Comment by randycupertino | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randycupertino | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot to look here, but the main take away is that this unpartnered adults have been increasing significantly over the last 30 years. Men are generally more likely to be unpartnered than women. Also, there are significant ethnic differences.

“While the unpartnered population includes some adults who were previously married (those who are separated, divorced or widowed), all of the growth in the unpartnered population since 1990 has come from a rise in the number who have never been married.

This trend has broad societal implications, as does the growing gap in well-being between partnered and unpartnered adults. Looking across a range of measures of economic and social status, unpartnered adults generally have different – often worse – outcomes than those who are married or cohabiting. This pattern is apparent among both men and women.

Unpartnered adults have lower earnings, on average, than partnered adults and are less likely to be employed or economically independent. They also have lower educational attainment and are more likely to live with their parents. Other research suggests that married and cohabiting adults fare better than those who are unpartnered when it comes to some health outcomes.”

I don’t think our society is setup for singles, particularly singles as the majority. And we are getting pretty close. These findings are really interesting.

The 3% difference in partner/unpartner rates of men vs women is entirely accounted for by the 4% difference in being institutionalized (e.g. in prison). Really these types of studies should control for this.

> I don’t think our society is setup for singles, particularly singles as the majority. And we are getting pretty close. These findings are really interesting.

Social reproduction is the primary requirement to have a society in the first place, and adult singles don't participate in social reproduction at anywhere near the rates of married couples.

This is something that the society has to discourage in order to remain viable. Historically those who can't or won't participate in that process have taken on service roles that promote social reproduction, for example with nuns teaching schools, or priests reproducing the faith. People like this, together with widows, are really the only singles that are accepted by societies that survive across time, the others being subject to some social disapproval.

If you lose that drive to survive and perpetuate your society, which all western liberal societies have, then it's just a question of making people more comfortable as the entire society shuffles off the game board. We are truly a Ship of Fools.

> Social reproduction is the primary requirement to have a society in the first place, and adult singles don't participate in social reproduction at anywhere near the rates of married couples. This is something that the society has to discourage in order to remain viable.

Eh, but that depends on how many children the couples are having! And I don't think it would be such a terrible thing for the earth's human population to shrink somewhat.

The earth's human population is not going to shrink. The population of some groups will shrink and others will increase.

As secular societies are replaced by fundamentalist societies, the result will not be the earth having fewer people, but rather secular liberal belief systems and policy preferences disappearing.

Yes, you can prolong those policy preferences with a period of repression, but long term the future is not bright for either liberalism or modernism.

Take a look at the transformation of Israeli politics between 1990 and 2020. 58% of those under the age of 19 are ultra-orthodox and 30% are orthodox. That's 88% orthodox or ultra-orthodox. Israel used to be a fairly secular state with an orthodox minority. It is very rapidly going to be an orthodox population with a secular minority. This is not about overall populations increasing or decreasing, it's about the future belonging to those groups that reproduce themselves.

That depends. Can liberal belief systems convert the children of illiberal belief systems at an adequate rate? The approach that too many take these days, "We're self-evidently right, and if you can't see that you're so indoctrinated that you're blind"... that isn't going to cut it. Those with liberal beliefs have to do better than that, or they will lose.

Note that "liberal" is defined in the classical way, belief in liberty. It doesn't have to do with political left vs. right. And those with the liberal belief system may need to battle illiberals on the left as well as on the right. And even you, when you say "you can prolong those belief systems with a period of repression", I wonder how liberal you actually are. No, you cannot prolong those belief systems with repression, because once you turn to repression, you don't believe in the liberal belief system any more.

Also note that not all liberal belief systems are secular, and not all religious belief systems are either "fundamentalist" or illiberal.

We might have different ideas about what social reproduction means. I believe social reproduction occurs every time a social interaction occurs which reenforces social norms through social accountability. How many children people are having is more of a sexual reproduction topic to me.

Ah, y'know what, I totally missed the "social" part!

...but then, I also don't think your partnership status has much impact on that at all!

You don't think that relationships act as mechanism for reinforcing social norms?

To me this doesn't mean much demographically without information on what proportion of that 40% were ever married at any point, and whether they reproduced in that time. Otherwise you could just get a nation of single parents who split shortly after having children (leaving aside what we know about actual TFR rates in the West).

Yes, hypothetically you can have a society in which people marry, have kids, raise the kids, and then split. But that's not what's happening across the Western democracies.

Look, this issue of social reproduction is the biggest threat to liberal democracy, and it goes a long way back. In France, the same areas in which the most copies of Diderot's Encyclopédie were bought were the ones that started seeing both marriage and fertility declines. As the society as a whole proceeded to liberalize you started seeing population declines across the board.

I would add that things like child support benefits and other forms of social insurance -- the routine answer to all social ills in the West -- have not shown any efficacy in addressing this. It's not a welfare problem. Hungary has tried to give lots of money to increase fertility. Romania tried authoritarian techniques to increase fertility (fertility was a chronic problem in Eastern-bloc nations). None of that worked.

If you really believe that modern liberal societies are a viable concern, then you have to solve the problem of more and more people dying alone, having never married, and having no children. You have to solve the problem of people living isolated lives and not being integrated into tight family networks. Because over the long run, these defects will prove fatal.

>Look, this issue of social reproduction is the biggest threat to liberal democracy,

This is absolute alarmist nonsense. If you believe this, do you think that Europe is further down the path of moving away from liberal democracy than the US is thanks to the US having a larger birth rate?

Yes.

I agree with the gist of what you write, but I think your text below (although correct) is misleading.

"But that's not what's happening across the Western democracies."

Western democracies do indeed have poor social reproduction, but I do NOT believe "Western" or democracy is the driving factor. If anything, your statement understates the issue because below replacement fertility rates are rapidly expanding and by no means restricted to the West or to democracies. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

There are ~ 90 countries where fertility is below replacement including disparate non-Western countries like UAE, China, South Korea, Malaysia, Mauritius, Nepal, Lebanon, etc... including those that are not democratic.

> Unpartnered adults have lower earnings, on average, than partnered adults and are less likely to be employed or economically independent. They also have lower educational attainment and are more likely to live with their parents.

Although true, that might be reversing correlation and causation. It is quite easy to see why someone might struggle to attach themselves to a partner if they live with their parents, have low educational attainment and no job.

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