Feel like you've identified Goodhart's law in a domain it's usually not talked about. If a policymaker just thought lowering divorce rates is what they ought to do, they could do this in a couple of ways:
1. Make it harder for people to get divorced. If the barrier is already high then doing so would either have no impact or keep people in awful marriages. If the barrier to divorce were low, this might actually work but we know that's generally speaking, untrue.
2. Improve the mapping process - This would actually make sure people enter into higher quality marriages on average.
Notice 1 is infinitely easier and more conducive to central planning than 2. If i'm policymaker, i'm so much more likely to add a bureacuucratic burden to the divorce process than try to build and open source an AI driven dating platform.
I think we can safely say that it's more likely than not that social engineering here will produce worse outcomes in expectation.
Yes, exactly, I wish I'd noticed I was talking about Goodhart's law, haha. And I think your points are also true when we use shame/praise to enforce more or less marriage - easier to use shame to increase the costs of divorce and lower the divorce rate than to do the more difficult work of helping people have better relationships.
I agree that whether a couple wants a divorce is probably a pretty good indicator that they should get a divorce (under a utilitarian criterion) - but I'm less convinced of how perfect an indicator it will be.
Whilst status quo bias keeps people in marriages, grass is greener sentiments can conceivably have people jumping ship prematurely. And there is reason that people may have a grass is greener attitude, i.e., be overly optimistic of the situation outside of marriage - namely that the last time people were in the dating pool, they were younger.
Further, liberal cultural attitudes to divorce are likely to give people excessively optimistic ideas of their prospects out of their marriage.
Lastly, although people greatly care for their children, they tend not to be perfect altruists to them - so there is still a problem of externalities here. Some divorces will be for the best for the children - which conservatives often forget. And it probably isn't just abusive relationships where divorce is better for the children - I can't imagine growing up in a non-abusive but incredibly acrimonous home is in the welfare-interests of many people. At the same time, I think we can agree that there will be many divorces, instigated more by a vague discontentment, that will be very costly to the children and/or one of the partners.
So, I think that it's reasonable to suggest that at present, with many leaving marriages because of an apparent lack of spark and in the absence of particularly strong problems, the divorce rate is above optimum for the utilitarian.
At the same time, if we did take the pivot of conservative feminists - increasing negative social attitudes to divorce and making it harder - then the grass is greener sentiment would be lower, and the lower divorce rate would probably be below the utilitarian's optimum, e.g., with many staying in acrimonious marriages under the misconception of it being for the best.
So, whilst I'm not convinced that the divorce rate at present is a good indicator of the optimum divorce rate, I wouldn't suppose that this means that the conservative takes are correct either here.
I wonder if a move in a better direction that would have wide appeal would be that people have to sit down and work out exactly what their expectations are. In the secular age, people often get into marriages with varying degrees of seriousness about the commitments they are making and varying beliefs about what the commitments look like in practice. We don't rely as much on common religious teachings to give us details of what it should look like. If irreligious and less devout people took the time to agree a more detailed picture, there would probably be a better idea of the agreement, and therefore - I posit - a lower chance of it being suboptimally terminated.
I've thought a little more on it and I think my comment overlooks the consideration that the utility-maximising/optimal rate of divorce probably changes with these factors too. But unsure how this will play out, especially since these beliefs probably affect the optimal rate of marriage.
In my career domain (software engineering), we warn leaders, managers, and executives: "Beware what you measure. You'll get exactly that."
I don't ever recall hearing that in my educational domain (social sciences—specifically political science). Seems like a warning policy wonks and wannabe social engineers should heed.
I think there is a game theoretic/contractual importance to the permanency of marriage: "for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health... until death do us part". The precommitment to retaining the relationship in future states that are suboptimal as a form of economic, phycological and social insurance is essential to the relationship.
If you weaken the precomittment sufficiently (reducing the social penalty of exit) both parties are predispositioned to maintain outside options, avoid pooling resources and engaging in other costly/inefficient behaviors, as I know my partner will leave if things go badly for me or well for them. The insurance value of the relationship is greatly reduced and it inherently/necessarily creates less committed relationships. Too strong of a social bind leads to all sorts of issues of moral hazard: abuse, lack of effort in the relationship etc.
The whole "natural law"/economic grounding of marriage is reasonable expectation of permanency reinforced by social norms. The stability provided by not only two people, but the social bonds of two extended families is foundational for individual flourishing and children. (The reasonable expectation of permanency also encourages supportive in laws; there is nothing worse than in laws attempting to undermine your marriage.)
People are flawed and they are going to make dumb decisions which will necessitate separation and divorce. However for a typical couple you can make decisions that benefit the marriage jointly or you personally are the expense of the marriage. If your incentives are aligned with the marriage, it's self sustaining (aka you figure your shit out).
Thanks, Paul. I agree with some of this - I think that a marriage should only be entered if both parties *think* they will be together forever, but I probably disagree about how large the social penalty should be if they find that the relationship isn't working for them and break up. I do think the precommitment should be non-trivial, but I think the marriage contract as it exists confers a reasonably high level of precommitment that allows both parties to pool resources even against a background of high divorce rates. This is why I think even when marriages end in divorce it's not clear they shouldn't have happened - the precommitment in the contract may have allowed the relationship to be more productive, functional and fair (while it lasted) than it would have been in the absence of marriage.
Based on your point that "Too strong of a social bind leads to all sorts of issues of moral hazard: abuse, lack of effort in the relationship etc." we seem to agree about how this should be analyzed, but you place more weight on the importance of assurance of permanency for relationship health/strength than I do. This could be due to our having different expectations about how difficult it is to go through a divorce even in the absence of social punishment for doing so. I think the pain of divorce is very severe as it is, but part of the reason leaving is so painful is that both parties expected the relationship to last, so I think that the expectation that the relationship is for life *should* be there when people get married. And I don't think people would want to sign a standard marriage contract with all of the financial implications it has if they didn't believe this.
Finally, I don't actually think divorce is always indicative of bad decision making, although it often is. Things change, and you can't perfectly predict how so you're always taking some risk when getting married. Getting married may have been the best decision (based on everything one could reasonably know at the time) even if you ultimately break up. This is analogous to forming a business partnership - something not working out is not proof positive that it was a mistake to try. As you say, both parties have to work on and be committed to the relationship long term and if one party loses interest, changes significantly etc. there isn't much the other can do.
And my intuition for why we shouldn't be too eager to discourage divorce also comes from the fact that some of the best marriages I know of are second marriages (where no kids were involved in the first one). Getting out of those unfulfilling relationships can lead to much more productive partnerships with a more fitting spouse.
It turns out that these higher “exit costs” to ending a marriage end up allowing for marriage to be very important t for college-graduate couples.
—-
“””
We propose an alternative explanation focusing on educational differences in demand for marital commitment. As the gains from traditional gender-based specialization have declined, the value of marriage has decreased relative to cohabitation, which offers many of the gains of co-residence with less commitment.
We argue that college graduate parents use marriage as a commitment device to facilitate intensive joint investments in their children. For less educated couples for whom such investments are less desirable or less feasible, commitment and, hence, marriage has less value relative to cohabitation. “””
Lurking in the background is the presumption that marriage just is a form of contract. While that presumption certainly has overwhelming hegemony in the present circumstances, many features of marriage make much more sense if one views it as a comprehensive one-flesh union of body and soul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Marriage%3F
Unfortunately, most liberals seem unable to even understand the meaning of the latter view, much less explain or argue against it, and are thus doomed to eternal bafflement when confronted with aspects of human behavior that fail to conform to the 'rational contractual agent' model.
Love grows, desire wanes. The imbalance of sexual satisfaction, frequency and exploration has come to a head in my marriage. At sixty-six, I'm fit, curious and all systems go! Partial separation and/or an open-sexually-relationship seems like the only solution. With two daughters, two grandsons and forty-five years together, it's hardly a failure.
I think there are a few ways to set up the problem. I think there are two information problems: unknown long run compatibility and unknown understanding of partners commitment. Long run compatibility is not entirely knowable, but can be migrated by share values and intentional courtship; mostly feel this issue is immaturity which is why young marriages fail more. My bigger concern is unknown commitment (one person is considerably less committed); here I think greater cost of divorce prevents the marriage by the low commitment type (as they presumably have less intrinsic cost from separation or higher dissatisfaction from a long relationships).
I think the cost of divorce depends heavily on local culture. Stigma is higher now then it was 30 years ago. The gender costs have varies over time and place. I think we agree that there is an appropriate and excessive cost to divorce; I mostly think we have it right within normie upper middle class white America and Europe.
Feel like you've identified Goodhart's law in a domain it's usually not talked about. If a policymaker just thought lowering divorce rates is what they ought to do, they could do this in a couple of ways:
1. Make it harder for people to get divorced. If the barrier is already high then doing so would either have no impact or keep people in awful marriages. If the barrier to divorce were low, this might actually work but we know that's generally speaking, untrue.
2. Improve the mapping process - This would actually make sure people enter into higher quality marriages on average.
Notice 1 is infinitely easier and more conducive to central planning than 2. If i'm policymaker, i'm so much more likely to add a bureacuucratic burden to the divorce process than try to build and open source an AI driven dating platform.
I think we can safely say that it's more likely than not that social engineering here will produce worse outcomes in expectation.
Yes, exactly, I wish I'd noticed I was talking about Goodhart's law, haha. And I think your points are also true when we use shame/praise to enforce more or less marriage - easier to use shame to increase the costs of divorce and lower the divorce rate than to do the more difficult work of helping people have better relationships.
I agree that whether a couple wants a divorce is probably a pretty good indicator that they should get a divorce (under a utilitarian criterion) - but I'm less convinced of how perfect an indicator it will be.
Whilst status quo bias keeps people in marriages, grass is greener sentiments can conceivably have people jumping ship prematurely. And there is reason that people may have a grass is greener attitude, i.e., be overly optimistic of the situation outside of marriage - namely that the last time people were in the dating pool, they were younger.
Further, liberal cultural attitudes to divorce are likely to give people excessively optimistic ideas of their prospects out of their marriage.
Lastly, although people greatly care for their children, they tend not to be perfect altruists to them - so there is still a problem of externalities here. Some divorces will be for the best for the children - which conservatives often forget. And it probably isn't just abusive relationships where divorce is better for the children - I can't imagine growing up in a non-abusive but incredibly acrimonous home is in the welfare-interests of many people. At the same time, I think we can agree that there will be many divorces, instigated more by a vague discontentment, that will be very costly to the children and/or one of the partners.
So, I think that it's reasonable to suggest that at present, with many leaving marriages because of an apparent lack of spark and in the absence of particularly strong problems, the divorce rate is above optimum for the utilitarian.
At the same time, if we did take the pivot of conservative feminists - increasing negative social attitudes to divorce and making it harder - then the grass is greener sentiment would be lower, and the lower divorce rate would probably be below the utilitarian's optimum, e.g., with many staying in acrimonious marriages under the misconception of it being for the best.
So, whilst I'm not convinced that the divorce rate at present is a good indicator of the optimum divorce rate, I wouldn't suppose that this means that the conservative takes are correct either here.
I wonder if a move in a better direction that would have wide appeal would be that people have to sit down and work out exactly what their expectations are. In the secular age, people often get into marriages with varying degrees of seriousness about the commitments they are making and varying beliefs about what the commitments look like in practice. We don't rely as much on common religious teachings to give us details of what it should look like. If irreligious and less devout people took the time to agree a more detailed picture, there would probably be a better idea of the agreement, and therefore - I posit - a lower chance of it being suboptimally terminated.
I've thought a little more on it and I think my comment overlooks the consideration that the utility-maximising/optimal rate of divorce probably changes with these factors too. But unsure how this will play out, especially since these beliefs probably affect the optimal rate of marriage.
In my career domain (software engineering), we warn leaders, managers, and executives: "Beware what you measure. You'll get exactly that."
I don't ever recall hearing that in my educational domain (social sciences—specifically political science). Seems like a warning policy wonks and wannabe social engineers should heed.
I think there is a game theoretic/contractual importance to the permanency of marriage: "for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health... until death do us part". The precommitment to retaining the relationship in future states that are suboptimal as a form of economic, phycological and social insurance is essential to the relationship.
If you weaken the precomittment sufficiently (reducing the social penalty of exit) both parties are predispositioned to maintain outside options, avoid pooling resources and engaging in other costly/inefficient behaviors, as I know my partner will leave if things go badly for me or well for them. The insurance value of the relationship is greatly reduced and it inherently/necessarily creates less committed relationships. Too strong of a social bind leads to all sorts of issues of moral hazard: abuse, lack of effort in the relationship etc.
The whole "natural law"/economic grounding of marriage is reasonable expectation of permanency reinforced by social norms. The stability provided by not only two people, but the social bonds of two extended families is foundational for individual flourishing and children. (The reasonable expectation of permanency also encourages supportive in laws; there is nothing worse than in laws attempting to undermine your marriage.)
People are flawed and they are going to make dumb decisions which will necessitate separation and divorce. However for a typical couple you can make decisions that benefit the marriage jointly or you personally are the expense of the marriage. If your incentives are aligned with the marriage, it's self sustaining (aka you figure your shit out).
Thanks, Paul. I agree with some of this - I think that a marriage should only be entered if both parties *think* they will be together forever, but I probably disagree about how large the social penalty should be if they find that the relationship isn't working for them and break up. I do think the precommitment should be non-trivial, but I think the marriage contract as it exists confers a reasonably high level of precommitment that allows both parties to pool resources even against a background of high divorce rates. This is why I think even when marriages end in divorce it's not clear they shouldn't have happened - the precommitment in the contract may have allowed the relationship to be more productive, functional and fair (while it lasted) than it would have been in the absence of marriage.
Based on your point that "Too strong of a social bind leads to all sorts of issues of moral hazard: abuse, lack of effort in the relationship etc." we seem to agree about how this should be analyzed, but you place more weight on the importance of assurance of permanency for relationship health/strength than I do. This could be due to our having different expectations about how difficult it is to go through a divorce even in the absence of social punishment for doing so. I think the pain of divorce is very severe as it is, but part of the reason leaving is so painful is that both parties expected the relationship to last, so I think that the expectation that the relationship is for life *should* be there when people get married. And I don't think people would want to sign a standard marriage contract with all of the financial implications it has if they didn't believe this.
Finally, I don't actually think divorce is always indicative of bad decision making, although it often is. Things change, and you can't perfectly predict how so you're always taking some risk when getting married. Getting married may have been the best decision (based on everything one could reasonably know at the time) even if you ultimately break up. This is analogous to forming a business partnership - something not working out is not proof positive that it was a mistake to try. As you say, both parties have to work on and be committed to the relationship long term and if one party loses interest, changes significantly etc. there isn't much the other can do.
And my intuition for why we shouldn't be too eager to discourage divorce also comes from the fact that some of the best marriages I know of are second marriages (where no kids were involved in the first one). Getting out of those unfulfilling relationships can lead to much more productive partnerships with a more fitting spouse.
LoL. Not all marriages are made in heaven.
Reminds me of an amusing quip which, in the nature of the beast, speaks to some fundamentals:
While love may be blind, marriage can be a real eye-opener ...
> they failed to succeed at that
I’m gonna borrow the phrase “failed to succeed” for general application to my life
It turns out that these higher “exit costs” to ending a marriage end up allowing for marriage to be very important t for college-graduate couples.
—-
“””
We propose an alternative explanation focusing on educational differences in demand for marital commitment. As the gains from traditional gender-based specialization have declined, the value of marriage has decreased relative to cohabitation, which offers many of the gains of co-residence with less commitment.
We argue that college graduate parents use marriage as a commitment device to facilitate intensive joint investments in their children. For less educated couples for whom such investments are less desirable or less feasible, commitment and, hence, marriage has less value relative to cohabitation. “””
Lurking in the background is the presumption that marriage just is a form of contract. While that presumption certainly has overwhelming hegemony in the present circumstances, many features of marriage make much more sense if one views it as a comprehensive one-flesh union of body and soul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Marriage%3F
Unfortunately, most liberals seem unable to even understand the meaning of the latter view, much less explain or argue against it, and are thus doomed to eternal bafflement when confronted with aspects of human behavior that fail to conform to the 'rational contractual agent' model.
Love grows, desire wanes. The imbalance of sexual satisfaction, frequency and exploration has come to a head in my marriage. At sixty-six, I'm fit, curious and all systems go! Partial separation and/or an open-sexually-relationship seems like the only solution. With two daughters, two grandsons and forty-five years together, it's hardly a failure.
I think there are a few ways to set up the problem. I think there are two information problems: unknown long run compatibility and unknown understanding of partners commitment. Long run compatibility is not entirely knowable, but can be migrated by share values and intentional courtship; mostly feel this issue is immaturity which is why young marriages fail more. My bigger concern is unknown commitment (one person is considerably less committed); here I think greater cost of divorce prevents the marriage by the low commitment type (as they presumably have less intrinsic cost from separation or higher dissatisfaction from a long relationships).
I think the cost of divorce depends heavily on local culture. Stigma is higher now then it was 30 years ago. The gender costs have varies over time and place. I think we agree that there is an appropriate and excessive cost to divorce; I mostly think we have it right within normie upper middle class white America and Europe.