Inductivist

In response to my claim that married people are, on average, wealthier than people in other marital statuses, a commenter on Twitter suggested that this kind of finding ignores the loss of wealth due to divorce, so it is not worth it to get married. The implication is that people who never marry should be wealthier than divorced people. Of course, we would need to adjust for age since wealth tends to grow as one gets older. 

I did this using General Social Survey (GSS) data. Respondents were asked their wealth on a 15 category scale that went from less than $5,000 to more than $15 million. This first model is for men (n = 1,689):

Divorced people are the reference category: all other marital statuses are compared with them.  We can see that never-married men do not more have more wealth than divorced men. The sign indicates that the divorced have more wealth, but the relationship is not statistically significant. The only group that is significantly wealthier than divorced men is the married group. 

And for women (n = 1,769)?

Never-married women do not differ significantly from divorced women in wealth. Widowed and separated women are poorer than divorced women. Married women are the only group that are significantly wealthier. 

Bottom line: marriage is a good place to be. 

I haven't annoyed my irreligious friends in a while, and the only person who reads this blog that I don't want to be annoyed occasionally is me.

A common type of contemporary thinking goes like this: The more slowly, deliberately, and freely people decide to get married, the happier their marriage will be. Following this line, highly religious people should have the most miserable marriages because they marry younger. They might feel more pressure from family to get married and might want to avoid the temptations experienced all too often as singles.

The General Social Survey asked respondents how often they attend religious services and how happy their marriages are (if they are married).  The sample size is 11,543:


















The pattern is clear:  satisfaction with one's marriage rises with church attendance, especially among more frequent churchgoers.

In recent years, I've been shifting away some from the conservative sociologist's view that traditional institutions (e.g., church, marriage) improve people's lives toward the naturist view that people with certain genetically-influenced traits (i.e., agreeableness, conscientiousness) select themselves into traditional institutions. There could be some truth to both views.

Marriage and religion are universal practices, and as NN Taleb instructs us, institutions that have been around forever are probably doing something for us whether we understand it fully or not.

Whether you are a social conservative or a eugenicist (let me know if there is a less loaded term), we have experienced an unmitigated disaster in the 2010s.  Both camps want healthy married parents having lots of healthy kids that are raised in a safe home.  Here are a series of graphs to document trends away from this:
















The percent married has dropped from 68% in the 1970s to 44% in the 2010s. And look at the trend in never-marrieds: the rate doubled over the past five decades from 14 to 28%.
















The trend is sharper if we only look at young people (ages 18-34). Among this group, the percent married has plummeted from 61% to 30% while the percent never-marrieds jumped from only 30% to 64%. In a word, early marriage is collapsing.
















Accompanying the decline in the institution of marriage is fertility among intelligent women. This graph shows the number of kids for women ages 40-59 with IQs of 118 or higher.

We see a collapse in the number of these women having four children, a strong increase in the percentage having two kids, and most disturbingly, a doubling of childless women--from 15 to 31%.
















A current priority of elites is to get women as educated as possible so they can have the type of careers that give them maximum autonomy.

The social conservative and the eugenicist, by contrast, know that prioritizing female education kills fertility among intelligent women and renders a society incapable of replacing itself with talented people. Maybe there is no necessary connection between education and fertility, but under current conditions, the link is very strong.

The above graph shows the tremendous growth in four-year and advanced degrees among American women. The number of intelligent women like my mom who finished high school, got married, and had four healthy children has become a rarity.
















The success of the gay marriage movement might be the most visible family-related loss that we social conservatives experienced in the past decade. The graph above shows the complete reversal of attitudes among young people (ages 18-34) concerning gay sex. (The General Social Survey doesn't have a question about gay marriage that spans the decades.)

The popularity of same-sex marriage is an important indication that Americans are replacing the belief that an important life purpose is to have a large biological family with the belief that the purpose of life is self-fulfillment and that being married or having one or two kids (biological or not) might work toward fulfillment for some people.

I suspect over the long-term that reproductively-oriented people tend to inherit the earth. Muslims and Africans might eventually displace Western Europeans. More virile people might eventually displace sterile Americans as well.

Evolutionary theory claims that men value physically attractive partners while women desire partners with high status. Normally, we think of status in terms of income, but we can divide men in terms of their sexual success with women. Physical attractiveness is correlated with youth, so I calculated the age difference for married couples. The following is the average number of years that the husband is older than the wife (General Social Survey, sample size = 338):

Mean number of years that the husband is older than the wife by husband's income

Low-income      2.93
Middle-income  2.23
High-income     1.66

This is the opposite of what we predicted: the age gap is smallest for the high-income. Evidently, wealthy men and their wives are more egalitarian, while poor couples are more traditional.

And by number of sex partners since age 18?

Mean number of years that the husband is older than the wife by sex partners since 18

0-3       1.81
4-6       2.86
7-9       2.08
10-19   2.48
20+      4.54

The mean bounces around for the lower numbers, but the men with 20 or more sexual partners have the youngest wives by far.

Sexually successful men seem to be trading their appeal for more youthful wives, but this does not seem to be the case for men with lots of money.

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller wrote a piece for Quillette that sees polyamory becoming a mainstream part of modern society.

Assuming that he is right that openness to polyamory is growing, I suspect this is part of a larger trend toward greater cultural libertarianism: pursue your desires as long as you don't aggress against others. It's another step in the move away from institutions and roles and toward contracts. It's the view that there there is no proper way but your way (as long as you don't harm anyone).

I'm surprised that Miller doesn't see this trend as getting close to as a society that is purely a reflection of biology.  Many traditional institutions seem to be designed to check human nature. "I want all attractive women." "Sorry, you get one." "My old wife isn't sexy anymore. I want to trade in her in for a younger model." "Sorry, you get one, for good."

What does a cultural libertarian society look like?  What does nature look like? Miller should know. Women are picky and want a high-status partner who reliably gives his abundant resources to her. Those men are in short supply. Men want many partners but so do other men, and they find themselves in a competitive situation with limited resources. High mate value men tend to win by getting the most attractive women, and getting the most women. Low mate value men tend to get a partner by devoting resources only to her, but some of these men get no one.

Isn't this what we'll get if polyamory grows? There will be no institutional constraints on alphas. They will focus on being players, and many women will respond to their attention. Men of low mate value will have a harder time winning over a partner, and their offer of monogamy will be worth less in a society that does not value it. Like the alphas, they will long more strongly for multiple partners since there are no dominant institutions telling them monogamy is the right way, but many of them will get no women, forget about many. A large population of young men with no access to partners is not good for the stability of society.

Evolutionary biology teaches that humans tend to follow one of two strategies: high mating effort or high parenting effort. One tends to happen at the expense of the other. Under polyamory, interest will be shifted toward pursuing mates. Parental effort will suffer. That means fewer children--as if we don't already have a problem replacing ourselves--and the care given to children will be of lower quality.

It looks like such a system would select in evolutionary terms for dominant and slick men rather than solid, steady men. Society benefits from more steady men and fewer con artists.

More promiscuity leads to more jealousy which is a major cause of homicide. The US already has the highest rate of homicide among wealthy countries.

From what I can see, we need more monogamy, not less.

UPDATE: This pro-polyamory position taken by Miller seems to be another case of privileged people advocating lifestyles that can work for them but that wreak havoc on vulnerable populations. I suspect that people like Hugh Hefner bear some responsibility for present-day Black America.

In the last post, General Social Survey data indicated that researcher Paul Dolan was wrong in claiming that single, childless women are happier than married women with kids.  In the old days, I would have focused, at least some, on the Durkheimian idea that social roles shape characteristics like one's level of happiness.  I was trained as a sociologist, and it has been my instinct to see social forces as important.

Years of study have convinced me that it is time to focus more on biological forces. The correlation between marriage and well-being need not be causal: people who are genetically happy might simply select themselves into marriage.  In fact, the correlations between marriage and a host of positives--greater financial success, mental and physical health, lower mortality, less risky behavior, less crime, and longer longevity--might be due to common genes which cause the correlations.

A study by Johnson et al. (2004) supports this idea.  Analyzing data on a sample of over 7,000 adults that included more than 2,500 twin pairs, they found that certain heritable traits predict marriage, and that much of the link between being married and being happy is due to genes. 

Specifically, they found the following traits for married versus single women: married women are more affectionate, nervous, careful, and traditional, and they feel like they are treated fairly by others. On the flip side, single women are less sociable, more risk-taking; they're calmer, more modern, and they think they are treated unjustly by others.

The profile of married men versus single men is very different: married men are cheerful, active, persistent, decisive, persuasive, aggressive, and traditional. They are less prone to fantasy, and they think that people treat them fairly.  Single men tend to be the opposite: They are sullen, indecisive, undisciplined, passive, modern, prone to fantasy, and they feel they are treated unfairly. 

All of these traits are strongly influenced by genes. According to the study, the heritability of being married is about .7, meaning that 70% of whether or not people are married is due to variation in genes.

So it looks like married people, especially men, tend to be happier because of their personalities. Affectionate, sociable women seek out marriage, and so do cheerful men who have the traits that lead to career success.  Married women seem drawn to comfort, security, and affection.  Men, in general, appear to be drawn to marriage, and the success-bound ones achieve it.

Single men and women are more modern, so they probably see marriage as less desirable, less expected, and both tend to be disagreeable. Single men might be less happy because they are less successful, and single women are more alienated, which is associated with sadness and mental health issues.  In addition, single women are risk-takers, and seem less drawn to the security and comfort of a permanent union.   

A piece in the Guardian reported that women are happiest if they stay single and childless, according to research done by London School of Economics professor Paul Dolan.

Dolan is wrong. The graph below displays 2000-2018 data from the General Social Survey (sample size = 12,254).  The bars indicates mean happiness (1 = not too happy, 2, = pretty happy, 3 = very happy).

 















Childless, never-married women are less happy than married women at all nine levels of family size.  A married women with eight or more kids is happier than a single, childless woman.  The difference between between the latter and married women as a whole is close to half a standard deviation, a good-sized gap.

Dolan claims married women only say they are happy when they are interviewed with their husband in the room.  I compared women who were interviewed in person with those who completed a self-adminstered questionnaire.  The results were the same for both groups. 

I wondered which factor most strongly predicts men having sex frequently: youth, money, looks, or being married?  Here are the statistical results (GSS data, sample size = 685 men, standardized OLS coefficients, all effects stat. sig.):

Factors predicting frequent sex

Youth  .32
Income  .14
Good looks  .09
Being married  .16  

Being young is by far the most important factor.  Older guys don't have sex nearly as much.  Next in importance is being married.  I imagine many men think you get more sex when you're unattached.  You might get more variety, but not more sex.  A big paycheck comes in third, but good looks is least important for men.

So if you like lots of sex, don't get old.

The last post showed that men with a minimum of one sexual partner in the past year are happier than men with nobody.  But does a man gain more happiness as the partners increase beyond one? Here's a graph showing mean happiness by partner number:

According to evolutionary theory, there is a tradeoff between mating effort and parental effort. If you put more time and energy into pursuing sexual partners, this is less time and energy to devote to raising children. High mating effort or high parental effort are seen as alternative "strategies."

So, are men with lots of sex partners less likely to be married -- a measure of parental effort? Or is it generally the case that men with many partners follow a combined strategy of marriage plus lots of women? And on the low side, does a man with undesirable traits have few partners and fail to convince a woman to marry him?

The General Social Survey asked men how many sex partners they have had since 18, and they asked about current marital status. Let's focus on men in their 30s. Here are the mean number of partners (I exclude men who say more than 100 because these outliers throw off the mean) by marital status:

Mean number of sex partners since 18 (N = 2,827)

Never Married  14.2
Married  9.0
Widowed  6.6
Separated  14.8
Divorced  17.1

Widowed and married men have had the fewest partners, while never-marrieds and separated/divorced have had the most. Put very roughly, the anti-marriage group has had double the partners compared to the pro-marriage group.

I suppose you could argue that marital status is driving the number of sex partners rather than reverse -- the idea being that marriage reduces promiscuity -- but the average never-married has been with as many women as the typical separated guy. It looks to me like men who are good at getting partners avoid marriage or are weakly attached to it. Many of them do get married, but it's less likely to last. There does seem to be some tradeoff going on here.
 

This is fascinating. It is the story of a devout gay Mormon therapist who has been happily married to a lovely (and understanding) woman for 10 years. He told her he was gay on a date when he was 16. Their sex is intimate, not a sexual turn-on for him, and they have three beautiful daughters. The girls, in turn, have what is their birthright--a mother and a father.

New from the Journal of Research in Personality:

Both psychoanalytic views of attachment and evolutionary theories of imprinting suggest that mates may be preferentially chosen to resemble one’s parents. Using data from a large Dutch study of twins and their families, we tested these hypotheses with regard to personality traits from the Five-Factor Model. Little evidence of parent/spouse similarity was found, although women did tend to select a husband who resembled their parents with regard to Openness to Experience. This effect may be due to the influence of Openness on their social worlds, rather than to their experiences in early childhood.

In a chapter of the Meaning of Marriage, Roger Scruton claims that the move away from marriage reduces fertility below replacement level. Using GSS data since 2000, I calculated the mean number of offspring for white women ages 40-59 by marital status. If Scruton is right, married women will have the most kids, never-married will have the least, and separated/divorced women should be in the middle. Let's look at less and more educated women separately:


Mean number of offspring

Women with less than four-year degree (sample size = 1,759)
Married 2.23
Separated/Divorced 2.14
Never-Married .46*

Women with four-year degree or more (sample size = 866)
Married 1.88
Separated/Divorced 1.63
Never-Married .15*

*significantly lower than corresponding married or separated/divorced groups


Never-married women have fewer kids than married or separated/divorced women whether they are more or less educated. Educated single women have hardly any children at all. A society made up of these type of women would pretty much disappear in a historically short period of time. Next, I'll look at black women.

These two Pew graphs show how young women are now more ambitious than men. Sixty-six percent of females ages 18 to 34 say career success is "one of the most important things" or very important" in their lives. The corresponding figure for young men (seen below) is only 59 percent.


I expect this new gap will further weaken the institution of marriage. I'm not sure if the Girl Power crowd is aware of this consequence. Radical feminists, of course, are cheerleading the decline. If a man does not earn more than a woman, he is less attractive as a partner. Most women want a husband, but they are less likely to enter marriage and are quicker to exit it if the man offers fewer positives. Marriage is still comparatively strong among high status people, but economic incentives matter.

Blacks seem to do a little better in more conservative regions.

Using GSS data for the nine U.S. regions, I calculated the Pearson correlations between: 1) the percent of black men who are married, 2) the mean level of church attendance (for all races), and 3) the mean level of political conservatism (for all races).

All correlations are positive and very strong: percent married/church attendance, .84; and percent married/political conservatism, .66. (While we're at it, the correlation between attendance and conservatism across the nine regions is .89. Religiosity and conservatism are, empirically, practically the same thing.)

Prominent law professor Jonathan Turley makes the case for legalized polygamous marriage. 50,000 polygamists are waiting for their turn. They're living in the shadows, folks. Let's regularize their status so they can spread even more! It's the era of "whatever consenting adults want to do." J.S. Mill, the new God! Happy day.

In this new study from American sociology's flagship journal American Sociological Review, self-assessment of overall health of women at age 40 is significantly higher if they had no children out of wedlock. Single mothers experience higher levels of stress, psychological distress, and social isolation. According to the authors, Hispanic women escape the negative effects because their cohabiting more closely resembles marriage, and they have closer kinship networks. Overall, cohabiting or getting married after the nonmarital birth does not mitigate the negative effects. Only an enduring marriage to the biological father improves health. (They adjust for selection effects.)

By the way, it puts a smile on my face to see IQ as a control: not surprisingly, it predicts better overall health.

A reader asked if I could post the graph for marriage trends for women in their 20s. You can see that the percent married has dropped dramatically over the past 40 years. The norm was reversed in a historically short period of time. The rate is higher than for men of the same age, but women experienced a sharp drop in just the last two years: The percent married fell from 26.0 percent in 2008 to 22.5 percent in 2010.

This graph shows the decline in marriage among men in their 20s. Fifty-nine percent in 1972 were married. That has plunged all the way to 17 percent in 2010. The drop between the two most recent surveys--2008 and 2010--was 2 points.

Fifty-two percent of men in their twenties who are married attend church more than once a month. In the past year, my religious 21 and 22 year old nephews (the latter is on his way to med school) got married to great girls of the same ages. God bless 'em.

UPDATE: Audacious Epigone has reminded me that there are bloggers who doubt the validity of GSS data. Why haven't I seen them expressing their doubts about the data in the comment sections of this post?

Roissy has claimed that husbands who do more chores at home have sex less often because it is a turn-off to their wives.

The GSS asked respondents how often they have sex, and how many hours of houeswork they do in a typical week. Sex frequency is influenced a great deal by age, so I include it as a control:

Standardized OLS regression coefficients (sample size = 218, married men)

Hours of housework -.05
Age -.45*

*statistically significant

While age exerts a powerful effect on frequency of sexual intercourse, housework is unrelated. (It might have a small negative effect if the sample size were larger).

Wives are less likely to want sex if they are tired or if they are in a bad mood. They are more likely to be in a bad mood if they feel that their husband is not pulling his load. (I'm skeptical of the view that what a woman finds attractive in her man is his exploitation of her). The chance of her wanting sex will be higher if she gets manly vibes from her husband. So the best plan for a husband is to show his wife that he is doing his fair share, but to focus on manly types of work. That means work that is physical or technical. Much of it will be outside. If you don't know how to fix stuff, like a car--you're smart--learn. Avoid any type of work, except for barbecuing, that requires an apron.

The goal for a good marriage is to be traditional but to be just. In Bruce Charlton's words, be a patriarch.