I read maybe a chapter and a half of the Two-Parent Privilege, but I gave up due to a lack of behavioral genetics. It's impossible to properly analyze the effects of being raised with two parents versus one parents without taking into account in that divorce risk is a function of the personality traits of the two parents, personality traits are heritable, and therefore, children of divorce and children of stable homes differ *genetically* before we take into account any environmental effects.
Mind you: I actually believe that being raised by two parents *does* matter (though I can't point to any conclusive data to justify this belief.) That's why I am so frustrated that mainstream discussions of this topic (even by conservatives) don't adequately address the critiques of behavioral geneticists.
Yeah, that wasn’t mentioned even once in the book. I remember Scott Alexander discussing how schizophrenia is heritable. If schizophrenia both raises your risk of divorce and also perhaps make it difficult to hold down a job, then I could see the way that it would correlate with lower income people having lower marriage rates. Now that you mention it, I didn’t see anyone raise behavioral genetics at all when I was doing some outside research on this. Almost everyone was viewing this purely through the lens of Gender War.
It's a valid point, and economists are infamous for having a blind spot towards genetics.
But I'll just note that the worst and most obvious negative effects are when mom brings in a new boyfriend, and it's hard to argue with the statistics and common sense there, about the dangers of unrelated male co-residents. Especially (though not exclusively) among the lower classes, where the new boyfriend is more likely to be bad news. Even if the new guy and the child's father are equally bad news, the new guy is far likelier to engage in more and worse abuse towards the child.
I also think that, in this case, a father who is not resident but is at least somewhat engaged with his children can be a deterrent against abuse in and of himself, as opposed to a father who is totally uninvolved. I'm acquainted with such a case: a woman who pulled herself out of poverty and reports being raped at a frighteningly young age by one of mama's boyfriends. She noted that none of the half-siblings who lived with her suffered nearly as bad of abuse -- but they all had fathers who checked in on them and would presumably have been prepared to retaliate against mama's new guy. Her father was gone without a trace, so the beau du jour felt he could prey on her with impunity.
Good point. In the US, the religion with the highest rate of marriage is Hinduism and I assume there’s a strong overlap with Asian American, who have a high rate of marriage. Christian marriage rates aren’t much different from the rest of the population, but Christianity is so widespread that lots of people identify as Christian, but mean very different things. Sometimes it means they go to church twice a year, or not at all.
Thank you so much for more data on this consuming question. After speaking to my adult children this morning, I wonder what the map looks like for a reliable internet connection. Is time on the internet correlated with lower marriage rates? Their theory is that people used to marry mates they met in the real world, but now young people think they have access to the entire world in their pocket, and can do better than settling for someone in their hometown.
> Is time on the internet correlated with lower marriage rates?
I can't say I have any hard data on this, but I think people interacting with the real world is going to really help them build real life friendships and that's going to help them find a partner. Something else that wasn't raised in the book was that some zip codes are becoming increasingly lopsided in terms of their gender ratios due to college being about 60% female. That's driving women in urban areas to go online to find partners because there's a shortage of men, and men in rural areas online because there's a shortage of women.
Wow! Wonderfully cogent analysis of the question. Thank you!
I read maybe a chapter and a half of the Two-Parent Privilege, but I gave up due to a lack of behavioral genetics. It's impossible to properly analyze the effects of being raised with two parents versus one parents without taking into account in that divorce risk is a function of the personality traits of the two parents, personality traits are heritable, and therefore, children of divorce and children of stable homes differ *genetically* before we take into account any environmental effects.
Mind you: I actually believe that being raised by two parents *does* matter (though I can't point to any conclusive data to justify this belief.) That's why I am so frustrated that mainstream discussions of this topic (even by conservatives) don't adequately address the critiques of behavioral geneticists.
Yeah, that wasn’t mentioned even once in the book. I remember Scott Alexander discussing how schizophrenia is heritable. If schizophrenia both raises your risk of divorce and also perhaps make it difficult to hold down a job, then I could see the way that it would correlate with lower income people having lower marriage rates. Now that you mention it, I didn’t see anyone raise behavioral genetics at all when I was doing some outside research on this. Almost everyone was viewing this purely through the lens of Gender War.
It's a valid point, and economists are infamous for having a blind spot towards genetics.
But I'll just note that the worst and most obvious negative effects are when mom brings in a new boyfriend, and it's hard to argue with the statistics and common sense there, about the dangers of unrelated male co-residents. Especially (though not exclusively) among the lower classes, where the new boyfriend is more likely to be bad news. Even if the new guy and the child's father are equally bad news, the new guy is far likelier to engage in more and worse abuse towards the child.
I also think that, in this case, a father who is not resident but is at least somewhat engaged with his children can be a deterrent against abuse in and of himself, as opposed to a father who is totally uninvolved. I'm acquainted with such a case: a woman who pulled herself out of poverty and reports being raped at a frighteningly young age by one of mama's boyfriends. She noted that none of the half-siblings who lived with her suffered nearly as bad of abuse -- but they all had fathers who checked in on them and would presumably have been prepared to retaliate against mama's new guy. Her father was gone without a trace, so the beau du jour felt he could prey on her with impunity.
Great article. Shame we have no data for religious affiliations, often an important aspect of culture.
Good point. In the US, the religion with the highest rate of marriage is Hinduism and I assume there’s a strong overlap with Asian American, who have a high rate of marriage. Christian marriage rates aren’t much different from the rest of the population, but Christianity is so widespread that lots of people identify as Christian, but mean very different things. Sometimes it means they go to church twice a year, or not at all.
Thank you so much for more data on this consuming question. After speaking to my adult children this morning, I wonder what the map looks like for a reliable internet connection. Is time on the internet correlated with lower marriage rates? Their theory is that people used to marry mates they met in the real world, but now young people think they have access to the entire world in their pocket, and can do better than settling for someone in their hometown.
> Is time on the internet correlated with lower marriage rates?
I can't say I have any hard data on this, but I think people interacting with the real world is going to really help them build real life friendships and that's going to help them find a partner. Something else that wasn't raised in the book was that some zip codes are becoming increasingly lopsided in terms of their gender ratios due to college being about 60% female. That's driving women in urban areas to go online to find partners because there's a shortage of men, and men in rural areas online because there's a shortage of women.