But I also think culture and economics, ideas and incentives, are all entangled at a deep level, working in cycles and feedback loops rather than in simple causal arrows — and thus it’s a mistake to treat changes in what people believe, and particularly the sweeping generational changes in how Americans conceptualize the links between sex and marriage and procreation, just as epiphenomena of economic pressure. And it’s a particularly convenient mistake for social liberals, because it enables them to downplay the fact that these changes are also their own ideological victories — victories that have been accompanied by, well, many of the negative consequences that social conservatives warned against in the first place. In large ways and small, and now at a suddenly-accelerating pace (today gay marriage, tomorrow marijuana legalization, etc.), we’re getting the culture that social liberalism wants — less traditionally religious and more socially permissive, with fewer normative ideas about how sex and love and childbearing fit together. And if conservatives would profit from acknowledging the economic forces shaping these realities, liberals would profit from acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, a cultural transformation that they’ve long favored is coming at a cost.