How can the Government encourage people to marry? Treat marriage like obesity
Hanging around fat people can make you fat, according to a Radio 4 item this morning, which was taken from Wired magazine:
A few years ago, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler made a striking discovery about obesity: it spreads from person to person, much like a contagious virus. They were able to demonstrate this by mining the data sets of the Framingham Heart Study (FHS), a longitudinal survey that has revealed many of the risk factors underlying cardiovascular disease. Because the FHS noted each participant’s close friends, colleagues, and family members, Christakis and Fowler were able to recreate the social network of the town, to see how everyone was connected to everyone else.
And this is when they made their remarkable discovery about weight gain. According to the data, if one person became obese, the likelihood that his friend would follow suit increased by 57 per cent. (This means that the network is far more predictive of obesity than the presence of genes associated with the condition.) If a sibling became obese, the chance that another sibling would become obese increased by 40 per cent, while an obese spouse increased the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37 per cent.
On one level this is not surprising. As many authors, Malcolm Gladwell among them, have shown, suicide has also long been known to be contagious, with suicide clusters, and copycat suicides, accounting for a surprisingly high proportion. Prominent suicides reported in the media always lead to increases in suicide rates among the general public, as well as in fatal head-on car collisions (the most common form of disguised suicide); that’s why the media try not to report suicides too thoroughly.
And this is relevant to government policy outside these areas, since social contagion works in a number of areas, not the least marriage and divorce. Earlier this week the Centre for Social Justice released a new study into marriage through British history, which showed that births outside marriage increased from around 5 per cent in the 1960s to 45 per cent today, and that this has had enormously damaging effects. According to the CSJ:
Research shows that children brought up by lone parents on average do much less well than those brought up by two parents. For instance, they are 75 per cent more likely to fail at school and 50 per cent more likely to have alcohol problems. Separate studies have also shown that cohabiting couples with children are far less stable than married couples with children.
But the detailed examination of the evidence stretching back to the 18th Century by Professor Rebecca Probert of Warwick University and Dr Samantha Callan, the CSJ’s senior family researcher, confirms that the sexual revolution of the 1960s did indeed mark a decisive break with 200 years of conventional family structure.
So births outside marriages have increased; more damaging, but not unconnected, so have broken homes, with a quarter of children now raised by single parents. The enormous social (and economic) costs of this experiment in post-family living are clear to all but a handful of diehard feminists living in the intellectual equivalent of Transnistria (but before condemning or stigmatising teenaged mothers we should look at the roots of their poverty, social injustice etc etc).
But why did it happen? Partly it was because the law changed; divorce was made easier in 1971, and this not only freed those locked in unions of misery but, since divorce is also socially contagious, may have encouraged their friends to do so. The Abortion Act 1968 may have played a role, freeing men from the social pressure to marry pregnant girlfriends (at the time of the act 40 per cent of teenaged brides were pregnant on their wedding day, which had fallen to under 20 per cent by the 1980s). And the financial incentives changed, most particularly with the change in social housing rules in the early 1970s which allowed lone mothers to jump the waiting list. And despite a growing intellectual awareness of the costs involved, general social attitudes have changed, so that today only half of people believe parents of children should get married.
Perhaps we don’t want to seem judgmental; but in dealing with broken families, just like dealing with obesity or suicide, we should take into account the socially contagious effects of behaviour. Working-class boys used to (generally) marry their teenaged girlfriends because that’s what everyone else did, but there is no disgrace or shame in behaving like one’s peers. Today marriage has become almost a “middle-class thing”, because only the middle-classes have social networks in which marriage is the norm. Middle-class people are rarely obese, either, for that matter.
Many of the social changes of the often-derided 1960s were very positive, but others were made by people who underestimated how social people are, and the needs for social norms, which could only really be regulated by (often mild) pressure. But how to make something the social norm again without that dread word "stigma" – that is the question.
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