Some months ago I was driving around on deliveries in Las Vegas when a fascinating segment came on the radio station KLOVE regarding the 50% of marriages end in divorce statistic that everyone has been told of my generation since we were young. Now being that I was in graduate school in Sociology with a specialty in Marriage and the Family, I already knew the statistic itself was BS. I just hadn’t realized how deep the deception went.
This shouldn’t be a hard thing to calculate overall. Obviously 100% of marriages end eventually, either through death or divorce. Of course the outcome is uncertain for recent marriage cohorts where both spouses are still alive, but they can be extrapolated out to a degree: the longer the marriage length, the less likely divorce is, with some bumps along the way. Although we may think that an ideal marriage ends with both partners being very very old and perhaps dying in each others arms, that isn’t usually the case. Some people can have second marriages without ever getting divorced. I’m one of them and so is my brother.
This 50% of marriages end in divorce number began in the 1970’s regarding alarm at the very large birth cohort of Baby Boomers who were coming into their 20’s and 30’s and getting divorced in much higher numbers than any generation before them. This was, after all, the free sex and love era. It started as an alarmist warning that if trends continued to rise that 50% of marriages would end in divorce. The researcher was able to track down, with great effort, the original expert quotation and study, supposedly from a USA Today article in 1985, which definitively posted the 50% of marriages end in divorce statistic.
Except the study it was supposedly based on didn’t exist. She reached out to the Marriage and Family expert who had been quoted in the original article, who responded to her request by emailing her back, in all caps, “I NEVER SAID THAT.” The statistic had been completely fabricated, but by whom and for what ends?
There are some caveats regarding the true number of marriages that end in divorce. Some people may seperate but never legally divorce. Baby Boomers, being such a large birth cohort, skewed the divorce numbers higher for awhile. Every marriage after the first one which ends in divorce makes the next marriage more likely to end in divorce also. So if you’re on your third marriage after two divorces, the odds of you staying married to your spouse are actually lower than 50%. I think some of these celebrities who have been married, three, four or nine times simply get too old to bother finding a new partner eventually. Gay marriage also skews the statistics, with lesbian women especially likely to divorce, although gay men don’t have this problem as much. My guess is that trans marriages are just a load of crazy.
But overall the odds of divorce have held steady since I was in graduate school: for a heterosexual couple getting married for the first time in this day and age, the odds of divorce are about 22%. It certainly does happen, but don’t those numbers sound more optimistic for someone contemplating marriage?
But the meme of 50% of marriages end in divorce developed a life of its own, further breaking up the family structure before it could even form. Virtually every man I know who was contemplating a serious romantic partner cited it, with many chosing not to do it because of the financial and emotional risk of that coin flip down the road. Those who had been damaged by the breakup of their parents the generation before were especially bitter regarding this. Virtually every woman who was lifelong commitment oriented faced harsh competition in an era of unlimited easy sex.
Financial incentives for the lower classes broke up the family unit even further, as it became more lucrative to be a single parent. Working harder simply meant more taxes, less benefits and of course less time with your children. The calculus wasn’t worth it unless the man was top tier, in which case he had a lot of options and legal marriage was thus viewed by him as all risk with no reward. It has created generations that often don’t marry at all.
Being that the masses of humanity are the Net Zero those in control of the financial levers want, I am quite sure that most of this was by design.
I really enjoy KLOVE. I often flipped through radio stations at every long set of advertisements or sometimes simply due to changing my mood. I am as likely to listen to Mozart as I am to Metallica. Christian radio stations usually turn me off with hypocritical political agendas and sometimes played music that sounded downright Satanic. It all seems part of a broader multifaceted agenda that has been sketched out for generations.
Why have crude oil prices gone down but Las Vegas fuel prices have jumped to above $4 per gallon? Just two months ago I knew of a truck stop off of I-15 where I could buy it for $2.98.
I have been drowning in the confirmation bias of the Trump supporters and detractors alike for the last few days. Whether people notice the stock market moves up or the drops down seems 100% dependant on their political opinion of the President. When did such implicit support become mandatory?
I follow the markets because I’ve been in financial services for 20 years. I will be the first person to tell you that this has become a gigantic casino in which moves have no relationship to fundamentals. Increasingly those money market gains and losses come about entirely due to changes in monetary policy. Literally trillions of dollars in market swings through just a few bought off politicians or regulators who, say, tweet the right or wrong policy tweak. They probably do this after informing their friends and cronies of the change, of course.
Now that used to be called insider trading. But who exactly would be able to prosecute it when the mafia Dons at the top have bought everyone important off? The market moves based on the Trump family holdings in his Truth social stock ticker DJT amounted to a $410 million increase in asset value just on Wednesday April 9th alone.
Mike Adams, whose business is dependant on selling things often outsourced from certain countries, seemed to go full black pill on Trump:
Elon probably needed a cut as he was quite critical of the tariff plans. Tesla of course has been losing share price too, notwithstanding the (probably Soros funded) “liberals” burning them.
Who even knows what is going on with cryptocurrency trades, but they’ve become as metastisized into the cancerous system as anything else and perhaps even more so due to their “anonymity”. So while I understand the angst of a Main Street which has been gutted and debased with everything throwaway, I see a bigger problem here, which is too much abundance.
Abundance for the masses is the enemy of the ones who rule the world, so they need to maintain scarcity. That is because when people are desperate they will work through their debt based fiat system. The easiest way to do this was to create and fund regulatory agencies, providing good jobs to those who micromanage every iota of our existence. They create laws designed to benefit the very few at the expense of everybody else. And of course they control all of the markets.
What would it take to return to sound money? A near total reset of everything to anarchy. All I’m seeing is a desperate last minute steering to CBDC instead and a plan to try to kick this can of worms down the road.
I think they want to cash in on our deaths without us even knowing it. Counted in dollars paid for our blood and sacifice. I sometimes ponder why…
What do you all think?
Crazy is often being right, too early.
Amen.
The federal reserve and its owners are responsible for everything evil in money world. There is nothing organic about any market moves, they control the markets with the same ease as using the gas and brake pedals in your car. Speed, acceleration and braking are controlled and the federal regulators (radar cops) that are supposed to be watching only issue citations to the peons on their way to work. A dozen years from Jekyll Island to 1929. Go figure