Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit explains why he left big law:
…I looked at the partners and their lives and thought, “this is what it looks like when you win?”
But one thing I noticed about a lot of the partners was that they worked hard and pushed for more compensation because they were married to women who spent a lot of money. Perhaps the older women lawyers don’t have that incentive to stick around.
A commenter echoed Glenn’s description of the pressure involved for those who stay in big law:
Chasing partnership in Big Law has been described, properly, as “a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie.” Best thing that ever happened to me was getting sacked from a Big Law firm in October ’08, when the legal market (and the economy at large) collapsed. I’ve done a bit of solo work, which has been grand, and am now outside general counsel to two companies and having a grand time of life.
I would rather sell everything I own and take up bartending than go back to life in a big firm — even if it were possible at this stage, which it pretty much isn’t. Sorry I spent 10 years trying to make that crap work.
As you may recall, the pressure married men feel to seek out and remain in more stressful and difficult jobs is a key benefit Prager and Wilcox claim men get from marriage. While obviously not all married men seek out and remain in jobs as stressful as big law, as Glenn suggests marriage does push men to make career choices they otherwise would prefer to avoid. This isn’t bad in itself, but the lengths we go to in order to minimize the sacrifices married men are making is a problem. This kind of foolishness prevents us from understanding the true cost of feminist policies to destroy traditional marriage. Being forced to work much harder to support others is not a benefit of marriage to men, just as the benefit of buying a home isn’t the need to work harder to pay the mortgage.
While Prager and Wilcox sell pressure to work more difficult jobs as a benefit to men, at least they understand that for men marriage comes with pressure to earn more. That men take on obligations as bread winners in marriage that women don’t would come as a terrible shock to many, probably most, economists. In fact, this is something economists go to great lengths to avoid seeing.
One of the favorite theories is that marriage frees men up to focus more on paid work. By this theory, single men dream of working a more dangerous job with more stress, a longer commute, and working more hours, but are prevented from chasing this lifestyle by the constant demands of housework. These poor single men are stuck putting dishes in the dishwasher when they could be sitting in traffic, traveling for business, or working late into the night. This absurd feminist theory simply won’t die, even though the data shows that marriage increases men’s focus on paid work while not reducing their focus on housework. As the St Louis Fed explains in For Love or Money: Why Married Men Make More
…If a man spends less time on housework after he is married, then it makes sense that he would see an increase in his wages because the extra time and effort spent at work would increase his productivity and promotion chances.
…while marriage does seem to make men more productive in the market (i.e., men begin making higher wages after marriage), household specialization does not seem to be the cause. They find little difference between married and unmarried men in the time they spend on home production.
If the productivity from marriage itself is not the result of decreased hours spent on housework, as Hersche and Stratton suggest, then where does that improved productivity come from? Because the earnings of divorced or separated men are higher than those of never-married men, the added productivity that accompanies marriage must be of two kinds: (1) productivity from the marriage itself and/or (2) advantages that remain even after the marriage is dissolved. Korenman and David Neumark argue in a 1991 study that the wage premium earned by divorced or separated men is attributable to the advantages gained while married. Their evidence is that wages grow more slowly in the years of divorce or separation.
Economic papers are filled with this kind of willful misunderstanding of what is going on. Why do men earn more after marrying, and then after divorce tend to stop growing their earnings? The answer is quite simple, and boils down to incentives. Men who want to marry know they need to earn more to signal provider status. After marriage men have greater responsibilities, and therefore have to earn even more. Threats of divorce ratchet this pressure up further, as men understand that the family courts are designed to separate fathers from their children while financially rewarding the mother at the father’s expense. Divorce for women means ejecting the man and keeping both the kids and a large part of his paycheck. Divorce for men means losing the kids and paying a steep monthly fee to finance the operation.
But since divorce removes the incentive married men naturally feel to earn more money, family court judges know they need to replace the natural incentive with something else. This is why the family courts assign men earnings quotas (imputed income) based on their previous income. The man might earn less than his quota, but he will be billed for child support and/or alimony based on this quota. This quota system is enforced with the threat of imprisonment, and is not surprisingly despised by the men who find themselves forced into it. This explains why divorced men earn more than never married men; they have a quota to meet based on their income at the end of the marriage. If they don’t maintain their married level of earnings, they will be sent to prison. It also explains why divorced men’s earnings tend not to grow like they would have were they still married; quota systems are effective in the short term at coercing hard work, but they create a disincentive for increasing productivity. Under a quota system earning more only increases your quota. Most men under our new quota system will work hard enough to stay out of prison, but they aren’t going to take risks and/or work harder for the privilege of increasing their quota.
Note that while Prager and Wilcox claim the pressure married men feel to work harder is a benefit to men, the St. Louis Fed likewise implies that being forced by a court to pay alimony and/or child support is an advantage divorced men have which never married men lack (emphasis mine):
…the added productivity that accompanies marriage must be of two kinds: (1) productivity from the marriage itself and/or (2) advantages that remain even after the marriage is dissolved.
We won the cold war because an incentive based system leads to a kind of dynamic productivity that a quota based system can’t ever hope to create. Yet we have dramatically reworked our family structure in ways only the Soviets could truly appreciate. This new system is hurting us in ways we refuse to accept, because accepting the cost would force us to rethink our family model. Part of the problem is that the costs associated with replacing marriage with a child support system weren’t immediately obvious. Since we pretended we still had a fundamentally marriage based family structure, initially men carried on as if that was the case. In fact, most men today still do so. However, over time the reality of the new system has caused not a marriage strike, but something more ominous. Just like with the Soviet system, this will continue until we decide the ideology behind the quota system isn’t worth the economic pain it inevitably causes. In the meantime, economists will remain baffled as to why married earn more than divorced men, and why both earn more than never married men.
The economics of love.
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“This absurd feminist theory simply won’t die, even though the data shows that marriage increases men’s focus on paid work while not reducing their focus on housework.” ~ Dalrock
I do exactly zero cleaning at home. I can’t even remember the last time I vacuumed. That’s one advantage of having eight kids. But if you include classically male chores, I do a hell of a lot more housework than I did when I was single.
I have a 12-acre property to maintain. I build stuff. I fix stuff. I maintain cars. I probably did about 1/10th as much housework when I was single, and I would probably do a lot more housework if I didn’t have one of those jobs married men often pursue.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy working with my hands, and it’s a nice break from my office job, but it’s still work. I assume plenty of other dudes here have similar experiences.
Gee, it’s almost as though economists regard men and women as interchangeable carbon-based work-units, rather than as different forms of humanity. Tabula rasa economicus, as it were.
But that has no nuance, so it can’t be right.
End child support and alimony and watch how quickly our incentives rebalance to 50% joint custody and men and women increasing their productivity above divorce level quotas. Decreased fear of divorce rape will improve men’s willingness to marry. Don’t forget that the mother is even more dis-incentivized from earning money under divorce, since it means less child support to her. She can work for $1, or not work for $0.50. He can work for $1, or not work and go to jail. A father with joint custody of his kids will work harder to support them, than a father who doesn’t see them and works under the quota system.
“…If a man spends less time on housework after he is married, then it makes sense that he would see an increase in his wages because the extra time and effort spent at work would increase his productivity and promotion chances.”
Why does a decrease in time doing housework automatically equal an increase in time and effort at work? If I spend less time on the golf course my bowling average will automatically shoot up?
“Because the earnings of divorced or separated men are higher than those of never-married men, the added productivity that accompanies marriage must be of two kinds:”
Only in the babblings of economists are productivity and earnings treated as the same thing, but only in certain cases. Funny how middle class wages (earnings) have basically been stagnant for 3+ decades while productivity has gone through the roof.
Our society needs to enforce parental responsibilities, and if you can’t take care of your children, provide them with food and shelter, even with state welfare, child protective services will step in and take them away. It should be the same with single parents, if you can’t take care of them, give them to the other parent who can, or let the state take over. Arrange joint parental custody and visitation so that the welfare of the children is paramount to the welfare of the mom. My kids’ mom doesn’t need $500/month from me to put food on the table, and if she did, that’s not a safe stable position to force my kids into, especially when I’m willing to have full custody so she doesn’t pay a dime to me. I don’t see any reason for it’s existence other than the soviet style quota system Dalrock describes. Take away a man’s children, and then make him pay for it? Choose one or the other.
Lol, that Fed piece is ridiculous, they really tried to pull the other leg with that one. Good going Dalrock! I agree with the second quote, getting out of a law firm was the best decision I ever made. Even better that there is no marriage to worry about.
The Fed economists get paid for making a mountain out of a mole hill basically. Married and divorced men earn more and chase better jobs because they have to, whether due to having the family to take care of or due to a court order to force the same, the outcome is identical. He works harder and for longer because the man has to not because he wants to. Not a benefit for the man, it’s a premium for the family and society as a whole.
Once again, women doing housework should be mandatory for married couples. It’s one of the only benefits she provides. Any women who complains is insane and shouldn’t get married. Marriage is of such little benefit to the man himself that women need to be getting on one knee and proposing to men; and then paying the man a monthly sum for staying with them. They should do the housework, have sex with their husbands whenever he wants, day or night. Women should be thankful that any man is willing to even think about marriage to them.
The lies built by the media, economists, Pastors and other leaders is merely to keep the machinery moving. They know damn well if the vast majority of men caught on, shits done.
Ran into this …
http://momastery.com/blog/2016/08/01/i-need-to-tell-you-something/
Sorry if it is off topic.
Marriage is of such little benefit to the man himself that women need to be getting on one knee and proposing to men;
Let TSHTF and the social order completely invert itself and desperate women, realizing finally that there is no such thing as a SIW, might just start doing that. They probably won’t be getting down on one knee so much as literally throwing themselves at the man, weeping and begging hysterically for the man to “make me your woman! I’ll do ANYTHING, I SWEAR!” It will be really interesting to see how many (or few) men decide that these women are worth the risk and expense.
Dang man, headed for the ally now! Have not golfed in years….helloooo pro bowling tour
I think the cause-effect here is backwards…women are more likely to marry men who are more dominant and assertive, which are exactly the type of men that tend to pursue high pressure jobs and make more money. Wages grow more slowly following divorce because there’s only so many positions at the top and you’re waiting for people to retire to get one. Add the stress of divorce, and voila!
@ feeriker:
“weeping and begging hysterically for the man to “make me your woman! I’ll do ANYTHING, I SWEAR!” ”
–“And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by your name, to take away our reproach.”
Isaiah 4:1 (KJV2000)
Aint it just Glorious?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/2016/08/01/i-was-single-for-decades-now-im-happily-married-and-feel-like-ive-sold-out/#comments
Lol, that Fed piece is ridiculous, they really tried to pull the other leg with that one.
Yeah, sure, and the Duluth Wheel is ridiculous, too. Unfortunately junk thought like this informs major policies which is why it’s muy importante for Dalrock to cover it, since no one else will.
>>Economic papers are filled with this kind of willful misunderstanding of what is going on.
You should see the sociology and psychology papers, lol. EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING is turned inside out and twisted around as if we are having a collective social argument with a woman. Wait….never mind. The “poor” are said to be starving for lack of nutritious food AND to be morbidly obese, I suppose for lack of nutritious food? “Women” are helpless victims tossed on the random waves of circumstance AND victims of awful, awful patriarchy AND master’s of their domain and strongindepednant feeeemales. The marriage strike is caused by neckbeard men with no responsibility AND by men who are focusing on their careers over family AND because there are no good men any more. I am sure there is a Bible verse that describes our upside down turnabout intruder world where good is evil and evil is good.
bpp
You should see the sociology and psychology papers,
Economics involves some numbers, sometimes, supported by something sort of resembling a premise. Why, I once saw a pricing curve in a textbook that required [fear, tremble] differential calculus. Well, the first derivative, anyway.
Sosh and psy used to have some numbers. Old books that I’ve looked at from the late 1940’s had numbers, usually in the context of public health. Can’t tell when that went away, but for sure it was gone by the 80’s.
If there’s numbers, it might be science. Otherwise, eh, it’s opinon, like history could be well researched and informed opinion but still opinion.
Modern day psych / sosh papers seem to be pretty much exercises in SJW virtue signalling; the conclusion being pre-determined, what is needed is a path from the “data” (laugh!) to the conclusion no matter how tortured or convoluted. It’s not just opinon, it’s politics.
For example, does divorce hurt children? Sheesh, is that even open to discussion anymore? Yet it is, because admitting the truth means divorce is not an unaltered Good Thing, and might call into question the divorce-porn market and even the divorce industry itself.
The biggest factor in divorce is the husband’s employment status. This is why you can’t let your woman get away with guilting you into being a stay-at-home dad so that she can indulge in her careerist fantasy. She works because it’s her dream to work in X profession. You work because you HAVE TO. A woman’s career is all about her and a husband’s career is all about her. Don’t be a male stay-at-home mom.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-28/don-t-blame-divorce-on-money-ask-did-the-husband-have-a-job?utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-business
Quality post, Dalrock.
In response to:
“Our society needs to enforce parental responsibilities, and if you can’t take care of your children, provide them with food and shelter, even with state welfare, child protective services will step in and take them away. It should be the same with single parents, if you can’t take care of them, give them to the other parent who can, or let the state take over.”
The state is only competent when it does activities that its agents enjoy.
Thus states are often competent at killing, but they are seldom competent at nurturing.
Also, states have a tendency to buy and sell human beings:
Remember the “kids for cash” scandal?
In 2011, former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella was convicted of accepting bribes for putting juveniles into detention centers operated by the companies PA Child Care and a sister company, Western Pennsylvania Child Care. Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, are said to have received $2.6 million for their efforts.
Look, taking on the roles of responsible husband and father has always been a tremendous sacrifice for men. However in the past society acknowledged those sacrifices with some perks: respect, a certain amount of deference, male only spaces, some authority over family matters, and property rights. Those benefits are all gone. Yet men are still expected to live up to their historical responsibilities. The amazing thing to me is that men continue to get married at all. Why is that?
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Robert What?
Men continue getting married because of thirst for sex.
Most men can’t get sex outside marriage. Or they can’t get sex regularly outside marriage. Marriage is still advertised as the one place where the average man can get “regular sex’ in a “good relationship”.
@thedeti
‘Men continue getting married because of thirst for sex.’
Obviously that is a great misconception. There is nothing to dry up sex like getting married and men that are even partially awake recognize it. The marriage rates show that this entire jig will be up within a generation, young men are not as stupid as those in our generation.
ColoMtnMan:
Most men are not attractive. Most men are unable to get sex outside of marriage or a relationship. Marriage is sold to them as a way to get regular sex.
Most men who stay with a woman long enough get pressure from that woman to marry. The unspoken argument is “marry me or I will break up with you and you will no longer get sex. Marry me, and the sex will continue and even improve. I’ll want to have more sex with you if you marry me.”
Christian men are exhorted to avoid sex before marriage. Marriage is sold to Christian men as the only legitimate place in which sex can occur.
Most men who stay with a woman long enough get pressure from that woman to marry. The unspoken argument is “marry me or I will break up with you and you will no longer get sex. Marry me, and the sex will continue and even improve. I’ll want to have more sex with you if you marry me.”
Most men sell themselves short. If sex is the man’s primary or only consideration, then MOST men can actually say to any woman who says the above “OK, fine. Don’t let the door hit you on your cellulite-laden arse on the way out. I guarantee you that this bed you’ve been laying in will have your replacement in it within a month, if not much sooner.”
That’s not an idle threat from most men. With even minimal game, even an average (or slightly below) man can get all the regular sex he wants. Now as to the QUALITY of the life support system (and its physical appearance) that provides all of that sex, that’s a whole ‘nother matter. For any middle-aged man of even average looks and in even moderately good physical condition, it’s horrifyingly easy to build up a “soft harem” for sex. True, most of that “harem” will consist of well-ridden, well-used middle-aged wrecks who are probably on every psychotropic med imaginable, but hey, if sex (and NOT a relationship) is your goal, then that’s a very temporary and easily dealt-with problem.
Christian men are exhorted to avoid sex before marriage. Marriage is sold to Christian men as the only legitimate place in which sex can occur.
True, which is why the aforementioned advice is useful only to non-Christian men (or churchian playahs). It probably also helps explain why the ratio of women to men who are regular church attendees today is sol lopsided.
What’s that old joke…..Scientist’s have discovered a food that diminishes a woman’s sex drive by 95%. Wedding cake.
@ feeriker:
“For any middle-aged man of even average looks and in even moderately good physical condition, it’s horrifyingly easy to build up a “soft harem” for sex. True, most of that “harem” will consist of well-ridden, well-used middle-aged wrecks who are probably on every psychotropic med imaginable, but hey, if sex (and NOT a relationship) is your goal, then that’s a very temporary and easily dealt-with problem.”
You’re not the first person who’s said this. I’ve noticed this same thing. Lot of these women have no problem being “plates”, in Rollo Tomassi parlance. They are plates, they know they’re plates, and most of the time they’re OK with it. They don’t really want relationships. A lot of them want a man to come around every week or so, have sex with them, maybe take them out for drinks or dinner, and then leave. They want to go on dates. They want to have no strings attached sex. They want to have some fun.
thedeti says:
August 1, 2016 at 5:59 pm
Yes, and just to be clear, my last post was meant to be descriptive, NOT proscriptive. As that popular saying goes, “just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean that you should.”
This post and accompanying comments made me conduct a mental review.
I’ve lived long enough now to know quite a few divorced men. Did not understand what was happening in the background (Duluth Model, “No Fault”, semi-arbitrary monetary quotas with jail time option!!!, etc.) I learned essentially all of that from this blog after the fact, from Dalrock explaining it and from guys telling some of their stories.
Reviewing the individual cases in my mind, I see clearly in retrospect that we were talking about woman launched frivorces (unhappiness) with cash and prizes in virtually every case. No one knows what goes on behind other people’s closed doors, but these men were quality individuals in my estimation. Accomplished, dependable in a tight spot, honorable. All of them took it hard.
All of them married again, or are actively seeking to do so. These are men that took the hits and know the risks/costs (presumably even the $ quota threat). One can mentally track with a young man that is avoiding marriage based on a severely stacked deck, but why are the veterans returning to the marriage game? I don’t know and haven’t asked the ones still in contact.
When I read of quotas in this article, I immediately thought of the Soviet system. Lo and behold, then it gets mentioned.
Quotas for agricultural produce were not sustainable.
Quotas for machinery led to poor quality
Quotas for labor productivity led to the Chernobyl Accident.
What makes the current crop of social engineers in Western countries think that their quotas will work?
If you don’t think quotas are the norm, there are the following:
-Quotas for divorced men’s earnings (mentioned).
-Quotas to industry for female CEOs
-Quotas for LGBTIQ employees
-Quotas for female participation in the STEM subjects at university
How long is it before the inefficiencies that get built into the system make it crash, exactly as it did to the Soviets? Further, who is driving this agenda and why? Whoever it is, they must be more powerful than government AND the forces of Supply and Demand at the same time. I’m starting to think “Illuminati”.
I was reminded of the surgeon who was divorced by a horrible bitch-wife. He resigned and got a job in take-away food. He was resigned to do this until his children were independent, so that then he could go back to work and give his children, not his wife, the proceeds of his labor.
I don’t blame him one little bit.
@Lost Patrol
Because some men want to be leaders. No matter the risk, they want the imagined rewards society bestows on patriarchs. Even when society stops honoring fatherhood they still believe that their family can, and that may be enough. I think the older generation still sees that outcome as a possibility, while teaching the younger generation that the odds are ever decreasing. I would tell any young man to avoid marriage at all costs, but I’ve already been divorced and survived, so what worse can they throw at me?
Speaking of Professor Wilcox, here’s an interesting video from 2014 where he and his wife Danielle give a college lecture on marriage.
A lot of (inadvertent) RP themes here. Danielle speaks about how she had been dating “an artist from Seattle” before she met Brad in grad school in the early nineties. She calls her husband a “Steady Eddie” who when they were dating was concerned about her “health insurance.”
She also notes that she had a really tough time getting him to escalate.
So Wilcox comes to this from the perspective of a blue piller who was fortunate enough to get in the orbit of a smart, religious woman who had her Epiphany Phase at a younger age than most do today. (He does deserve credit for having masculine body language and speech patterns.)
I watched the Prager University video and I don’t understand what is supposed to be attractive to men about working more hours, commuting more, and greater stress.
@thedeti
Gee, thanks for the education; I was totally unaware of everything you mentioned.
Actually I have two marriages and almost a cool M in alimony to my credit so I am quite familiar with the racket being run and the games being played by women before, during and after.
My point is that men can absolutely get sex regularly outside of marriage and Christian men of our generation are the only ones falling for this ruse in large measure anymore because the younger generation of men are less gullible fools than we are. They see marriage in Amerika for what it is – a loser’s bet for men. As a man you’re playing against a stacked deck, and the platitudes of ‘Christian’ men are not going to protect you in this society.
Fortunately, a higher percentage of men in the younger generation ‘get it.’
As the St Louis Fed explains in For Love or Money: Why Married Men Make More
Since when does the Federal Reserve contribute to the ‘feminist’ narrative? Isn’t the Fed supposed to be fully apolitical?
Oh wait, we have a San Francisco Democrat female as Fed Chairperson now… Hence, the FI has to enter places where it did not enter before.
Tomorrow : The sky is patriarchal because it is blue rather than pink.
We won the cold war because an incentive based system leads to a kind of dynamic productivity that a quota based system can’t ever hope to create
Debatable, since as soon as the USSR collapsed, the US began to work feverishly to do to ourselves what the USSR could never do to us. Today, being an open socialist is more socially acceptable in the US than being a capitalist. By any measure, America is far more left-wing in 2016 than in 1991. If that is what winning the Cold War looks like….
To the extent that a country won the Cold War, it is China. It stayed neutral after 1969 or so while the US and USSR drew all the attention, and transitioned from Communism to a high-growth economy without much bloodshed. It has also managed to avoid democracy, and hence, the inevitability of feminism and feminist socialism.
Dalrock, I just can’t read your posts in their entirety. The pain they dredge up!
Yet my ex was not as evil as most of the women I see.
And my new wife, however, had been committed to “simple living” and “opossum living”, from the book of the same title.
I claim that far from a boost to a man’s productivity, marriage can often be a drag on it. It is time to revisit the ‘housework’ albatross again.
The article a few weeks ago about housework revealed something evil :
Dalrock said :
“You can test all of this by offering suggestions to the next woman who complains to you that her husband doesn’t do enough housework. My wife hears this complaint from other Christian wives all of the time. Each time she starts by giving them time to explain why their no good husband isn’t doing enough around the house. Then my wife offers suggestions that don’t involve the wife assuming authority over her husband and making him do work the the woman (falsely) believes is humiliating. For women with children old enough to help, she advises having the children do more of the housework. Other times she will identify time consuming work the woman is focusing on which could just as well be left undone. In other cases she will suggest ways to get a “problem” job done that better frees up her day (cooking with a crock pot, etc). The response is always the same, because the issue is not about the woman having too much work. Invariably once the discussion turns toward solutions that don’t involve making the husband do more housework, the women lose all interest in the conversation.”
Emphasis mine.
Note that these are supposedly conservative women in intact marriages. Yet, there is a seething need to make the man waste time on unnecessary, mundane tasks.
We know full well how the cuckservative myth of ‘men earning more through marriage’ is a fraud due to obscuring incentives with necessity and assuming the woman is so magical that marriage to her showers some productivity pixie dust onto the man, but I question even that. In the above situation, what if the man is a highly skilled professional who earns $200, $300, or even $500/hour in his primary profession? Such menial tasks waste his valuable time. Even worse, what if such a man is an entrepreneur, where the job is 24/7 with a very uncertain payoff. To have these sorts of stupid demands on his time for nothing more than the woman’s need for passive-aggressive abuse, damages the potential for the man to succeed in his entrepreneurship.
For all the cuckservatives who claim that marriage increases a man’s earnings, we can counter with the fact that all the big tech entrepreneurs (Gates, Ellison, Brin/Page, Zuckerberg, Musk) did their first and big great innovations *before* getting married at all. If they had gotten married, they would have to do menial, needless housework which would have detracted from their entrepreneurship, which itself is a process that women oppose. How many great innovations were blocked because the man married before his great idea arrived to him, and he was not permitted to work on it due to the woman’s need to conduct abuse?
Question : Is it really this common for married women to conduct this sort of passive abuse onto their husbands, and take away their discretionary time, no matter how valuable his other work may be? If so, then I question whether even ‘stable’ marriages are even such a great thing in the information age.. Marriage conceals the anti-civilizational tendencies of women, and the opportunity cost of great male innovations being stifled is not quantified.
Leiff,
I’m not sure we have a middle class anymore. The information age has really rocketed up productivity, but that hasn’t translated into much wealth going to people with an IQ that much below 105.
At one time (say, 1965, the atomic age) we did, a fat middle class, and a small lower class, and a teeny-tiny upper class. Of course much more than 72% of all people 18 and older were married in 1965. And wives were not nearly as hypergamous then, they actually went to church and listened to the Pastor/Priest/Rabbi when HE said Father Knows Best. And we had more than ample manufacturing jobs for “marginal” men (IQ less than 95) who could only earn a living and support a family with their hands in creating wealth.
Nowadays, I’d say (with only 48% of people 18 and older married, and it is still dropping) and a vanishing manufacturing base, I’d say with the information age we have about 10% upper-upper class ($200K+ a year combined income, husband and wife), another 20% that are closer to middle class ($60K->$199K a year combined income) and the rest (70%) lower class. And of that 70% only the smallest percentage is married and a more than significant percentage has no real earned income… at all.