Does Marriage Need Modernising? (Your Radical Questions with Ed Davies)

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0:30Amol Rajan:Next up, love stories. Are they all they're cracked up to be? It feels good to worry less. It feels good to GEICO. The sun's shining, birds are singing, and all feels right in the world. Until the season changes and suddenly you lose your motivation to get out of bed. In fact, one in five people experience some form of depression no matter the season or time of year. At the American Psychiatric Association Foundation, our vision is to build a mentally healthy nation for all. because we want you to live your best life and be your best you all year round. Please visit mentallyhealthynation.org to learn more.

1:08Amol Rajan:Hello, it's Amol here. Now, just before we get into this week's radical questions and answers, and by the way, thank you so much to all of you, large numbers who are sending in these questions. They're terrific. And as you can tell, and you're about to tell even further, we're really trying to pursue answers on your behalf. But just before you hear this week's episode of your radical questions, I wanted to offer a little nudge to get your questions for a future episode, because we have got coming on the podcast, the main podcast, someone who thinks that electoral politics is broken, but democracy isn't.

1:39Amol Rajan:Electoral politics is broken, but democracy isn't. If that sounds complicated, she's going to make it very, very simple, because someone called Helene Landemore has a radical roadmap for what to do to restore politics to the people. She's a political theorist at Yale, and she says the answer to our problems is to do politics without the politicians. We're going to explore what that might look like, how it's been done in various ways already in democracies around the world. And if you're someone who is, and I know many of you are, because I get this feedback through our wonderful social channels and indeed our inbox.

2:11Amol Rajan:If you're someone who really believes in politics, but thinks maybe it's kind of going wrong, and if you're someone who thinks maybe the problem is the politicians that we get, this episode is for you. If you've got a question for Helene Landemore about politics without politicians, please do send it in. You can contact us on 0330 123 9480 or email radical at bbc.co.uk. And we'll do our best not only to put that question to Helene, but to make sure you get a really thorough answer to. Now, on to this week's episode.

2:52Amol Rajan:Hello and welcome to your Radical Questions. You know the drill by now. This is where I put your questions to one of our radical and brilliant guests. This is your chance to engage very directly with them. This is their chance to engage very directly with you. And we're all about connection on this podcast, which was very much the theme of Ed Davies when on last Thursday's episode, he came on Radical and talked to us about the extraordinary changes to British social life, families and the declining rate of marriage. He's from the Centre for Social Justice, a poverty think tank, joins me on the pod today.

3:23Amol Rajan:We've just had an absolutely fantastic conversation about some deep trends that are reshaping this country. And Ed has very kindly agreed to stick around a little bit longer to answer your questions. Right. Are you feeling ready, Ed? Ready. Here we go. This is our first question from Karen in Monmouth. Hi. Just wondering how much social mobility has had an impact on family isolation. Karen, social mobility has an impact on family isolation. Does that mean increased social mobility, which includes the mass entry of women into the workplace through white-collar jobs, has led to family isolation?

3:58Amol Rajan:I'm not entirely sure how I interpret that question.

4:00Ed Davies:I think there's two ways I can interpret that. I wonder if it means slightly mobility, as in actual physical mobility, that people move away to get jobs would result in isolation. So historically, definitely you would see families, multi-generational families helping each other and that is definitely harder now you know i live 200 miles from my parents they don't help with child care other than very occasionally um through no fault of their own they'd very willingly do it but it's that has changed to a degree the other part about social mobility thinking about it in the more traditional sense is the role that families play and connections and friendships play in advancing your own economic and working advancement and that's huge and it's very under talked about that coming from a stable family with parents that have your back is probably the single biggest factor in social mobility so the decline of family

4:49Amol Rajan:will definitely have had an impact on that so the benefits of the kind of moral and and future economic benefits of both um of connections both um social connections uh and also family connections uh us those benefits kind of skew towards people from poorer backgrounds because Because the poorer you are, the more some of that social capital can help you kind of, you know, find out about certain jobs, get advice on certain things, open certain doors in a way that people from richer families can just rely on because they come from stable families and they know a lot of people.

5:21Ed Davies:Yeah. The more you're sort of stable your families, the more connections it will have, the more it will be sort of embedded in its community is the reality. And so exactly as you say, I went to a round table at a secondary school up on the Wirral not that long ago, quite a tough area. and we were talking about what work experience are you guys doing and the variation in the room was enormous. But I particularly remember there was one guy who said, I'm going to do architecture with my uncle. Tough background, but he had an uncle who was an architect. That was going to be his work experience. And a guy at the same table saying, my mum stacks shelves at Tesco, so I'm going to stack shelves.

5:50Ed Davies:And that difference in their work experience based on their relationships in their life was just huge and that trajectory will carry on from there. In all the work you do at the CSJ,

6:00Amol Rajan:how do you approach the question of what comes first? Is it poverty or the problems of poverty, if you know what I mean? I mean, this is the perennial thing because people say, you know, well, you know, for instance, take marriage and then the decline in marriage. You know, a lot of people say, well, the reason some marriages break down is because people are just so poor. They haven't got much money and that puts a huge strain. And when money is tight, you have arguments. And when you have arguments, you might think, well, I don't want to stay together. Whereas if you're richer, you can conceal those and paper over those issues.

6:28Ed Davies:Yeah, absolutely. So debt, money is probably the biggest driver of divorce and family breakdowns. That's definitely true. I mean, the way we approach it is there are probably, we talk about our five pathways, and there are five factors underneath poverty that always appear throughout our work. So they are worklessness, educational failure, family breakdown, debt and addiction. And the reality is, is any one of us can experience any one of those things at any time. But if you go into the poorest communities, you will find three, four, five lights out all at once. and the slight problem with our approach to poverty these days is we think well if we if we can give you a bit more money through the welfare system then we get you out of sort of inverted commas poverty but actually if your problem is you're in an abusive relationship or you have a gambling addiction or you can't speak english which is true of millions of people in the uk you're not really going to help yourself get out of the situation you're in you'll get a bit more money from government which might make life a bit easier but you will never stand on your own two feet and experience the joy of getting your first paycheck.

7:25Amol Rajan:Are there millions of people that can't speak English?

7:27Ed Davies:So there are 5 million people this is an OEC study a few years ago that said there are 5 million people who are functionally illiterate and innumerate in the UK and they measure it by can you read a fuel gauge and can you read the back of an aspirin packet those figures may have changed slightly because that was a few years ago but that's 5 million people who are struggling at a really basic level

7:46Amol Rajan:That is extraordinary. Right Karen thank you very much indeed that was a comprehensive answer I hope we answered it in those two ways and therefore got to the core of your question um let's have another question this is from henry hi i'm on ed hope you're both doing well um this debate really frustrates me because the decline of marriage is often framed as a cultural problem where young people don't seem to care about commitment and i think this is absolute nonsense because for me the more uncomfortable truth is that we've allowed the institutions that support long-term marriage to crumble and marriage is probably now seen as luxury good more so than something that we should all aspire towards and something that's definitely going to happen if we generally want it to recover isn't the only serious route through things like housing reform cheaper child care and legal modernization rather than people grandstanding about social values thank you very much indeed henry this is the interplay of cultural and economic forces right this is the fact that sort of you might read a cultural decline in the attachment to marriage is a great ideal when actually it's driven by the fact that people

8:48Ed Davies:want to get married but they can't because they're too damn skin yeah so there are small effects on marriage uh and birth rates and things around housing um but they're not big there are almost no effects internationally around child care costs uh and marriage and childbirth actually which is interesting one of those things that intuitively feels really important isn't that

9:09Amol Rajan:important that child care costs which are child care in this country is very expensive for instance compared to a place like France, there's no evidence that childcare costs

9:17Ed Davies:put people off getting married. So internationally, it doesn't really seem to be... The correlation is very weak between childcare subsidy and getting married and having children, and particularly the having children bit. I think the instinct is always, well, if childcare was cheaper, we'd have more children. Interestingly, that doesn't seem to be the case. The sort of the consistent correlate across almost every country in the world, I think, is that if you don't get married, you don't have kids. so there are the number of children being born each year outside of marriage has been pretty consistent for the last few decades and the number of children per marriage has gone down a tiny amount but it's still more than replacement it's 2.1 2.2 now so you have two or three but the number of marriages has gone down and that's why our birth rate is falling and that's why things are getting worse in that sense so there are definitely effects on cost of living and housing and that sort of thing in small, you know, interestingly, if you raise bank of interest rates and mortgages go up, you do see a tiny drop in birth rates.

10:14Ed Davies:But the really big factors are about coupling, and it's totally logical. If I can't find someone to have kids with, I probably won't have kids. And if I do find someone to have kids with, I probably will have kids.

10:24Amol Rajan:But, you know, just in preparation for this interview, you came across this remarkable story in the New York Times about the rise of platonic coupledom. Yeah. I think, do you know what, I'm going to find the headline. There was this thing about in search of a platonic co-parent. And this is a piece in the New York Times from just late January where it said there's this huge phenomenon. And I'll name some of the apps. There's a Modamily, which is maybe Modamily. Maybe that's an acronym for modern family. There's an app called Co-Parents. There's another one called Let's Be Parents. And this is this enormous phenomenon in America.

10:57Amol Rajan:I don't know if it's extended here or not. of people saying, I kind of want kids, but not the marriage, if you know what I mean. I like the idea of not just procreation, but raising and rearing and nurturing children. But I just don't want the kind of annoying, snoring person next to me in bed. Do you think, I mean, would you say that platonic co-parenthood is basically a suboptimal solution to some of the issues you're concerned about? Yeah, I think some of this stuff, it's so funny how we come around

11:28Ed Davies:full circle on some of this stuff so i mean we looked at it a bit in the areas of some sex and how sexuality is changing over the years and particularly around consent that you're starting to get this movement that people need to sign consent forms it's like we're going to consent that we're in a committed relationship we'll sign this form it's like we used to have these things that we signed and it was about keeping sex within the thing it was a marriage certificate but you look at these platonic you know i want to raise a kid platonically i think maybe it's because we've got to this point of idealizing marriage as this sort of sexual hinterland and incredibly romantic and maybe you know disney has something to answer for on this is that not how your marriage is there are well i mean i think most people with lasting marriages say the key thing about their marriage is that they have unbelievable respect for their partner and they are their best friend and yeah there'll be some hopefully you know romance in there and sex but it'll come and go over the decades um and what we're seeing here is people going oh i can kind of see the value of commitment and having a partner to do with this but marriage feels a bit fusty and old-fashioned and so we'll call it something else but you're basically getting to point where people are signing contracts for sex and saying they're going to raise with a partner in the long term it's like well maybe this thing we did for thousands of years wasn't so bad after

12:34Amol Rajan:all but to go to henry's question your you would say that it does actually is this is not a kind of because henry says he's sick of this idea that it's all kind of you know a cultural thing but you'd say that it does actually start with a kind of cultural celebration of the value of uh marriage and by that sort of a legal recognition of your coming together yes so there is something specific

12:55Ed Davies:about the act of making a commitment that does really matter, I think. And there are various reasons for that, but a couple of really key ones. When you don't have that conversation of, are we in this for the long run? You just sort of slide into a life that you don't think about. Suddenly, you know, you might share a house or a dog or a child, whatever it is, but you've never really sat down and said, are we definitely in this for the long haul? And there is something about having that conversation to say, okay, we're in this for the long haul, that makes a huge difference and enables you to plan the rest of your life and think about things in the long term.

13:25Ed Davies:So that definitely matters. And the other thing is the level of commitment. There's some great research in America between men and women. And it says basically, how committed are you to this relationship? Not married, how committed are you? And as you might expect, the women are much more committed than the men. But the really interesting thing is that they know it. So when they ask them, how committed is your partner? The women will say, well, the man's less committed than me. When you get married, you have to explicitly state an equitable level of commitment. And that really matters to the strength of a relationship.

13:53Ed Davies:I know the degree to the you're in this and you know the degree that I'm in this and we've stated it. So it does matter that moment of commitment. But also you say it in front of other people. Yeah, yeah. And they're all backing it as well. They have to say, yeah, no, we back this. So you've got people in your life who are supporting it and nourishing it. And, you know, yay for that.

14:08Amol Rajan:You get that awkward moment where someone says, does anyone here know of any reason why? And then someone says yes. You think, oh, God, this is going to be awkward. Henry, thank you very much indeed for that question. Another one that's come in from Alex. Alex said, I think this was to me on Instagram. Thank you very much, Alex. to what extent are cultural attitudes and financial circumstances responsible? So it's a very similar question. You would say actually we tend to think of government as fixing the financial circumstances, but there's a prior issue, which is how we approach this culturally.

14:37Ed Davies:Yeah, I do. I have sympathy for the sort of financial aspects, but only because culture has changed around them. So as I say, they do make a difference, but we were much poorer in 1970 and 1920 and the middle of the First World War, and yet our marriage rates were incredibly higher.

14:51Amol Rajan:And so the common argument, which is that we've made life difficult for people in their 20s, because if they're lucky enough to go to university, they might come out with£50 ,000 of debt. They are entering a more precarious jobs market, and that's before AI comes for entry-level white-collar jobs. They can't afford a house because it's now nine times the average salary rather than three times the average salary. Those things, if you reversed economically over the course of, I don't know, five or ten years through very, very good government, those things wouldn't necessarily, in your view, lead to a reversal of this decline of marriage.

15:26Ed Davies:No, I do think the one, though, where I do hear some really good arguments is around male employment and the sort of marriageability. So you talk about hypergamy, where women want to marry someone earning as much or more or as educated or more educated, that at the moment, actually, particularly below the age of 30, men earn less than women. so that those crucial years when people used to get married and women want to marry someone earning more or equal to them that's slightly falling away and some of that is around employment and i think if the jobs market was better particularly for young men i think that might help but ultimately i don't think that's the whole answer how has the jobs market gotten worse for young men so yeah this is part of our lost boys work we've looked at um basically all through school in the early years of employment men are falling massively behind so every single year of school now every single key exam stage boys do worse than girls gcse is a level sats they do people said ot levels no technical qualifications girls do way better than boys in those as well they're less like boys less likely to go to university and then in the jobs market boys are more likely to be unemployed they're more likely to be economically inactive the proportion of of young men sort of 18 to 24 not in education employment or training rose about 40 percent in the four years after the covid pandemic so we've seen this huge change in work and education for young men which definitely does filter into the sort of the dating market and the marriage market but then we've also got to remember this decline in marriage started in the 1970s like this is this is not just about what's happened in the last five to ten years

16:54Amol Rajan:do you see that given it started in the 1970s do you see that as being a kind of overspill from the decade of sexual liberation that was the 60s do you think the 60s is sort of was this you know um what's it called the permissive society which roy jenkins as home secretary is meant to have overseen and there was the abolition of the death penalty and the end of the criminal offence of being a gay person who loves someone. Do you think that there's sort of the 1960s basically is where a lot of this begins?

17:25Ed Davies:Yes, I think the sexual revolution and the economic revolution and things are all downstream of this drive of individualism. So I wouldn't put it all on the sexual revolution or the economic revolution that happened there. There is this meta narrative above it all around sort of liberalising and individualising society. I mean, if people want to read more on this, I think one of the most interesting books on this is Morality by Rabbi Jonathan Sachs. It was written in about 2020, just before he died. But it talks about we moved from a we society to an I society. And it lays out the different areas where this has happened in our lives and in society and politics and things like that.

18:02Ed Davies:And it's very clear that there was this big change that happened in the 1970s and everything was downstream of it. What have we gained and what have you lost in that move from we to me or we to I. I mean, in some ways, it's a brilliant thing. It values the individual. And having a value on every individual life, I think, is brilliant. It's really important. But we have to live with that intention with the fact that we live in a society and we have relationships and that life is intention between the individual and the corporate. And I think historically, this has probably happened because in the Second World War, we were so in hock to the corporate because we had to be.

18:34Ed Davies:We had to be on the same page. By the corporate,

18:36Amol Rajan:you don't mean capitalist big structures.

18:37Ed Davies:You mean the kind of embodied institution. Exactly. Sort of communities where we had to support each other and where you build social capital. And because that shifted post Second World War, you have seen this and not in a good way. Suddenly, we're like, actually, we can still value the individual. We can, you know, we sent women into work because they wanted to and they can be economically independent, things like that. all these things were really positive but we forgot that the corporate that our relational life does still matter and that we are not atomised individuals and my behaviour will affect you it will affect my children it will affect my wife and my family and my friends and my colleagues that I don't exist on an island no man is an island classically that we've slightly forgotten that

19:16Amol Rajan:Do you think technology is driving this? Because one of the things about we mentioned in the main episode Robert Putnam and his book Bowling Alone that was partly about how the advent of the television had created an arena which is the family home and this idea of us all kind of getting together to watch TV together in a multi-generational way, usually quizzes involving the phrase start up for 10. There was this kind of wonderful idea of us kind of coming together to have a shared kind of visual experience, but something was lost. And what was lost was, you know, kids playing out on the streets, as Jonathan Haidt would have said, and did, sat in that very chair a few weeks ago.

19:49Amol Rajan:Kids playing out on the street kind of until it got too dark. And we've gone from the television, which created this shared family arena, to the smartphone, which is an individualized experience. And you kind of in a two way relationship with the screen, much more two way than TV. And in that move from kind of pre-TV to TV to smartphone, what's gone is the social connections through which is play, social connection and it's time spent with other people.