Minimising Marriage
Jennifer Roback Morse is an economist and the mother of two children plus two books: Love and Economics (about motherhood) and Smart Sex about, as the subtitle says, Finding Lifelong Love in a Hookup World. Here are edited excerpts of an interview with Morse conducted by Marvin Olasky.
Has having two children changed the way you approach economic questions? It made me realize how much economists take for granted: we assume that people are adults, that they can manage on their own, make contracts, pursue their own self-interests, defend themselves, respect property rights. . . . But I can tell you, 2-year-olds do not respect property rights.
They want what they want? Unless you get children from the stage where they're little bundles of impulses and somehow make them adults who can keep promises and contracts and respect other people's rights, you don't have a society. So the business of creating a society is actually taking place in the home and being done by mothers and fathers. The whole economics profession was overlooking that part of life.
What happens if we assume this basic teaching will inevitably happen? Without some basic structure to function in, it becomes every person out for himself. Forget gay marriage: That's a sideshow. The main show is the deinstitutionalization of marriage. By making it so we're free of attachments and obligations and responsibilities, we don't have the ability to cooperate with each other or the structure that allows us to invest together over a long period of time.
No-fault divorce has certainly been freeing for the person who wants to abandon a marriage . . . To be crude and economics-y, when a man and a woman have a child together, you're asking that they invest a long period of time cooperating in order to bring that child up into adulthood. Right now, with no-fault divorce, you have less contractual protection for the activity of bringing up a child than you have to build a house together. You couldn't get out of a mortgage contract as easily as people get out of their marriages. There's less investment in child-raising because there's no basic structure for cooperation over a long period of time.
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 more women are going to end up spending their lives alone and doing their child-bearing completely alone.
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.
Do mom and dad have to be married? When an unmarried couple tries to do this, the lack of commitment between the two turns out to have ramifications for the child. It turns out that a cohabiting biological couple doesn't do nearly as well as a married biological couple. The commitment has something to do with it, and also their relationship is shaped by the fact that they're not committed to each other. There's more domestic violence and there's more child abuse with cohabiting parents, even when it's the biological child of both.
Other love interests emerge? The mom often gets involved with another guy, and what ends up happening is she's more interested in the new boyfriend than the child. If that turns into a cohabiting situation, statistically that's the most dangerous situation for the child—to live with mom and a cohabiting boyfriend. Some of the problems associated with single parenthood would go away if the moms would never have another boyfriend. But that's not what they typically do.
What are the political implications of this, especially for people who lean libertarian? As marriage disintegrates, are we stuck with a bigger and more oppressive government? Yes. If you have the really extreme case of a child who can't control himself, it's called attachment disorder. A child without a conscience is a permanent problem to society. To say that we're all going to be free without restraints, that's a Rousseau view of freedom. Most libertarians aren't Rousseau people: Most libertarians are John Locke and American founding-type people. Most libertarians get that there's something a little goofy about Rousseau, and his wild people, and so on. But somehow in this area we're becoming Rousseau people.
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.
Hat Tip: Justin Taylor
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