It’s National Special Education Day. Let’s look at the latest from the towering intellects of the Ivy League: “Winning the Bread and Baking it Too: Gendered Frictions in the Allocation of Home Production” (NBER with authors from Princeton, Penn, and a university in Chile).
From the abstract:
We document that female breadwinners do more home production than their male partners, driven by “housework” like cooking and cleaning. By comparing to same sex couples, we highlight that specialization within heterosexual households does not appear to be “gender neutral” even after accounting for average earnings differences.
Final sentence:
the next frontier of gender equality may be encouraging men to “lean in” at home, including teaching home production skills and changing norms about task provision from a young age. This will allow men to maintain competitiveness on the marriage market even in an environment where their labor market advantage fades
The PhDs who wrote this are saying that a man who is interested in doing a ton of housework will be pursued for marriage by women with great jobs, but it seems that they never met an actual woman with a great job who said “I want to find a good homemaker to be my stay-at-home husband”.
The absurdity of this idea becomes readily apparent when one considers the interaction between the authors’ ideas and the typical state’s family law and family court. The stay-at-home husband who gets tired of the hardworking middle-aged wife can sue her and collect alimony and child support in order to fund his new relationship with a young woman (or young women). She was the breadwinner and he is entitled to maintain his lifestyle after he discards her in favor of someone younger. From Massachusetts Prenuptial Agreements:
One case that we looked at involved a successful financial services industry fund manager. Due to the Wall Street-style checks rolling into the household, her husband decided to relax at home, watch the nannies raise the children, surf the Web, pursue hobbies, etc. As the wife was getting ready to retire the stay-at-home husband asked “Do I need this woman to earn more money?” The answer was no due to the fact that she was about to stop working. He then asked “Do I need her around to provide a stable environment for our children?” The answer was no because the kids were nearly launched. Did he need her to produce more children? It would have been biologically impossible due to her age. After a bit of litigation it turned out that, under the Massachusetts no-fault system, “I want to have sex with 22-year-olds off Craigslist” is as good a reason for a divorce as any. The husband got paid tens of millions of dollars down at the local family courthouse. Although he only netted half of the money that his wife had earned, his practical spending power had increased due to the fact that the wife, like a lot of self-made people, was a saver while he was a spender.
I find the paper interesting mostly because it shows the academic contempt for practical knowledge. They assume that American men without PhDs are behaving irrationally and need to learn from their intellectual superiors. Unemployed and low-income men who become champions at housework are going to snag hot wives who earn $500,000 per year because it will never occur to the $500,000/year women that they could be exposed to a family court lawsuit as soon as their hotness fades. That real-world American men aren’t pursuing the suggested strategy for “maintain[ing] competitiveness on the marriage market” doesn’t cause the academics a moment of self-doubt. They couldn’t even do a Google search, which would have yielded, for example, this Washingtonian article:
“What’s noteworthy to me is the fury of the women,” says Heather Hostetter, a prominent divorce lawyer in Bethesda who handles cases in Maryland and DC. “I just don’t experience that as much with men who are confronted with the fact that they have to pay alimony. And part of the fury relates to this idea of ‘What exactly am I paying for?’”
“It may be a shock to some women [because] they are not interested in supporting, nine times out of ten, what they call the ‘loser’—and that’s why they’re getting out of the marriage, because he’s a ‘loser,’ or he’s strayed, or whatever it might be,” says Cheryl New, a family lawyer who has been practicing in Maryland and Virginia for three-plus decades. “I think it is really hard emotionally for women to wrap their arms around this phenomenon.” Especially considering that in Maryland, Virginia, and DC, it doesn’t even matter how long (or short) your marriage was—you can still be made to pay.
One ex I spoke to told me that when she and her husband split four years ago, “he cleared the house out when he left. He took the TV, the china, my flatware. All of the things you would anticipate a man would say, ‘I don’t want this, you can have it.’ ” She pays child support and covers major bills for the kids—tuition, camp, insurance. “It’s a harsh reality,” as she put it. “I often look in the mirror and wonder whether this whole feminism thing backfired on me.”
These are the same folks who think that they can offer us practical advice on how to structure the welfare state (giving SNAP/EBT to 17 million in 2000 will never create 42 million SNAP-dependent Americans in 2025 (remember that there are additional federal food welfare programs so the number of Americans who receive taxpayer funded food is considerably larger than 42 million)), how we should change our lifestyle so as to reduce CO2 emissions enough to save our beloved Earth, how we can give every American unlimited medical procedures at a modest cost, and how we can have open borders without exacerbating what the same academics have identified as an affordable housing crisis, a working class wage crisis, a health care system capacity crisis, etc.
In case you’re wondering if it is only these three authors who have a blind spot regarding the family court exposure and the lack of any real-world women trying to find low-income stay-at-home husbands, here are all of the experts who assisted them:
We are grateful for useful comments from seminar and conference audiences at Brown, Harvard Business School, University of Michigan, Cornell University, Chicago Harris School, New York University, University of Pittsburgh, Drexel University, Arizona State University Applied Microeconomics, Barnard Economics of Gender Symposium, Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics gender session, May Ridge Forum on gender economics, Society of Family and Gender Economics, New Advances in Family Economics Ravello, and Zurich Workshop in Economics and Psychology.
See also this hater who claims that men actually do more work once ensnared into a partnership with a female:
The academic dream definitely happens when the man over promises & then his career takes the L train after the wedding. “founder on deck” “self employed” “CEO of an open source project” abound on linkedin. Most guys only hit it off by being completely full of it. There seems to be some longevity to the marriage as the woman keeps up the appearance of being married to a high roller.
“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” — Galatians 6:7 KJV
“Winning the Bread and Baking it Too: Gendered Frictions in the Allocation of Home Production”
With all due respect, what a load of academic horse shit. The tradwife thing is B.S. too because women ARE capable of being more than just housewifes. My wife has a world-class mathematical brain and the tenacity of a pitbull (in a sweet way). Sowing “men gud, women bad” or “womyn good, men bad”, either way is going to lead to a failed crop and no bread.
@lion > then his career takes the L train after the wedding. “founder on deck” “self employed” “CEO of an open source project”
Also “semi-retired”. Guilty as charged. Like modern schooling, the system is rigged against men in today’s corporate America. (Overcorrect much, society?) Our marriage (25 years) has been successful because we are a team that leverages our respective abilities, and neither one of us gives a crap about what anybody else thinks. I cooked every single meal for 10 years, etc., etc., etc. to help my wife early in her career to the detriment of huge technical debt on my own projects. I had a string of horrible jobs and horrible bosses–she has been lucky and privileged to have great jobs and bosses. Not one of her bosses ever called her a “little fucker”, like mine–by more than one boss. (The L-train lesbian HR lady was OK with him calling me a “fucker” because I “provoked” him by defending myself from being provoked by him.) When life gives you modern taste-free GMO lemons, you mix the juice with artificially lemon-flavored Kool-Aide and sugar to make some damn fine lemonade.
We own our spotless, functioning, and respectable house and cars outright, have 100X the retirement savings of the average GenX, and are both tired at the end of the day from equally split endless household chores. Had I continued accepting the beatings from wage-slave management, she wouldn’t have her soul-mate. We also both have fun jobs, I just get paid more sporadically. You reap what you sow, for sure. Back to work for me.
I made the mistake of scanning the summary of Hancock, et al. again before closing it, and read:
> men’s housework time is inelastic to relative household wages
In their “model” do they consider me replacing a $5 gasket inside a dishwasher to save $1200 “men’s housework”? What about maintaining cars to last 250,000 miles? Is my wife’s lawyer-like ability to read the fine print of contracts, “women’s housework”. I wonder why Hancock’s (presumably male) name is first on the paper, and Lafortune and Low (presumably female, which both sound made up, AI maybe?). Lafortune and Low surely did all the work, being women. Damn patriarchy. Sorry about all the ranting today, Phil. I spent 40 hours the past three days working on my LALR(1) parser, while doing the laundry, vacuuming, car maintenance, and reading your blog.
I was in Special Education, so I celebrate. Gifted is special, too, yo.
@DF edgelord
Yeah, you are kinda ranting — but I get it, I do. Seems like the biggest flaw in the Science behind this paper is that the topic is gender socio-economics, not just gender economics. (It also leaves out any discussion of trans-gender issues, and uses homosexual binary marriage as a control “norm”. What kind of woke study is this?) Anyway, dating apps have this thing called 6-6-6, which women of even mid sexual market value and low income insist upon. So when you are described as a “little fucker”, I share your indignance at the treatment of short guys. One of the 6’s is “over 6 foot tall only” (the others are 6 pack abs and a 6 figure income). I guess they are trying to breed spindly, tall stick space-alien people, or something. It would take a real lack of insight to not understand that the bloom of youth is ephemeral, and when you artificially reduce mating to scalar quantities rather than the complex biology and sociology that underlies human relationships, your choice might backfire on you. Biological success, in terms of reproducing your DNA, is much different than whatever other measure of success society assumes. And my wife doesn’t accuse me of shirking domestic duties either when I am underneath a 4000 lb SUV, repairing something that the auto tech messed up. Loyalty and trustability were my biggest factors in choosing a mate.
> “founder on deck” “self employed” “CEO of an open source project” abound on linkedin
This reminds me of the husband of one of my coworkers. They are in their mid-to-late 30s and she is a special education teacher in my school. Her husband has a grandiose linkedin page but it’s all for show; she had to pull strings to get him a job as a paraprofessional in our district, albeit at a different school for nepotism reasons. If you’re wondering if she is attractive or pleasant, she is neither
> The PhDs who wrote this are saying that a man who is interested in doing a ton of housework will be pursued for marriage by women with great jobs, […]
LOL! I have this strategy when I go through any journalistic artifact in order to gauge the objectivity of what it’s saying: would the author have said the “negation” of what they are saying if it were true? In this case would the author have said something like:
The man who’s not interested in doing any household work would have the pick of the litter.
If a publication would not have said the “negation” if it were true, then they aren’t saying the original sentence as well. They just want to make sure that they are a part of some propaganda. Here’s Chomsky explaining this is another way:
https://youtu.be/lLcpcytUnWU
You could also ask an LLM. If AI understands and agrees with the paper, drag-n-drop the PDF to the trash, then empty the trash. My super-woke LLM was quite pleased with the article’s abstract. Something about “gendered wedges” — my door stops appear to be neuter, but IDK.
Phil, I’m also quite disappointed that you failed to mention the immigrant angle in this paper:
“We show this mechanism—allocation of housework, rather than norms about earnings—plays a role by relating marriage rates to home production allocation in US immigrants’ countries of origin.”
Like everything else, it’s all about the immigrants. In truth, I’m really confused, but I don’t have $5 to buy the whole paper. I know LLM wouldn’t like me to say this, but I would rather huff solvent than read this article. Paint thinner messes up my brain, after a long day of painting the siding and cleaning car parts, but in a much more pleasant manner than “experts” in gender economics from Barnard. I’m going to ask my wife to make me a sandwich and get me a Bud Lite.
> You could also ask an LLM. If AI understands and agrees with the paper, drag-n-drop the PDF to the trash, then empty the trash.
LOL! This is very clever.
> I’m going to ask my wife to make me a sandwich and get me a Bud Lite.
A fellow Bill Burr fan, I believe.
> I often look in the mirror and wonder whether this whole feminism thing backfired on me
🤣🤣🤣
“Lillian”, by Damon Runyon:
Cats are like women, and women are like cats. They are both very ungrateful.
I have no comment on who high-income women seek as partners.
However, there are other studies which come to different conclusions on the amount of work time vs free time disaggregated by gender.
https://thegepi.org/GEPI-Free-Time-Gender-Gap-Report.pdf
(See the bar graph at the top of page 7)
https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/05/Parent-Time-Use.pdf (See table 4 on page 24)
Seems quite unfair that the home maker should lose the house. Traditionally, it’s the working spouse who loses the house.
Women seem to instinctively dislike men being the stay at home spouse. Perhaps it’s because they know much of the day will be free to, say, eat bonbons in front of the TV.