We tend to overuse the term “existential crisis.” Politicians and self-described cultural leaders in the mainstream media and Hollywood are particularly guilty of being Chicken Littles. They tell us that unless we adopt economy-destroying policies, climate change will doom us to mass starvation, flooded coastal cities, and a constant barrage of category-five hurricanes. Some thought leaders on the other side of the political spectrum warn that we’re entering a period where a group of a few hundred thousand global elitist supervillains with enormous IQs will depopulate the planet and keep the rest of us as techno-serfs.
Yet we have a more apparent and obvious threat to our future due to cultural and economic changes never seen before. The populations of many advanced nations, from Finland to Australia and from the United States to Italy, are suffering from fertility rates that are significantly below the levels required to maintain current populations. Adding to the issue is that we have an economic system that requires an increase in consumers and productive workers. Immigration has largely been used as a way of dealing with this issue, but it’s debatable whether or not this form of population growth is equal in outcome to the organic method of the local population having children.
It may seem like a leap of the imagination, but much of the current population issue is a result of modern dating culture. Simply, families aren’t being formed. Women are having fewer children and at a significantly older average age. More children are currently likely to grow up raised by a single mother due to divorce occurring early in the child’s life, women engaging in recreational sex and electing to keep their baby, or the “I’m a proud independent women and I don’t need no man!” syndrome.
Children who are raised by single mothers end up being less productive in the sense of the word as we use it in economics. They'll end up with lower incomes, on average, and are more likely to engage in criminal behavior. We can debate the reasons for this, but this reality is indisputable. This has enormous implications for the future of the economy.
When I was a young single man in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, there was a saying that “women give sex to get love and men give love to get sex.” Although this may seem cringe-worthy by our current standards, it had some validity. Men have always wanted sex, and for most of our history, the main way to get sex for the large majority of men was to marry, as few reached the heights of power of Genghis Khan or King Solomon. Marriage was, for the vast majority of men, the only way to acquire regular consensual sex. Dating in my day may have involved premarital sex, as we were in the post-sexual revolution, but the intention for most was to eventually find a spouse and have children. We were just too embarrassed to admit it.
The world has changed since then. Women have become more educated and joined the workforce. They’re deferring children and marriage, by their own choice in some cases but by the choice of men in a larger respect. Independent of one’s moral take, women have become more promiscuous, sleeping with a much larger number of men than they were 50 years ago. The exact numbers are difficult to assess because women who engage in promiscuity tend to undercount the number of sexual encounters they’ve had in surveys, possibly due to residual shame and the knowledge that men are far less likely to have a long-term relationship with a woman with many past lovers.
Women’s newfound sexual freedom had the unforeseen consequence of freeing men from “putting a ring on it.” They could now have access to sex without obligation. Women, in turn, were free to explore sexual freedom and avoid motherhood until they entered middle age, but they had to work to support themselves. This provided the economic elite with more cheap labor, as the law of supply and demand also applies to labor markets and more consumers with discretionary income.
Women, for their part, are engaging in sex but having difficulty finding husbands and future fathers of their children for two main reasons. One is that women are unrealistic. In surveys and interviews, young women have a stated preference for men that make significantly over $100,000 and are over 6 feet tall. This cohort of potential mates is less than 1 percent of men. I suspect that many of these highly sought-after men are happy to sleep around, as their choices are many, or are already married, as wise and attractive women have seized the opportunity.
The baby boomers were the first double-income generation. This had the effect of bidding up home prices as family income soared. They’re retiring, are retired, and are beginning to pass away. As their homes enter the market, there will be fewer buyers, as birth rates have declined and there are fewer double-income households. House prices are also high relative to income, fueled by years of artificially low mortgage rates. People will continue to retire and their benefits will have to be paid by a shrinking number of productive taxpayers.
The economy will grow less in the future, which many expect is in part due to our dating culture. It’s pointless to blame feminism, misogyny, pornography, or family laws that destroy men financially and make marriage a high-risk behavior on the part of men. We have a problem and it needs to be addressed.
A society that legally and financially encourages strong marriage and loving child-rearing is needed, but that demands cultural changes. The first step would be a reform of family laws that currently make marriage undesirable for all but the poorest of men, and rebuilding the tax system to incentivize family formation and children.
