Mixed Feelings About The Tradwife Movement

I'm not disposed to think harshly of the tradwife movement, even though it is full of Millennials and Zoomers who are glamorizing an era they never lived. Those Millennials tend not to acknowledge the many serious problems facing wives in that era and may not even be aware existed. It was a time when wives often couldn't have a bank account, or at least a credit card of their own, couldn't take out a mortgage, and lived in circumstances when their husbands do do bad things to them with impunity. 

So, why am I less concerned about them?

Homemaking Can Make Sense For Most Wives Some Of The Time

For all that current norms make clear that it shouldn't be women's fate or obligation, the reality is that a very large share of all adult American women will spend a few to a great many years of their lives as full time homemakers in a married couple. 

Raising kids is a tough job. It's hard to do when both parents work. And, trying to have both parents equally share money earning and parenting responsibilities equally, rather than having them specialize their roles in the family, isn't always the best option.

Indeed, a family where a wife is a homemaker is most likely to happen these days in college educated couples, because they're the only ones who can afford to do so. 

One of the important reasons we have a legally recognized institution of marriage at all is so that mothers of young children (there are exceptions to this pattern but it is the predominant one) can feel secure and have legal protections for their well-being if they take the economic risks associated with being a homemaker within a couple for a while. 

The Economic Prosperity Of The Era Being Glamorized Was Nice.

Plenty of folks on both the left and on the right politically are nostalgic for the economic prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s. This economic prosperity made this family structure a viable possibility for most people, because you could afford to raise multiple children, and own a home and car, on one man's income then, even if you had only a high school education and a rank and file worker job. 

There insurmountable reasons that we can't restore the sources of that prosperity

Some of the economic circumstances that made that happen can't be restored, others can. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States was a global economic manufacturing powerhouse that created lots of demand at businesses for workers who didn't have to be very educated, intellectually talented, or skilled, which was fortunately, because high school diplomas were almost as rare as college degrees are today.

In part, this was a product of the fact that World War II was fought in the rest of the world in Europe and Asia, and that war destroyed the civilian manufacturing industry, while apart from a single day at Pearl Harbor, World War II was not fought in U.S. territory leaving it unscathed. And, World War II had also established a massive industrial base that was used to conduct the war effort of the United States and its allies in the places where World War II was being fought which could be swiftly converted to civilian production when the war was over. Everyone else with the money to buy goods was outsourcing their manufacturing to the U.S. while they were rebuilding a post-war society from the rubble that the war left behind. This economic situation can't be restored. 

There are now countries with manufacturing economies all over the world. Some of these countries that got started on a low wage, lightly regulated model to undercut U.S. factories that were more expensive, like Mexico, China, Vietnam and Thailand. There are also other countries with strong manufacturing economies like Germany, South Korea, and Japan, that have much higher wages and much greater regulation but have managed to master labor-management relations better than the U.S. did and automated their operations sufficiently to make up for their higher labor and compliance costs. The U.S. manufacturing industry has followed the high wages and automation path of Germany, South Korea, and Japan, but has done so only successfully enough to keep domestic manufacturing output more or less flat with fewer workers, and a declining share of goods sold domestically manufactured. The U.S. imports a lot of the manufactured goods that it consumes from these countries, because they've developed a competitive advantage compared to the U.S. in this part of their economies.

The favorability of the 1950s and 1960s for less educated workers was also a product of the fact that manufacturing technology was still pretty primitive. There was very little automation and lots of rote manual labor that was required. Since then, manufacturing has become much more automated, and factory work now requires skilled technicians who usually have at least associate's degrees, if not more education, to run the machines that do the rote work that used to be done with manual labor. It is a transition that has been made possible because a vastly larger share of the U.S. adult population is better educated now than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. This is another economic situation can't be restored.

But, other parts of the 1950s and 1960s era of economic prosperity may be possible to restore. Lots of people don't know it, but that era was also dominated by pervasive and powerful unions who went on strike a lot, and had very high taxes on the most affluent taxpayers, which were invested in infrastructure, education, and other long term public sector investments that made our society more prosperous.

Our modern economy relies not just on having lots of people who show up to work and do their jobs, but also on the intellectual knowledge, skills, and talents of those workers. Modern technologies require those intellectual aptitudes at a level required to be sufficiently productive, and a much smaller share of the population has those aptitudes, than the share of the population that was suitable for manufacturing work in the economy of the 1950s and 1960s. 

Even in countries that have used public policy to be more equitable than the current U.S. economy, a productivity divide still exists in their workforces to a similar degree to the U.S. But, those countries use taxes and social welfare programs run by the government more heavily than the U.S. to equalize outcomes. 

A Society With Stable Marriages Into Which Most Children Are Born Isn't Unattractive.

While some of the legal and economic and social forces that kept the divorce rate low then were and are problematic, it is also true that divorce rates were very low, and out of wedlock birth rates were also very low (at least in the early part of this time frame for everyone, and in the later part of this time frame for everyone but black families with fathers who were not high school graduates). 

Nobody feels warm fuzzy feelings about divorces, even when they are the lesser evil for a married couple, and nobody wishes that a larger share of children were born to single mothers from couples that couldn't manage to stick together. 

In East Asia, they have stable marriages and few out of wedlock births at the cost of few marriages that are often late in life, record low numbers of births overall, and multigenerational caretaking pressures in marriage that lots of women aren't willing to tolerate, so it isn't impossible even though it has high hidden costs. 

In Northern Europe, they have unstable marriages, often late in life, and lots of out of wedlock births, made possible by strong social safety nets, and low but not quite as low birth rates overall, and more personal freedom and individual actualization. 

Neither leading approach in the world to organizing marriage and parenting at the societal level in the developed world is without its drawbacks. 

In the U.S., we have ended up with a system that charts a third way with an intense marriage divide associated with socio-economic class and education. U.S. marriages are almost as solid as they were in the 1960s and out of wedlock births are rare among college graduates, but marriages are increasingly uncommon and fragile when they happen among people with no college education, and couples with no college education who eventually marry, on average, have kids first, and marry a few years later. 

The reason for the divide is counterintuitive and isn't one that college educated feminists would applaud or acknowledge. The marriages of college educated women in the U.S. are solid, and their children tend to be born after these women marry, because the lifetime career earning penalty for leaving the workforce to be a homemaker when and if a wife tries to return to her pre-parenthood career, is much steeper for college educated women in administrative and professional careers than it is for women without college educations whose careers don't require lots of uninterrupted experience to maximize one's earnings.

A woman who is a doctor or a lawyer who takes six years out of the work force to raise children when they are little may end up making half or less of the salary that they would have been making at the same age if they'd not had children and continued working in that time period. In contrast, a woman who is a waitress or day care worker or receptionist or CNA is going to make about the same income when they return to the workforce after six years at home taking care of their children as their peers who didn't have kids and worked continuously at the same job the whole time do. Meanwhile, a professional doctor or lawyer husband who continues to work uninterrupted while his wife stays at home with the kids will see his income increase substantially over six years, while a husband who is a plumber or CNA or truck driver who has stayed in the work force for those six years will still be earning about the same amount as he did six years earlier adjusted only for inflation. And, the high school only educated husband is likely to have significant bouts of lengthy unemployment from time to time during which he will be an economic burden on his family which creates a powerful economic incentive for his working wife to divorce him, while a college educated husband is likely to have uninterrupted prosperity and find new, decent paying employment fairly swiftly if he loses his job for some reason.

As a result, in a college educated couple, wives who have been homemakers for a few years become much more economically dependent upon their husbands than wives in college educated couples who aren't nearly so economically dependent upon their husbands and will periodically have husbands who are economically dependent upon them. Economic dependency is the biggest part of the glue that keeps college educated couples together with kids born in wedlock, that is absent in working class couples, although better social and interpersonal skills among college educated couples, and cultural norms about marriage and parenting the emerge from peer pressures when the economic incentives work the way that they usually do for people like you, may play a modest secondary role in this divide as well.

The economic dependency of wives with many children with their husband in an economy where few occupations and jobs were open to women and those that were available didn't pay well drove the stability and frequency of marriage and of having children within marriage in the 1950s and 1960s as well, as much as legal formalities like the availability of divorces only based upon fault and ill-developed systems for reliably obtaining child support and alimony in the event of a divorce.

Now, this doesn't mean that all college educated women end up being "tradwives". Lots of Millennials and Zoomers buck tradition and just don't have kids at all and never leave the workplace and never become economically dependent upon their husbands or partners. Some of them do become homemakers and become somewhat economically dependent upon their husbands. But, even then, their college educations mean that they can still make much better money if they return to the workforce than women in the 1950s and 1960s did. Birth control and abortion mean that modern homemakers are likely to have one or two kids, rather than three or four or five of them, also making it easier to return to the workforce sooner. Divorce is now available on a no-fault basis, and child support and alimony awards are a lot more predictable and collectible so long as your ex-husband has a decent income, which college educated men generally do (and if a college educated man willfully earns less to spite his wife's ability to get child support and alimony from him, modern legal doctrines punish him severely). Wives and ex-wives today have more economic rights of their own than they did in the 1950s and 1960s in practical reality at least. And, wives today have much strong institutional and cultural support than wives in the 1950s and 1960s did if a husband is abusive towards his family.

In short, while college educated wives still have enough economic dependency on their husbands to make waiting to have kids until marriage worth it, and to make staying married worthwhile, unlike wives in the 1950s and 1960s, their economic dependency and legal status is not so low that they need to stay married even when their situation is horrible.

And, lets face it. Unless your marriage was unimaginably horrible, divorce is not a desirable thing for anyone even if it may be, on balance in someone's opinion, the best available option. 

It is the exception and not the norm for a divorced person to not rant emotionally about that experience. Shuttling kids between households under the usual shared parenting arrangement is complicated, cumbersome, takes more social skills to manage than parenting while married to your co-parent did, and leaves both resulting household for the children poorer because the large and very real economies of scale that come from living in a single household are lost and because the parents have lots the benefits that having specialized parenting v. higher income employment did. Sometimes stepparents, and prospective stepparents, really are evil towards their stepchildren and that isn't good for the kids. And, often, divorced couples with shared children have to return to the courthouse multiple times because they can't agree on how to handle inevitable changes in the parents' employment and living situations and as the children grow up and have different needs. Single motherhood is a recipe for poverty and hardship and a missing male role model for a child, even though an absent father can make living and parenting a lot more conflict-free than an involved father who the mother doesn't want as a spouse.

Trusting Your Spouse Doesn't Make You A Bad Person And Presents Less Risk Now Than It Used To.

Certainly, there is also nothing so horrible about being a woman who is an idealist who loves and trusts her husband so much that she has faith that their husband won't abuse their relationship in which she is trying her best to reciprocate by treating him well. 

The actual reality is that people are often blind to the darker potentials for mishaps in their own personal lives than they are in the lives of others from which they have more distance. 

But a little hope and trust and idealism isn't morally blameworthy. And, in any case, for better or for worse, modern day tradwives who cultivate marriages along these lines still have more institutional protections for themselves against abuses of their relationship with their husbands than their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s did if things do go wrong, a discussed above. 

Women have more rights now which makes the relationship less of a risk if it doesn't go well even if many tradwives don't realize how much better they have it than wives did in the 1950s and 1960s and take their protections for granted. If a pregnancy threatens to lock a woman into a bad relationship and dependency for many years to come, she can unilaterally get an abortion in many states to prevent that, something that was not an option back then.

Many Tradwives don't Acknowledge That Their Lifestyle Is Only Possible With Privilege

If anything, the most prominent and outspoken tradwives of today can be faulted most for their failure to acknowledge the economic privileges that they personally as individuals enjoy which makes this lifestyle possible for them, when it isn't possible for others who aren't so lucky. 

This lifestyle is only possible if your husband is very economically successful in a way that is very stable and sustainable. Their failure to recognize that this isn't a lifestyle that is economically feasible for most people in their generation, whether their less privileged peers would want to emulate them or not, can be a problem. 

The problem is that their message can lead to economic ruin and hardship and unhappy traps for women in tradwive styles couples if the husband is not so economically prosperous and secure. The "tradwife for all" ideal can unfairly shame and denigrate husbands and potential husbands who are good partners interpersonally in a relationship, but aren't quiet so economically elite.

If you have a solid income that is economically stable, you are a desirable husband to someone who is interested in the tradwife lifestyle. But if you don't make all that much money and have an education and career that leaves you with bouts of unemployment or an unsteady income, you and your wife need to be a two career couple to make your family work economically, and that isn't a good fit to the tradwife model.

Improving Government

Government has a mix of problems. Sometimes it regulates too much, sometimes too little, sometimes it owns too much, sometimes too little, sometimes it is just operated in the wrong way. This post is a grab bag of ideas about improving it.

* Sidewalks should be publicly owned and maintained. Individual responsibility of property owners for this doesn't work because low rates of non-maintenance (including lack of prompt snow removal) makes the network of sidewalks much less valuable.

* Bicycles should usually not share roads with cars and trucks. They should use sidewalks or dedicated, protected bike paths and lanes.

* Amtrak has failed and should be shut down outside the Northeast Corridor.

* The U.S. Postal System worked well for a long time, but in the era of widespread parcel delivery services and e-mails and texts, it no longer does. Strong Veteran's preferences and higher pay than private sector equivalents don't justify it. Free mail for incumbents in Congress don't justify it. Delivering junk mail is not a good enough reason for a massive public enterprise. Fewer and fewer letters of significance are delivered that way. Money orders are no longer economically important and can be provided by private commercial banks and money services. Subsidizing rural living isn't a good reason for it.

* Occupational licensing is required when it shouldn't be. When it is required, requirements like a lack of a criminal record are often inappropriate for people who have been non-recidivist for a long enough time (about five to seven years) when the risk of future crime fades to the background level. Worse yet is construction trade licensing at the local level when it should be at the state level, fostering a high level of non-compliance. Independent legal para-professions should be allowed much more liberally, although licensing that might be appropriate. There should be a common database of licensing discipline since many disqualifying acts for one profession should also apply to others.

* Zoning and land use regulation should be dramatically paired back and places like Colorado finally realize that this is true and driving high housing prices. Deregulating is better than mandating affordable housing or rent control. Development fees to mitigate externalities of government costs caused by development, however, make sense. 

* Involuntary landmark designation is almost always a bad idea and an unfunded mandate. If it is important enough historically to preserve the government should buy it and rent it.

* Building codes are critical and non-compliance with permit requirements is far too high. But building codes are also too restrictive and the processing of building permits is much too slow. A system of private building code compliance auditors similar to the CPA system might be better.

* We should do a better job of discouraging people from building disaster prone housing in flood zones, fire zones and other "stupid zones".

* We should do a better job of encouraging off site manufacturing of buildings and large building modules.

* Property taxes are a decent way to finance local government (and shouldn't exempt non-profits and governments other than the one imposing them) but are a bad way to finance public K-12 education which is the main way that they are used now.

* Electing coroners, treasurers, clerks, surveyors, secretaries of state, engineers, and judges (even in routine judicial retention elections) is a horrible idea.

* Electing sheriffs and district attorneys and attorneys-general isn't as horrible an idea, but is still a worse idea than having elected officials appoint them, directly or indirectly.

* State and local school and college boards would be better not elected by the general public. Local school boards should be elected by student's parents. College boards could be elected by alumni or appointed by the elected official who make their funding decisions. State school boards should be appointed by the state officials who fund state K-12 education.

* Shorter ballots are better. In the England, there is one nation election in which you vote for a single legislator on a partisan ballot in a single district, irregularly, but not less than every five years absent a world war, for a government that does everything that the state and federal governments do in the U.S., with no primary elections since parties nominate their own candidates internally, and there is one set of partisan local council elections for one or two posts, and there are few referenda a lifetime, and they are democratic enough, despite having a monarchy and a house of lords. Very modest public electoral input is enough.

* I don't favor a system quite as simple as England's. But we should still have much shorter ballots.

* Rare recall elections make sense for officials who serve longer terms and perhaps for judges and other public officials who are now elected but shouldn't be.

* State constitutions and local charters should have less detail and so that changes to them should be things that require voter approval and not housekeeping measures.

* Some referenda on tax and debt issues is appropriate, but Colorado, with TABOR overdoes it. New taxes, and not new revenues from existing taxes, should get public votes. Maybe bond issues that commit a government to substantial tax obligations from general revenues but not renewals of them.

* Citizen initiatives have their place in overcoming systemic flaws in the legislative system and making elections interesting to voters. But it should be a bit harder and more structured and generally should avoid spending and taxing decisions that need to be made globally.

* Colorado mostly does the probate process right, although probate procedure could use more structure. Most states make the process too intrusive.

* When there is a single post in a candidate election, dispensing with primaries, having a majority to win requirement, and having runoff elections would be preferable to first past the post elections and to instant runoff elections.

* There would be merit to electing state legislatures and state congressional delegations by proportional representation.

* There would be merit to making state legislatures unicameral.

* The electoral college should be abolished in favor of a direct popular vote.

* The franchise should be expanded. The voting age should be reduced to sixteen. Non-citizens should be allowed to vote. Felons, even felons in prison, should be allowed to vote (in their pre-incarceration place of incarceration).

* HOAs are horrible but sometimes necessary institutions. They should be abolished or replaced where possible, and be restructured with fewer powers and less discretion where not possible. HOA covenants are routinely unreasonably restrictive.

* Municipal ordinances related to zoning and land use should have fines or other civil penalties, not criminal penalties.

* Arbitration on the U.S. model is usually a bad idea and should be banned in many circumstances.

* We should have a more pro-active way of intervening in cases where people are mentally ill or cognitively impaired, and the system for adjudicating these cases is too cumbersome.

* Single judges should not handle parenting time and parental responsibilities cases, and the best interests of the child standard should have more detailed substances to guide it. Alimony should also be less discretionary.

* There should be a right to counsel in all cases involving "persons" such as child custody cases, protective proceedings, and immigration cases.

* Forum shopping in the federal courts needs to be better restrained, and allowing a single forum shopped judge to issue national injunctions is problematic.

* After some rocky starts, regulation and technical private management of junk faxes, junk telephone calls, and even junk email has made some real progress. Social media junk is less well regulated.

* Privacy regulation often does more harm than good. Juvenile justice privacy does more harm than good in most cases, educational privacy goes too far, and Europe's GDPR goes too far. Secrecy around ownership of closely held companies is too great and the exception under the Corporate Transparency Act is far too complicated. There are places for privacy regulation but it needs to be cut way back. Secrets are often harmful in hard to quantify ways.

* Cryptocurrency serves few, if any, legitimate purposes, is an environmental disaster, and should be discouraged.

* Programs to help the poor need to have much less paperwork and red tape; means testing is rarely a good choice unless it is integrated into the tax system.

* Some tax credits for poor and middle income people, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Obamacare insurance premium subsidies, are far too complicated.

* State and local government funded free wi-fi for all would make lots of sense.

* There is a logic to allowing vouchers for religious private K-12 schools, but on balance it does too much to support religious institutions at public expense. Charter schools, i.e. public schools with autonomy from school boards, are a better approach. School choice of some kind does make sense among public ordinary and charter schools, ideally, statewide, rather than only within a school district.

* Boarding schools attached to high schools in more urban areas would be a better alternative to highly subsidized tiny rural high schools.

* We do a horrible job of managing the business of health care. The requirement that doctors be the sole owners of medical practices also forces them into being small business owners when they are ill suited to that part of their jobs and leads to bad systems and poor health care administration and bad financing arrangements. Almost every other country, in many varied models, does a better job. The current system results in overpaid health care providers (doctors, nurses, drug companies, medical equipment companies, private hospital system owners, etc.), for inferior results. Our drug prices and medical equipment prices and ambulance prices and ER prices are all vastly higher than in other countries and this isn't mostly driven by private pay medical education or medical malpractice lawsuits.

* We need to create more medical school slots. We have too few doctors and are compensating for that with too many senior paraprofessionals like nurse practitioners, physician's assistants, and midwives. We should also allow more non-M.D.'s to provide the care that psychiatrists do since the knowledge base for psychiatrists doesn't overlap heavily with that of M.D.'s and where it does overlap can be taught separately.

* The substance of pass-through taxation in taxing closely held business income once at roughly individual tax rates while allowing limited liability, is good, but the actual pass-through tax mechanism is not. Subchapter K of the Internal Revenue Code is not a good approach for taxing closely held limited liability entities, it complexity, it phantom income, and more don't work well. A double taxation reducing or limiting variation on the C-corporation model would be much better.

* We do a poor job of taxing hot assets in international taxation.

* We lack adequate guidance for remote worker labor and tax regulation, and haven't updated our laws adequately to reflect the era of independent contractors.

* We over regulate many prescription drugs and under regulate supplements and herbal remedies and the like. Homeopathic remedies and other supplements need to be regulated more like drugs. Prescription drug approval when approved elsewhere should be easier. Prescription approval for experimental drugs for the terminally ill, or in a pandemic, should be easier. More non-abuse prone prescription drugs should be available over the counter or with pharmacist approval.

* Prostitution should be decriminalized or legalized to a greater extent.

* We vastly under-regulate firearms and explosives and military equipment.

* We do a poor job of commercial air travel security, imposing too much of a burden and delay for too little benefit in a security theater way, at an excessive cost and a greatly excessive externality cost. We also do a crap job of managing luggage charges and checked luggage, and we are more inefficient than we need to be in how quickly commercial aircraft are loaded and unloaded.

* Uber, etc. revealed that we over-regulate taxis, but that we do need some regulation to assure riders are safe from dangerous or dangerous to them drivers.

* Buses and intracity rail won't thrive until we make them feel safer and comfortable.

* Public energy utilities do mostly a good job, except in Texas which opted out of the national energy grid.

* Clean water and good sewage treatment should be expanded urgently to places like Indian Reservations and Flint, Michigan.

* To better disentangle church and state, the charitable income tax deduction (but not the gift and estate tax deduction) for contributions to religious organizations (but not the tax exemption for churches) should end, the parsonage exemption should end, the property tax and sale tax exemptions for churches should end, the investment income of churches should be taxed as a corporation, and the ban on politics by churches should end.

* There should be more power to compel road maintenance below some standard.

* There should be a power to compel HOAs to do their jobs for all members, similar to landlord-tenant maintenance claims.

The State Of The Union Is Strong

By a variety of measures, the U.S. is in a time of record or near record peace, prosperity, and well-being, although blue states (i.e. those that lean towards the Democratic party) are generally better off than red states (i.e. those that lean towards the Republican party). 

This should provide a political boost to President Biden in his rematch seeking re-election against former President Donald Trump. Biden should also be helped relative to the 2020 Presidential election by his incumbency, by the fact that the electorate is less white and less Christian, by the fact that many of the oldest voters in 2020 have been replaced by younger voters, and by the fact that younger voters and Democrats have been turning out more reliably in 2020 and 2022 than in prior elections with overall voter turnout reaching record highs, and with a rolling back of felon disenfranchisement laws in many states. And, of course, Donald Trump is facing four sets of felony criminal prosecutions on more than 90 charges, and has had other legal problems such as two civil judgments against him for a combined amount of more than half a billion dollars for fraud, rape, and defamation. Fox News is wounded, after paying an immense defamation settlement to a voting machine company and facing other similar massive pending lawsuits, and almost all non-Fox News outlets have made Trump's short fallings clear. Trump's three U.S. Supreme Court appointments as part of a six to three conservative majority overruled Roe v. Wade in  a highly unpopular decision and has been plagued by evidence of corruption leading to recover lows in its credibility, which has mobilized pro-choice voters and removed the urgency on the part of conservatives to vote for Trump to secure a conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority. 

But the polls, nationally and in swing states, show that the Biden-Trump Presidential race in 2024 (there is essentially no possibility that either major political party will pick a different nominee) is a toss up, and the polls understated Trump support in both the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections. 

Violent crime rates in the U.S. are at their lowest level since 1970, down about 51% since 1991. The murder rate in big cities that bounced up in the pandemic (2020-2021) has fallen again (down 5% in 2022 and down another 12% so far this year compared to the same time period in 2022) to return to almost pre-pandemic levels which are comparable to murder rates in the early 1960s and are down about 50% from the peak levels in the early 1980s. Property crime rates are down 62% since 1991 and declined steadily until a slight bump upwards in 2022. Crime rates are generally higher in red states and lower in blue states.

The teen pregnancy rate is lower than it has been at any time in all of history and prehistory in North America. The teen pregnancy rate is down 75% since 1991. It is down 79% in that time period for black teens, 77% for Hispanic teens, and 76% for white teens. Teen pregnancy rates are lower in blue states and higher in red states.

After reaching a 50-year record low for two consecutive years (2020 and 2021 at 14.0 divorces per 1,000 married women), the divorce rate rose slightly in 2022 to 14.56 divorces per 1,000 married women. But, divorce rates are still lower now than at any time from 1970 to 2019. There is a class divide in marriage, however. For Americans in the top third income bracket (mostly college educated), 64% are in an intact marriage, meaning they have only married once and are still in their first marriage, comparable to 1960s and earlier levels. In contrast, only 24% of Americans in the lower-third income bracket (mostly people with no college) are in an intact marriage. Divorce rates are lower in blue states than in red states. 

U.S. unemployment is at its lowest level in 54 years. The economy added 2.7 million jobs in 2023. The U.S. has had positive job growth for 38 consecutive months, putting the current streak in 5th place of the longest job streaks in US history (since 1939). Inflation-adjusted disposable personal income rose 4.2 percent in 2023.

The U.S. poverty rate in 2023 was 11.5%. It has been lower than that in only three of the last 60+ years: 2019 (10.5%), 2000 (11.3%), and 1974 (11.1%), and in none of those years was it dramatically lower. By comparison, the U.S. poverty rate was 15.1% in 1993 and 2010, was 15.2% in 1983, and was 19.0% in 1964 (and was 15.1% or more in 1965 and 1966). Poverty rates are higher in red states and lower in blue states.

The percentage of Americans who don't have health insurance is at record lows (mostly due to Obamacare). A greater percentage of people don't have health insurance in red states than in blue states.

GDP growth in the U.S. has been solid during Biden's administration after experiencing an unprecedented plunge four years ago in the final year of Trump's Presidency due to the COVID pandemic. The stock market (which is a leading economic indicator of the economy's future direction) is at an all time high, despite upward trends in interest rates. The dollar is at 20 years plus highs in strength relative to other major world currencies. Per capita GPD and household net worth is much higher in blue states and blue regions of states than in red states and red regions of states.

Most economic activity has returned to pre-COVID levels. Inflation has come back to normal after a COVID/Ukraine War driven spike. Gasoline prices are close to their long term average in inflation adjusted dollars.

The percentage of Americans age 25 or older who have have high school diplomas (91.1%) was an all time high in 2022, and the percentage who had college degrees (37.7%) in 2022 was just slightly below the all time high of 37.9% in 2021. In 1960, only 41.1% of Americans age 25 or more had high school diplomas and only 7.7% of Americans age 25 or more had college degrees. Educational attainment is higher in blue states and lower in red states.

The number of Americans in active duty military service relative to the population is as low as it has been at any time in the last 83 years. The draft ended in the U.S. 51 years ago. U.S. military spending as a percentage of GDP is 3.48%, slightly above its post-1960 lows from 1997 to 2002 when it reached its modern low of 3.09% in 1999. In 1967 it was 9.42% of GDP. People in red states are more likely to serve in the military than people in blue states.

COVID deaths and hospitalizations are way, way down. COVID death rates were generally higher in red states (mostly due to lower vaccination rates) and lower in blue states.

U.S. deaths from AIDS are at a record or near record low, down more than 90% from the peak number of deaths per 100,000 people in 1995. One of the four major strains of influenza has gone extinct sometime in the last four years.

The average share of electricity generated from coal in the US has dropped from 52.8% in 1997 to 19.7% in 2022 and is still falling. The United States got nearly 17% of its electricity from solar, wind and geothermal power in 2022 and is still rising. That's up from just over 5% in 2013. Fourteen states produced the equivalent of more than 30% of the electricity they used from solar, wind and geothermal in 2022. That is up from just two states in 2013.

The U.S. produced 2.5% more energy in 2022 than it consumed. 2022 marked the highest level of US energy independence since before 1950. By comparison, in 2005 the U.S. consumed 44% more energy than it produced.

The percentage of Americans who identify as non-religious, 30%, is at an all time high and the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian is lower than it has been at any time since European colonization of North America. Among Americans aged 18-29 who are indicative of the future trend, 43% are not religious, 52% are Christian, and 4% adhere to some other religion. Red states are more Christian and less secular, while blue states are less Christian and more secular.

In 2022, immigrants made up 13.9% of the U.S. population, the highest percentage in more than a century. It was last this high sometime between 1910 (when it was 14.7%) and 1920 (when it was 13.2%). This is higher than in the 1900 census (13.6%), the 1880 census (13.3%), the 1860 census (13.2%), and the 1850 census (9.7%), but lower than in the 1890 census (14.8%) and the 1870 census (14.4%). The year 1970 census had the smallest foreign born population in the period from 1850 to the present at 4.7%, about a third of the current foreign born population percentage. Blue states have higher percentages of immigrants than red states.

The percentage of people living in urban areas (80.0%) v. rural areas (20.0%) in the 2020 census was essentially the same as in the 2010 census which set an all time high of 80.7% urban, with most or all of the difference from 2010 to 2020 being due to a stricter definition of what counted as urban in 2020. The percentage of the population that is urban is projected to grow steadily over the next thirty years as it has for almost all of U.S. history, and over the last 20 years, there has been much more population growth in urban areas than in rural areas. Blue states are generally more urban than red states. 

Hello Baby (Spoilers Below The Fold)

Hello Baby is a webcomic at Webtoons by Enjelicious, a South Korean comic author, who established herself with her first "big time" debut comic, Age Matters, which was recently completed after years of serialization. Hello Baby has been running for about six months and as I write, thirty episodes are available if you are willing to pay a modest price so you don't have to wait three weeks to read episodes for free.

Age Matters, one of the hottest titles in the romance comic genre at the time, was about a young woman filling in for a friend in her friend's job a cook and maid for a young CEO of a social media tech company who falls in love with him, that also has a strong supporting cast of secondary characters, and a backstory of melodrama involving famous models, villains motivated by jealousy and money, and rich family business chiefs looking for marriage alliances. Overall, the tone is cute and funny, if somewhat cliched. The most serious issues it explores, not very seriously, are the propriety of a woman dating a younger man, and the propriety of a woman dating her boss. It has a good chance of being made into a live action K-drama if this isn't already in the works.

Hello Baby is her sophomore romance comic effort. It is more serious, more down to Earth, and explores deeper emotions and issues related to modern marriage, parenting, love, responsibility, and our social instincts that deserve thought and discussion (but can't be discussed without revealing some spoilers from the first dozen or so episodes from what will probably be more than a hundred episodes when it's done, below the fold). It is also a huge hit and also has strong K-drama potential.

The Judicial Implications Of Gridlock And Its Deeper Causes

A new substack article is entitled: "Imprisoning innocent people is bad Section 2255 should be fixed immediately."

The author isn't wrong.

A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling holding 6-3 that actually innocent people who had no meaningful ability to litigate their innocence because it results from a new, retroactively effective, interpretation of the law, have to rot in prison anyway, arises in the first place because Congress wrote a flawed law restricting habeas corpus attacks on convictions that could be amended by a simple statute.

The fact that the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines allow federal judges sentencing people for crimes to consider conduct which juries acquitted defendants could similarly be solved with legislation from Congress.

Congress has the power to overturn the court created doctrine of qualified immunity for law enforcement officers who violate people's civil rights, and could similarly reform other non-obvious interpretations of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 that also unjustifiably put the interests of bad cops above the interests of people who have their civic rights violated.

Similarly, Congress could codify Bivens actions which are a more limited court created right to sue federal officials for violating your constitutional rights.

Congress could easily pass a law ending the spectacle unique to the U.S., of forcing young children who can't even speak English and sometimes can't even read or write to represent themselves in deportation hearings that we otherwise require people to have a law degree and pass the bar exam to participate in for someone else. So far, in part due to Congressionally created barriers to Article III court review of the executive branch immigration courts, the courts have failed to address this travesty.

Congress could pass a law amending the Affordable Care Act, so that a misinterpretation of that statute that allows states to deny expanded Medicaid coverage at no cost to state coffers, to clarify that this isn't permitted.

Congress could amend the Federal Arbitration Act to forbid the extreme interpretations of the law that have turned arbitration into an unconscionably lawless forum for resolving disputes that is demonstrably biased against consumers, investors, and employees.

Congress could amend ERISA to tame the absurd lengths to which the Act's pre-emption effect produces unjust and unanticipated results.

Congress could amend the definition of "navigable waters" which courts have recently construed to end federal protections for a great many wetlands, and could expressly expand the authority of the EPA to take measures to prevent global warming, that the U.S. Supreme Court has rolled back.

Congress could rewrite the rules for granting national injunctions and the rules that allow litigants in Texas to basically choose which judges will hear their cases.

Congress could pass laws on the interstate sale of abortion inducing drugs so that U.S. law on the subject wouldn't be forced to hinge on who judges interprets a 19th century statute.

Not all bad court decisions can be overcome by rewriting laws that the courts have misinterpreted. But the interpretation of federal statutes still makes up the largest share of the docket of the U.S. Courts of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court, so statutory reforms could make a huge difference.

Why doesn't this happen?

It doesn't happen because it has grown so difficult to pass laws on any issue upon which there is potential partisan disagreement that doesn't involve government spending or appointing Presidential nominees to top federal jobs. It takes the convergence a majority in the U.S. House, supermajorities in the U.S. Senate (which still have the filibuster and other minority privileges for most kinds of legislation), and Presidential support to pass a federal law. 

If a single political party doesn't have both trifecta control of the House, Senate and Presidency, and significantly more than a bare majority in the Senate to either overcome the filibuster or overcome a handful of dissenters in one's own party, signifiant legislation is impossible. And, those conditions have been few, far between, and underutilized by the party in power when they were present. Hostile courts can further complicate the task.

Passing ordinary legislation that is then upheld as constitutional is harder in the United States than in almost every other country in the entire world. In most parliamentary systems, the head of government always has majority support in the lower house of parliament (when it is not unicameral) and an upper house of parliament, if there is one, serves primarily a delaying function, which makes it much easier for the ruling party or ruling coalition to pass ordinary legislation.

It also doesn't help that very few countries have the extreme flaws in its democracy that the U.S. does associated with the Electoral College, unequal representation of voters in the U.S. Senate, routinely necessary supermajorities to pass ordinary legislation due to the filibuster and other quirky Senate rules, disenfranchisement of the residents of the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico which each have more people than some U.S. states, single district plurality voting's spoiler effects, pervasive gerrymandering, elections administered by partisan elected officials, political parties who have no say over who their own candidates will be, and dismal voter turnout by international standards. 

For example, Turkey, in areas ruined by earthquakes just a few months earlier, has better voters turnout than the best performing U.S. states, and has virtually no gerrymandering due to its proportional representation system, and is also not troubled by spoilers due to its direct Presidential elections based upon the popular vote with a requirement that the plurality winner secure a majority to be elected without a runoff election. 

When correcting even obviously flawed court interpretations of legislation (or just plain old obviously flawed legislation) by passing new laws becomes too difficult, the courts, which adjudicate the status quo until new laws are passed, become excessively powerful at the expensive of Congress and the Presidency.

If the barriers to passing ordinary legislation were less daunting, the partisan tilt of the federal courts right up to the U.S. Supreme Court, would matter far less. Bad court decisions would be overturned swiftly with corrective legislation, and in response, courts would avoid making decisions that interpret legislation in inappropriately wooden and unjust ways in the first place.

Of course, the problem can't be entirely laid at the feet of the institutional design. A variety of reforms of the legislative and electoral process could solve those design problems if there wasn't another deeper problem. 

The deeper problem is that the United States is deeply divided politically, because it is deeply divided culturally. There are few times in recent U.S. history when there has been fewer issues upon which there is a broad bipartisan consensus, and there have been fewer moderates to bridge divided between the two major parties.

You would think that there ought to be a consensus that people whom we know have not committed a crime shouldn't continue to rot in prison for decades to come.

You would think that there ought to be a consensus that five year olds who don't speak English shouldn't have to represent themselves in deportation hearings.

You would think that there would be a consensus that federal government officials shouldn't be able to intentionally violate any of your well-established constitutional rights with impunity.

You would think that there would be consensus that someone shouldn't have to spend an additional decade in prison because a judge thinks by a preponderance of the evidence that someone committed a crime that a jury acquitted that defendant of committing.

But there isn't the kind of broad bipartisan consensus needed to pass laws reforming these seemingly "no brainer" statutory reforms. The Republican party (and even a handful of conservative Democrats or members of Congress who caucus with Democrats in Congress) is collectively, overwhelming opposed to passing any of these reforms.

It is hard to say why this political party is opposed to these kinds of measures. 

But basically, the Republican party has become a neofascist, far-right movement. Its base of working class, less educated, older, Evangelical Christian whites, especially white men, feels incredibly aggrieved. They don't care about reality or governing well. They are ready to resort to violent threats and tactics, and to metaphorically burn down the entire government, in order to postpone or reverse the political and demographic trends that are on track to permanently relegate them to becoming an irrelevant political fringe group. So, as a result, they have no qualms about blocking even common sense reforms. They want to provoke a crisis in the hope that in that kind of crisis environment they will have a better chance of holding onto their political clout and privileged status than they will if the system works the way it would if everyone were making policy in good faith.

How did they get this way?

One big problem has been growing economic inequality.

Working class wages have been almost stagnant for almost fifty years, and working class unemployment rates have stayed mostly high, while incomes for college educated people have soared and college educated people have experienced sustained, very low unemployment rates. Mostly, working class white men haven't actually seen their inflation adjusted incomes actually fall, but they have stayed stagnant, while black Americans, Hispanics, and women have all seem much greater progress over the last fifty years from a previously dismally low state. As jobs opportunities for women have grown dramatically in the last fifty years, and their own economic prospects have stagnated, their ability to form stable families has collapsed. 

Rather than being providers for their families, they have become economic dead weight dragging down their female partners and children. Their economic failures create situations where their children are subjected to abuse and neglect driven by economic struggles, until the state intervenes and breaks up their families.

Some of them are also dimly aware that the stability of marriages for their college educated couple peers has actually improved at the same time. They blame the immorality that those college educated people have imposed upon them, even though declining morality and acceptance of gay rights has nothing to do with their plight and is just a scapegoat.

The real problem is that low skilled jobs have moved off shore where labor is cheaper for better quality workers, or have vanished entirely as technology has replaced lots of low skilled workers who aren't very productive with far fewer medium and high skilled workers who are vastly more productive. 

Our society no longer needs nearly as many men with little education but hands on abilities to do physical labor as it did in the 1950s and 1960s when the rest of the world was still recovering from World War II, millions of men had died in the war, technology had not yet revolutionized the means of production, the baby boom was keeping women out of the work force, and mass unskilled immigration hadn't yet begun.

Cultural norms that they used to take for granted in a predominantly Christian, predominantly white, less educated era where LGBTQ people were forced into the closet, and male dominance in the family and workplace were taken for granted have collapsed. Psychologically, this makes them feel like outsiders and strangers in their own land.

Their economic malaise for their social class has produced deaths of despair and made conspiracy theories look attractive, because they can't make sense of their world. 

They have embraced religion just as secular beliefs are dramatically on the rise nationally, because religion thrives when it protects threatened cultures and can insulate them from a changing world where they no longer fit.

They are attracted to political violence and guns, because an ability to threaten to use violence masks the fact that in other domains of life they have become ineffectual and impotent. They are sick and tired of losing, day in and day out, in economic and social interactions to better educated people who've managed to find a place in the thriving upper middle class educated establishment or its coattails. The mastery of information and knowledge that this class possesses, which they who've never liked or been good at schooling or book learning can't attain, leaves them constantly outsmarted and struggling to preserve their increasingly fragile self-confidence and egos. So, rather than try to improve themselves which feels futile, they've turned on knowledge and intelligence and education itself, and have started to view science with suspicion and distrust.

There's a huge generation gap in these kinds of beliefs. Their children are far more liberal and far less conservative Christian than they are. Sustained immigration has diversified the nation ethnically, religiously, and culturally. Their own self-destructive responses to their condition is leading them to die early, a trend most dramatically in evidence in the anti-vax movement during the COVID pandemic. Far fewer people are dropping out of high school and far more people are going to college or at least getting some college even if they don't secure a degree. They are fighting their culture's decline in numbers and relevance, but even they can see the writing on the wall. Most of them recognize, at least subconsciously, that they are fighting an ultimately futile rear guard action in culture wars that their side will eventually lose, but want to keep fighting it at least for the rest of their own lives, the rest of us be damned.

The uptight upper middle class college educated conservative intellectuals who used to provide the policy ideas for the right have been left adrift. They have now fled the movement in favor of either the Democratic big tent, or the no man's land between the small and rowdy Republican tent and the Democrat's tent, while former blue collar union men, whose union jobs are no more, have crossed over to the Republican tent.

The ultra-rich have stuck around, not because they have much in common with their working class fellow party members whom they hold in quiet contempt, and have made lemonade out of lemons by playing and manipulating the grass roots of their party to achieve their own selfish ends that don't benefit their grass roots supporters at all. The ultra-rich are staying with the GOP for the same reason that Muslims and conservative black men stay the course with the Democrats: because the other party is a threat to their very continued existence, even if they have many points of agreement with it. The ultra-rich risk betrayal at the hands of their own increasingly populist party, but so far, most of them see this as the lesser of two evils.

Despite the fact that Democrats hold the Presidency and a razor thin Senate majority, a decades in the making ultra-conservative Supreme Court, a razor thin majority in the House, and trifecta control of many red states, has currently brought conservatives to a high water mark. They've rolled back abortion rights by fifty years in a huge, mostly contiguous swath of the nation. They've ended affirmative action in higher education. They've brought the nation to the bring of a default on the national debt. Their anti-woke movement is making the most concerted move to roust liberal politics from schools, colleges, universities, and businesses since McCarthy's Red Scare. They've expanded access to firearms and in their heartlands, reduced the risk of criminal liability for using them. They've gerrymandered for all they are worth, bent election rules, and made it harder to vote. They've embraced the war on science with open arms. They're starting to nibble at ways to advance white Christian nationalism. They've tried to flip homophobia from illegal behavior in most forums to government mandated behavior. They've further polarized the nation and made a failed coup attempt that only encourages them to try again next time. They've rolled back labor laws to the nineteen teens.

Will this high water mark last?

Probably not. But there's an outside chance that it could, at least in part of the nation, and that's terrifying.

Colorado Has Authorized Licensed Legal Paraprofessionals

Colorado's Supreme Court has adopted a new set of court rules that allows licensed legal paraprofessionals to operate independently to represent parties to a limited extent in certain kinds of cases. The scope is limited to fairly simple family law matters and does not involve serving in a role similar to a lawyer in an evidentiary hearing. 

The first rule of the set explains the scope of this practice:

Rule 207.1. Licensed Legal Paraprofessionals’ Scope of Authority to Practice 

(1) Licensed Legal Paraprofessionals (“LLPs”) are individuals licensed by the Supreme Court pursuant to this rule to perform certain types of legal services only under the conditions set forth by the Court. They do not include individuals with a general license to practice law in Colorado. 

(2) An LLP’s scope of licensure is limited as follows: 

(a) An LLP may represent a client to perform tasks and services identified under section (2)(f) of this rule in a legal separation, declaration of invalidity of marriage, or dissolution of a marriage or civil union. 

(b) An LLP may represent a client to perform tasks and services identified under section (2)(f) of this rule in an initial allocation of parental responsibility (“APR”) matter, including parentage determinations, that is not part of a dissolution of a marriage or civil union. 

(c) An LLP may represent a client to perform tasks and services identified under section (2)(f) of this rule in a matter involving modification of APR regardless of whether the initial APR was part of a dissolution of a marriage or civil union, or modification of child support and/or maintenance. 

(d) An LLP may represent a client to perform tasks and services identified under section (2)(f) of this rule in any of the following matters: protection orders, name changes, and adult gender designation changes. 

(e) An LLP’s authority to practice law under any section of this rule includes filing and responding to motions for remedial contempt citations under C.R.C.P. 107. 

(f) Even if an LLP is authorized to represent a client pursuant to sections (2)(a), (2)(b), (2)(c), (2)(d) and (2)(e), an LLP is not authorized to represent a client in any of the following: 

(i) the registration of foreign orders; 

(ii) motions for or orders regarding punitive contempt citations under C.R.C.P. 107; 

(iii) matters involving an allegation of common law marriage; 

(iv) matters involving disputed parentage where there are more than two persons asserting or denying legal parentage; 

(v) matters in which a non-parent’s request for APR is contested by at least one parent; 

(vi) preparation of or litigation regarding pre- or post-nuptial agreements; 

(vii) matters in which a party is a beneficiary of a trust and information about the trust will be relevant to resolution of the matter; 

(viii) matters in which a party intends to contest jurisdiction of the court over the matter; 

(ix) the preparation by the LLP of a qualified domestic relations order (“QDRO”) or other document allocating retirement assets that are not liquid at the time of the matter; 

(x) the preparation by the LLP of documents needed to effectuate the sale or distribution of assets of a business entity or commercial property; 

(xi) matters in which an expert report or testimony is required to value an asset or determine income due to the inherent complexity of the asset or income at issue; or 

(xii) issues collateral to, but directly affecting, a matter which falls within the LLP’s scope of practice when such issues require analysis and advice outside that scope of practice, such as immigration, criminal, and bankruptcy issues that could directly affect the resolution of the matter. 

(g)Within the types of matters and authorizations to practice law identified in section (2)(a), (2)(b), (2)(c), (2)(d) and (2)(e) of this rule, an LLP who is in good standing may represent the interests of a client by: 

(i) establishing a contractual relationship with the client; 

(ii) interviewing the client to understand the client’s objectives and obtaining information relevant to achieving that objective; 

(iii) informing, counseling, advising, and assisting the client in determining which form (among those approved by the Judicial Department or the Supreme Court) to use as the basis for a document in a matter, and advising the client on how to complete a form or provide information for a document; 

(iv) preparing and completing documents using forms approved by the Judicial Department or the Supreme Court, including proposed parenting plans, separation agreements, motions or stipulations for child support modification, child support worksheets, proposed orders, nonappearance affidavits, discovery requests and answers to discovery requests, trial management certificates, pretrial submissions, and exhibit and witness lists; 

(v) obtaining, explaining, and filing any document or necessary information in support of a form or other document, including sworn financial statements and certificates of compliance; 

(vi) signing, filing, and completing service of documents; 

(vii) reviewing documents of another party or documents and forms prepared by a pension or retirement plan which allocate pension or retirement benefits pursuant to a decree of dissolution, and explaining them to the client; 

(viii) informing, counseling, assisting and advocating for a client in negotiations with another party or that party’s representative and in mediations; 

(ix) filling in, signing, filing, and completing service of a written settlement agreement in conformity with the negotiated agreement; 

(x) communicating with another party or the party’s representative regarding documents prepared for or filed in a case and matters reasonably related thereto; 

(xi) communicating with the client regarding the matter and related issues; 

(xii) explaining a court order that affects the client’s rights and obligations; 

(xiii) standing or sitting at counsel table with the client during a court proceeding to provide emotional support, communicating with the client during the proceeding, answering questions posed by the court, addressing the court upon the court’s request, taking notes, and assisting the client in understanding the proceeding and relevant orders; 

(xiv) providing clients with information about additional resources or requirements, such as parenting education classes, and filing certificates of completion with the court; and 

(xv) advising clients regarding the need for a lawyer to review complex issues that may arise in a matter. 

(h) An LLP is not authorized to conduct an examination of a witness. The LLP may only address the court pursuant to section (2)(g)(xiii) of this rule. 

(i) Limits on the activities that can be performed or matters that can be undertaken by an LLP under this rule do not, by themselves, require the LLP to withdraw from the representation of a client if the LLP can provide authorized services to that client. Nothing in this rule precludes a client of an LLP from retaining a lawyer or acting pro se in the same matter in which the client has retained an LLP when an activity, task or issue is outside the LLP’s authorized scope of practice.

According to a Colorado Supreme Court Office of Attorney Regulatory Counsel email newsletter:

LLPs must satisfy the admissions requirements set forth in the rules, including those in C.R.C.P. 207.8. That rule provides for a degree-plus-experience track or a longer experience track, but either way an LLP must take a legal ethics class and pass both an ethics exam and a family law exam. The Advisory Committee on the Practice of Law and Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel (“OARC”) are starting the process of assembling the infrastructure for those exams.

The LLP program is the culmination of years of studying the issue of unrepresented litigants in family law cases – around 75 percent of the parties in such cases – and the programs in other states that have authorized non-lawyers to provide certain services. These licensed paralegals/paraprofessionals often charge hourly rates roughly one-quarter to one-half the typical rates of attorneys.

Marriage v. Cohabitation In England

This post recaps an answer I provided on marriage v. cohabitation in the U.K. that I made at Law.SE while stripping away parts that are irrelevant in the context of a blog post.

U.K. Law Is Mostly Not Uniform On This Subject

Unless otherwise clearly indicated, I am referring solely to the law of England and Wales. Most laws related to rights incident to marriage are not uniform in the U.K. Instead, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England and Wales, each have their own separate laws on these subjects, although the differences between them are more differences of detail than of broad conceptual structure at a "forest" level. All references to England below are to England and Wales whether this is expressly stated or not.

Who Is Compared?

The comparison I am making is generally between married people and unmarried cohabitants, as the law that applies between total strangers isn't really analogous in most cases. (Even though it is theoretically possible to have a married couple that never significantly cohabitates.)

While the question is specific to a couple with children, formal rights in relation to the children of a couple are only slightly different in theory. But, as discussed below, the limited size of child support payments make the differences between married couples with and without children in divorce cases, significant anyway because there is a right to property division and spousal maintenance in addition to child support for married couples but not for unmarried couples.

Marriage v. Civil Partnerships In England

In most, if not all, circumstances, couples in a "civil partnership" receive the same legal treatment as married couples in English law, and you may assume that they are mostly equivalent for the purposes described below. England also has same sex marriage, but a significant number of civil partnerships, most entered into between 2004 when they become available and 2013 when same sex marriage was allowed, remain in existence and have not been converted into marriages.

Getting Married And Ending A Marriage

Common Law Marriage v. Formal Marriage

Despite being the source of the doctrine historically, England no longer has "common law marriage". Common law marriage was abolished in England in the Marriage Act (1753), although it wasn't as clearly established as it is now in common law marriage jurisdictions even before then. An unmarried couple can now become a legally married couple in England and Wales only by filling out the proper government forms and presenting them to the proper government officials.

According to the same source, Scotland began formal marriage registration in 1855 (which was previously documents only by the church) and once had four forms of "irregular marriage", three of which were abolished prospectively (i.e. new marriages could not be formed in this way) in 1940, and the last of which was abolished prospectively in 2006. Common law marriage outside of England and Wales, when it did exist elsewhere in the British Commonwealth, was or became closer to the Scots law practice than the historical English practice. Other parts of the British Commonwealth and United Kingdom mostly also abolished common law marriage, but did so later than England did. India, however, has a legal doctrine quite similar to common law marriage today as a legacy of British law, for members of some religions, and Australia, Canada, and Ireland have recognized somewhat similar concepts by statute or local case law innovations. Notably, common law marriage had not been abolished in the American colonies at the time that the United States gained independence in 1776 (although it took a while for the British to diplomatically recognize this political reality).

In the time period from 1753 to 2006, the formalities required to get married were more lax in Scotland than in England, so it was common in that time period for couples for whom the formalities of the English marriage system were inconvenient to travel to Scotland to marry. In addition to the reality of this situation, this is a prominent feature in many fictional novels set in this time period. As a result, there is an ample case law in English and Scottish courts over choice of law issues related to this reality. This case law was referred to regularly in the late 19th century and early 20th century by U.S. courts addressing choice of law issues related to marriage and divorce, particularly in cases involving marriages and divorces entered into in Mexico and the Caribbean in an effort to evade legal restrictions present in the home states of the couples involved.

In most circumstances, however, the law of England and Wales will recognize the validity of a marriage which was legally entered into under the law of the place where the marriage where it was entered into, even if that marriage didn't comply with English law regarding what is necessary to get married.

Terminating A Marriage In England Then And Now

Also, like all other common law jurisdictions (and so far as I know, all other civil law jurisdictions), but unlike the situations in Islamic law, it is impossible in England and Wales to end a validly existing marriage by any means other than the death of a spouse or a court order decreeing that the marriage has been dissolved. Also, if a couple was not validly married, even though there could reasons someone might think that they were validly married, a court can clarify the situation by annulling a putative marriage.

Historically, since England Christianized for the last time (after becoming almost entirely pagan after Anglo-Saxon invasions by the end of the 6th century that had been preceded by partial Christianization). The restoration of Christianity in England began about 600 CE, and had run its course well before the Norman invasion of 1066 CE, which is at the root of the modern English legal system. Divorce was then prohibited in England until the Anglican Church broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in 1532 in the English Reformation.

The first Christian era marriage in England terminated by divorce since long before the Norman invasion in England was in the case of King Henry VIII's marriage to Anne which was terminated in 1552. The next divorce in England took place no earlier than 1670 (although there were a handful of aristocratic annulments in that time period), and divorce was only available by parliamentary decree until 1857 when the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) was enacted, with just 324 divorces granted by parliament from 1670 to 1857. The same source notes that:

Only four of the 324 cases were brought by women. A husband needed to prove adultery to obtain a divorce. By contrast, a wife was required to prove adultery and some other especially aggravating circumstance to have the same grounds. Over the years, women learned that brutality, rape, desertion and financial chicanery did not count. 

Under the 1857 Act divorce could be granted on the grounds of marital fault, for which adultery by itself sufficed for a man seeking a divorce and adultery by a husband together with cruelty, or rape and/or incest of someone else was required for a wife seeking a judicial divorce. Then according to the same source:

A private members’ bill in 1923 made it easier for women to petition for divorce for adultery – but it still had to be proved. In 1937, the law was changed and divorce was allowed on other grounds, including drunkenness, insanity and desertion, although there was a bar on petitions for the first three years of the marriage.

Divorce remained particularly rare even after judicial divorce was authorized, especially prior to the 1923 reforms in English divorce law:

In the first decade of the 20th century, there was just one divorce for every 450 marriages. . . . it was not until the Divorce Reform Act 1969 that they reached the level we are familiar with today. This legislation marked an important shift not merely because it added further grounds for divorce, on the basis of two years' separation with the other party's consent, or five years' without, but because it removed the concept of ‘matrimonial offences' and hence the idea of divorce as a remedy for the innocent against the guilty. Today, there are just two marriages for every divorce each year.

Finally, starting in April 2022 the divorce regime there became an almost fully no-fault divorce regime. So, basically, either member of a married couple can unilaterally divorce at will, without that five year waiting period required from 1969 to 2021, but with still having the economic consequences discussed below.

Ummarried Couples Compared

Unmarried couples can break up at will, and court intervention is only available to resolve specific disputes over title to specific property, child custody type issues, and child support type issues, which married couples if they broke up would address in a divorce case. If unmarried couples resolve all issues of property division, child custody, and child support by mutual agreement without ever having resorted to court intervention, court involvement in their break up is not required at all. As noted here:

In response to the increase in cohabitation, several legal changes were made in the UK in recent years. In Scotland, the Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006 provides cohabitants with some limited rights. [ed. England does not currently have similar legislation in force.]

In addition, since 2003 in England and Wales, 2002 in Northern Ireland, and 2006 in Scotland, an unmarried father has parental responsibility if he is listed on the birth certificate. . . .

While 49% of cohabiting couples that aren't married or in a civil partnership believe they have rights under a 'common law marriage', common law marriage has no legal standing in England and Wales. Cohabiting couples aren't automatic beneficiaries or have protections regarding non-joint bank accounts, mortgages, tenancies or pensions, unless the other person is explicitly mentioned as a joint account holder or in the terms as a beneficiary, for example in the event of death.

Notable Legal Implications Of Marriage In England and Wales

I'll list only a sampling of the legal incidents of marriage which are now, or have historically been, among the most important (some of which have been repealed but are mentioned because many people are not aware that the historic legal situation is no longer the case):

1. Paternity

Marriage creates a strong legal presumption (which is in some cases rebuttable) that children born to a married woman are children of her husband:

Until officially declared otherwise, a man is deemed to be a child’s legal father if he is married to the mother at the time of the child’s birth[.]

2. Rape

England no longer recognizes an immunity between spouses for rape. Spousal rape is a crime in England just as it would be for non-married cohabitants.

3. Duty of Support

A spouse has a duty to economically support a current spouse (beyond child support), while unmarried cohabitants do not have a duty of support to each other.

If your partner won't support you, you can ask a court to order them to support you.

When it was nearly impossible or at least very difficult to get legally divorced, this right was used in about a dozen cases a year, almost always by women, often in the form of a lawsuit seeking divortium a mensa et thoro ("separation from bed and board") in the canon law courts of the Anglican Church, usually on the basis of adultery or life threatening cruelty and usually with the woman receiving regular spousal maintenance but losing all custody of her children as a result unless there were extenuating circumstances.

These days, most spouses who are not being supported simply get divorced and receive spousal maintenance and a share of marital property (and possibly child support as well), instead, so the right to bring a lawsuit to enforce this right has largely fallen into dessitude and is rarely utilized in practice. The doctrine is mostly used to justify policies in other areas of the law that assume spouses provide economic support for each other (which they usually do even though this right is rarely enforced with lawsuits).

4. Property Rights During Marriage

During a marriage, the property rights of spouses are essentially identical to those of non-spouse cohabitants.

This is as a result of the Married Women's Property Act (1870) which abolished the doctrine of coverture (which treated a husband and wife as a single economic unit managed by the husband) in England and Wales.

During the marriage title to property controls who owns and controls property in England and Wales for the vast majority of purposes for members of the married couple, just as it does for unmarried cohabiting couples, even though title may be disregarded for married couples in a divorce, and in some cases in connection with inheritance rights.

As discussed in Part 9 below, England and Wales does not have a "community property" regime that is effective during the course of a marriage (although it might recognize the "community property" character of property acquired during a marriage while the couple lived in a community property jurisdiction for some purposes.

5. Income Taxation

Marriage has income tax implications in he U.K.:

If you’re married or in a civil partnership

You may be able to claim Marriage Allowance to reduce your partner’s tax if your income is less than the standard Personal Allowance.

6. Government Benefits, Pensions, And Employee Benefits

Marriage is relevant to rights under some government benefit including "welfare", programs, but the details are too numerous to set forth here. Likewise, marital status is frequently relevant to the rules for public and private pension plans, and sometimes for other public and private sector employee benefit plans as well.

One isolated area where cohabitation can confer rights similar to marriage, however, is in English Social Security laws:

Social security law

Living together has been part of the law since the beginning of the modern welfare state in 1948. The term "Living together as husband and wife" was introduced from 4 April 1977 to mean the same as "cohabiting with a man as his wife" which was used before that date. The term is now "living together as a married couple".

To be regarded as "living together as a married couple" or cohabitating, there are various questions to consider. The question of cohabitation should take into consideration all the six questions, and looking at the relationship as a whole.

Additional details on the six factor test for recognition of an unmarried couple for English Social Security benefits purposes can be found here.

7. Court Testimony

Historically, England had a privilege that excluded from evidence in court cases certain testimony from spouses against each other and certain testimony about confidential communications between spouses. This has now been abolished:

The form of privilege, restricting the admissibility into evidence of communications between spouses during a marriage, existed in English law from 1853 until it was abolished in 1968 (for civil cases) and in 1984 (for criminal cases).

The testimonial part of the spousal privilege was mostly abolished in the late 1800s with further clarification through 1984 in certain domestic violence settings.

8. Immigration

Spousal status is relevant to an immigration application when one spouse is a British subject and the other is not:

Also known as a UK marriage visa, a spouse visa allows married partners of UK citizens to immigrate to the UK because they are married to someone who is 'settled in the UK' - i.e. a person who is ordinarily resident in the UK and has no immigration restrictions on how long they can stay in the UK.

9. Rights Upon A Divorce Or Breakup

As a practical matter, differing rights if the couple breaks up are the single most important difference between being a cohabiting unmarried couple with kids and a married couple with kids.

The difference matters because the less affluent member of the couple gets a much better deal upon a break up if the couple is married than if they couple is not married. The strong rights of a less affluent member of a couple primarily matter because this makes it economically safer for a woman in married couple who has kids to sacrifice her own economic prospects to focus on those kids than for a woman who is an unmarried cohabitant. This also matters because the economic incentive for a husband not to divorce a wife who is economically dependent upon him is much stronger than the economic incentive for an unmarried cohabitant boyfriend/father to not break up with an unmarried cohabitant girlfriend/mother.

Upon divorce, a divorced spouse is entitled to share of the couple's property and/or spousal maintenance (a.k.a. alimony) in excess of child support, which are far in excess of the rights of a non-spouse cohabitant, especially in the case of a long marriage in which the couple's wealth has grown during the marriage.

Non-spousal cohabitants who split up divide their property based upon title to property and have no spousal maintenance obligations to each other so only child support (if applicable) is at issue. Child support and custody are still present between unmarried cohabitants or co-parents who have children together.

In the arena of property division, England does not have what in the U.S. is called "community property". 

There is, instead, a distinction between marital property acquired during the marriage and separate property, and England and Wales has an "equitable division" regime rather than one in which there is a fixed percentage right of each spouse, and marital property rights remain inchoate (rather than vested and presenting existing) until death or divorce. If a property settlement is not reached by mutual agreement a court considers factors including:

• Each partner’s individual assets
• Contributions to the marriage or civil partnership, both financially and emotionally
• Time out of the workplace
• Earning capacity
• Standard of living before the break-up
• Requirements such as catering for disabilities
• Length of marriage
• How old you both are

In practice, the fact that a couple has children together also tends to influence what is equitable in a property division.

The presence or absence of spousal maintenance greatly impacts the practical effect of a split up for a couple with children who are married v. a couple with children who are not married. A marital property settlement and spousal maintenance in addition to child support makes life a lot easier for a less affluent ex-spouse than child support alone.

10. Inheritance

Upon death, a surviving spouse has inheritance rights different from and greater than a non-spouse cohabitant, in the estate of the deceased spouse.

Generally speaking, if there is no will, a spouse has significant inheritance rights, while a non-spouse cohabitant does not. There are also legal limitations on the extent to which a spouse can be denied an inheritance even if there is a will.

While in general, a spouse has testamentary freedom to disinherit a spouse in English law (unlike the vqst majority of U.S. and civil law jurisdictions), in England, the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependents) Act (1975) "sets out categories of people that have the legal standing to challenge another person's Will on the basis that they have not been left reasonable financial provision."

Spouses also have greater rights at death than unmarried cohabitants with regard to management of a probate estate of a decedent partner and disposition of a partner's body, at least in the absence of estate planning documents to the contrary.

Transfers to a spouse at death are also exempt from inheritance taxation.

Marital status is also highly relevant in England to the rules for succession to aristocratic titles and for the titles of someone who is married to someone with an aristocratic title. While English law normally makes little or no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children (which is a function of whether their parents were married), in the area of succession to aristocratic titles and eligibility for titles that imply marriage to someone with an aristocratic title (like the former Queen's Consort), the distinction between married couples and their children, and unmarried couples and their children is very important.

11. Incapacity

Unlike most U.S. jurisdictions, marriage does not, in and of itself, grant strong rights relative to a cohabitating partner, to a role in medical decision making or guardianship proceedings in England.

An adult's "next of kin" is generally their spouse or civil partnership partner, which is not automatic in the case of a cohabitating partner. But, the rights associated with next of kin status are generally limited to notice or information until another basis to be involved in decision-making is established:

As far as the law is concerned next of kin means nothing with the exception of children aged under 18. The next of kin of a child under 18 may be legally entitled to make decisions for or on behalf of the child.

The term usually means your nearest blood relative. In the case of a married couple or a civil partnership it usually means their husband or wife.

Next of kin is a title that can be given, by you, to anyone from your partner to blood relatives and even friends. It is also possible to name more than one person as your next of kin. This is a title that is primarily used in order for emergency services to know who to keep informed about an individual’s condition and treatment.

This means that you have no legal rights as a result of this title. This can create difficulties if you haven’t put additional measures in place to manage your relative or loved one’s affairs. If you do not have any legal rights, you cannot make decisions on their behalf.

Similarly, pretty much anyone can be appointed to be an adult's guardian in England, with no absolute priority for a spouse or a blood family member over a cohabitating partner or any other person expressing interest in the care of an incapacitated person. Marriage is just one factor among many considered in a fairly wholistic manner when deciding between competing applications to serve as someone's guardian.

Cohabitation Post-Divorce By A Formerly Married Couple

A married couple with children that gets divorced and then cohabits post-divorce are not on quite the same footing as a cohabiting couple with children who have never married.

The starting point in such a couple for the rights of the former spouses vis-a-vis each other begins with the divorce decree and any incorporated settlement between the spouses in connection with the divorce. Provisions related to child custody and child support may be modified over time as the children grow and circumstances change. In some unusual but not unheard of circumstances, spousal support duties arising from the prior marriage can be imposed long after the divorce even if spousal support was not immediately imposed at the time of the divorce or was only nominal at that time.

Provisions related to court ordered child custody arrangements, child support, and spousal support normally continue in force until they are spent by the their own terms (e.g. when the children become adults or spousal support established for a fixed time period ends), are modified by a later court order, or the couple remarries.

It is uncommon, but not completely unheard of, for the children of a couple for whom child custody arrangements have been imposed between unmarried coparents or in a divorce at one point, to ever cease to be subject to some sort of court order related to child custody.

Court orders related to children or spousal maintenance cannot normally be adjusted by mutual agreement after a divorce without court intervention.

Remarriage will generally abrogate and cause to become void all provisions in a divorce decree, settlement, or post-divorce court order related to the children, and all provisions with spousal maintenance, while the property ownership and debt obligations of the parties to the remarriage restart from scratch at whatever state they were in immediately prior to the remarriage. Sometimes a remarriage after a divorce legitimatizes the paternity of children born between the marriages.

First Marriages Of A Cohabiting Couple With Children

When a cohabiting couple with children marry, they have all of the incidents of a married couple.

Sometimes, but not always, this will help establish the father's paternity of their children. Court orders related to the custody and child support of their shared children will usually be dissolved (I don't know if any formal legal action is required to do this or not).

Property acquired by the couple prior to marrying while cohabiting will generally be separate property owned by the spouse who was in title to that property prior to getting married.

In a subsequent divorce of that couple, the length of the marriage will not include the full time of their cohabitation, but their cohabitation prior to marriage is a factor which a divorce judge is not prohibited from considering entirely in making an equitable division of marital property and in awarding spousal maintenance.