Thursday, October 21, 2010

A simple truth about the divorce rate

It's sometimes reported that the divorce rate is 50%. That figure, apparently, was a prediction based on the peak rate of divorce in the US in the mid-90s: it was the highest estimate of what the lifetime risk might be (current predictions seem to be around 40%).

Understandably the 50% figure spooks many young men. Under current no fault divorce laws, a man can be divorced by his wife without having done anything wrong and end up paying child support to help finance her life with a new man. It's reasonable for men to consider this unjust and to believe that they are not being protected under current laws.

So let me start by saying that divorce laws need to be reformed and, if we want to restore faith in marriage as an institution, we need to find ways to lower the overall divorce rate.

But having said that, something important needs to be pointed out. The divorce rate is not so high for everyone. Some people have an extremely high risk of divorce, others a low risk.

I looked up my own risk of divorce using a "divorce calculator" (which I'll link to later on) and it showed only an 8% risk of divorce after eight years of marriage.

So what are the factors affecting the risk of divorce?

a) The risk is much higher if the wife marries at a very young age. For instance, 8 years after marriage 42% of women who married under the age of 18 are divorced; 35% of women who married at ages 18 and 19; but only 25% of those aged 20 to 24.

The protective effect of waiting doesn't continue after age 25, at least not when longer term trends are considered.

b)  Parental marital stability. If your parents divorced you're 40% more likely to divorce yourself. If your parents married others after divorce the figure rises to 90%.

c) Education & income. Any university level education reduces the risk of divorce by 13%. Having an income over US$50,000 reduces the risk by 30%.

d) Ethnicity. Divorce risk varies by ethnicity, with Asian couples being least likely to divorce, then whites, then blacks (the white rate of divorce in the US is 32%). Interracial marriages are less stable on average, with black male/white female marriages having double the risk of divorce compared to the white average.

e) It seems too that the more sexual partners a woman has before marriage, and the younger she becomes sexually active, the higher the risk of divorce.

These are just some of the more easily measurable factors connected to marital instability. There are no doubt others, including attitudes held to both marriage and divorce, mental health, financial responsibility, the level marital stability or instability within a peer group and so on.

The point to be made is that the risk of divorce for some men at least is still relatively low. There may be some men out there who believe that they have a 50% risk when the real risk is more like 15%. There's a "marriage calculator" here which plots in a few of the factors involved; as I wrote earlier, my own risk of divorce at this point in time was 8% (rising to 10% after ten years).

47 comments:

  1. You forgot to mention frequency of attending religious services, which has a significant impact (over 30% drop in divorce rates, according to GSS data), with active Catholics having the lowest rates, for obvious reasons.

    Interracial marriages are less stable on average, with black male/white female marriages having double the risk of divorce compared to the white average.

    True, but misleading (as Chuck discusses here). Describing it that way makes it seem like the main factor is "interracial", when the statistics you site (and all other statistics I've seen) prove that is not the defining reason that BM/WF couples have such high divorce rates. They have such a high divorce rate because they are marriage involving the two sub-groups with the highest divorce rates (black men and white women). The average is so high because BM/WF couples are very numerous and have really high divorce rates, so they skew the overall picture.

    It is only BM/WF interracial marriages that are significantly less stable than the average. From the report you cite:

    Although results from Table 3 showed an elevated likelihood of divorce across marriage cohorts for intermarried couples, the results from multivariate analyses showed that this experience was not
    shared across all combinations of intermarriage. The types of differences that create the greatest risk of divorce were race-, ethnicity-, and gender specific.

    Intermarriages that did not cross a racial barrier, which was the case for White/Hispanic White couples, had statistically similar likelihoods of divorcing as White/White marriages. Racial differences in marriage, on the other hand, correspond to higher
    divorce rates but mostly in marriages where the White spouse is female.
    NH Black husband/White wife marriages were twice as likely to divorce as
    White/White couples, and NH Asian husband/White wife couples were 59% more likely, according to Model II.

    Highlighting the role of gender in
    interracial dynamics, the reverse combinations actually
    showed a lower or similar risk of divorce
    . White husband/NH Black wife couples were 44% less
    likely to divorce than White/White couples, and White husband/NH Asian wife couples were only
    4% more likely to divorce by Year 10...

    We find that although interracial
    marriages overall are more vulnerable to divorce, this
    reflects the experience of some but not all couples. According to the adjusted models predicting divorce as of their 10th year of marriage, interracial marriages
    that are most vulnerable involve White females and non-White males (with the exception of White females/Hispanic White males) relative to White/White couples. Conversely, White men/non-White women couples show either very little or no differences in divorce rates; or, as in the case of White men and Black women, are substantially less likely than White/White couples to divorce by their 10th year.

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  2. I got 14% (some college) and my husband (college grad) gets 8%, using your test. Factoring in everything else, the divorce rate is most certainly in the lower single digits for our cohort. Using NFP already puts us at 5%, so that doesn't surprise me at all.

    Interesting topic.

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  3. 20-25 seems like a good age for the women, with 25-30 the best for the men. Very young men are often overwhelmed by their wives and usually don't earn enough to support a family yet. With the women, you wouldn't want to wait much longer, as her fertility begins to decline rapidly after 28.

    I was 23 and my husband 30, when we married. That's a very pleasant age-differential, somewhere between 5 and 10 years. An older husband carries more natural authority and has stronger nerves, I think. And if the wife his still quite young, the husband gets to enjoy her youth a bit.

    As for teenage wives: I think women should perhaps spend that time educating themselves and preparing for marriage. With modern delayed maturity, 18 now seems awfully young to marry.

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  4. The correlation between "number of sexual partners before marriage" and "probability of divorce within 7 years or less" for women seems pretty strong to me. The hookup culture is therefore destroying the marriageability of women who participate in it.

    Women are more socially oriented than men, as a group. That is, the first question many women ask about an issue is "what do others think?" or "what are others doing?" rather than "what is right/just?". So the hookup culture is self-reinforcing; women who participate in it are seen as having more prestige than those who do not participate, leading to more women participating in it.

    The 'slut positive' variety of feminism also is contributing to the destruction of marriageability in women. By essentially trying to convince all young women to become promiscuous, the 'slut positive' feminists hope to raise their own prospects for long term relationships, as I see it.

    A young man would be a fool to marry a woman who has had "too many" sexual partners before him, and the research seems to suggest that any number greater than one is "too many". This is not to say that a woman who was promiscuous cannot reform, but it does indicate the chances are low she will. Reformed prostitutes were a factor in parts of the Anglosphere over a century ago; the "soiled doves" of the US West were the wives of many a man. But there was a tremendous informal pressure on married women to remain faithful in those days, exactly the opposite of today. Therefore, any young man who wants to have children and see them grow to adulthood would be well advised to seek out a virgin to marry. It would be wise for him to remain as chaste as possible as well. That's not my theology speaking (although it says that), that's the growing body of research on family formation speaking.

    Chastity before marriage appears to be a significant factor in the long term stability of marriages. The long term stability of marriages has a direct effect upon the creation and preservation of wealth, the furthering of knowledge, and other fusty old notions that just happen to underpin the civilization we are all currently living in.

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  5. It is also significant that the divorce of parents has an effect upon the ability of their children to form a lasting family bond. First of all, it refutes yet again the 1970's notions that "divorce is a private matter between two adults" and "people shouldn't have to stay together for their children".

    Second of all, it is another marker that young men should consider prior to marriage, although it seems to be less serious a factor than female promiscuity. Not just for the divorce risk, real as that is, but also because women who come from broken homes seem to be more anxious about their marriage (for good reason) and thus prone to various negative traits such as snooping into the husband's mail/email/text log, questioning him if he deviates from daily routine (comes home late), demanding regular proofs of love and fidelity, etc. Children of divorce tend to be less secure, it's a documented "feature".

    As smarter people than I have said, if there were a communicable disease that did to children what divorce or worse yet bastardy does (increased probabilities of drug abuse, early pregnancy, school failure, alcohol abuse, cheating on spouse, divorce, etc.) then there would be a massive campaign to develop a vaccine. However, since unilateral divorce is a convenient feature for the upper classes, it won't be going away any time soon.

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  6. Alte, I don't agree with your take on the interracial marriage statistics.

    You have to remember that what is being measured in the statistics is the rate of divorce in interracial marriages compared to the white average.

    So, for example, marriage between Asians has a significantly lower risk of divorce than marriage between whites.

    Therefore, when an Asian woman marries a white man you would think that the divorce rate would be lower than the white average - and this is the message often given at men's rights sites (i.e. the argument goes that Asian women are more traditional when it comes to marriage and so are less likely to divorce - which is true when Asians marry each other).

    But that doesn't happen. White husband/Asian wife marriages dissolve at a slightly higher rate (4%) than the white average. The low Asian rate of divorce doesn't carry over when white men marry Asian women.

    As for Asian man/white wife marriages, they fare even worse (a 60% higher chance of divorce than the white average).

    It's the same when it comes to hispanic marriages. These are more stable than the white average. But when hispanics intermarry the advantage is lost and divorce rates rise up toward the white average (14% higher when it's an hispanic husband/white wife combination, 5% lower when it's a white husband/hispanic wife combination).

    When it comes to white/black intermarriage the results are mixed. As mentioned in the post, black husband/white wife marriages are much less stable (108% higher chance of divorce - more than double).

    The exception to interracial marriage is the situation you are in, Alte, namely white husband/black wife marriages. These have a lower risk of divorce than the white or black average.

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  7. It gave me:

    People with similar backgrounds who are already divorced: 17% People with similar backgrounds who will be divorced over the next five years: 6%

    So yeah, not a huge risk.

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  8. I suspect a lot of white man/Asian woman marriages have low quality white males ordering catalogue brides, whereas the rare white male/black female marriages will tend to involve high quality mates on both sides, often of high social class.

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  9. But my premise is not that there is no difference in the divorce rates, but that they are not all (in fact, the majority are not) "less stable than the average". A 4% increase would take your own cohort's divorce rate from 8% to 12% (actually only 8.32%, but that is splitting statistical hairs), which isn't significant.

    It would be much more significant to consider which part of the country the couple came from, what religion they espouse, how often they attend church, or their nationality -- all factors you don't mention in your article.

    White men and white Hispanic men -- when married to Asian, Hispanic, or Black women -- have similar or LOWER rates of divorce. So, for white men and black women, interracial marriage is a statistically irrelevant or even positive factor when considering divorce rates. The only couples for whom interracial marriage correllates with significantly higher divorce rates are those involving white females, which is what the summary of the report also states.

    Technically, I'm in the worst group: "mixed race females". Racially-ambiguous women (but not men) are divorce-crazy, for obvious reasons.

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  10. I will speculate that interracial marriages virtually always will come with a higher risk of dissolution because of cultural aspects. We all go into marriage with a set of expectations and premises, and many of them are not conscious. It is the unconscious, unspoken premises/expectations that can all too often lead to conflicts within a marriage that neither partner really understands.

    Take a very simple example: displays of affection. Suppose that a man comes from a family where mother and father were somewhat formal with each other in front of the children, but affectionate in private, while his wife comes from a family where her parents touched each other a lot, kissed from time to time in front of the children, held hands, snuggled on the couch in the evening, and so forth.

    As long as it's just the two of them, this issue likely won't come up; in public, both of them won't have a problem being somewhat formal. But then children come along...

    She's going to expect to be treated as her mother was, and he's going to expect to treat her as his mother was. She's going to feel that he's ashamed of her, and he's going to feel uneasy at expectations he doesn't understand.

    This can lead to resentment on both sides; she feeling that he doesn't love her anymore because he's only affectionate in private, him feeling that she's placing unreasonable demands.

    And that's a simple case. Now consider a cross cultural marriage, between a black man and a white woman, or a white man and an asian woman. There'a a whole lot of cultural expectations each one is carrying that the other simply won't understand until they are explained.

    Years ago I was told that communications is important in marriage, along with manners. I'm still learning that...

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  11. I suspect a lot of white man/Asian woman marriages have low quality white males ordering catalogue brides, whereas the rare white male/black female marriages will tend to involve high quality mates on both sides, often of high social class.

    But the statistics already filter for social class (but not for the nationality, as you mentioned).

    In other words, I think there is a large amount of self-selection involved. I could imagine that Asian women who marry white men are more likely to be foreigners or are probably more "liberated" than those who marry Asian men. Anecodotal evidence that I've seen has pointed toward the fact that black women who "marry out" seem to be less divorce-inclined to begin with, and are often of milder and more submissive temperament.

    I was just disputing that interracial marriage correlates with higher divorce rates across the spectrum. In that, it is different than college education, divorce rates, etc. where the correllation is very signifant.

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  12. I suspect that the divorce rate is going to go through the roof in the next 10 - 15 years.

    The current rate of 50% includes our parents and grandparents generation who held more traditional views toward marriage (even many of the baby boomers). I simply cannot imagine half of Gen X and Gen Y married couples staying together "until death us do part"). I am 37 and already starting to see some of my peers divorce (for the most puerile reason I might add) after just several years of marriage.

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  13. Politics must come into it as well. I know lefties who are quite casual with the concept of divorce, eg long term monogomous relationships are impractiacal/impossible whilst more conservative people don't agree with that.

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  14. There's also a big religious component as well..

    Jews have a higher rate of divorce then other religions.
    Interfaith marriages have a super high rate etc etc etc

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  15. Alte wrote,

    "White men and white Hispanic men -- when married to Asian, Hispanic, or Black women -- have similar or LOWER rates of divorce. So, for white men and black women, interracial marriage is a statistically irrelevant or even positive factor when considering divorce rates."

    That may be true, but it's a benefit their descendants cannot enjoy for obvious reasons. Their sons won't be white and would therefore fall back into the same patterns of divorce such a marriage is supposed to improve upon in the first place, statistically speaking.

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  16. ''I looked up my own risk of divorce using a "divorce calculator" (which I'll link to later on) and it showed only an 8% risk of divorce after eight years of marriage.''

    It would be interesting to see my risk of divorce.

    A) I'm thinking of marrying in my mid 20's (24, 25 or 26) during med school (I turned 18 a month ago)
    B) My parents have been together for 25 years (both are engineers but my mother dropped out full-time and ever since only works part-time)
    C) 12 years to complete medical course, the medical branch I'm going into makes anywhere between 100 000 to 200 000 dollars per year and just like my mother I'm going into locum tenen (a part-time option for doctors)
    D) I'm mixed race and most likely marrying a doctor of African descent (my father's race)
    E) Christian and virgin but post-evangelical

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  17. I will speculate that interracial marriages virtually always will come with a higher risk of dissolution because of cultural aspects

    Exactly right. Shared culture is enormously important if a marriage is to be based on something other than sex.

    The problem with Caucasian men marrying Asian women is that the children from those unions usually identify as Asian. In most marriages with only one Caucasian person, the children will strongly identify with the race of the non-white parent, both because it's not cool to be white and because they will be non-white in appearance. When Caucasian people marry outside their race, they sunder themselves from their own people and damn their children to a lifetime of non-acceptance by either race.

    Walk around any U.S. military installation and you would think you could go to South Korea or the Philippines and not see a single native female. It's not uncommon to go to an on-post vendor and see it staffed with nothing but Filipinas. This craze of marrying Asian women jumps by an order of magnitude among the military, another disastrous dividend of empire.

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  18. It would be interesting to filter the data for military marriages, which are notoriously unstable.

    Their sons won't be white and would therefore fall back into the same patterns of divorce such a marriage is supposed to improve upon in the first place, statistically speaking.

    Not according to this study. Remember, white monoracial couples are the average, but they are not the lowest. Being white does not necessarily provide any additional protection from divorce. Their mixed-race sons have a below-average divorce rate. The lowest rate of the entire study, in fact.

    It is their mixed-race daughters who would have an elevated divorce rate. This is probably because of their broad sexual appeal and higher social status among minorities, which raises their ability to "trade up" (one of the main reasons women divorce).

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  19. We have to remember that women initiate most divorce and are mostly driven to it by hypergamy, so women who are married to men they consider "higher status" than themselves will generally have a lower divorce rate than those married to men they consider "lower status". That aspect alone would help explain the data in the study.

    Women (and children, for that matter) are actually very culturally malleable, and will change to suit their husbands/fathers if they respect him and are close to him. Women being traded is common throughout history, and they have been selected for their ability to adapt.

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  20. Shared culture is enormously important if a marriage is to be based on something other than sex.

    That is probably true, and the study acknowledges that in the introduction, but doesn't address it. The study is only about race, and doesn't take into account any fruther aspects of culture, such as nationality, political views, or religion.

    If you look at Table 3 in the study, you will see that interracial marriage was associated with similar or LOWER rates of divorce until the 1985 cohort, which belies the idea that culture or the nature of interracial marriage is the main factor. Culture is actually becoming more homogeneous over time, not more differentiated. And the stigma of interracial marriage is also dropping, so such marriages are getting easier not harder.

    That implies that something else drove the increase in divorce rates thereafter, with the divorce-rate differential narrowing again in the late 90s.

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  21. JCS,

    I have to disagree with you. The push for white men to marry Asian women comes from men's rights activists, who promote it as an alternative to unstable, feminist inspired Western marriage.

    But it's not a sensible strategy. As the statistics show, such marriages are slightly less, rather than more, durable than marriages between whites. It's not an effective way for men to try to protect themselves from the effects of divorce.

    There's a blog I'd recommend that you read at length. It's written by an Australian doctor who is married to a Chinese wife. It describes both the good times but also the very real difficulties involved in such a marriage.

    One of the stresses on the relationship is the break up of similar partnerships in the doctor's social circle.

    I won't link to the site directly, but you can copy and paste the following link:

    http://interacialmarriage.blogspot.com/

    Some interesting posts include:

    http://interacialmarriage.blogspot.com/2010/01/dna-envy-and-dinner-conversation.html

    http://interacialmarriage.blogspot.com/2010/03/some-cross-cultural-problems-in-our.html

    http://interacialmarriage.blogspot.com/2009/11/shower-heat-lamp.html

    And here's one about a Russian bride who also acted in a mercenary way toward her Australian husband:

    http://interacialmarriage.blogspot.com/2010/10/re-writing-history.html

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  22. Let us not conflate race, nationality, and ethnicity. Those are three distinct aspects of culture. That doctor's experience would be very different if his wife was a native-born Australian of Asian descent. She would still be "Asian" but their culture would probably be much more similar.

    I think that Western men aren't only interested in Asian women because of a presumed-lower divorce rate, but also because they are believed to generally be higher-quality wives. I don't think a 4% elevated divorce rate would be enough to deter most of them, if that were true.

    I do know that international marriages in Germany (the majority of which involve German men) have a significantly lower-than-average divorce rate. Their divorce rate drops again when German women's international marriages (which mostly involve Turkish men) are excluded from the statistic. That would provide support for the argument that "marrying out" can allow a Western man to "marry up" in wifely quality.

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  23. Alte,

    I don't think on average that Asian women are higher quality wives.

    I don't even think that that's the motivation of the Western men who prefer Asian women.

    Western culture was once highly successful in producing "family men". These were not your dashing alpha male types who made women's hearts beat faster. They were men who were highly focused on getting things done at work and as fathers, and who cultivated the qualities necessary for this (perseverance, duty, loyalty, reliability etc).

    It was once the case that these men could offer young women important goods, such as material security, a home of her own, children. So women who married these men were inclined to think of them as "good men" and over time this led to respect and love (there was a saying in the nineteenth century, almost inconceivable now, that "beauty in a woman is a reward for goodness in a man").

    The world has come crashing down for this whole layer of men. Feminism has "liberated" white women to be independent and self-sufficient and to pursue the more exciting alpha types when they are in their 20s.

    What are white men to do? There have always been men from the less stable part of the working-class who weren't able to offer women much in the way of material security. Such men compensated for this by being much more attuned to what triggered female attraction. They spent a lot more time cultivating a self-image designed to appeal to female psychology.

    There are now a lot more white men who are "proletarianising" themselves in this way as an adaptation to the modern reality.

    But not all Western men are going to do this. First, because some men from very well-established middle-class cultures aren't going to want to proletarianise themselves. Second, because Western men are used to the freedom of focusing productively on their own pursuits, and cultivating the qualities for such pursuits, rather than having to focus their energies less productively on cultivating an image designed to trigger female attraction.

    Enter the Asian female. The most attractive Asian women do not, in my experience, usually go for "good but not dashing" Western men. But more middlingly attractive Asian women sometimes will.

    This might be because Asian cultures are still a little more traditional. It might be because Asian women are attracted to the DNA of Western men (wrongly thinking they will have fairer children). It might be because Western men have a height/testosterone advantage on average over Asian men, so that the "good but not dashing" Western man will still seem quite masculine. It might be because Asian culture is more materialistic, so Asian women still value career status and income in their husbands more than white women do.

    Whatever the reason, the white men who want to do things the old way, and not make the adaptation to the new dating reality, might find Asian women to be a more available option. I think that's more of the reason why there are so many white male/female Asian couplings, rather than Asian women making superior wives (which is not borne out by divorce statistics).

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  24. Culture is actually becoming more homogeneous over time, not more differentiated. And the stigma of interracial marriage is also dropping, so such marriages are getting easier not harder.

    I'd say that's wishful thinking. I don't know what you mean by culture becoming more homogeneous. We as humans are just as divided now as we've ever been, which is the natural order of things. The lessening of the stigma around interracial marriage is another symptom of our overall decay as a society and not something a conservative would celebrate; a people who believe in themselves keep their women within the fold, and shame them when necessary. If Caucasians are ever again able to reaffirm their right to survive as a people, the stigma on interracial marriage will strengthen accordingly.

    There is also a new, more subtle stigma developing as we learn more about the myriad heartaches of mixed-race children.

    That doctor's experience would be very different if his wife was a native-born Australian of Asian descent. She would still be "Asian" but their culture would probably be much more similar.

    We've seen the failure of this notion in America and throughout the West. Non-whites who are many generations removed from their immigrant forebears will often harbor a very romantic notion of their mother-country and identify with it at the expense of the host country. They create their own subcultures and take pains to set themselves even further apart from the host culture (even blacks have their own rather obvious subculture). They agitate not for their adopted country but for their tribe. Your Australian-born Asian woman will never really understand what it means to be an Australian, just as she and her white husband will never really understand each other.

    Sorry, but modern day America provides ample evidence of the failure of the melting pot concept. Some chasms are simply unbridgeable.

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  25. JCS,
    You sound like a real jerk for insulting and threatening the site owner like that. You can make a point without screaming at him.

    I don't think on average that Asian women are higher quality wives.

    I never said they were. I don't really know many Asian women, and none of them well. My point is about -- to put it crudely -- buying power. As you yourself note, a good Western white man can often "punch above his weight" among minority women. If he limited himself to white Western women, then he'd be stuck fighting with a bunch of other guys over a lower-quality woman, or being celibate, or acting like a prole.

    But I see it with most of the international and interacial couples I know. If the husband is white, the woman is generally unusually young, intelligent, well-educated, pleasant, and attractive. You can even see the dichotomy with German male / Eastern European female couples. The women often look drop-dead gorgeous and the man's just a regular guy. This is "marrying up" phenomenon is documented statistically here (in German).

    At any rate, my original point was that the interracial divorce statistics you presented reflect such status differences, which I found interesting. I really like statistics.

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  26. The most attractive Asian women do not, in my experience, usually go for "good but not dashing" Western men. But more middlingly attractive Asian women sometimes will.

    That's a good point, and I missed it on first reading.

    Yes, I think it's the same universally. The 9s and 10s generally get a Top Quality Man from their own group, and are less interested in marrying outside of that. I think it gets harder for the 7s and 8s, though. They're attractive enough that they feel like they should have a TQM, but -- because of the polygamous nature of feminism -- they have no chance other than to share one or be a pump-n-dump. They probably aren't willing to sink to that level (like the good-enough men aren't interested in acting like a prole), so they look for a TQM in a less competitive field, where the men have a higher status because of their race. There they can use their looks to shoulder their way past the 5s and 6s, and land a 6 Man who gets a bump up to an 8 by virtue of being white. Better a 6 White Man for yourself alone than sharing an 8 Black Man, for instance.

    That's a very strong meme in the Buppie community (and has inspired a lot of books lately), so it wouldn't surprise me if the dynamic is also (more subtly) at work in Asian ones.

    China's a bit of an exception to this because it's One Child Policy has made women such a scarce resource. In the black community it is the other way around: there are way more eligible black women than eligible black men. The Economist wrote about that here:

    http://www.economist.com/node/15867956

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  27. Let us not conflate race, nationality, and ethnicity.

    Rubbish. This is what liberals say when they want to destroy white nations, races, and cultures. Until recently, each white nation was associated with a specific race and ethnic group. Most non-white nations still are.

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  28. "[parental divorce] is another marker that young men should consider prior to marriage, although it seems to be less serious a factor than female promiscuity."

    How many parents re-marry after divorce?

    I was surprised to read: "If your parents married others after divorce the figure rises to 90%."

    Astonishing. I suspect children of such divorcees have quick access to advice and "positive" models encouraging them to break their first marriage rather than reform it. Perhaps children of faithful parents just don't know how to divorce.

    The figure helps explain a recent divorce:

    Two virgins who led my church young adult group married in their mid-early 20s after five years of dating. Though the parish was "liberal" Catholic, both rejected contraception and used NFP.

    Within a year, the wife began an affair with a friend from high school. The marriage ended, against his will.

    Both her parents were remarried after divorce.

    Her poor upstanding husband was heartbroken. What will happen to his kids' marriage chances if he remarries and becomes a father?

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  29. JCS, I've reluctantly removed your two comments, in part for bad language, but also for abusiveness.

    You've made some good contributions previously and I'm happy for you to continue to post comments here.

    BTW, I wasn't attempting to "shame" you for anything. I thought I was discussing the meaning of the divorce statistics with Alte.

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  30. Cry more JSC the comments weren't directed at you and were a legitimate expression of opinion. Its unfortunate that your posts had to be taken down because you made good points.

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  31. Generally speaking, there are fewer people in higher income brackets than the lower income brackets. Thus, the error associated with calculating the divorce rates of higher income brackets is higher than that associated with the lower income brackets.

    Women with higher incomes may very well be happily married to men with equal or higher incomes than themselves. However, I would hazard a guess that richer women are not content being married to men who make significantly less than they do. These marriages are likely to persist because richer women figure it is better to stay in the marriage than shell out alimony and/or child support. We don't know how many unhappy marriages there are not just in this group but in general. We also do not know how many rich women are single because there are no 'good' men out there. The perception that richer women may be more eligible than poorer women is skewed by this fact.

    Women who attain higher education would be the ones with higher income. They are also likely to be older than women with lesser education. This would reduce the higher education benefit.

    I don't know whether a correlation exists between college education to an extent and promiscuity but I would think one does. This would reduce the university education benefit.

    With women increasingly outearning men, it is likely that more women will not marry and that there will be more bitter marriages.

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  32. Until recently, each white nation was associated with a specific race and ethnic group.

    Rubbish. Tell that to someone who wasn't born and raised in Europe.

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  33. JCS,

    There are a number of solutions to difficulties with feminism including staying single and turning gay. A few solutions are however more valuable than others. You don't have to be a feminist to have some concerns about inter racial marriage.

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  34. Rubbish. This is what liberals say when they want to destroy white nations, races, and cultures. Until recently, each white nation was associated with a specific race and ethnic group. Most non-white nations still are.

    Rubbish. Tell that to someone who wasn't born and raised in Europe.


    Racially, the same is true of America and Australia. America was overwhelmingly Western Caucasian for the majority of its history. Our meteoric rise to prominence (and all the advances that went with it) was almost totally the work of white people.

    The browning of Caucasian countries corresponds with their decline. All the libertarianism in the world will not move that mountain.

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  35. Van Wijk,

    My response was not about race, but about the idea that "each white nation was associated with a specific race and ethnic group". That would only be true if it read "each white nation was associated with a specific race", and then it would be merely redundant (obviously a "white nation" is associated with the "white race").

    But the second part "each white nation was associated with a specific ethnic group" is clearly false. North America was colonized by multiple ethnic groups, not just one (although the English like to pretend that they were always alone here). The European nation-state boundaries also do not match up with the ethnic groups. That's been one of the main causes for intra-European warfare throughout history.

    I was disputing the idea that "white" is an ethnic group in Europe. It isn't; it is a racial classifier and it encompasses many people that Americans would not consider white (such as myself). The Celts are obviously a different ethnic group from the Slavs and different again from the Alsatians. That is like saying "black" is an ethnic group, and ignoring the differences between Moroccans and Zambians. Or saying "Asian" is an ethnic group, and lumping the Japanese and the Kurds together. The reason Americans conflate race and ethnicity is because Americans tend to lose their ethnic ties (in the infamous melting pot, which was actually assimilation to English ethnicity), and all that remains are physical similarities (race).

    Race is all they have left.

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  36. The browning of Caucasian countries corresponds with their decline.

    That is true, but the "browning" (i.e. high immigration rates) is a symptom of that, but not the cause. There are plenty of Western countries killing themselves off well enough without the help of any brown people at all. Just look at Eastern Europe. Latvia has a 1.5 fertility rate. Dead as a doornail and pale as a ghost.

    Once they've all died off (which they seem quite determined to do), the brown people will be free to move in unencumbered -- immigration laws be damned. What is the point of immigration laws if there are only a bunch of doddering elderly to defend the border? In Europe, they increasingly have their brown people defending the border against the foreign brown people, which is little more than a farce, and unsustainable.

    Why else do you think Sarkozy never called out the military to deal with the rioters?

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  37. Alte,

    If you looked at Latvia closer they probably wouldn't be that bad. I imagine they'd have a strong Church attendance. They certainly have a strong national identity and desire to defend their country. Their young men I'm sure accept and do compulsory military service.

    What they do have is a low birth rate. However, if you looked at just the white birth rate in Western countries it would be equally low.

    Latvia has the need to increase its birth rate. We on the other had have to incorporate new citizens and increase our birth rate. We also have to fight the increasing uselessness and self indulgence of our people. Whilst East Europeans are willing to move to countries like the UK and work hard.

    Additionally the Arab countries may have strong birth rates but they're a rabble. Their performance in the War on Terror out of a potential population of millions has been pissweak.

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  38. Only 4% of Latvians attend church services weekly, the lowest rate in all of Europe. There is a small Christian minority, and they are doing well (of course).

    Latvians have a life-expectancy of only 71.6, which puts it at the bottom of the European tables. This is mostly due to widespread drug and alcohol abuse, high rates of HIV/AIDS, endemic tuberculosis, and a 34/100,000 suicide rate among men (a record low for that country, but still higher than any other European country). Latvia has Europe's highest poverty risk rate and highest rate of material deprivation, and both are concentrated among the working population. Latvia no longer has compulsory military service and the state is nearly bankrupt.

    From here (based upon Latvian state statistics):
    "Latvia saw a catastrophic decline of GDP of 18% in 2010 and its welfare state has been decimated to a degree unparalleled anywhere else in Europe (at least so far). From 2008 to 2009, births fell by 9.5% and marriages, a very rough indicator of future fertility, fell by a truly stunning 23.3%. The decline continued into 2010, with births in Jan-Mar falling by 11.6% and marriages declining by 22.4% on the same period in 2009. Since Latvia’s total fertility rate was a not too healthy 1.45 back in 2008, this means that it is now in one of the deepest demographic chasms in Europe."

    Whilst East Europeans are willing to move to countries like the UK and work hard.

    Yes, but that is the problem. You can see the same migratory pattern within Germany, from East to West. Such movements merely hasten the death of the areas left behind. An aging country like Latvia can't survive such a drain of it's best and youngest, because the welfare state will quickly go bankrupt which will create a mass-exodus of the remaining youth.

    The Middle Eastern countries aren't much more religious, young, or aspiring than Eastern Europe. Palistine is an exception that merely proves the rule.

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  39. My original point was just that some of the posters on here have it backwards: Western countries aren't declining because of immigration. They have high immigration rates because they are declining.

    High immigration rates are a sign of a boom hitting it's peak (like West Germany during the Wunderjahren). But after the boom comes a bust, and then everyone complains about the immigrants. The immigrants were allowed in because the fertility rate was declining, as the natives became too materialistic and selfish to reproduce at a sustainable rate.

    Now we have entered the period of decline. There must be decline in ephemeral wealth for the economy to recover (which could take decades). The problem is that the birth rate usually sinks during periods of economic decline, so that creates a death-spiral.

    As I see the ignorant and selfish way that the European and American public has been reacting to the current economic crises, I become increasingly pessimistic of the future of the West. Demography is destiny and it is a reflection of natural selection. If we don't reproduce, we have proven that we are unfit. Perhaps we deserve to die out.

    May the best culture win.

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  40. Good point about Latvia. I wouldn't disagree that our immigration rates are a partial consequence of structural difficulties within our countries. Nonetheless immigration poses its own problems. I don't think ever in our history has the proposition been put forward that others have the same right to live here, or that their citizenship is as valuable as ours,. Nor the idea that immigration should be inevitable or largely beyond our control. Immigration as an issue has the potential to kill our national identity and reduce its countries members to the state of semi confused individuals. Indeed this consequence is heralded as a positive advantage of immigration. Given that, immigration in our countries is an issue on its own right which must be faced regardless of other issues. In that respect countries that don’t have high immigration rates do have an advantage on that front.

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  41. Yes, I agree with all of that, Jesse. And of course I understand that mass-immigration can weaken the core of a society. I've seen that myself in Germany. My point was just that immigration is acerbating the problems, but not necessarily causing the problems.

    BTW, the Australian immigration boom is a sign that the economy is peaking because of housing and commodity bubbles. It's going to be nasty for everyone when they burst.

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  42. Race is all they have left.

    Which is why I specified "racially." America is proof that many European ethnicities can blend together to the degree necessary to forge a new people. It is also proof that nonwhite races cannot peaceably blend with the whites in the same country. Your point regarding ethnicities is academic at best.

    Once they've all died off (which they seem quite determined to do), the brown people will be free to move in unencumbered -- immigration laws be damned...

    Demography is destiny and it is a reflection of natural selection. If we don't reproduce, we have proven that we are unfit.


    And inevitability is the language of the tyrant.

    I have no problem with a reduced overall population. 198 million people is quite enough for a country the size of the United States. I also see no reason to have a baby-making competition with the Mexicans or the Moslems and end up living in some Gibson-esque urban nightmare. I'm sure Sun Tzu said something about allowing the enemy to choose the terms of the engagement.

    This is where "demography is destiny" runs off the rails. Your scenario assumes the peaceful outbreeding of the white population with the preservation of some semblance of good order, or at least the absence of war. It assumes the indefinite continuation of the Western, state-funded medical care that is required to keep the current breeding class disease-free and healthy. It assumes that huge numbers of immigrants (read: colonists) will maintain the country's first-world standards rather than reverting to those of their home countries. You assume far too much, and then despair.

    I do not believe that the West will fade away peacefully. Once a certain threshold is reached (possibly while whites are still in the majority), nonwhites will begin the culling and colonization that they so yearn for. In fact, I'd say it has already begun on a small scale, but mention of it in the media is strictly verboten. Soon you'll begin to see towns taken over, then small cities. Eventually whites will have nowhere to run to and will fight or perish.

    If history was written by the extrapolation of trends, Spain would still be Moslem. War changes everything. It crushes trends and scatters investments.

    I believe I will see open war in my lifetime. Borders will shift and states will dissolve. It may be that we are doomed, but defeatism is a contemptible trait, and one I'll not indulge in while I still draw breath. I'll leave it to the weak to rend their garments and wail in anguish.

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  43. A lot of my points are academic. That's sort of my thing.

    I think there's a certain amount of immigration possible before one reaches a "cultural threshold", where the immigrants start to change the country they live in. It's quite a low threshold, but I don't see racial mixing in the absolutist terms you do. Perhaps because I've mostly lived in places that were >98% white, and my presence didn't seem to lead to societal decay.

    I do not believe that the West will fade away peacefully.

    Well, neither do I. I also see violent conflict and civilizational decline.

    Don't believe the Muslim propoganda. Their birth rate isn't much higher than ours, and we would swamp them demographically by inching up over the replacement rate again. The fact that we don't seem to even be able to do this is what has me a bit pessimistic.

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  44. The 'slut positive' variety of feminism also is contributing to the destruction of marriageability in women. By essentially trying to convince all young women to become promiscuous, the 'slut positive' feminists hope to raise their own prospects for long term relationships, as I see it.

    Interesting point. One wonders how much of feminism is an unconscious (or maybe conscious) genetic attempt of otherwise unattractive women (and feminized men) to reduce the competition and find mating partners.

    I see increasing numbers of women in their 30s and 40s who are now in a state of semi-panic over finding a husband. Many of these are the same women who were busy putting down marriage as "oppression" in their 20s.

    I also see "male" feminists playing the traditional male function of protecting womyn, competing for their attention by attacking other men over date-raype on campus, for example.

    ReplyDelete
  45. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7532/is_200804/ai_n32270493/?tag=content;col1



    http://www.divorcemag.com/statistics/statsWorld.shtml

    http://www.divorcereform.org/nonus.html#anchor5599108


    http://gorigirl.com/interracial-divorce-in-the-u-s-statistics-and-how-much-they-matter

    This paragraph caught my eyes



    The likelihood of divorce for intermarriages is greatly affected by the type of interracial marriage.
    Marriages that do not cross a race barrier, but do have different ethnicities (i.e. white/Hispanic white) have a rate of divorce just a little higher than white/white marriages.
    Interracial marriages that have one white person and one person of another race mostly only show higher divorce rates when the white spouse is a female (i.e. white guy + other race girl don’t show particularly high divorce rates compared to same-race couples).
    Black husband/white wife marriages are twice as likely to divorce as white/white marriages, and Asian husband/white wife marriages are about 60% more likely to divorce as white/white marriages. Which, I suppose is an unfortunate statistic for Aditya and me (and one I didn’t expect at all)!
    White husband/black wife were nearly 50% less likely to divorce than white/white couples, and white husband/Asian wife couples had pretty much the same divorce rate as white/white couples
    Compared to Hispanic/Hispanic couples, Hispanic white/white couples showed a higher likelihood of divorce (not surprising). Likewise, Asian/white couples were more likely to divorce than Asian/Asian couples. However, black/white couples only show a higher rate of divorce compared to black/black couples if the white person in the relationship is a woman.
    The researchers were unable to evaluate other sorts of interracial marriages, such as black/Asian, because of the low number of such couples in the sample data.


    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish

    Columbia study on racial preferences in dating

    In 2007 economist Ray Fisman, in a two-year study he co-authored on dating preferences among Columbia University students, did not find evidence of a general preference among white men for Asian women. Furthermore, the study found that there is a significantly higher pairing of white men with East Asian women simply because East Asian women discriminate racially against black and hispanic men. As quoted onSlate.com ,[14] and also reported in The Washington Post and the Review of Economic Studies (a publication of the London School of Economics):
    “ We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women's neutrality, not the men's pronounced preference. Men don't seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman's race had no effect on the men's choices.”
    The study was carried out over two years and was conducted by economists Ray Fisman (lead researcher from Columbia University) and Emir Kamenica (University of Chicago), as well as psychologists Sheena Iyengar (Columbia University) and Itamar Simonson (Stanford). They took data from "thousands of decisions made by more than 400 daters from Columbia University's various graduate and professional schools." [14]

    ReplyDelete
  46. http://gorigirl.com/interracial-divorce-in-the-u-s-statistics-and-how-much-they-matter





    The likelihood of divorce for intermarriages is greatly affected by the type of interracial marriage.
    Marriages that do not cross a race barrier, but do have different ethnicities (i.e. white/Hispanic white) have a rate of divorce just a little higher than white/white marriages.
    Interracial marriages that have one white person and one person of another race mostly only show higher divorce rates when the white spouse is a female (i.e. white guy + other race girl don’t show particularly high divorce rates compared to same-race couples).
    Black husband/white wife marriages are twice as likely to divorce as white/white marriages, and Asian husband/white wife marriages are about 60% more likely to divorce as white/white marriages. Which, I suppose is an unfortunate statistic for Aditya and me (and one I didn’t expect at all)!
    White husband/black wife were nearly 50% less likely to divorce than white/white couples, and white husband/Asian wife couples had pretty much the same divorce rate as white/white couples
    Compared to Hispanic/Hispanic couples, Hispanic white/white couples showed a higher likelihood of divorce (not surprising). Likewise, Asian/white couples were more likely to divorce than Asian/Asian couples. However, black/white couples only show a higher rate of divorce compared to black/black couples if the white person in the relationship is a woman.
    The researchers were unable to evaluate other sorts of interracial marriages, such as black/Asian, because of the low number of such couples in the sample data.

    ReplyDelete
  47. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish

    Columbia study on racial preferences in dating

    In 2007 economist Ray Fisman, in a two-year study he co-authored on dating preferences among Columbia University students, did not find evidence of a general preference among white men for Asian women. Furthermore, the study found that there is a significantly higher pairing of white men with East Asian women simply because East Asian women discriminate racially against black and hispanic men. As quoted onSlate.com ,[14] and also reported in The Washington Post and the Review of Economic Studies (a publication of the London School of Economics):
    “ We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women's neutrality, not the men's pronounced preference. Men don't seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman's race had no effect on the men's choices.”
    The study was carried out over two years and was conducted by economists Ray Fisman (lead researcher from Columbia University) and Emir Kamenica (University of Chicago), as well as psychologists Sheena Iyengar (Columbia University) and Itamar Simonson (Stanford). They took data from "thousands of decisions made by more than 400 daters from Columbia University's various graduate and professional schools." [14]

    ReplyDelete