Is it surprising though? Regardless of how far we’ve come in terms of viewing gender roles, the society still expects men to provide. Most women don’t prefer marrying down, while men are okay with it and that is a fact. And when married men do not have stable jobs, most women get additional pressure from people around them, friends, family, etc.
The more successful a women is in her career, the fewer dating options she has. The opposite is true for men.
Another issue is that college educated women do not prefer to marry non college educated men. This is a problem because there are way more women in college than men.
The best place to be for successful women to find a mate is Silicon Valley where the gender ratio is so messed up. There is a joke that women in the Bay Area have a “49er attitude”. A 4 who thinks she is a 9 because of the abundance of successful and intelligent men.
> The more successful a women is in her career, the fewer dating options she has.
This is a result of their own sky-high standards and unwillingness to date/marry down. The same is not true for a man.
> There is a joke that women in the Bay Area have a “49er attitude”. A 4 who thinks she is a 9 because of the abundance of successful and intelligent men.
Isn't this also true nationwide due to dating apps, skewing the perception of successful and attractive men on the apps as the new "average" ?
> This is a result of their own sky-high standards and unwillingness to date/marry down. The same is not true for a man.
That's a very reductive take.
While I'm sure this is sometimes the case, is it inconceivable that it's also hard for women to fulfill their socially prescribed womanly duties while also being a high performer in their careers, and they have to choose between picking from a limited dating pool of partners who don't have traditional expectations, or a relationship which becomes punctuated by conflict over their unwillingness to take on duties expected of them?
Whereas a traditional relationship is centered around men as the primary (or sole) breadwinner, and the family structures revolve around catering to their domestic needs while they make the domestic/familial/social sacrifices in order to climb the career ladder, so (while I'm not denying it's also a frequent source of conflict) it's easier for high-achieving men to find partners who will accept the status quo and take on supporting roles
You seem to misunderstand what is meant by "dating down" and the refusal of women to do so. It's not a problem of philosophical compatibility and non traditional roles.
If I like fast cars and I'll I've ever been exposed to is your average beater, then it wouldn't take that much to excite me. A sporty commuter might even do it.
But if I've been consistently exposed to supercars, or if I even own one myself, then it will take a much more impressive vehicle to excite me.
Fundamentally, I'm still attracted to the same thing regardless of my situation: fast cars..but one scenario leaves me wanting a lot more than the other.
>Isn't this also true nationwide due to dating apps, skewing the perception of successful and attractive men on the apps as the new "average" ?
It's true on dating apps but those women come back to Earth as soon as they turn off Tinder. In Bay Area, women don't come back to Earth. Tinder or not.
PS. I'm not bashing Bay Area women. It's how it is. I think more Silicon Valley men should move to New York and more New York women should move to Silicon Valley. Both sides will be happier.
No, I think it's just necessary. Most couples want kids. That means the man needs to be able to support her lifestyle in the 9 months where she shouldn't work.
It's surprising because several myths about financial status within relationships are still unfounded despite being commonly spoken about.
Also, we haven't come that far in regards to gender roles. Women wearing pants and going to work, and men wearing nail polish is the extent of what was normalized in society. Anything else and we still view it with very traditional lenses.
> Also, we haven't come that far in regards to gender roles. Women wearing pants and going to work, and men wearing nail polish is the extent of what was normalized in society. Anything else and we still view it with very traditional lenses.
Even this is an optimistic lens: a man wearing nail polish at work is likely to play very differently between a coastal city and a small "heartland" town.
The issue I think is more that women have been fighting for rights while men aren't really allowed to do that in western society. There are countless examples. Women can wear mens clothing and no one bats an eye, but men can't wear womens clothing. It's now normal for women to work, but stay at home men are almost non-existent. Teenage boys kill themselves many times more often but the main thing you hear about in the news is how social media effects teenage girls.
Athletic/gym gear, tank tops, bike shorts/leggings, speedos, etc. aren't really formal clothing, and they are practical both for physical activity and for fitness signaling (e.g. attracting mates and discouraging rivals.) (And sports from football to martial arts are a sort of ritualized fight.)
But I think you are on to something - men's attraction strategies are often via resources rather than health/fitness (or overt physical conflict with rivals.)
Academic robes and hoods were originally practical for keeping you warm in a freezing university. I can't imagine churches or abbeys were particularly well heated either. Another advantage of robes (or kimonos) is they can trap heat from external sources.
It's normalized to the point where it's not likely to attract attention but still not common. I'd say it would be vastly more normalized than a man wearing a skirt for example.
Kenji does it when he's playing with his daughter, he polishes her nails and she polishes his -- I think this explanation would fly even in the most uptight and puritanical of the conservative crowd. I do wonder whether he'd bow to the pressure of being more "professional" if he was still making videos under the seriouseats or ATK banner.
Maybe he would, but he is quite an oddball in more ways than one. Both of his parents were Harvard/MIT professors, he is not silent about his political views (he at one point literally forbade anyone with a Trump hat to come in to his restaurant) so we shouldn't extrapolate from this one singular case one way or the other.
No male artist born after 1960, no. Last concert I went to was Carrie Underwood. Who was wearing nail polish. (I’m not judging just literally was not aware it was a thing.)
Close, I think it’s more about signalling you’re not into traditional gender roles. There are women who are into that, just like there are gay men who don’t like effeminate men. If you live in a place with enough potential friends and lovers it saves everybody time, and you look fabulous to boot.
Very true. My son is six months old and as we've chosen to breastfeed half the time I'm completely useless to my son. I can change nappies and comfort him but most of the time he needs his mum. I can see why society developed the way it has. If you remove birth control and baby formula people would be forced into traditional rolls during their child bearing years.
Business must accomodate humanity, and not the other way around. Silicon Valley utopians would like everyone to be a fungible unit of productivity. If your culture does not produce healthy children, your culture is going away.
That's not the Bay Area, mate, that's just Capitalism.
SV just like to put their own veneer on it to make it seem kinder and gentler than the NYC screw-you-pay-me approach, but make no mistake it's the same stuff.
Don't jump to conclusions. What you describe is one possibility, or may account for part of it, but men who don't have work and don't feel useful or like they have a purpose might also become intolerable, and this could easily lead to divorce too.
For instance, other studies have found that men's work is strongly tied to their sense of identity, much more so than women, so men who lose their identity could become depressed, irritable, lash out, etc.
While we should be cautious, this also agrees with the lived experience of almost every married couple I know.
I don't think this is true of all women. But I and several of my friends have noticed that as our income level changed the level of support and tolerance from our wives changed noticeably.
When I'm making more money or receive a promotion my wife is noticeably more supportive and tolerant of me. Despite me being much happier and more agreeable at the low income jobs, my low income jobs still pay more than her job, and only caused a very small change to QoL (due to my large savings). I can only imagine what it's like if I made less than her or we had to actually start sacrificing due to lower pay.
And of my friends where the wife is noticeably more successful than the husband there is always quite a bit of stress from the wife who is constantly pushing him to be more successful. Not to mention the amount of crap these wives get for their less successful husbands, which is quite substantial.
the wife of a friend of mine works for the united nations and every few years the whole family is moving to a different post in a different country. because of the way the visa works in most countries, the husband can't automatically find a job in the new place, and so after they moved last time, after having a job in the previous country he felt exactly that kind of uselessness because he could not contribute. he eventually found a purpose in running his own startup online.
myself i used to earn a lot less than my wife, but i never felt useless as i see my purpose in contributing to society and i could always do that by working with FOSS. it is my work and my purpose, even if it doesn't pay.
I think men and women just prioritize different things. Men might be willing to "marry down" in terms of finances but are probably less willing to do so in terms of attractiveness. And as a woman with a high-paying job, I would argue the problem is not entirely with women. I couldn't care less how much a guy I date makes (that's the beauty of being able to fully provide for myself and my kids, I don't have to rely on any guy's money). Without exception, though, every guy I've gotten serious has had some level of insecurity around it. They might say they are OK with it, but eventually they will have some problems with it. To be fair, this might be because of societal expectations, but it isn't because I care what they make.
It can be indirect socialization to boot. Perhaps we have agreed that men don’t have to be the breadwinner. But… what else are they supposed to bring to the relationship?
We can of course say, oh they are supposed to be funny, loving, and do their fair share of chores. But what can only they bring?
I think this could be a driver of insecurity. If not a provider role, we haven’t figured out what alternative respectable roles they could fill, which means as far as culture is concerned they feel useless.
A man who dates a woman with higher income is taking a big risk that eventually she's going to get frustrated with his lower income and end the relationship. This isn't an misguided concern, hang on on reddit dating/relationship forums and about once a month you'll see a post from a woman in this situation and frustrated by it. Inevitably the advice she gets is "break up with him".
Majority of women are not ok with men making less, no matter what they say - its often an unrevealed preference.
Socioeconomically marrying down then is a big disadvantage for either gender, in the cases i am aware of. I don't however know how to find wider stats. thanks for explaining.
It precludes being a power couple, but high status wealthy men have happily wed their secretary or a school teacher for decades. Especially in the single breadwinner era, this worked fine. The woman was bringing skills like caring for children and cooking, not wealth.
Anecdote but I’ve noticed there’s a big difference in the activities men and women do when they’re “idle.” In 2009 a friend got laid off and began to play World of Warcraft for like 14 hours a day. His girlfriend started to think he was intolerable in this state. It’s something like pathological depression.
I get the feeling that males not engaged in something perceptibly “productive” are judged very harshly.
With no disrespect intended towards your friend: I think there's broad social agreement that anybody who plays video games for 14 hours a day is probably intolerable in anything except a completely lopsided relationship.
Put another way: that leaves 10 hours a day for eating, sleeping, and the actual things that make relationships work (quality time, sharing responsibilities, etc.). Unless your friend didn't sleep, he probably wasn't being a very attentive partner.
I have found that average number of hours played per day is negatively correlated with how laid-back the player is. Laidbackness is bimodal, in that lower skill and very high skill players tend to be laidback. A large amount of above average (but not excellent) players tend to play more hours per day, be more obsessive, less forgiving, and fairly judgemental of how other people play. I like to think of this as the Dunning-Kruger curve in action. We call these players "sweaties", because they are breaking a sweat and stressing over everything. Really great players don't stress, they just perform.
In undergrad I used to play crusader kings for hours and get super (too) invested. These days I jump on Doom Eternal (hurt me plenty) for maybe 15-45 minutes at a time, chew through a horde of demons with glee and can easily walk away to do something else.
Different games tho, with different narrative focuses. CKII / III is designed to get you sucked in, attached to your dynasty and its members, and focused on emergent gameplay -- it's your world, or one that evolves in new and fun ways around you.
The newest Doom games are great, but there is no deep story, just enough plot and lore to give the game context. In a practical sense you're shootin, jumpin, and clickin -- 20 frenetic minutes of excitement. Put cursor over target until dopamine is deployed, repeat. Crazy adrenaline highs but also no larger engrossing activity except generating skulls for the skull throne.
That may be the case, but I think the point still stands. A lot of people can respect their partner spending 10 hours a day to get money to contribute to a collective future but not respect them for spending it on a hedonistic pleasure they don't share
This is counterfactual: the GP describes someone who was unemployed. We have no particular reason to believe that an unemployed video-game-addicted investment banker would fare any better than an unemployed video-game-addicted not-investment banker.
A grown up man spending 14 hours a day playing games is a very bad sign. It's ok for a few months, provided one has some money, but not a great long term strategy.
Yes, it's hard. But you don't fight depression with endless gaming sessions. Quite the opposite, really.
I feel incredibly stupid playing multiplayer games during business hours because, well, who am I playing against/with? Either children or lazy bums.
Acceptable comment until the last paragraph. God forbid someone have non standard work hours, or take a break, or a day off, or be retired... Maybe you even match with people in a different time zone...
You're right, I did not phrase that properly. See my response to afpx.
Of course people retire, take days off, etc. I simply stated how I feel. Plenty of voice chats have left me with the impression that kids and "lazy bums" really do make up the majority during business hours, at least in the games I play - RTS and FPS
When I stopped working (cause I was tired and had saved more than enough money), I pretty much played video games and smoked pot for 2 years. My spouse gave me a hard time, because she was getting social pressure because of it. But, she basically told everyone to lay off because I was a responsible adult. After about 2 years, I got bored with video games and started coding again for fun. But, my spouse was awesome for her continual support.
But, it was irritating that people gave me a hard time about it. Some people seem to need shared pain, and if they’re in pain but they see someone chilling, they’ll react to it.
Hey man, I've taken long sabbaticals myself. Since multiple people complained, I guess dropping generalisations like that was inappropriate. In my mind it was clear that I was referring to working age people who could use all that free time for something else.
Personally, I am looking forward to some gardening. I've spent several decades playing games multiple hours almost every week. Clearly not everyone has been wasting their youth as I did and I am glad for people who finally get to do what they want.
Self-judged harshly. Your friend is playing WoW not just to escape but to feel accomplished in a group. He can't escape his biological need to fit in, compete with and succeed with his boys.
Under employed and unemployed men are less likely to be the primary breadwinner of the household. Pretty much all the formulas and tables that divorce courts use to determine how hard of a financial fucking a man gets deliver much less of a fucking if the man is being out earned by their spouse so there's less incentive for under-employed men to "fix things". While state laws different and some states are pretty equitable about divorce enough aren't that it should show up in statistics.
Probably a lot of this to it. When I got married the amount the state expected for any kid went from a pretty standard computed amount of 20% (30% post tax) to more like the ~10% post-tax it actually costs me to take care of the kid without mandated support (which still affords them quite a generous lifestyle). There's no rational reason why the kid is always gonna need 3x the money if you're not married, yet the courts say it's so dire a need to spend 3x the money for unmarried couples if you don't pay it you go to jail.
This shows up as greyed out for me -- I think the means downvoted? If so, that's a shame, as this really comment really intuits and susses out a reasonable hypothesis based on incentives.
> One new study of 6,300 heterosexual couples found that all other factors being equal, men who were not working full time were 33% more likely to divorce in the following 12 months than husbands who did have full time jobs.
You cannot control for ”all” other factors in an observational study. You can control for ”how people choose to answer your survey questions,” which is two steps removed from the truth.
Wonder if that's correlation, not causation, due to tactic behaviour regarding relationship ending. For example, divorcing a unemployed partner may entail a worse deal in terms of alimony or child support. Divorcing a partner that is fully employed probably makes harder for the defendant to claim plain lack of money.
It’s simpler than that: typically there is an underlying factor that causes both the unemployment and the divorce. It could be depression, sustance abuse, poor impulse control, anxiety disorders, any number of things. You can’t control for all of these. Some are hard to measure, some will yeild inaccurate measurements because the men in the study lie (or don’t even realize they have this problem) etc.
This is called the third variable problem. It occurs when unobserved variables account for a correlation in studied variables.
Virtually every correlation study can be criticized through this method. Modern correlation studies 'account for' or 'control for' all observed variables in an attempt to prevent criticism along this line. This type of correlation study exists essentially to say "this correlation is interesting", and spark investigation as to why they are correlated.
Sociology is primarily correlation studies because of the logistical and ethical challenges around experimentation. For example, if we could force a randomly selected group of males to be unemployed we could avoid the third variable problem and establish causation. However no ethics review board would consider "I'm curious if your marriage will survive" a valid reason to fire someone.
Statistics do not create a causal hivemind, and vice-versa. We must stipulatively define what "unemployment" we're discussing. It is especially true in lower- and middle-incomes where women decide to become single mothers much more readily and demand employed men.
For wealthier people, I intuitively doubt this holds because there are other fulfillment activities that supplant clawing at jobs for survival. Freedom from meeting survival needs can be counterintuitively freeing and depressingly boring or allow stopping to smell the proverbial roses, depending on individual outlook. There are millions of existentially depressed wealthy housewives who feel they don't have a greater purpose in the world, enough excitement, or anything new to look forward to... hence cheating, therapy, and post menstrual adventures breaking free from family.
I hypothesize from intuition that coupling, marriage, and families are more likely to start and continue when there is necessary and sufficient wealth captured. OTOH, crimes and diseases of despair (heroin and mass shootings) happen when there is not.. because happy and comfortable people generally don't throw themselves away. I'm wondering about the future of many countries, including China, where there are idle, surplus men without income... this is very dangerous.
I quit my full time job a year and a half ago, so my wife could pursue her dream career, I could spend more time with the family, take care of the house, be there for the kids when they get home from school, do some hobby projects for myself, have dinner ready when my wife comes home from work etc etc. Everyone is happier. If anything, I feel we're _less_ likely to divorce thanks to this change.
You may enjoy "The Way of the Househusband" on Netflix. It's a comedic slice of life show about a former Yakuza member who takes the intensity of his former life into domestic life and scares and confuses people he runs into because they assume he's still in the Yakuza. There's an anime and live action versions, although I prefer the anime myself.
I'm not really a Househusband, I still have a fulltime job, but I do most of the cooking and cleaning and errands, so I related to it a lot.
It’s probably more of a confusion in the measurement - if you are not working full time, that’s a whole lot more time to spend around someone who may have only been tolerable to you in smaller intervals.
I've heard a non-trivial number of divorces in Japan happen after the husband retires.
Long hours, those guys work, and now they're home all the time. Small annoyances are easy to deal with when they're gone most of the time, but now he's home 24/7.
So in the past I've worked 33h/w instead of 38.5h/w. Soon I'll go 35h/w to get an afternoon with the kids or some time for a workout. That will make me more likely to divorce? I think the opposite is the case.
What are you getting paid per hour? I'm sure my wife won't complain if I'm working only 20 hours a week at $250/hr.
But if you're only pulling $25/hr cutting out 10 hours a week is a significant dent in total earnings.
Plus you have kids, and workout -- both uses of your time that I'm sure your spouse probably approves of. You're not working 30 hours a week and then playing competitive Yu-gi-oh for another 30, non?
Surely not 250/hr. But then US wages and what you get in Europe can't be compared just by numbers. Had always been earning to go along easily. Which is also the reason why reducing weekly hours a bit is possible.
But also the article says it's not about the earnings at all. But then also talks about widening the husband and father role, which is not done by getting more man into full-time, quite the opposite.
Here the full-time is defined by the collective bargaining agreement, which in my case is 38.5h/w (and you must take one 30 minutes break). Anything less is part-time.
Anecdotal, but there is a large overlap between the breadwinning woman’s group and the divorce groups at my office. I myself fall into that Venn diagram.
>For years sociologists have argued over why couples split up and what policies should be put in place to try to coax couples into getting married or keeping them married. (This is not just meddling; an intact family is widely considered to be a sound unit on which to build a society, so governments have an incentive to try and keep them together.)
Um, this paragraph was jaw-dropping to me. People think it is ok for the state to manipulate the personal lives of citizens like that? People think that incentives/punishments that keep people pushed to stay in unhappy/unhealthy marriages is a good thing?
Even the statistical conclusion seems absurd. People who only stay in marriages because of incentives will not have the same effect as "a sound unit on which to build a society"; I would actually suspect the opposite
If there are “externalities” brought upon the state due to separations, ie strain on public services (crime, welfare programs, school, healthcare, etc) doesn’t the state have an incentive to do so?
In the context of the article, it seems that this wording would suggest
> "Both men and women without full time jobs are more likely to divorce."
but this is not supported by any evidence that I could find. Indeed, it seems that unemployed (non-employed?) women are actually less likely to divorce, and that divorce rates see a linear, positive correlation with the hours worked by the female partner in male-female marriages.
Of course this is a correlative and not a causative factor, and likely is confounded by e.g. social norms and economic factors, so I don't think it says much. More recent results find that divorce (inversely) correlates more strongly with economic success, which also correlates with single-income households.
In any case, the available data suggests that a more nuanced opinion than "Gender doesn't matter for anything" would provide a better explanation.
N.b., the data I found was either from countries with a historical patriarchal bias (e.g. Iran, Türkiye) or rather old (before 1990) so it's possible/probable that these trends have shifted over time. If so, however, they are not under active research as far as I can tell. This is not my area of expertise so I might have missed some critical keywords in my search.
Yikes, that's awful. We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and ignoring our request to stop (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404079). You can't abuse HN like this.
Moreover it looks like you've primarily been using HN for political/ideological battle, which is also not allowed, regardless of your politics/ideology.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
a lot smaller of a demo, plus a fluctuating one at that, as we are slowly going back to offices
i'd imagine they do better tho, since they're more often white collar jobs, full-time jobs, and generally more lucrative than some on-site ones.
hubby hides out in the basement for 7.5 hours Mon-Fri but still brings home six-figures... easy-peasy. And speaking from experience, it means I can be cooking her dinner while on a workbreak a la slowcookers, etc.
"But Killewald’s study, which will be out in the August issue of the American Sociological Review, disputes that suggestion: “My results suggest that, in general, financial factors do not determine whether couples stay together or separate,” she says."
I am curious, does the myth that rich men will marry poor women, but rich women will not marry poor men, apply here?
I'd be interested in reading this study, because for a long time it has been conventional wisdom in this country that problems with a family's financial situation is the top cause for divorce.
> These days guys who have jobs have a predicted divorce probability in the next year of 2.5%, whereas the same guys who do not have a probability of 3.3%. That’s a third higher.
I feel that's a bit misleading, isn't it? In the grand scheme, it's 1 extra divorce per 100 (25 per 1,000 or 33 per 1000).
It's a grave mistake to ignore sex differences and dangerous when this ignorance is institutionalized. While people can be wrong about what those differences are exactly or may exaggerate certain differences in some respects or even go so far as to take a chauvinistic view, it is also possible to go to the other extreme and downplay or deny them altogether. Ideological framing and anti-intellectual misrepresentation can enable dismissive attitudes about these differences (which, frankly, are essentially beautiful and complementary and the basis for much of human dynamism). I think our understanding of men and women has suffered greatly under this infantile ideological pressure and the result is misery and disorientation.
How is this relevant? It is relevant because these sex differences influence what each sex contributes in this complementary relation. I mean this in a general sense as the particulars will be affected by circumstance. These differences affect what each sex seeks to provide and what each sex is drawn to. One does not desire what one already has. In this respect, it will not be surprising to find that unemployment or part-time employment will affect men differently than women. Men relate differently to people than women do. Women have a strong tendency to love regardless of merit while men tend to have a strong need to earn respect. A man without a job is, in most cases, going to be synonymous with a man who is aimless and has feelings of worthlessness. (This is why rich kids often become profligate, deranged, and depressed. Aimlessness, indolence, softness, helplessness, and self-absorption. Selfishness is the loneliest of states; only in living selflessly for the good of others in concrete ways and through self-sacrifice, forgetting about ourselves, are we liberated from the prison of selfishness.) This is going to affect his relationships, including his martial relationship. These sorts of men are more likely to wallow in self-pity, scapegoating (therapy is often a great way to obsessively blame one's parents, for everything), and self-destructive and hedonistic pursuits which further damage their ability to relate properly to women as human beings and in healthy ways to people in general. They are also dangerous because these alienated men are more likely to find appeal in ideologies of hatred, violence, and scapegoating.
Incidentally, this is one reason why UBI would be a terrible idea. Jobs are supposed to be ways in which both a family is served and the community is served. That's how we find purpose. For men, taking away their jobs is a way of ensuring their alienation from community, their sense of meaninglessness, and their aimlessness. It would deny them the ability to be who they are: men. There is a reason why so many retirees, especially men, have shorter lifespans than those that continue to work in some capacity.
Purpose defines manhood. In terms of living in western society, economic participation means unless you already have resources, you are required to procure resources to ensure survival, this is carefully balanced by female predisposition to a desire security and stability as their primary mating strategy, as this further reinforces the drive to procure resources. This is a management strategy that is as old as the written word.
Manhood is a cultural construct as much as whatever your culture considers 'purpose'. Both can and have been defined a variety of ways. Fundamental biological drives and evolutionarily stable strategies are one input, but certainly not the only one. As food is abundant today it's even less critical a factor than it once was.
So let's drop all the social shaming and chest thumping. It benefits few and breeds discontent among the masses who didn't win the genetic lottery.
> Incidentally, this is one reason why UBI would be a terrible idea.
I am fairly sure giving people money causes them to be more employed, so it's funny when pop economics comes to the opposite conclusion. The mechanism being that money lets you invest in yourself, or spend more time searching for better higher paying jobs. But it doesn't motivate you to quit entirely because then you'd be relatively deprived compared to your more employed cohort.
(When Bernie said "Walmart employees are so low paid they're on welfare", he was making a causal claim that being on welfare means you get paid less, or in other words that welfare is bad. Which is a weird thing for him to say, but you don't have to imitate him.)
Also, two-income families are a sign of high paying jobs, not low paying jobs. True story.
>When Bernie said "Walmart employees are so low paid they're on welfare"
I don't think that's what Bernie meant. Being on welfare in the US isn't really something that is healthy nor sustainable - you don't have money to buy healthy foods, better clothes to improve your station in life, or get good healthcare.
Being on welfare pretty much means you can't go anywhere else, except work in Walmart jobs.
If they weren't on welfare they'd be even worse off though. Giving money to people causes Walmart to pay them more, because it gives them more negotiating power.
It'd be true for wage subsidies (giving Walmart money), and of course it's also true for programs with welfare cliffs (work requirements or those horrible SSDI asset limits). I don't think the programs he was talking about have that issue though.
Of course the real problem with trying to solve everything with wage increases is that it doesn't help non-workers like children and elderly people.
Correct. Because they're not tied to a job for income, and leaving said job does not endanger their livelihood - they're capable of forcing Walmart to pay them proper wages.
I think we agree.
> Of course the real problem with trying to solve everything with wage increases is that it doesn't help non-workers like children and elderly people.
Why should they be any different? Just provide teenagers with a fraction of what an adult would get, and increase it every year. Elderly people ARE people, right? If not, I have some serious concerns for myself in the next few decades. :)
> Two thirds of divorces are initiated by women, even though their chances of remarrying are slimmer than their ex-spouses’.
The framing here is flawed, it suggests that being in a state of marriage is a goal. That only holds up in the earlier mentioned "government incentive to have intact families" perspective, but it is devoid of acknowledging the individual motives.
It's very weird watching believers in the blank slate hypothesis, collide with reality again and again.
In general women are hard wired to being attracted to healthy, high status intelligent men, with access to resources, and good personal hygiene. Fortunately for men, these are all things guys can do a lot to cultivate and build through concerted effort.
It's really no different to the things most men find attractive in a women. We can tell whether a women is "hot" instantly.
This notion of challenging the expectations of society, or redefining gender roles is largely nonsense. You can't redefine the things men are going to find attractive in women, no more than you can redefine the things women are going to find attractive in men.
It's a little odd that anyone is even surprised by this outcome. That's liberalism- I guess
It's really hard to tease out differences caused by culture from differences caused by genetics. This has nothing to do with "liberalism", science is just hard when it comes to human behavior.
I agree the science is hard to do, but most people who have ever encountered women don't need a scientific studies to discover things that are blatantly obvious.
Generally speaking, Women are attracted to men who are above, or at least across from them in status hierachies. Men who are unfortunate enough to lose status become less attractive to many women, increasing the risk of divorce among women who are unscrupulous.
Liberalism makes a virtue of ignoring things that are obvious (challenging stereotypes, breaking down stigma etc.), by pretending that they don't exist. This leads to surprises when mundane reality reasserts itself.
more time together get home also means more time for conflict. most relationships - i would say - are highly depending on not spending too much time together.
> One thing is clear. It’s not because under-employed guys make less money; the figures didn’t change no matter how much they made. “When I show that husbands’ lack of full-time employment is associated with risk of divorce, that’s adjusted for income,” says Killewald. “It’s not how high earning he is.”
Why are major sociology studies done with such small samples? I understand that if everything is done correctly a relatively small sample can strongly reflect a population. However wither someone has a full time job or not (1099 or W2) is reported to the IRS, and marriage/divorce records are public. Why are government departments not collaborating with academic institutions publish these types of insights?
Assuming proper control for biases in the population, a sample size of 6300 is not tiny. The estimated error for such a population is going to be around 1% (give or take).
Not research, but most government departments do have dedicated statistical bureaus!
This would probably fall under the BLS[1] or BEA[2], which are bureaus of the DOL and DOC, respectively. Another potential fit would be the IRS's SOI[3] division.
