The sexual revolution

David Friedman ponders the sexual revolution.

My son Patri has a recent blog post raising the question of whether pornography may be harmful to relationships; he points out, correctly, that even if one thinks something should be legal it does not follow that it is desirable. In the same spirit, I want to explore the possibility that the sexual revolution, or at least parts of it, on net made the world a worse place. The argument has two parts:

 

1. One would expect the availability of reliable contraception and legal abortion to have sharply reduced the number of children born out of wedlock. In fact it was accompanied, in the U.S. and abroad, with a steep increase in that number. Correlation is not causation but it does raise the possibility of causation, especially when it goes in precisely the opposite of the predicted direction.

....

There might be a cause-effect relationship in that contraception breaks the link between sex and childbearing.

2. So far I have described marriage as only about sex and childbearing, and have implicitly assumed, as economists normally do, that the individuals involved act rationally. I now want to expand the first part of that and hedge on the second. Marriage is also about a complicated set of emotional and material benefits, what I think of as a nest, something that can exist without children and could even exist without sex. For a lot of people, men and women, the world is often a cold and lonely place, and it is nice to have somewhere you belong, with someone who loves you and whom you love.