Nudges, Marriages, and Feminists

I just finished reading the book Nudge, in which a couple of academic economists explore the idea of 'choice architecture' and what they call 'libertarian paternalism'.  The basic idea is that many of the decisions that are made in both public and private spheres end up nudging us to choose in a particular direction, even if unintentionally, and that we can use that fact to help improve the choices people make by intentionally 'nudging' them in a better direction. However, they support doing so thoughtfully so that we intentionally seek to maintain freedom of choice rather than mandating things. They open the book with the example of how the way food is displayed in a cafeteria influences which foods are purchased, and that we can influence the choice of healthier food in schools by the way the food is displayed. This doesn't coerce anyone's choice but does give healthy food greater exposure. The way we design buildings and cities also nudge decisions on transportation, housing, etc. and such decisions must be made.

We use government in this way much of the time, via tax deductions and tax credits, subsidies, and rebates. It goes beyond nudging to mandates when we legally require things.I like the author's emphasis on seeking to maintain freedom, the libertarian part of it, as well as the idea that choices which must be made may as well seek to help us. Of course, we will not all agree on what is 'good' and what 'helps'. In many cases, though, like the default option for work or government benefits, this idea can be put to good use. For instance, many companies now automatically enroll you in the 401k savings plan if you do nothing, whereas in the past the default if you did nothing was to leave you un-enrolled. This is a 'nudge' and seems to me a good one.

However, the more the decision involves morality and values, the more diificult this use of 'nudging' gets to be. One chapter in the book proposes changing the societal approach to marriage, proposing that governments no longer sanction any marriages, that marriage be 'privatized'. The change would be that the government would only sanction civil unions, and marriage would be a private or religious matter exclusively.  The authors contend that this would improve the freedom of religious groups as well as non-religious folks, as religious groups could be free to exclude whomever they choose and have standards as high as they want without concern about what impacts it might have on things like government benefits.

In many ways that is a place we have already arrived at, though not officially. The June 21 issue of Newsweek magazine,  which has Sarah Palin on the cover, has 2 articles that impact this issue. The first article is about Sarah Palin and the renewed energy of women of the religious right and the other is an article that argues against marriage by 2 self-vowed 'secular, urban' women who rail against the evil of marriage. Palin's work is described as a different sort of feminism, one that 'gathers up the Christian women traditional feminism has left behind' and admits that 'mainstream feminism has had an antireligious bias for a really long time.' The other article is the voice of that 'mainstream feminism' which argues that 'marriage is ...no longer necessary' and that 'the idea of marriage has become so tainted...that we're hesitant to engage in it.'

It is interesting to me that secular, urban homosexuals are arguing they should get married while secular, urban women are arguing that they should avoid marriage. Neither of them are arguing on the basis of virtue. Both are arguing on that basis of what makes them more financially successful and more self-satisfied.  There is very little discussion of what it means to be human, since being human means little more to them than 'maximizing our marginal benefit' in economic terms, which includes maximizing their personal power and liberty. I said above that in many ways we are already there because 41% of births are out of wedlock, divorce rates remain high, and benefits in both jobs and in government are readily available to both singles and homosexuals who live together or have children (whether adopted for homosexuals or out of wedlock for heterosexuals). The feminist article admits that for dual income marriages, there is no tax benefit to marriage. The battles today about marriage are really more about status and power than about economics and benefits, and it is interesting that the secular feminist argument and the homosexual argument so completely contradict each other. To me, one key weakness of the Christian discussion of marriage for the past 2 centuries, since the onset of Romanticism, is that we talk about marriage mostly in terms of self-fulfillment, not in terms of virtue, living out our humanness as God created it, or learning how to put other's needs ahead of our own desires. The feminist article admits that couples who marry for love find that '90% of couples have lost the passion they originally felt. And while couples who marry for love are less 'in love' with each passing year, one study found that those in arranged marriages grow steadily more in love as the years progress-because their expectations, say researchers, are a whole lot lower.' I think it has more to do with different expectations rather than lower expectations. Expecting to put someone else's needs ahead of your own and being surprised that doing so makes you a better and happier person seems like higher, not lower, expectations to me. The secular, urban feminists haven't figured that out.

All of this points out how very selfish and self-centered we are. The most difficult thing about marriage is that it demands putting our self-centeredness aside so often. The basic idea about Nudge that I like is the call to consider what is best for others, yet it quickly degenerates into defining 'best' as nothing more than maximizing our selfish desire for power or pleasure. And I think this is why Palin is touching a lot of Christian women. They see in her example with her Down Syndrome child and her out-of-wedlock grandchild a person who is still striving to do the right thing as a mom, and a lot of moms seem to relate to that. I am not a Palin political supporter because she still seems uninformed about a great many matters of state and policy. But I do see how she represents for many women an alternative to the selfish, secular, urban women of the political left.