Sex, marriage, risk compensation, and the overwhelming pull of the equilibrium
How to know the difference between real progress and temporary progress paid for by future generations
Better… for now
Imagine you’re a US factory in the middle of WWII. You discover that if you shifted around the assembly line, that you could increase production by 5%. You’re encouraged by the success and look for more opportunities. You find that you don’t need to let a piece of metal cool all the way before proceeding to the next step. In fact, it helps to have it be hot and malleable. You shave another 10%. You look for efficiency improvements everywhere, but where do you stop? Should you?
There are some changes that are measurably good, but long-term are useless. This is the biggest risk to taking a data-driven approach. Say you implement a new management technique for your company. You measure performance of your employees. You discover a 10% improvement. You decide to keep the change. Little do you realize that performance improved not because of the change you were measuring but because you were measuring in the first place.
Another example: you recognize that car collisions are going to be less likely if cars are further apart when they drive down the road. You make a road wider in some segment of road, while keeping the speed limit the same. You measure traffic accidents and find that many lives are saved. You immediately make it a political priority to build wider roads as a measure to save lives. What happens? People drive faster, buy bigger cars, and drive more carelessly. Eventually, traffic accidents go back to what they were, but now the roads are wider. Is this an improvement?
Another example is when web designers / UX people realized that pre-checking a checkbox to sign you up for newsletters gets people to sign up to their newsletter when they make a website account. Websites started doing this all over the place. Now nobody wants to sign up for anything with their email account.
My point is people adapt to new situations. Is it safer to ride with or without a bike helmet? Well, it depends on whether the sorts of risks you’ll be taking with one are greater than the alternative. People adapt to perceived risk. If the risk is lowered, they take more chances. If it’s higher, they’re more careful.
When it comes to public policy, people tend to go for what feels right and then look for justification to prove it. Proving is often not too hard. Nudging people’s behavior a couple degrees one way or another isn’t rocket science. In financial terms, it’s a form of arbitrage. You find a gap that can be taken advantage of. People applaud you for being a good person, and yet the world becomes safer for say 10 years while the burden of the extra safety is paid indefinitely.
Fun… for now
Addictive games and addictive apps make use of nudging as well. They hijack our reward centers to get us to keep clicking, scrolling, and refreshing. We feel great in the moment, but the costs are only seen long-term when we look back at our lives and ask where the time has gone. The internet is nothing new when it comes to this. Previous generations had their own poisons. People had newspapers, books, and movies.
There’s a difference between public policy changes and media. Public policy takes a while to change. There’s process and infrastructure that needs updating. Media is different. With media, the thing entertaining you isn’t Facebook per se, it’s what’s on Facebook. People find new ways to get attention just as you adapt and get bored of the old ways. At one point, the ice bucket challenge was cool, but we get bored. No, problem! The internet finds something new.
I lied a little about media. There is a mechanical component of it. Before, you did have to do a little legwork to either pick up a newspaper or watch a movie in theaters. Now, there’s an addictive casino in your pocket with movies and news.
We normally like to think flooding the market with a good or service drives down its price. In the case of media it certainly does. But the advent of the like button means the most addictive content bubbles to the top so we never get bored.
Sex
Now let’s talk about sex. Modern sex has the fun and the better parts figured out.
Modern women find themselves getting married later and later. It’s common for women to get married at age 30, when 90% of their eggs are already gone. We can’t push marriage back much further than we already do. Actually, we can if women start freezing their eggs.
Some women say they don’t need a man anyways and some blame men for not committing. However, I think what’s happened is that men and women have simply adapted to a series of new technologies and what we’re seeing are the unintended consequences. As a society, we’ve destabilized an old system. Even if the old system was bad, destabilizing it doesn’t guarantee a better life for everyone right away.
A summary of key technologies in sex:
Condoms
STD tests and medications
The birth control pill
The day after pill
Abortions
All of the above have done something very special: they’ve lowered the cost of sex. Sex used to be far more dangerous. But now, sleeping with someone on a first date is hardly surprising. In fact, people want to know if there’s chemistry so sex is an important part of modern dating.
If people compensated for the reduced risk we’d expect sex to increasingly become more dangerous until society reaches an equilibrium. STDs love it when sex is common so if AIDs and other diseases can spread faster than they can be managed, then risk will continue to go up.
Another risk is pregnancy. This is blasphemous to mention, but it’s true. Safe sex is only as safe as two consenting adults want it to be. Despite all the technology, unwed births are going up. However, total births are going down. So maybe safe sex is able to keep pregnancies down, but isn’t it odd that it mostly affects unwed mothers. This is a tragic irony, and worth digging into.
Women get married later than they used to, and by a lot. The average age of marriage in 1950 was 20 for women. Yes, 20. You might say modern men take 10 more years than normal to decide if they love a woman enough to marry her. How could this be?
In this case I’d like to blame social policy. Like before, I believe people have certain risk tolerances and things will go back to an equilibrium eventually. It may take decades.
Women like to marry men they admire and respect. However, there’s a problem with this. Men want to marry women they’re attracted to. Or rather, men want to sleep with attractive women. The difference between sleeping with lots of women with no strings attached is preferable to marriage… until you want kids of course. High quality women will twist the man’s arm into getting a marriage. Why twist? Modern marriages are brittle. They have a 50% chance of dissolution, and since it’s overwhelmingly women initiating these divorces, men find marriage a risky proposition. It’s a bet of half your wealth + future unearned wealth that the woman of your dreams won’t divorce you. If this woman is really the woman of your dreams, chances are she’s settling for you. But she’s also getting older and her body clock is ticking.
You could say men shouldn’t be so selfish about their money. I’m not going to argue that point. The arguments are very good and there are many. Women have powerful reasons to get married. Men balance their risks and rewards just as women do. In the end, we have 50% men and 50% women. Both sides are trying to optimize, and we should end up with people getting matched up eventually, and yet they don’t.
From the guy’s perspective, sex before marriage may be preferable. It’s so close to marriage sex that it almost doesn’t matter that he’s not married. The animal brain doesn’t know about condoms and birth control. It feels like real sex, and yet it’s an illusion. It’s the same feeling that you might get from reading the news. You’ve spent a bunch of time and have experienced a bunch of emotions, but you’re left without a clear plan of action for your life. A guy with a girlfriend is essentially getting the experience that would be similar to that of a wife from the past. A date gets him something like what would be a mistress experience. It’s a bad deal for women. As they say “why pay for the cow when you get the milk for free”. It’s understandable how this turns into man-hating
However, once married, the tables turn for women. Suddenly, life is great. The only problem is the woman wonders if she could have done better. Sex feels like marriage, and it adds to a woman’s baggage. It makes it harder for her to be too excited about married life when she doesn’t even need to image what could have been. She’s already lived it. And yet she still has to pay the ultimate cost and bear the children of the man who would marry her, and not the man she would like to have proposed.
Why do we have to many unwed women? I think it’s because some women are beauty objects and yet they’re a net negative to a man’s life. This is a tricky situation because beauty gets attention, and she has options that won’t materialize. The men would consider marriage with such women if the deal was better. As it stands, women are presumed to know what’s best for the child and get to get up a leave the marriage on a whim. Women say communication can fix this and if a man really loves a woman... but let’s stop there. Such arguments have their place and they are effective, but I’ve personally learned to tune them out. Women have to up their game because the pull of the equilibrium is a strong force that isn’t easily overcome.
For beautiful, but burdensome women, life it’s possible that life is just as bad no matter what solution gets implemented. The currents situation means such women don’t get proposed to by the sorts of men who would be willing to tolerate such a woman if the deal was better. However, if the deal was better, then it would come at the expense of the woman’s happiness and autonomy. The man would be making more of the decisions for her.
In short, no fault divorce and birth control have done several things:
Lowered the cost of sex
Increased the cost of marriage for men
Increased years of single life for women
Made premarital sex indistinguishable from married sex
I think I’m starting to understand what the economist Tyler Cowen means when he says “solve for the equilibrium”. Any solution that doesn’t consider the opposing forces at play is doomed to fail. We don’t want to make lots of changes and end up right back where we started. Some technologies create new equilibriums, and the differential between and advanced society and a neighboring backwards one helps to benefit the advanced one. Slavoj Žižek also has an important piece of wisdom when he says “Don’t act. Just think.”. Sometimes we have to slow down. The areas where we should are in: policy and in media. Perhaps even some technologies need to be slowed down. It’s hard to say. I suspect there are compelling reasons for why things have changed, even if I might not know what they are.
As silly as it may seem, I think a great filter for trying to figure out if something is good or bad is whether the change will help or hurt the goal of terraforming Mars for humans. The goodness of any technology depends on the context and its use. I have a hard time finding a better filter than Mars. If it’s good for Mars it’s good for you and me.