I haven’t read Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, but I did read the Atlantic article it was based on. It struck me at the time as one of those all-too-common cynical gambits in the magazine features business that makes me not-so-sorry that there probably won’t be any magazine feature articles in 20 years. The basic idea is to take a thesis that’s ambiguous between the trivially true (some women would do well to be somewhat less picky about the men they date) to the sweeping and offensive (feminists are blinding you ladies to the fact that you need to marry the first halfway decent man you can find before your ovaries shrivel!!!!) precisely because pushing the envelop beyond what’s defensible will create more “buzz.”

Meanwhile, the article was striking for a dearth of specific engagement with relevant statistics. And according to Jessica Grose’s review expanding the argument to book-length didn’t resolve this problem:

Gottlieb spends more than 300 pages trying to convince us that there is an unhappy army of spinsters just like her—lady lawyers, doctors, and graphic designers regretting their fussiness. And this army, she argues, is responsible for our national marriage crisis: Is this “why the percentages of never-married women in every age group studied by the U.S. Census Bureau (from 25-44) more than doubled between 1970 and 2006?” she asks.

As Grose argues, overly picky women can’t be the cause of growing spinsterdom among educated professional women because there is no such trend:

The new research has more good news for college grads. Stevenson said the data indicate that modern college-educated women are more likely than other groups of women to be married at age 40, are less likely to divorce, and are more likely to describe their marriages as “happy” (no matter what their income) compared with other women. The marriages of well-educated women tend to be more stable because the brides are usually older as well as wiser, Stevenson said. Researchers have long known that the older people are when they marry, the more likely that the marriage will last.

Back to Grose:

About 80 percent of female college grads ages 30-44 have been married at some point, compared with 71 percent of women who did not graduate from high school, according to the latest Pew research. The marriages of college grads are also increasingly stable. From the 1970s to the ’90s, rates of divorce fell by almost half among college-educated women, but they remained high among women with less than a four-year degree. If there’s a crisis in marriage, it’s because the least educated and poorest women are no longer getting married.

Growing family instability among working class Americans is a real phenomenon and it’s worth trying to increase our understanding of it. It appears to be an important driver of growing inequality, and perhaps an impediment to education-driven upward mobility. At the same time, it arguably reflects the empowerment of working class women over the past 30-40 years to the point where they’re no longer as compelled to put up with unsatisfactory situations. For book-sales purposes, it’s more useful to try to gin up panic about the sort of educated people who are likely to buy books, but there’s nothing doing here.

The House is scheduled to vote today on H.R. 626, the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act of 2009. The bill would provide four weeks of paid parental leave to federal employees. A similar bill passed the House last year, so passage is all-but-guaranteed. Jim Webb, who’s sponsoring the Senate version of the bill, has a fact sheet out that’s useful. When the bill moved through committee, The Washington Post covered conservatives objections, whereby basically the right doesn’t think it’s worth devoting any resources whatsoever into improving working conditions for federal employees. That makes sense if you put zero value on the ability of federal agencies to do perform their functions effectively, but not so much for the rest of us.

A larger issue, of course, is the general lack of paid parental leave in the United States. In most developed countries some form of paid leave is mandatory:

This is basically a recognition on the part of everyone from Japan to Norway to Canada that having a child isn’t just a random consumption choice that we should leave entirely up to the free market. Parents have a special social role to play, and it’s important to all of us to put them in a position to play it well. You might think that family values loving conservatives would see this as perhaps a bigger problem than whether or not gay couples in New Hampshire can get married.

Here’s some earlier CAP work on paid leave in California and family policy (including paid leave) in the UK.

Apropos yesterday’s post on the international dimensions of surrogate pregnancy, it turns out that a lot of this is already happening in India:

Reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding enterprise in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe in recent months, as word spreads of India’s combination of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.

Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some European countries and subject to a wide spectrum of regulation in U.S. states, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost of the medical procedures, air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to collect the baby) comes to around $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States.

This is going to feel wrong and exploitative to a lot of people. But almost all work that residents of poor third world countries can obtain producing goods or services for rich country consumers feels wrong and exploitative. And yet that work — in sweatshops, etc. — is invariably more lucrative than the practically available alternative of working in subsistence farming or in the purely local economy of poor country. And of course it helps people have babies they want to have. So ultimately it seems like a good thing to me. Of course someday perhaps we’ll invent machines that can gestate fetuses for us and move beyond some of these issues. Or perhaps by then there’ll be a luddite movement aimed at stopping the deployment of gestation machines lest they destroy the surrogacy jobs people are counting on.

When egalitarian liberals object to things like surrogate motherhood, I understand where they’re coming from even as I disagree. But what is one to make of something like Ramesh Ponnuru’s apparent egalitarian objections? Differential financial power is objectionable enough that it provides a grounds for banning certain kinds of consensual transactions, but it’s not sufficiently objectionable that we should actually do anything to try to eliminate or ameliorate it?