Child Support

I'm reading a book, Kidding Ourselves, about creating more equal marriages. The author, Rhona Mahony makes the point that marriages will not be equal until extra-martial options are equal- if divorce leaves women desolate and men well off, women will put more energy into the marriage. One of the things she suggests to produce this is ensuring that women receive child support regardless of when their husbands pay it.* Essentially, she'd have the men pay their child support to the government, and the government pay the child support to their children's mothers regardless of whether the man actually paid.

This idea has a lot of innate appeal. There's a lot of ways to stall on paying child support without going to great effort and without getting in trouble. Men can use this to bargain their ex-wives into accepting lesser child support payments because they need the money now**. And that's before you get into men who are willing to move out of state or work off the books. There's also the fact that instability is more expensive than stability, and the time value of money, that means even if the men eventually do pay, it's worth less when it's delivered late and sporadically. A guaranteed mechanism would prevent this.

But I'm not convinced a government bureaucracy is the solution to anything being too slow and erratic. Could private insurance do the same thing? Assume several companies offer child support insurance: they pay the mother the court mandated $N, and the husband has to pay $N + the insurance premium. I would allow negotiation such that the man could offer the woman more child support in exchange for going without insurance- but since people tend to marry (and sleep with) people their own level of maturity, the men most likely to skip out on child support are most likely to have bred with women inclined to forgo insurance. Do we allow them to change courses mid-stream? That's hardly insurance.

There's also the issue of choosing insurance companies- the payer will want the cheapest one, the recipient will want the one that's easiest to work with. And given how some divorces go, some recipients will choose the most expensive one just to spite their ex. We could make the insurance payments the responsibility of the recipient, with a possible increase in child support to pay for it, but since rates will presumably be higher for payers who are more likely to be delinquent, that will still punish the recipient for the payers irresponsibility.

But I really can't see making insurance, or government mediation, mandatory. The government is slow and disorganized. Had my parents divorced, I know my dad would have been more timely and reliable than any government or private company, because he loves me and my brother and wants us to be taken care of. He's not the only one.

I can't see a lot of bad coming from making these options available. It's possible that the existence of insurance would make people more callous towards recipients who don't get their support, but it's also possible this will free up law enforcement to go after dead beats more vigorously, or even that insurance companies will invest in increasing the enforcement rate.

*I assume she'd be fine with the reverse as well. For ease of discussion I'm going to use men as the example child support payers and women as receivers, because that's 99% of what happens, but everything I say would apply in reverse, or to homosexual couples.

**Newt Gingrich did this to one of his ex-wives, to the point that her church held a fund raising drive to keep her and their children from starving. I'm pretty sure this is not the ex-wife he served with divorce papers the day after her cancer surgery, but I could be wrong.

Kidding Oursevles

I liked this book way more than I thought I would. I expected it to be stupid feminists who were bad at math expecting the government to order people to do it the way they wanted, in the face of economics and human nature. And there was a lot of that in the second half of the book. But the first half is extremely solid economics, outlining how early choices create marginal effect that snowball into big differences in the distribution of labor within a marriage. It's an extremely interesting application of game theory and negotiation that applies equally well towards business partnerships.

The big thing it illuminated for me is how good intentions and professed belief in equality are not enough. This shouldn't have surprised me. There's some study showing that when cops were given a simulation involving a potentially dangerous black man, it didn't matter at all whether they professed to believe black people were more violent or not. It only mattered whether they'd heard the stereotype. There's a school of thought that we believe everything we hear until it's specifically disbelieved, and I find that super ultra plausible.

Anyways: even two people really dedicated to equality will have internalized what the current focal point for household chore distribution is. Unless they consciously dedicate themselves to moving away from it, accepting that it will feel awkward at best and quite possibly cause significant pain, they will continually slide back to the more ordinary chore distribution. This really resonated with me, because the one thing my ex-live-in-boyfriend and I fought about was housework. To me, it was really really important that we set up some formal agreement, at least for certain chores, so that no one felt taken advantage of and everyone was doing their fair share. To him, it was really really important that chores be done spontaneously and with no sense of obligation, because otherwise they felt like work and it would make him super resentful. Unlike most women, I didn't suffer the disadvantage of caring more than he did (Mahony says outright that the person who cares is the person who's going to do it and you might as well accept that). But potentially just as bad, I liked to do my cleaning in maintenance mode: small amounts of cleaning most days, keeping the place in general good shape. He liked to go into 16 hour marathons, because he's a miserable asshole after more than 30 minutes of cleaning and he wanted to pay that cost as few times as possible. Marathons would make me miserable all on their own, without adding an asshole boyfriend, so I hated these and took much more frequent breaks, which of course made him feel like he was doing more of the work and being taken advantage of, which coincidentally is exactly how I felt all the other days when I was doing small amounts of cleaning and he was doing fuck all.

The solution is to change the system such that your partner cares enough about the problem to work on it. For example, my ex cared more about cleaning up for guests than I did, so we could have invited his friends over more to align incentives. For couples with babies, the woman who gave birth has such a head start in bonding with her infant that the only way to counter it is to give the father or non-birthing lesbian partner large stretches of time alone with the baby. In order to counteract the head start, you actually have to have the father spend more time with the baby and do more care than the mother. I think one of the real value-adds of the book is that she gives people permission to do things that will cause pain in the short term (like letting the less bonded, less skillful parent care for the baby, or accept that someone will be miserable as the cleaning focal point changes).

Alas, the second half of the book is not so useful. She dismisses the suggestion that birth- and child- friendly work policies make hiring women more expensive and thus less likely to be hired with any evidence as to why that won't happen. Her understanding of economics does not extend to biology or pre-agrarian anthropology. She's totally right that making married couples file separately would lead to more women working, but doesn't address the people such a switch would hurt.


*Insect infestations I've had in two years living on my own, post-college? 1, ants, which arose while I was in NY and my neighbors were watching the cats so I kind of blame them. Insect infestations he had in the 2.5 years we were together? 4: 3 fruit flies, 1 fleas. Arguably the fleas weren't his fault, but the time he just left the Thanksgiving dishes out for two weeks? I think it was predictable that would lead to problems.