Men Can Have Standards Too

Men marrying into debt, falling fertility and more in this week's digest.

If you haven’t yet read my book Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, the Believe Journal here on Substack just published the book’s introduction. It’s a chance to try before you buy.

Desecration and the Negative World

Speaking of my book, Carl Trueman also has a new book out called The Desecration of Man. Trueman writes:

“Desecration” is a strong word, stronger than others have been used to describe the modern world such as “disenchantment.” It implies the intentional abuse or destruction of something holy, something of more than ordinary significance.

The idea here is that the modern world has not simply adopted an atheist-materialist metaphysics, in which we can go about our days without thinking much about religion. Rather, the modern world desires to explicitly transgress or profane old religious standards and values. This implies an underlying hostility to them. So while Trueman has his own framework, I see it as very compatible with and affiramatory towards my ideas of the “Negative World,” that American elite culture now views traditional Christianity as a negative rather that positive force in society.

Again, if you haven’t read my book yet, pick it up.

Men Can Have Standards Too

A video clip from the Dave Ramsey show became a viral topic of debate on X. A woman who supposedly has $90,000 in student loan debt called in because her boyfriend says he won’t propose to her until she’s debt free.

Ramsey tells her, “If you were my daughter, you know what’s I’d tell you? Dump him.” He goes on to say that her boyfriend is trying to make her prove her worth to him with money, that money disputes are the leading cause of divorce, and that this is a money dispute. Ergo, she should walk away from this relationship.

You can make a case for what Ramsey is saying, but what we are really seeing here is an example of the pervasive idea in our society that men are not allowed to have standards for women.

You may recall the furor several years back over a trollish post by a woman that, “Men prefer debt free virgins without tattoos.” The very idea that men have standards and some women don’t meet them is anathema to a lot of people - and especially to many Boomer men like Ramsey.

The giveaway here is when Ramsey tells this woman, “You’re a princess, and you deserve more than that.” Ramsey knows nothing about this woman but is sure she is a “princess” - the kind of person any guy would be lucky to have deign to pay attention to him.

Women are encouraged to set very high standards and reject men who aren’t worthy of being with a princess like her, but people get outraged if men set standards for women. Social scientists talk about men being “unmarriageable,” but never apply that label to any women.

Just as women can set standards for men, men can have standards for women too. Particularly today when we read a lot about how women are getting significantly more college degrees than men, how men are falling behind or failing to launch, etc., those men who have their act together need to recognize the value of what they bring to the table. They are not beggars who would be lucky to have any woman pay attention to them.

In truth, it’s completely reasonable for a man to not want to marry into a pile of debt - or a lot of other things. Men should think more about what their own non-negotiables are.

In this case, the man actually is helping her pay off the debt. While I don’t recommend pre-marital cohabitation, he’s letting her live with him for free so that she can devote the majority of her income to paying down debt. Her boyfriend makes $250,000/year, which puts him in the top echelons of income earners. If she simply dumps this guy as Ramsey suggests, how likely is it that she’ll find another guy who makes that much money to let her live rent free with him - and marry her with $90,000 in debt? It’s not impossible, but in this dating and marriage market, it’s very far from a sure thing.

Falling Fertility

Melissa Kearney is an economist known for her book on the “two-parent privilege.” She was just a guest on a fantastic Financial Times podcast about the implications of falling fertility for the economy. Here is some of what she said:

I don’t want to sound like an alarmist and put this close to 10, but I definitely am gonna put it above the median of five. And the reason is because if this is something we don’t address, we will be facing potentially very large changes in our society and our economy that have sort of, it seems, snuck up on us. So I don’t wanna sound like I’m saying, oh my goodness, this is definitely gonna cause an economic crisis. But it is something that people should be paying attention to and the consequences are potentially quite massive.

…

Now, the more sanguine demographers say, you know, we don’t know what’s gonna happen. They might catch up. For me, when I’m looking at the data, I don’t see any reason to think that that’s likely to happen. What we know from other high-income countries that have experienced a decline in births before the US is that more recent cohorts of women are not catching up, that birth rates are down in a sustained way.

None of the pressures or cultural changes or reasons that seem to be driving these declines look like they’re gonna reverse anytime soon. So to have the current sort of cohort of people in their twenties and thirties catch up, we’d have to have a really dramatic increase in childbearing post-age 30 that would have to happen for reasons that we can’t quite anticipate. And so I’m less optimistic than some other demographers. 

…

So that puts pressure on our fiscal systems. How do we take care of all these older people? How do we continue to pay for Social Security and Medicare? It also has the potential to mean less economic growth and less economic dynamism. And so we worry about that too. We worry that an older shrinking population is one with less innovation, fewer new ideas, fewer technological breakthroughs, and that has the potential consequences of decreasing living standards for all people.

The worry is about a shrinking population in a less dynamic economy that delivers the continued increase in living standards that we’ve become accustomed to. 

…

So we already spend 35 per cent of federal outlays on mandatory spending on people over the age of 65. Meanwhile, we’ve got young families struggling to make ends meet, right? And we’ve got a decline in fertility, and our government’s spending 5:1 on a per capita basis on the elderly to kids…Certainly, it’s not surprising that our healthcare spending on the elderly is more than it is on kids, because you’re exactly right, their healthcare needs are greater. But the income that we redistribute to the elderly, no. It is absolutely not true that they have greater needs than kids. Our child poverty rates are high, and there are very, very long-term consequences of child poverty.

…

What’s very interesting is that, in a paper in this new Aspen Economic Strategy Group, Jeff Clemens points out that as local areas continue to experience a decline in births and a decline in K-12 enrolment, and ultimately a decline in the number of people available for the local tax-based and working age population, towns are gonna have to unwind their commitment to public goods and services, and that is a really hard thing to do.

So specifically, let’s just think about schools. In a lot of local areas, well, rural areas in the US have been dealing with declining school enrolment for the past quarter century. That’s going to become more and more common across the US as birth rates decline. It’s really hard to figure out how to consolidate schools, how to close schools.

More local areas are also going to encounter this when it comes to hospitals and local transit systems. Those are all systems that have very large fixed capital and labour costs. And as you have fewer people, the per capita cost of running these types of public goods and services increases non-linearly.

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These older workers are holding on to higher-paying managerial positions for longer, and that’s crowding out opportunities for younger workers to advance and earn higher wages. This is well documented now in the US labour market and in other high-income countries. The older generation, people over age 50 who are holding on to their jobs for longer are the winners in this context, and the ones who are losing are the ones who are delaying their career advancement, not advancing into managerial positions.

The wage gap between older and younger workers has widened in favour of older workers in recent years. Relate this to what we also know is happening outside of firms. Younger adults are having a harder time entering the housing market and increasing wealth, and others have shown that the wealth gap has also increased in recent decades, favouring, again, the elderly.

…

I think this is top of mind because The Harvard Crimson recently had an article showing that now, I think it was like 40 per cent of tenured faculty at Harvard were above the age of 65. And that is a dramatic change from just 20 years ago. Again, it’s not like Harvard’s a growing company necessarily, but they’re not just gonna keep adding to their number of tenured faculty slots.

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I think fundamentally, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that a few extra thousand dollars or a few additional months of leave when a kid is born doesn’t really meaningfully change the calculus for somebody trying to decide, “do I wanna commit to a parenting lifestyle and be responsible for another person for at least 18 years?”

So these incremental things really haven’t worked. Now, what I’m about to say next requires some humility on my part as an economist. It’s hard to imagine this turning around without sort of a cultural shift or changes in social norms. So my read, again, with my colleague Phil Levine, we’ve done a lot of work on this. What we suggest is probably the single best explanation, which is like a catchall explanation for why fertility is down in the US and other high-income countries is because of shifting priorities. This isn’t a value statement. This is when you look at the way the more recent cohorts of young adults are choosing to spend their time and money in their twenties and thirties, they’re spending more time and money on establishing their career, on working, on leisure pursuits, and they’re choosing parenthood to a much lesser degree.

Click over to read the whole transcript. If you get stopped by a paywall in reading the transcript, you can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts.

Best of the Web

NYT: The Many Love Lives of Ted Turner - Known as a playboy, the media mogul gave his paramours and three ex-wives plenty of stories to tell. He also managed to stay friendly with many of them

NY Mag: Can You Really Choose Your ‘Best Baby’? - Silicon Valley-backed companies are selling $50,000 genetic tests to anxious parents, despite shaky science

WSJ: Young New Yorkers Have a New Hot Spot: Sunday Mass (gift link) - Gen Z is flocking to church for community, faith and dates thanks to meetup groups such as ‘Pizza to Pews’ and ‘Holy Girl Walk’

Ryan Burge: Who Marries Whom? Faith, Partners, and the Unequally Yoked

NYT: Speak, Yuppie (gift link) - A look back at the original 1980s yuppie phenomenon. A great read.

But perhaps we were too dismissive of the yuppies. So much of what we take for granted today — from our meritocratic rat race to our gentrified neighborhoods to our culture of overwork, fitness training and foodie obsession — was born in the yuppie-made 1980s. In that moment, they fashioned a bargain that we are still living with: An increasingly diverse professional class signed up for a life of hard-won affluence, at the cost of deep inequality for everyone else.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was a guest on the podcast of the Show-Me Institute in Missouri discussing city-county merger in St. Louis. This is one of the best and most nuanced looks at this type of government merger that you are likely to see.

New this week:

• The Lives We Won’t Give Up - We mourn what we’ve lost to modernity, yet we won’t surrender what replaced it.

• Protestantism’s Institutional Problem - A guest essay from Jordan Cooper on a serious hurdle to Protestant academics