did talked about it, their children remembering and talking about it later. The way domestic violence is portrayed in media - whether it is shown as something justifiable and ok or not.
When I was child, there was no domestic violence around me. Then I grew into adult and people started to talk more openly in front of me. Turned out, there was in fact domestic violence among adults I knew as child ... except I was protected from it.
The question remains. Do you think that the Western upper middle class are being willfully blind to some sort of domestic violence epidemic happening all around them, the way you describe previous generations as acting? You're relating isolated anecdata, that tell us nothing about whether some behaviors might have been common in the past.
Yes, Western upper middle class were willfully blind to domestic violence around them. Just like Eastern upper middle class. Or like lower class, really. It is not even that difficult ... you just don't talk about it. It was not crime. Most of it happens at home when no third party is around. If you did not wanted to be blind to it, you could talk to the aggressor and that was about how much realistically could be done. Shelters were not a thing at the time.
Whether it qualified as "epidemic" I don't know.
Seriously, people of all classes were also willfully blind to sexual abuse for years and that includes abuse by priests.
> Seriously, people of all classes were also willfully blind to sexual abuse for years and that includes abuse by priests.
Not really. This was a big part of why people were so vicious during the Protestant Reformation. You don't just have people buried up to their necks and then trampled by horses because you disagree about points of scripture.
(a) Where did you get “upper middle class in the West” from? The further-back context of this subthread is “family stability in countries that are much poorer”. Specifically, I assume, rural or recently urbanized/industrialized countries. The more recent context is some (uncited) polling of all Americans; those who were in favor of school prayer etc. are (statistically) less well educated, more religious, whiter, and older, compared to the rest of the population.
But (b) sure this also applies to upper middle class people across “the West” as of not very long ago. It’s not that every household was full of abusers, but it was treated by the public as a private matter, not talked about, and much more widespread than publicly recognized.
Public opinion tells us little about real-world behavior. The whole point of OP is that the upper-middle class liberal elites are not practicing what they preach to the rubes and proles.
What is your point? This thread is a tangent from the original article.
My claim is that “low divorce rates” historically often masked widespread abuse and unhappiness in stressed (even broken) marriages which were continued due to social pressure, not always for the best.
* * *
As for the article, this causal claim is wildly speculative bullshit:
"The educated class decides cohabiting partnerships are just as valid and important as marriage. And they also believe it’s okay to walk away at a moment’s notice from a cohabiting relationship. ¶ Poor and working-class people follow suit. To the detriment of themselves and their children."
The problem working-class people have is not bad “elite” role models, but a lack of money and good stable jobs, limited parental leave, a lack of cheap childcare options, a corrupt and exploitative criminal justice system, etc.
The supporting evidence presented in TFA is some papers about how people find newspaper op-eds persuasive, are impressed by qualifications when reading public policy recommendations, and choose their high heel shoe height based on local trends when moving to a rich neighborhood; extrapolating from this to young working-class parents separating from their partners because “elites” say it is okay is a ridiculous stretch. Especially when the young women directly quoted said clearly why they broke up. Occam’s razor says we should listen to what they say instead of inventing some secret reason without any direct evidence.
> Who decides how much they value religious liberty compared to lower divorce rates?
> When there is a trade off, who should get to make the decisions about where to strike the balance?
Of course the Supreme Court when concerning anything involving the government making an establishment of any religion.
The US isn't Saudi Arabia. As much as it's any American's right to practice the religion of their choosing, it's not in any religion's right to deny any individual - even in their religion - their individual liberties, or to impose their religion upon a person of another or no religion.
Liberties have always come paired with obligations to one's surrounding community, so there would be nothing new in this. We have a name for pure liberty or "liberation" shorn of any checks or obligations towards others: we call it licence, and every increase in licence is ultimately a step towards bondage and tyranny.
What do you mean? Historically most people in most places in the world (e.g. my ancestors in Europe a few generations ago, my godparents in southern Mexico recently, or most of your ancestors if you go back a couple centuries, wherever they happened to come from) have lived as rural peasants.
I think you're trying to think that stable families become less stable if their waged stagnate. They don't. What happens is that in aggregate, with stagnating wages, there are less stable (middle-class) families in society.
For so-called poorer countries, they are differently structured. It's tough to compare their family units with our rich nations.
> For so-called poorer countries, they are differently structured. It's tough to compare their family units with our rich nations.
But that’s exactly the point! Prior to the 1960s revolution in social norms, families in poor countries weren’t structured all that differently than ones in the US.
I’m no Reaganite, but the fact is that the stuff the old “family values” conservatives said is pretty much the same thing my Asian immigrant parents told me growing up.
Meanwhile, the data shows that Asian Americans who grow up in the bottom 20% have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 20% as adults. For white kids it’s just 11%. That’s a really big coincidence to hand wave away.
The crazy successful asian immigrants are mostly those who came recently, and who are bluntly the best and brightest of Asia coming to America for a better life due to US policy attracting the very best. Just like the above conversation, you only think of one slice of data to arrive at your conclusion.
The issue isn't with the absolute level of wages but with increasing income inequality (Gini coefficient) and the resulting loss of social status for young men on the lower end of that scale.
