The hearts of men

What Hacker News says

1. susan_hallDec 2014
   Marriage in the USA peaked in 1958. Please see the chart here:

   http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/the-real-re...

   Marriage peaked the same year that male participation in the wage economy peaked. It was also the peak year of the baby boom. It was also the peak year for the wage-to-rent ratio (average rent was only 22% of average wage, versus 32% now). It was also the peak year for wages for males under the age of 25. (Average male wage began to decline in 1973, but the average wage for young males has been declining since the recession of 1959.)

   Internet porn was not the problem in 1959, or 1969, or 1979, though the marriage rate, and the birth rate, plummeted during those years. But it is possible that the sexual revolution played a role. Barbara Ehrenreich has a fantastic book on the subject "The Hearts Of Men":

   http://www.amazon.com/The-Hearts-Men-American-Commitment/dp/...

   Although the marriage rate is now back down to levels last seen in the late 1800s, there is clearly a big difference in people's sexual practice. 41% of all the children in the USA are now born outside of wedlock. The number is comparable to London in the early 1700s (see Will and Ariel Durant's book "The Age Of Voltaire" where they quote the Bishop Of London, in 1719, estimating 50% of all couples with children in London were not married. This was at a time when the English government had decided to suppress marriage among the poor by raising the price of a marriage license to something only the middle and upper classes could afford, thus turning marriage into the ultimate status symbol.)

   Marriage has once again become a status symbol. The poor raise children without the benefit of marriage, while the (shrunken) middle and upper classes enjoy the prestige of marriage.

   The suppression of marriage in the 21st century is less easy to identify than in 1719, because back then it was an explicit policy of the government, whereas now marriage licenses are cheap. But marriage is a commitment to make things work over the long term, and without a stable job no one can reasonably make long term commitments, nor does anyone want to rush into a marriage that they know will fail, so the poor are left going through life without the benefits of marriage (or you could restate this as: "the poor are left going through life without the benefits of financial stability, which limits their ability to make the long-term commitments necessary to make a marriage work.")

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2. lkrubnerJan 2014
   I don't see a date on this essay, but I am assuming it was written in the 1960s? It has many assumptions that sound 60sish.

   This is true:

   "A longer fertile life for women would permit two or more children to occupy a smaller fraction of a woman's life."

   However, the emphasis in some of the other sentences needs to be qualified. For instance:

   "The first independent achievements of women were by upper class women in hierarchical societies."

   You can say exactly the same thing of men. Of ancient societies, we mostly have the writings of men from the upper class.

   And about this:

   "The changes permitted women to stay home and raise children, while men foraged."

   This falls into the fallacy that women didn't work or forage for food. As a counter-point, there is the Grandmother Hypothesis:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_hypothesis

   I've read estimates that in some of the African hunter-gatherer tribes (studied during the 20th century) the majority of calories going to newborn babes came not from the mother or father but from the grandmother (remember that in many of these tribes women become grandmothers in their 30s).

   His comments about "the upper middle class can't afford as much domestic help as in the past" sounds like it was written during the 1960s.

   He argues that greater wealth and economic advance has lead to this:

   "All this has reduced the relative desirability of housewifery and led to an increased demand for a better position for women."

   There is a counter-argument (which reverses the cause and effect) put forward by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book "The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment". She argues that after 1945 there emerged a culture of entertainment, adventure and pleasure seeking that caused men to pull away from traditional commitments and traditional social mores (such as marriage) and the women's movement of the 1960s was a reaction to that.

   http://www.amazon.com/The-Hearts-Men-American-Commitment/dp/...

   This if() statement is lacking its else() branch:

   "A girl can wait and if she is attractive good things may happen to her."

   This much is very true:

   "A disproportionate number of adults with initiative come from separatist social groups where the parents prevent children from taking their values from their peers or from the schools."

   This is possibly true, though I think other conclusions might be possible:

   "Getting more women in higher positions in society depends on breaking this tradition."

   This bit is borderline cliche and should be paired against the fact that in the USA 70% of all divorces are initiated by women:

   "However, a desirable man can get better terms than this, and the academic community is full of cases where a man first marries an intellectual equal and then replaces her by a second wife without so many ambitions outside the home."

   This seems to be the core of his argument:

   "Greater equality will be achieved if the amount of work required to have a nice home with well brought up children can be reduced to the point that a man of ordinary energy who shares the work equally with his wife suffers no disadvantage in his profession, and likewise a woman of ordinary energy who keeps a home going does not lose in her outside work."

   Missing from his essay is the possibility that things might simply fall apart: that the divorce rate would spike upwards to almost 50%, and that single motherhood would spike upwards to include over 40% of all children. His tone suggests that he was writing when the solidity of marriage was still being taken for granted. Anyone writing nowadays would have to take into account both the high divorce rate and also the high rate of single motherhood, which combine to suggest that perhaps there will be no easy reconciliation of what women want and what men want.

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