What Is The Legal Purpose Of Marriage?

This post was originally an answer at Law Stack Exchange that I wrote. The fact that it is quoted from that source is not indicated for ease of reading:

The case for Western-style marriage as a way to protect woman irrevocably relying on their spouse for economic support when having children

While this isn't a universal justification for marriage, it is an economic reason for marriage that heavily drives the decision to marry in modern times in the developed world in a large share of cases.

This analysis ignores what have historically been uncommon edge cases of couples who by choice or due to infertility don't have children, who are simply swept along following marriage rules that weren't really designed for them, even though they are now far more common, often for reasons that are not primarily economic, or coincidentally benefit from marriage rules not really designed for them.

The explanation of marriage on this economic basis also explains the class divide between marriage utilization in modern societies, with marriage remaining a strong institution for the affluent, while it falls apart from the working class and poor people.

In modern circumstances

Stereotypically, and very frequently in practice, when a man and a woman marry, they have children and the woman ends (temporarily or permanently) or scales back, her participation in the paid workforce. Particularly in the case of woman who have high levels of education or specialized training, doing so dramatically reduces the woman's lifetime earnings. This factor is much less important for woman with little education and/or few specialized skills who pay a much smaller penalty in their lifetime earnings for temporarily leaving the workforce or reducing their earnings while their children are young.

So, for it to make sense for a woman to have her male partner's children with the economic sacrifices associated with that decision, she needs legally enforceable protections for the reliance she places on her male partner to economically support her.

If the relationship falls apart, in the absence of marriage, the only remedy a woman who has sacrificed her lifetime earnings to have children, is child support, which only partially compensates the woman for the cost of raising the child that she had with her co-parent on a part-time basis (as the co-parent usually has some custody rights).

But if she is married and the relationship falls apart, she is entitled not only to child support, but also to a division of marital property and often substantial alimony (a.k.a. maintenance), which reflects her sacrifice of lifetime earnings in her name.

Of course, this remedy only has value (both as a remedy if the marriage ends, and as an incentive for her husband to not divorce her in the first place), if the husband has meaningful assets from which there will be marital property to divide and/or meaningful income from which alimony and child support can be paid.

These considerations help to explain why, in the modern U.S., college educated woman who are married to college educated men or non-college educated men with good economic circumstances, are much more likely to marry before having children (the average is two years after marriage), and are much less likely to divorce, than less educated and/or less economically skilled women.

In contrast, women who have relationships that could produce children with men who are not college educated and have poor economic circumstances tend not to marry before having children (the average is two years before marriage if the couple marries at all), are more likely to divorce if they have gotten married, and are less likely to even acknowledge their co-parent on a birth certificate, because in these circumstances, marriage does not provide meaningful economic protections to the woman having children and when the father is particularly destitute or potentially troublesome, even acknowledging the father's paternity may result in her paying child support to the father and being forced to continue to have him in her life.

In "pre-modern" circumstances

In pre-modern times (i.e. when there were far fewer economic opportunities for single mothers, and contraception outside marriage was unavailable or unreliable, and women tended to have far more children during a lifetime, so really in the 1950s and earlier), failure to have the complete economic support of a husband meant that a woman without a husband and any children she had living with her, were likely to experience extreme economic privation. Very few women had the ability to economically support themselves and their children without a husband in this era (only wealthy women who had significant income generating property could manage this feat).

Also, for most of that era, the state lacked a meaningful capacity to enforce child support, alimony, or shared custody arrangements. So, in that era, a blanket prohibition on divorce absent the most extreme circumstances (and usually even then restricted people who could survive on the property that they owned alone), was the only way to legally protect a woman's reliance on her co-parent to economically support her and their children.

This extreme economic imperative overrode modern era concerns about a relationship falling apart and a couple being forced to live in a "dead" marriage.

Alternatives to modern Western-style marriage and the economics driving these alternatives

A modern Western-style marriage isn't the only possible solution to the problem of providing economic security that allows women to feel comfortable making the economic sacrifices involved in having children.

Matrilineal societies with mothers and a male relative heading a household

There are some societies where women have children outside of marriage, sometimes with many men having children who are half-siblings. In those societies, mothers frequently establish households in a non-sexual pairing with a brother or uncle or father. But, most societies historically, and most modern societies, in particular, have not made that choice.

Strong social safety nets that make single motherhood viable

In some countries with strong social safety nets and third-party child care systems, especially in Scandinavia and Western Europe, but also in some countries with Soviet-style communism, single motherhood was much more economically viable and marriage was less common, because yet another solution to the problem of economic support for single mothers was devised.

Polygyny and removing some men and women from parenthood

Historically, in societies where a large share of men lack the economic capacity to support a woman and her children, while a minority of men are affluent, polygyny (sometimes with equal wives, and sometimes with a primary wife and secondary wives or concubines or slaves) solves the economic problem. Other solutions to that situation have been for a certain percentage of women to be celibate in holy orders or as priestesses and to forgo having children. Societies with this economic make up also sometimes have significant portions of men who are eunuchs and/or who become celibate and pursue religious callings.

Polyandry

Historically, in societies where almost all men lack the economic capacity to support a woman and her children alone, polyandry (often with two brothers marrying a single wife) is known and solves the economic problem.

Comment: Do you have any comment on how civil union or domestic partnership arrangements differ from marriage, or are they just marriage by a different name for legal purposes? – Ian Sudbery 

Response: In the U.S., civil unions were invented to be marriage for same sex couples when it was politically unpopular and not constitutionally required to allow same sex marriage. Institutions like PACS (Pacte Civil de Solidarité) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_solidarity_pact in France were motivated by the purpose as well, but became popular with unmarried couples who wanted some but fewer legal implications of marriage, often childless cohabiting couples, or couples who didn't want the cultural/religious baggage that the predominant Roman Catholic church there assigns to marriage. – ohwilleke

Quote Of The Day

I'll pray that every time that landlord goes out somewhere, he accidentally steps in dog poop. 

- Victoria of Many Faces, Episode 1 (after "that landlord" refused to rent a place to her because she recently adopted a child).

Siblings, Conflict, and Personalities

This is a question and answer from Facebook (I won't identify the person asking the question, and if you are anyone other than the person asking the question and know what I am referencing, please don't identify them or link to the conversation in the comments). I have added paragraph breaks that the Facebook user interface makes more difficult and less natural to do, for easier reading.

Question: 

I was raised as an only child. Half and step sibs came later in life, but from birth til leaving home, it was just me. I have felt lucky about this. 

Almost everyone I know with brothers and sisters have had fraught, difficult relationships with them. Is this as common as it seems to me? If you have siblings, has it been an easy relationship or not so much?

My Answer:

Being an only definitely influences your personality, not always for the better (stereotypically, more selfish, better at interacting with adults but less good at interacting with peers, less likely to understand give and take in relationships). 

My relationship with my brother (who is three years younger) is fine, but not super close. Siblings who are one or two years apart tend to have more intense relationships, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. Twins, of course, are their own thing (and are almost always on pretty good terms with each other). Big age difference siblings start to be more similar to only children as the age gap gets greater. My two children, who are two years apart, and my wife and her sister, who were two years apart, are probably closer than my brother and I were at three years apart. 

Birth order (oldest, youngest, middle, etc.) also significantly impacts your personality and outlook on lots of thing - it even significantly predicts the side that a scientist is likely to take between two competing scientific theories. 

Both of my children benefitted in their relationships in life from having an opposite sex sibling. People who don't have an opposite sex sibling tend to be more wary of the opposite sex in early puberty. 

As an estate planner and probate lawyer for three decades (I no longer do that work), each additional sibling increases the likelihood of will contests and disputes (even in non-blended families). Families with two full siblings are usually low conflict when the last parent dies. At four full siblings it is 50-50 between high conflict and low conflict. At five or six, there are usually two or three factions among full blooded siblings, at seven or more there are almost always factions. 

Families that have half-siblings and step siblings have much more conflict than families with full siblings, although timing matters a lot. Non-full blood siblings who were pre-teens together living in the same household (or if some were pre-teens and the oldest was a young teen) interact much more like full siblings with each other and also almost never have romantic feelings for each other, unlike those who were never in the same household or started living together as teens or later who are more like roommates with each other and sometimes do have romantic feelings for each other. So sometimes in a blended family, some of the non-full blooded siblings act like full siblings to each other, while others do not.

Post-Script

On balance I think our society as a whole probably loses something of value by having more only children, and by having far fewer middle children, than it did historically, in terms of adult social interactions and in terms of having less variety in personality types when a mix of birth order related personality types is valuable.

Also, while outside my realm of personal experience, it is pretty clear that children raised in polygamous families (usually with many children with each of the sister wives), that at least in Mormon history, those children had less desirable life outcomes than children raised in large monogamous families (with a far small total number of children in the household from their shared father).

Parenting

 

Good parenting is raising children who are a force to be reckoned with.

For those not familiar with the comic, Puck (left) informally adopted Daphne (right) as a toddler when Puck was still in college, in episode 3 on February 15, 1998, and has raised her for entire life in the comic over 28 years of our world time (Daphne now has a little sister, Miranda, who is about the same age as Daphne was when Puck adopted her, who is the child of Puck and her common law, soon to be legal, husband, Colin). This is the last panel of comic 831. The comic is currently on episode 843. It is set, primarily, in a medium sized city in Canada.

Labor Day Musings

* The state of labor in one chart:

The failure of businesses to share productivity increases with their workers starting in the early 1970s is the root cause of a lot of the current political reality in the United States. In my view, the decline of private sector union membership is more a product of declining worker economic power than a cause of this shift, but that's an open question in economics.

* The number of immigrants in the U.S. labor force has fallen by 1.2 million since Trump started his second term. According to the Wall Street Journal: "With zero net immigration, Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok estimates, the U.S. economy would be able to sustainably add only about 24,000 nonfarm jobs a month, compared with an average 155,000 from 2015 through 2024."

Agriculture (overwhelmingly in "red America") in the U.S. is particularly suffering both due to tariffs and due to the immigration crackdown that is cutting into the agricultural labor workforce. Nebraska and Iowa saw their state GDPs fall at an annualized rate of 6.1% in the first quarter of 2025.  Those tariffs were found to be mostly illegal by the U.S. Court of International Trade in a ruling affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a 7-4 ruling. The effect of the ruling is on hold until mid-October pending a petition for certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court which has consistently ruled in favor of Trump despite his weak legal arguments.

The anti-immigrant fervor is driven by two main factors: (1) the economic stagnation of working age men without any college education who native born white men attribute to immigrants, international trade, and civil rights for women and minorities, and (2) the fear of white protestants in places with few immigrants that their culture will cease to be dominant.

* Courts in India are very slow.

[I]n one recent example a Delhi court concluded a property dispute after 66 years. Both the original litigants were dead. Still, the lawyer for one of the warring parties cautioned that the conclusion was in fact not the end, as the ruling would be appealed.

Three years ago, after pondering a dispute for 16 years, the supreme court sent back a 60-year-old land case for fresh adjudication to a lower court, which had already taken over 30 years to give its judgment in 2006.

A 2021 study of Mumbai real estate found that more than a quarter of the projects under planning or construction and 43 per cent of all “built-up spaces” in the city were under some litigation. My apartment block was one of them.

…One of the reasons for this accumulation is human resources. India has around 16 judges per million people, compared to over 150 for the US. In 2016, the issue brought the country’s chief justice, TS Thakur, to tears during a speech as he requested that the government hire more judges to wade through the “avalanche” of backlog.

For what it is worth, there are far fewer judges per capita in the U.S. than in Europe, even though the total number of legally trained professionals in the U.S. and in Europe per capita are similar.

The lack of state capacity in the area of courts means that property and contract rights and other forms of private law are weaker, which is bad for the economy.

* Adults in the U.S. are having sex less often (the decline is at least as great among high school students). It is basically a coincidence, but my children were conceived right around "peak sex" in the recent history of the United states.

* Wildfires are at record high in Europe due to climate change.

* The U.S. housing market is starting to favor smaller single family homes again after a peak in roughly 2014. Single family houses in the U.S. are still, on average, much larger than they were 30 years ago.

* A mere 6.0 magnitude earthquake in Afghanistan, shortly before midnight on August 31, 2025, was enough to cause at least 800 deaths and 2500 injuries.

* "Flukewarm": That feeling when you're reluctant to make a recipe, because the last time you made it, it came out perfectly. But it was a fluke, you're not sure what you did right, and you're worried you won't be able to repeat your past success.

* Last Saturday, I went to a store to buy a blind spot warning system for my car. They weren't available in 2015 when I bought it. But, I couldn't. Tariffs have delays shipments of cars parts like that one by more than a month and have greatly increased the price of those parts.

* As our country devolves into a civil war, ICE agents in unmarked cars wearing masks and not displaying their badges are unlawful combatants, and are thus they are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. Instead, they are terrorists who are not entitled to the protections of legitimate combatants under the laws of war. They also aren't entitled to the peacetime protections and privileges of law enforcement officers.

* Rhode Island has the lowest state murder rate in the United States. Louisiana has the highest (or very nearly so) and has about ten times as many murders per capita.

* The lion's share of the counties in the U.S. with life expectancies lower than North Korea are (1) in the South and majority black or nearly so, (2) include Indian Reservations (or the Alaskan equivalent), or (3) are in Appalachia. The outliers are still in the South.

* Non-U.S. central banks are substituting gold for U.S. Treasury Bonds.

* The U.K. electrical wall plug design is safer than the U.S. design.

* People are dying on overloaded boats trying to emigrate from Gambia (in West Africa) to Europe. "More Than 130 People Are Feared Dead in West Africa Boat Tragedy: Around 150 people boarded a boat in Gambia that was thought to have been headed for Europe. The boat capsized after traveling about 380 miles."

* A judge ordered Alligator Alcatraz in Florida closed on the petition of an Indian tribe with an interest in the land, because an environmental impact statement wasn't done. The debacle cost $250 million. All detainees at the location which was inhuman and defective have been moved to other detention centers in Florida.

* Finland (which is the source of about half of my genetic ancestry) is a genetic outlier in Europe (for reasons that are well understood and closely related to the fact that it is also a linguistic outlier). 23andme was able to correctly pinpoint the place of origin of my Finnish ancestors to a region about the size of a U.S. county. The other half of my ancestry (which I know to some detail due to genealogy) is basically a European mutt that can't be localized from genetics much at all.

Other places with significant Uralic populations, Basque country, historically Celtic areas (despite the putative cultural origin of the Celts in the vicinity of Czechia which is being used as a baseline in the chart above), and places with significant Islamic migration since the 700s CE, also stand out in  this map. Sardinia is the closest modern match to the genetics of Europe prior to the arrival of the Indo-Europeans.

* It doesn't take a history genius to understand why South America, in general, and Argentina, in particular, has so much Italian ancestry (to a significant extent, because a lot of Italian Nazis fled there after World War II).

* The Holocaust has an immense effect:

* New Mexico is, by a variety of measures like education and poverty, much more like red states than blue states. But it has stayed blue because the GOP has historically made its Hispanic and Native American residents feel unwelcome and tried to persecute them. 

Utah is, by a variety of measures like education and poverty, much more like blue states than red states. But, its predominantly Mormon religion's conservative tenets have kept it out of the Democratic party fold.

* The cost of living is about 30% greater in the highest cost of living states in the U.S. than in the lowest cost of living state (Arkansas). Most of the difference is due to real estate prices.

* A plausible observation:

* Louisiana still hasn't recovered from Hurricane Katrina twenty years ago. It permanently reduced the population of the state, and of New Orleans, in particular (predominantly due to migration away from it, not due to the fatalities themselves).

* Almost every country in Western Europe has supplied Ukraine with military equipment. So have quite a few other countries (mostly in what could be called the Western European diaspora).

* Most of North America was once home to Buffalo, although the size of the herds may have been exceptionally large because the Native American populations that hunted them were decimated by European diseases not long before European migrants first documented them.

* Almost all of the land on Earth was connected about 200 million years ago.

* Republicans in Congress have grown less likely to have attended elite universities (while Democrats have grown more likely to have done so), mirroring the shift in college educated people towards the Democratic party.

* Data centers v. office building construction.

* Soil quality in Europe.

* Firefighting employment in Europe.

The U.S. figure is 0.2% (there are about 1.019 million firefighters out of 163.3 million employees, but two-thirds of them, who are not included in the 0.2%, are volunteers). This is similar to the European average.

* The twenty years from 1807 to 1827 did a lot to shape the political map of the Americas.

* Squirrels v. people.

* Women didn't start wearing underwear (i.e. panties and bras) in Europe until the 19th century, for the most part.

* Modern musical notation was invented by a Benedictine monk, Guido of Arezzo in 1025 CE and he also invented the Do-Re-Me system. Recognizable modern musical notation is older than Middle English.

* Billionaires have lower effective tax rates than the upper middle class and even less than for the average person.

We estimate income and taxes for the wealthiest group of US households by matching Forbes 400 data to the individual, business, estate, and gift tax returns of the corresponding group in 2010–2020. In our benchmark estimate, the total effective tax rate—all taxes paid relative to economic income—of the top 0.0002% (approximately the “top 400”) averaged 24% in 2018–2020 compared with 30% for the full population and 45% for top labor income earners. 

This lower total effective tax rate on the wealthiest is substantially driven by low taxable individual income relative to economic income. First, the C-corporations owned by the wealthiest distributed relatively little in dividends, limiting their individual income tax unless they sell their stocks. Second, top-owned passthrough businesses reported negative taxable income on average in spite of positive book income, further limiting their individual income tax. The top-400 effective tax rate fell from 30% in 2010–2017 to 24% in 2018–2020, explained both by a smaller share of business income being taxed and by that income being subject to lower tax rates. 

Estate and gift taxes contributed relatively little to their effective tax rate. Top-400 decedents paid 0.8% of their wealth in estate tax when married and 7% when single. Annual charitable contributions equalled 0.6% of wealth and 11% of economic income in 2018–20.

* Japan has the lowest housing prices in its major metropolitan areas of any comparable cities in the world. It isn't clear to me how much of this is due to lax land use laws arising from handling that function at a regional level rather than locally, and how much of this is due to its low birthrates and modest immigration rates.

Household Rules

Her: What does he want to do?

Me: My list would include putting hot things on the granite countertop in the kitchen, not cleaning the drain catcher and squeegeeing the titles after every shower, closing the curtains in front of a house plant at night and then not opening them when the sun rises, eating meals after seven p.m., leaving a dirty dish in the sink to clean in the morning, leaving liquor out and visible when contractors come to work at the house, doom scrolling at 3 a.m., moving or breathing heavily after getting into bed, eating out when we have sandwich ingredients in the refrigerator, not replacing the soap in the shower the moment it runs out, leaving on a trip without the radio playing, adopt cats, using the induction range without protective parchment paper over the surface, putting a pizza directly on the oven rack without a baking sheet, leaving clothes that I plan to wear again on the bedroom floor, interrupting meditation time for a smooch, leaving the ice maker bar in the freezer in the wrong position, wasting the day by sleeping until noon on a weekend or a holiday, impulse buying a Pikachu stuffed animal that is three feet tall, displaying art with a partially topless figure in the living room, not charging my phone every night, setting the thermostat too low, not immediately replacing a light bulb in a fixture with five of them when the first one goes out, eating popcorn with movie butter spray on it, ignoring the fruits and vegetables in the kitchen when getting a snack, putting a dishes in the dishwasher instead of hand washing them when there are only a few of them, putting enamel chop sticks in the dishwasher, filling the dish washer with dishwashing stuff all the way to the top of the slot for it, buying instant oatmeal instead of old fashioned oat meal, buying non-organic 2% milk, not taking off my shoes to go back and grab something I left on the kitchen table for ten seconds, leaving books stacked high next to my living room chair, spreading papers for work over the couch and leaving them there until the next day, complaining about having a Christmas tree, listening to music too loudly, closing the front door too hard, throwing out the plastic bag liner for the bathroom trash with the trash, ignoring dog hair on the furniture and reg that I don't notice, moving furniture that hasn't had felt pads put on the bottom of the legs, keeping boxes of newspaper clippings in the house, keeping many work related books in the house, bringing home groceries that weren't on the list, leaving the door open while stepping out for thirty seconds to do something, not shutting the blinds in the bedroom completely closed at night, using more than one pillow, letting bare skin touch the couch, sitting on the ottoman, putting sharp knives in the dishwasher, putting nut butter in the refrigerator, using the nice gel pens, using the fabric scissors, leaving small appliances on the counter after you're done using them, showering while the lawn sprinkler is going, setting the lawn sprinkler so it goes on the pavement so it can be done in one zone instead of two, throwing out the bran because it ruins baked goods, eating fruits and vegetables without rinsing them in vinegar, making hot drinks with unfiltered water, eating away from the table, hiding all the swim suits but the string bikinis, leaving the vacuum cleaner in the wrong room, disposing of food scraps with the grinder in the sink, letting bacon grease go down the sink, using the charcoal side of the grill instead of the gas side, using temperature settings higher than medium on the range, cutting cantalope into slices instead of cubes, buying more books without removing old ones from the house, using fresh paper that hasn't been used for anything else in the printer, making grits in the microwave without a cover, letting tweens watch PG-13 or rate R content, using all the coat hooks, leaving more than one pair of shoes out of the shoe storage box at a time, putting heavy things on the top cabinet shelves, using the gold rimmed water glasses if a member of royalty isn't visiting our home, not using dryer balls, not taking my phone in silent or do not disturb or airplane mode after a movie or airplane flight, eating the last edible before buying more, wear t-shirts from college, use an overhead light instead of a lamp, using a decanter as a flower vase, throwing away perfectly good ziplock bags, etc.

Her: It takes a lot to civilize a man!

Slightly modified from a Facebook post and comment thread. 

Why preserve this in a blog post?

Because it is easy to forget the myriad little rules that are part of daily life in a household, not lofty enough for policymakers, and usually summarized in just a few words. But, this is a reminder of how intricate and decision filled everyday life in a household really is and how many little choices and observations that we're often totally oblivious to, except in the moment, exist.

The Idea To Action Pipeline

My education and life training was typical of a lot of people who grew up in upper middle class families and lots of upwardly mobile people who used education and skill training and socialization in the course of securing those things. There are maybe a hundred million people in the United States, a country of about 340 million people, who have been raised or trained to have the kind of mindset that I have.

As younger children, a key focus from my parents (and the parents and teachers of most people like me) was on making good choices, and that's also something that was an important part of what my wife and I, and most of our peers viewed as good parenting.

As I got older, and advanced in my education and socialization all of the way into college, I was raised and taught (formally and informally) to identify problems, to analyze them in evidence and experience informed ways, to be familiar with lots of proven problem solving strategies, to devise appropriate solutions to problem that would work, and to know how to evaluate what is likely to work and test proposed solutions to see if they work as expected (and to revised the solutions if they don't).

Even in law school, the curriculum, while it taught us to nuts and bolts of what the law says, was very oriented towards identifying legal rules and official policies that were good, or were flawed, partially so we could use this knowledge in our adult lives and careers to push for better policies, and partially so that when we encountered flawed rules that we couldn't change we could understand what we were up against, why the rules were a problem, and with this information could devise the best strategies for dealing with them.

We learned to be on the lookout for good ideas that other people had, from other countries and places within our own country, from history, from different cultures, from people with a good track record for innovation, from sources that specialize in identifying good ideas. In the areas of science, and technology and medicine, back before the Internet, we subscribed to Popular Science and Science News. In the area of style and food and architecture when we moved to the West, there was Sunset magazine. These days, for example, I regularly check in on the Boing Boing websites, and read the latest academic scholarship from free sources like the arXiv and bioRxiv and SSRN preprint websites, NBER, the Legal Theory blog, and the various law professors blogs.

It is a way of thinking and conceptual tool kit shared with modest variation, by a large swath of people trained to make up our classes of mangers, professional, and makers. It's an approach used by scientists, engineers, inventors, transactional lawyers, mediators, business executives, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and innovators.

One of the textbooks used in my first college level political science classes, at Miami University of Ohio, was called "Power and Choice". And, the training, upbringing, and inclinations that I developed and that a huge swath of people developed, was focused on the choice side of this formula.

One of the reasons that I blog, and a major theme of my life, and the lives of lots and lots of people, although I probably have the luxury and means to do so more than most people, is to float constructive ideas for how we as a society can make better choices and find better solutions. Sometimes they are proposed government policies or laws. Sometimes they are better way to fund or finance something. Sometimes they are new technologies to could be used in a new way. 

Sometimes they are concrete approaches to concrete problems like better ways to landscape our home in a city in what is almost a high desert, or a better kind of appliance, or coming up with a better way to keep track of what pills I've taken or need to take, or a better way to keep track of what we need to buy at the store and what we already have in a way that we can actually find it, or how to manage household plants, or a more efficient way to pay bills.

Many of these ideas are solutions to problems that somebody else has. How to make better military procurement choices. What tools we could make available for first responders and disaster responses. How to tax publicly held companies and multinational business in a better way. How to deliver better health care results for our society as a whole, while doing so in a more affordable way. How to cut red tape in big bureaucracies.

Collectively, most of us have much less familiarity, less training, and less comfort and familiarity with the power side of the "power and choice" formula, even many of those of us who are truly exceptional and extraordinary at the choice part.

A lot of us are attracted to politics because we care about and have a good skill set for making policy, but are adrift when it comes to securing the power necessary to putting those policies in place. A lot of the scientists who see most clearly what paths to new scientific discoveries would be most fruitful and which are most likely to be dead ends are stymied at how to generate momentum and funding for those ideas in the scientific community. Lots of us are aware of businesses that would be good to invest in, or would be good to short, but don't have the financial wealth or the influence with people who have access to money to do anything about this knowledge. Lots of us are aware of innovative technological solutions that could bring about a lot of constructive change, but don't know where to begin to go about getting those solutions adopted more widely.

People like me, and there are perhaps a hundred million of us in the United States, have lots of good ideas, but feel hopeless or frustrated when it comes to turning these ideas into action.

And, it isn't just that we are stupid or missing the obvious. The idea to action pipeline is hard for most people to locate, is clogged up, and is full of seemingly unnecessary twists and turns that make it less effective. Acquiring the power to make even a seemingly obvious on brainer innovation that is itself minor seems to take absolutely epic amounts of time, money, connections, and effort that seems grossly disproportionate to the swift moment it takes to recognize that an idea is good and should be put into action.

It is no secret that I am no fan of Elon Musk, who is the richest man in the world. And, Mr. Musk is not a particular genius when it comes to coming up with ideas of his own. The technological innovations behind Telsa, SpaceX, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the Hyper loop, and his other projects were all the work of someone else. His ability to identify good ideas is slightly above average, but it isn't particular exceptional. Frederick W. Smith, who founded FedEx, is cut from the same cloth. He had identified one particular, not really profoundly innovative idea that could be implemented with technology that wasn't cutting edge but was still pretty new at the time he came up with it.

But, I have to grudgingly acknowledge that what Musk and Smith both excelled at (and may even continue to excel at) is securing the resources and momentum necessary to turn moderately good, although fairly obvious ideas that no one had implemented (as is so often the case) into action that allowed the ideas that were mostly children of other people to actually come into wide use.

In the case of Musk, being an heir to an emerald mine fortune helped a lot. Smith also grew up as the son of a wealthy, moderately successful business owner, attended the top local private schools, and went to Yale in some of the last years when doing so was more about money and connections than academic merit.

But turning ideas into action can be a lot more challenging for the rest of us, partially because we don't have nearly as much training in how to do this as we do in how to come up with good ideas (i.e. because we are much better at making good choices than exercising power), and in part, because the idea to action pipeline at the moment is mediocre and has deteriorated over time is a society that is starting to stagnate (something that Economist Tyler Cohen wrote a book about).

This is true even for people like me who have a solid nuts and bolts understanding of things like how capital is raised for businesses in the modern U.S. economy, how the political process works, and the inner workings of academia, while spending decades working side by side by quite successful political figures and business people and academics (albeit not necessarily the peak "A-list" individuals in their respective fields).

Yes, it is possible to innovate and turn good ideas into action, even if, in my humble opinion it is too hard to do so. And, it is true that innovation shouldn't be too easy or free of gatekeepers. There are also a lot of really bad ideas out there that, when implemented, do immense harm. The more easily ideas get turned into action, the more important it is that the ideas that receive the thumbs up are good ones.

For examples in the 20th century of bad ideas being adopted too quickly and causing immense harm, ask the people of the early Soviet Union, Maoist China, revolutionary Cambodia, or North Korea. Ask the members of cults like the one organized by Jim Jones. 

Ask the people who thought it was a great idea to cover beautiful hardwood floors with cheap vinyl who convinced tens of millions of American homeowners to do so. Further back, ask the people who thought that putting the ill-drafted Second Amendment into the United States constitution was a good idea.

More recently, look at the policy initiative of RFK, Jr., or the actions taken by Elon Musk's DOGE, or the "Liberation Day" tariffs in the second Trump Administration.

On the other hand, lots of opposition to new ideas is mindlessly stubborn, ignorant, corrupt, or mendacious.

Sitting in my living room under the ceiling fan on a hot, dry summer day in August, after returning to work at home after a morning in my office doing a lot of work that actually generates money, I don't have a solution for how to improve the idea to action pipeline. But, surely, even identifying this as a crucial and pervasive problem in our society is progress in and of itself and can lay a foundation for future progress.

TFR And Coupling Rates

The total fertility rate (TFR) is a point in time estimate of the number of children that the average woman has over a lifetime, compiled from a population weighted average of the number of children born to women of each age.

The "coupling rate" is the percentage of adults who are married to, or cohabit out of marriage with, a partner.

Note that these are trend line figures and not absolute numbers with 2010 set at 100.

The strong implication of this data is that in the last thirty years, in developing and developed countries, declining rates of child bearing are mostly a product of declining rates of couples living together (whether or not they are married), rather than being mostly due to couples having children at a much lower rate due to wider use of contraception (which probably is the biggest factor in undeveloped countries).

The Proportion of Two Parent Families Has Been Rising Since 2005

According to this source replying on U.S. census data, the percentage of children living with two parents (71.1%), as of 2023 (the most recent year for which final figures are available), is the highest it’s been since 1991 (34 year ago).

This is unsurprising given record low teen pregnancy levels.

At the low point, in 2005, this percentage was 67.3%. In 1970, it was 85.2%. It was 87.7% in 1960.

More Random Thoughts

* What if the Younger Dryas extra-terrestrial impact didn't happen? 

Pleistocene megafauna might have survived. The Clovis culture would have lasted longer. Native American cultures in North America might have been more patriarchal. Göbekli Tepe might not have been built at all, or might have been very different. The Neolithic Revolution might have arrived 4,000 years earlier. The genetics of European hunter-gatherers might have been more diverse.

* There is more than one scenario by which brain evolution could be next level. 

One is exemplified by the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica who have essentially the three main layers of the human brain plus a new one on top of that - dolphins come close to that. Another is exemplified by octopi who have a completely different brain structure with is decentralized with many sub-brains throughout their bodies. Yet another would be the cyborg approach (perhaps exemplified by Ghost in the Machine) where brains would be part human and part computer (perhaps the most likely as it has already been done at a very limited level).

* “Eternity is two people and a ham." - Irma Rombauer in The Joy of Cooking. But the price is right. You can get so much red meat for so little money when there are holiday ham sales.

* I visited the Colorado History Museum today and saw, among other things, the 90s exhibit. It is actually fairly stunning how little fashion, music, and movies have changed in the last 35 years, even though technology has changed dramatically. There was a much smaller generation gap between me and my children, culturally, than there was between me and my parents (or my wife and her parents).

* I still don't really understand why the dust bowl of the 1930s happened, or what the risk of it recurring is.

* My son is in Mexico City with his (serious, long term) girlfriend. He is almost exactly the same age that I was when I went there on my honeymoon.

* The U.S. Navy has been quietly developing unmanned surface and undersea ships that are just about ready for "prime time" as important components of our overall naval fleet. Here are some recent examples:

For example, the Australian Eureka unmanned or minimally manned ship has a 1,150 mile range, a 44 ton payload, can travel at 50 knots (60 mph a.k.a. 100 km/hr), and can launch Tomahawk cruise missiles and anti-ship Naval Strike Missiles (NSM). But is fairly small at 36 meters in length.

The Lionfish UUV (i.e. drone submarine) is about to enter service.

Lionfish is designed to address critical undersea warfare needs, including mine countermeasures, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), anti-submarine warfare, and electronic warfare.

The REMUS UUV family delivers critical advantages across modern naval operations and the autonomous systems have been proven to operate independently or in conjunction with crewed platforms — such as Virginia-class nuclear submarines — to extend mission range, reduce detection risk, and limit personnel exposure.

The U.S. Navy has a 100 foot long, 100 ton, unmanned surface vessel (USV) in the works (confusingly the same article seems to describe it as a 180 foot, 240 ton USV). It would have a range of thousands of miles.

The vessel is envisaged to be multi-role, capable of transporting logistics payloads, conducting ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) missions, or supporting naval munitions delivery without human oversight.

* My wife is currently watching White Lotus. One of the striking parts of the show is how aptly it captures the ways that men and women completely misunderstand each other because they have very different communications styles. To oversimplify, men are much more direct. Men rely far less on implied meanings and expecting people to "take a hint" than women. Women, in turn, overthink what men say, trying to look for hidden meanings in what men say that aren't there. Women, meanwhile, underestimate how much men can be hurt when they take what women say literally, when what women really mean is different, and is supposed to be implied from context. It also puts the lie to the notion that women are better communicators. Both are men and women are bad at communicating with members of the opposite sex. This mirrors differences in national communications styles. Germans, for example, are much more direct than Americans, while the Japanese, for example, have a much more indirect communication systle.

The Theoretical Foundations Of Republican Politics

People who understand the theoretical foundation of Republican policy positions tend to see it as too obvious (and obviously flawed) to mention. But this post is devoted to setting forth the core points of that theoretical foundation in the hope that a better understanding of it can point us towards better political tactics.

1. The Zero Sum Theory Of Employment Economics

Stylized Consensus Facts

The left and the right agree that the economic well-being of U.S. born white men without college educations relative to other workers in the U.S. economy has declined greatly, in relative terms, since at least 1970. They have captured almost none of the benefit of U.S. economic growth in the last 55 years, while women, non-white men, and college educated men, have all seen significant economic gains, relative to white men without college educations, over the last 55 years.

It is also widely agreed that the percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign born was at an all time low in 1970 and is now at or near an all time high, 55 years later. It is widely agreed there are a signifiant share of people in America (about 10 million in round numbers) who are not U.S. citizens and do not have legal immigration status, and that the undocumented immigrants who are in the labor force are predominantly less educated, less skilled workers. A significant number of U.S. born citizens, moreover, are children of undocumented immigrants.

And, it is widely agreed that a large share of good consumed in the United States are produced outside the United States with non-U.S. labor and imported to the U.S. There is also a significant off shored employees who provide services to people in the U.S., most notably, people who answer customer service telephone numbers for big U.S. businesses. The share of goods and services consumed in the U.S. that is produced with non-U.S. labor is much lower now than it was in the time period from roughly 1945 to 1970.

Zero Sum Thinking

Where Republicans (and right wing political movements generally) and Democrats (and centrists and left wing political movements generally) differ, is that the right believes that the labor market is well approximated by a zero sum model, in which the number of jobs in the economy is largely fixed.

If the labor market is a zero sum game, then all growth in non-white employee employment and pay comes at the expense of white employee employment and pay. Likewise, this theory implies that every improvement in female employment and pay comes at the expense of male employment and pay, that every job filled by someone who is not a U.S. citizen comes at the expense of a job that would otherwise be filled by a U.S. citizen, and that every off shored job that provides goods or services to the U.S. economy comes at the expense of a U.S. person's job.

In this theory, the Civil Rights movement, disparaged as "DEI", caused women and minorities to get jobs that white men would have gotten without government intervention, which they see as discrimination against white men. Therefore, it is imperative to right the horrible wrong that the Civil Rights movement has done to white men, who they feel that the pre-Civil Rights law economy demonstrated were actually more qualified than women and minorities.

In this theory, immigration laws that allow more immigration and illegal immigration have taken many millions of jobs away from native born Americans, as have the children of illegal immigrants whom they do not see as legitimate U.S. citizens since their citizenship was made possible by the illegal conduct of illegal immigrants. And, since most of these jobs are less skilled, this has come at the expense of non-college educated native born Americans. So, mass deportation of immigrants (legal and illegal), discouraging new immigration, and ending birthright citizenship all increase the supply of jobs available to native born Americans, especially those without college educations.

In this theory, free trade has made it economically feasible to off shore work that contributed to the U.S. economy and all of the off shored jobs would have otherwise filled by people in the U.S., so large tariffs are desirable in order to force firms to replace off shore workers with U.S. workers. And, again, off shored jobs tend to be disproportionately jobs that don't require college educations.

2. Moral collapse theory, and the belief that homosexuality and transgender identities are perverse and immoral choices.

Stylized Consensus Facts

Relative to the 1945-1970 time period, divorce rates have soared, marriage rates have fallen, couples are getting married later, a larger share of children are born out of wedlock, more children are being raised in single parent families, and people are having fewer children. Divorces are disproportionately sought by women. These trends have been particular stark for non-college educated men who are also experiencing economic stagnation.  This economic stagnation has led to economic pressures which, together with inferior social skills due to being less smart and educated, makes it more likely that they will be accused of child neglect and/or child abuse.

Non-college educated men, who have seen lower relative incomes and growing unemployment rates, also tend to end up having weaker relationships with their children when they are born out of wedlock or following a divorce, to have greater difficulty and willingness to pay child support and/or alimony, and to increasingly see marital assets reliably split 50-50 even though those marital assets were purchased disproportionately from their incomes.

The time period since 1970 has also been marked by the widespread increased availability of birth control pills and IUDs, by the legalization of abortion, by the rise of gay rights, and by a stark decline in the percentage of people in the U.S. who identify as Christian (in favor of both "nones" and non-Christian religions) as well as the percentage of people who attend church and otherwise actually make Christianity a part of their lives. It has also been accompanied by the near universal availability of unilateral "no fault" divorce, and laws that have given women with lower earnings more reliably larger child support and alimony awards, larger property division awards, and a greater ability to enforce those court orders. And, furthermore, women's rights outside the workforce have improved, making it easier for women to borrow money independently and receive higher education in fields previously reserved almost entirely for men like law and being medical doctors.

This is also a time period in which "war on poverty" and "Great Society" social programs have provided economic support to poor families, and especially, poor single mothers, first mostly black mothers, but increasingly non-college educated white mothers.

And, in the later part of this time period, access over the Internet to free hard core pornography of all kinds has become ubiquitous, when the First Amendment establishment clause has been enforced to make public schools and government more secular (such as removing prayer and the Ten Commandments from schools), when public schools have been more comfortable teaching scientific and historical discoveries at odds with Christian doctrine, and when school and public libraries have been more willing to shelve books that are arguably obscene or contrary to more restrictive conservative Christian belief systems.

Moral collapse theory

The right attributes most of these changes to moral collapse, and to feminism motivated changes in the law that have helped facilitate this moral collapse by undermining traditional values.

In this view, the law is making it too easy for women to have children out of wedlock, and making it too easy for women to shirk their marital obligations to their husbands by divorcing them and getting unfair benefits for doing so in female biased divorce settlements, and by restricting the number of children they have without the consent of their husbands or lovers. They also see abortion as murder. They see laws against marital rape as undermining the basic concept of marriage where a wife is obligated to have sex with her husband who is the head of the family and should be the ultimately decision maker on all questions in the marriage, in which wives should obey their husbands.

They feel that a transgender identity is contrary to common sense, isn't real, is a voluntary choice, and actually reflects a combination of perversion motivated fraud, and liberal brain washing. They feel that homosexuality is a voluntary choice that is sinful and perverse, is contrary to nature and God, and is disgusting. They see trend of the law treating homosexuality and transgender identity as legitimate as a symptom of the overall moral collapse in society that feminism has likewise facilitated.

In this worldview, gay rights, transgender rights, legalized abortion, birth control without a husband's permission, no fault divorce, prohibitions on marital rape, interpretations of the law that criminalize sexual assertiveness in pre-marital relationships, and greater independent economic rights of women, the decline of Christianity in general and in public institutions, and state intervention in the father-child relationship for abuse and neglect or to recognize an adolescent's or wife's autonomy, are all deviations from traditional values that are symptoms of a larger moral collapse in society.

This moral collapse is in this view the cause of these changes and needs to be addressed by returning society to a previously more implicit, Christian foundation.

In this view, the remedy to the fact that non-college educated men are having increasing difficulty getting married, staying married, keeping their kids and maintaining a relationship with them, and not being accused of rape, is to insist on making society more overtly Christian and to reinstate laws based upon a pre-1960s "traditional values" across the board.

3. Government is harmful theory.

Stylized Consensus Facts

Total nominal government spending has increased steadily. The scope and scale of the federal government, in particular, increased dramatically, first after the U.S. Civil War, modestly again during the Progressive era in the late 19th century and early 20th century, dramatically again during the Great Depression and World War II, and then significantly but less dramatically in the post-World War II to 1970s era. The scope and scale of the federal government far exceeds what was initially contemplated by the Founders and what the practical reality was for the first 80 years or so of the United States.

Government is harmful theory.

A third major pillar of right wing political theory is that government spending generates no value and is inherently less efficient and economically valuable than private sector spending, and that each government employee on average, has a net negative economic impact. And, taxes automatically reduce economic output.

In this view, the correct size of government is always to have less government spending and fewer government employees, with less taxation. So, indiscriminate tax cuts, spending cuts, and layoffs of government employees, especially at the federal level, is a good thing.

4. Education is overrated.

Stylized Consensus Facts

Educational attainment has steadily increased since World War II, with more people graduating from high school, more people attending college, more people graduating from college, and more people earning graduate and professional degrees. At first this was due to the GI Bill (which benefited veterans which a very large share of adult men young enough to consider college were after WWII, Korea, and Vietnam), and due to the creation of cheap state public universities made possible by high levels of economic prosperity at the time. Starting in the 1970s, women and minorities began to receive higher education at greatly increased levels, with women achieving something close to parity sometime in the early 1990s and continuing to have greater educational attainment than men since then.

Many jobs that previously did not require a certain level of formal educational attainment now do, either formally, or as a matter of practical reality. Almost all of the benefits of economic growth since 1970 in the U.S. economy has been captured by college educated people. College educated people have faced less competition from immigrants and off shoring than non-college educated people. Government has devoted far more resources to supporting higher education than vocational education such as apprenticeships in skilled trades.

Education is overrated.

The right sees the educational establishment from kindergarten through higher education as equally as much an institution for spreading left wing ideologies and propaganda, and undermining religion and traditional values, as it is an institution for actually providing value added knowledge. They see most educational requirements for work as artificial cultural and class driven barriers to entry rather than as being genuinely necessary to do the job. They believe that teachers and academics immorally twist what they teach to their own political agendas and self-interest that have little to do with truth and more to do with an agenda to undermine traditional values and to facilitate moral collapse. They will grudgingly acknowledge that sometimes education can be necessary (especially in STEM and in basic literacy), but that even there instruction is improperly undermining traditional values and religious beliefs based upon alleged academic knowledge that they do not trust. They see most teachers and professors as less competent and valuable than people who more directly produce economic value in our economy.

They see this as being motivated, especially, by a collective class effort of the upper middle class of college educated people to appropriate economic gains from the working class and middle class of non-college educated people and people with some college but not four year or greater degrees.

Conclusion

While there are other, less central, foundations of Republican politics, such as economic beliefs about where prices come from, energy policy, homelessness, crime, controlled substances, prostitution, and the political process, these four core theoretical foundations (all of which could be facially plausible, but don't bear out to be true with closer examination) which also impact some of these issues, at least in part, go a long way towards explaining right wing political stances.