Anchored

Looking at life through the eyes of an economist can prove helpful and sometimes provocative, as the book Freakonomics demonstrated several years back. Now, in the June 19, 2010 issue of World magazine, Marvin Olasky interviews economist Jennifer Roback Morse to discuss some of the implications of the erosion of the institution of heterosexual marriage. The cost of deinstitutionalizing natural marriage is devastating on multiple levels, including financial and sociological. Here are several excerpts from the magazine article entitled, “Minimizing Marriage” (pp. 84, 86):

Are men becoming less willing to take on commitments?

 

Single motherhood is becoming more and more prevalent, because you can’t get men to commit. Why can’t you get men to commit? Number one, because they don’t have to; number two, it’s dangerous for them to, because the obligation level ratchets up but the benefits do not. The irony of the whole feminist movement, which started off being something to liberate women, is that now women feel like the only free thing they can do is have a child completely by themselves because there is no way of attaching a child to a father and to the family. The move towards same-sex marriage and artificial reproductive technology are accelerating that trend, and making it more likely that women are going to end up spending their lives alone and doing their child-bearing completely alone.

 

Now we have many more women than men going to college. What does that do to our society?

 

We’re gradually pushing the men outside of the family. Women’s marriage prospects are deteriorating. It’s harder and harder to find a suitable guy to marry, because women feel like they have to get educated because they have to take care of themselves, and men think, eh, maybe they have to get educated because they might be a father by the time they’re, say, 30. Fatherhood induces many changes of behavior in men, and not just random fatherhood—fathering children and never seeing them again—but married fatherhood. That induces more mature and economically productive behavior. If a man doesn’t see that coming at him until he’s 30 or 35, then his incentive to get educated goes down. We’ve put a lot of things into this equation that are really skewing things and making it harder for relationships to work farther down the line.

 

So we have many more single moms. So what?

 

Many questions are involved: While mom’s attaching to the baby, who’s taking care of mom? In the natural family, there is another person taking care of mom, and that’s dad. Why is dad doing that? Because that child’s as much his as it is hers, physiologically. Could the mom do it by herself? The answer is, not very well. We have a lot of data on that point, that mom by herself does not do nearly so well as mom with dad. There are a number of reasons: first of all, someone has to earn a living. There’s a whole body of things that she doesn’t have to think about. Even if she does have a job, she doesn’t have to face it alone. It’s pretty decisive that kids benefit from two parents.

 

And what about a same-sex couple?

 

The assumption and premise is that they’re committed to each other. We have some preliminary data that says that actually these relationships aren’t as stable as heterosexual married couples. And data actually shows that lesbian relationships break up sooner than gay male relationships.

 

Here’s a little sociological fact: between two-thirds to three-fourths of divorces are initiated by women. Why is that? Because women are looking for emotional fulfillment. When you get two women together looking for that from one another, you can get an element of instability ratcheted up rather than your partner being someone who calms things down. The preliminary data show that the least stable relationship is the lesbian couple.

 

Those who care more about pocketbooks than people should be concerned?

 

A person who does anything they can get away with is scary to their family members, and they have to be controlled by the state. And they have to be controlled in very expensive ways: The California Youth Authority spends enough on each child in its care to send three people to [the University of California at] Berkeley. The Institute for American Values recently did a study that looked at the taxpayer cost of out-of-wedlock childbearing. They came up with an annual figure of $112 billion per year. That is the GDP of New Zealand—not chump change.