Link: https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/committed-to-the-trail/

Anyone who has ever done any off-roading knows the danger of inadvertently becoming committed to a trail. If you aren’t careful you can become too focused on overcoming the obstacle ahead of you without understanding what lies beyond. Before you know it you can end up boxed in, unable to turn around and go back the way you came.

Susan shares stats on women in the US continuing to delay marriage and childbirth. These women are betting that the trail ahead is passable and will lead them where they want to go. If they are right they will be able to “have it all”. If they are wrong, by the time they figure this out it likely will already be too late. They will be fully committed to the trail by then.

"Among today’s college graduates, 25% of women will not marry college educated men. That estimate is actually rosy because it assumes that men will want to marry in equal numbers to women. The data was not analyzed by sex, but in an era of misandrist family law that’s a dubious claim."

This likely over predicts the differences in future earnings power between college age men and women because women tend to be under-represented in higher paying majors and over-represented in unproductive majors. Still, women tend to be more concerned with credentials than men, so many of the college educated women Susan mentions will not be willing to marry a man without a degree even if he out earns her. Add to this the likelihood that a sizable number of men could see the lack of weddings and LTRS amongst their peers as a signal that their 20s would be better spent working the minimum and hanging out with friends instead of knocking themselves out to become a provider. Lastly, as Susan points out the extremely biased social and legal environment could cause many good husband candidates to decide marriage isn’t for them.

Members of our sub know that there has been a fresh onslaught of articles bemoaning the lack of good, economically eligible men for women to marry recently. Of course, most of these articles do not concentrate on the why. It concentrates on the plight of women who suddenly had the epiphany to look for a ready made partner in their late 20s and up. As Dalrock explains in this post,

This shouldn’t be surprising. The women who picked first chose the best options. The ones who waited to pick last are left with the rest. But there is another aspect to this, because women’s past decisions to delay marriage also played a role in the shrinking pool of men who prepared to take on the role of provider. The first generations of women who decided to push out the age of marriage for the most part found that the same number of men still prepared to be husbands. But over time as the length of the delay increased, this weakened the signal women collectively sent to young men that respectable men will be sexually successful. It isn’t just that young women are now astonishingly open about their intent to have sex with badboys in their prime and settle for a beta provider at the last minute, although that has to have an impact. It also isn’t just that as a society we see married fathers as beneath contempt, although surely that’s having an impact as well. Today an 18 year old man doesn’t see the same incentive to knock himself out on education and career that men of previous generations saw. Today an 18 year old man sees that for the next decade or so his most effective sexual strategy is to focus on being the sexy badboy young women dedicate their sexual prime to, not on patiently preparing to be the boring loyal dude who will pick up the tab. What should surprise us is not that men are slowly responding to the radical changes brought about by our still ongoing sexual revolution. What should surprise us is how many young men still focus their youth preparing for a role our society despises. Either way, young men are slowly starting to respond to the messages we are collectively shouting at them, and we should expect this trend to increase over time.

Indeed. What is surprising is not that women's strategy is backfiring but the lack of severity with which it should have.

Notice the word usage in this article:

To investigate the man drought, researchers created profiles of potential husbands, based on real husbands as logged in American Community Survey data. They then compared these hypothetical spouses with actual unmarried men. They found that a woman’s made-up hubby makes 58 percent more money than the current lineup of eligible bachelors.

“This study reveals large deficits in the supply of potential male spouses,” the study concludes.

“Many young men today have little to bring to the marriage bargain, especially as young women’s educational levels on average now exceed their male suitors’,” Lichter says. Some ladies are even starting to date down in order to score a forever partner.

As usual, you can see the stunning lack of introspection and entitlement on full display. How bad can it be if you're still being sassy about a bad deal?