Click here to read How to Handle a Difficult Wife: Part One.

“Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. 14 Let all that you do be done in love.” 1 Corinthians 16:13-14

You have all heard the song, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, that’s what your love means to me!” This song, Respect, is well known around the world as Aretha Franklin’s greatest hit. But what a lot of people do not know is that before this song was taken and retooled as a feminist anthem, it was written by a man and sung by a man, the great Otis Redding.

Redding is as famous as Franklin in his own right, and if you are not familiar with his music, but have seen Top Gun, you will probably remember his beautiful song Sitting on the Dock of the Bay. That song is pure goodness. Go listen to it now; you won’t regret it.

But before he wrote that hit, another one of his songs was Respect.

There is some debate over who originally wrote the song, but we know the lyrics were reworked by Redding when he released the song. Before he sang about the beauty of sitting and watching the ships roll in, he sang about one of the inherent longings of the man for respect from his wife,

“[Verse 1]
What you want, honey, you got it
And what you need, baby, you got it
All I’m askin’ is give me a little respect when I come home
Ooh, yeah
Hey, hey, hey
Yeah, now
Ooh, yeah…”

The song is about a man who wants to give his wife anything she wants, everything she needs. He even says, “And I wanna give you all of my money”, so he does mean everything, and all he wants in return is some “respect”. There is some debate online about whether or not Otis meant to use “respect” as a euphemism for sex, as apparently this was one way this word was used as slang in the street culture of his day.

However, even those who make this point highlight how the end of the song really drives home also just how important plain old respect was to the man,

“[Outro]
Respect when I want it
Respect when I need it
Respect when I want it
Respect when I need it
Got to, got to have it
We got to have it
Got to, got to have it…”

As one commentator has noted,

“In the coda that follows the final verse, Otis goes to work, wresting the word free of this narrow meaning, asserting his prerogative with an insistent determination that turns the song in its final moments into a plea for simple human dignity – “Respect is what I want! / Respect is what I need! / I got-ta got-ta have it! / Just give me some respect!” – that doesn’t stop at mere discretion.”

Take just a moment to meditate on the irony of a song about a man wishing for respect from his wife being turned into a feminist anthem, which is how many people remember this song to this day. It is incredible what feminism can subvert, isn’t it; to the impure nothing is sacred. Maybe sit on the dock at the bay and ponder this for a bit.

But then just sit back and consider how this song highlights two things very well: First, just how much a man wants his wife to respect him for who he is, what he does, and how he provides. But also, that simply expecting her to do so is often wishful thinking and also counterproductive. The song encapsulates how many men think, “Well, I provide, therefore my wife should respect me.” And she should. It is common decency. It is not something that should be taken for granted.

But how many people respect those who provide them with stuff without accountability? The government provides, doesn’t it? How many people respect their welfare providers, man or woman? In fact, the less the government demands of them to receive their welfare cheques, the more contemptible their opinion of their provider will be.

You might think that my example paints many wives in a bad light, but that is not the case. How many men have started their complaint to a friend about an impending divorce that they did not see coming, with this statement, “But I was a good provider!” I am sure you were. I am sure you can relate to Redding’s song deeply, “All I’m askin’ is give me a little respect when I come home.” But the truth is the man who puts himself in the position of begging for respect is only going to be increasingly viewed with contempt. You can’t demand respect; you have to command it by how you carry yourself, and what you expect from your loved ones.

We all know the difference between “demand” and “command.” But perhaps I should illustrate it to make it clearer. There were those bosses, or teachers in school, we all had that tried to be our friends, and when that failed, they over-corrected and demanded respect. But it did not work. The more they demanded it, the less we gave it. Then there were those bosses, or teachers in school, whose boundaries were known from the start. Their boundaries were clear and reasonable, and we therefore had respect for them from early on. And that respect grew over time.

This contrast between the one who “demands” respect and who “commands” respect is such a common trope in our culture that it is all through the fiction we consume. You can hardly see a military movie without them presenting some young Lieutenant who keeps demanding respect and not getting it, while some Sargent, Warrant Officer, or higher-ranked officer is inherently given respect by his men. Countless movies use this stereotype, precisely because it is all too commonly experienced in life. We have all experienced people who fit into both these categories.

The one who begs for respect, or seeks to demand it, will have contempt returned, in increasing measure. In the context of the military unit, an officer can correct this by simply showing himself capable in his role. But part of how he does this is by proving himself competent AND having clear boundaries of what he expects and will not tolerate. Boundaries for how you will be treated AND how you will treat others consistently with that standard really matter.

A man who wants respect needs to recognise this. You command respect not by shouting that you deserve it, but by showing you should be respected. If early in your marriage your wife starts speaking down to you, or contemptuously towards you, and you simply allow it, or worse, you just beg for her to stop it, you will likely develop into the man with the unruly wife over time. This is not good for you, her, your kids, or even society.

Most women have within them the capacity to be a good wife, or a bad wife. Even a good woman has the sinful nature, as do you, and if this sinful nature is fed, your beautiful, loving, and submissive wife can become your tyrant, and then you can find yourself, like so many other men, wondering why you provide so well, but are treated poorly.

So, ask yourself, if your wife talks down to you in front of her friends or your friends, will you just ignore it, or will you look her calmly in the eyes and say, “Don’t!”? Will she know that to speak of you in that way is not to be tolerated? Not that she cannot share her mind, or her opinion, or anything like that; of course she can and will. But if she disagrees with you, she knows to bring it to you at the proper time?

A good woman will want to speak up for her husband in front of her friends and his friends. But what if she has friends who influence her to do otherwise? How will you address that? A woman’s friends can mean the difference between a good marriage and a terrible marriage. Some men do many of the right things, but because they take no care to their wife’s social activities, they get blindsided. Are you making sure that you both spend time with people who will model respect between husbands and wives?

Remember Paul said this to Titus in the passage we looked at in our previous piece, “6 Likewise, exhort the young men to be sober-minded,…” (Titus 2:6). Why do you think, in the context of husbands and wives, that Paul tells young men to be “sober-minded”? It is because young men can be a bit silly, a bit daft, and a bit reckless. And if you approach what you tolerate in your marriage with a silly mindset, you could start patterns between you and your wife that may never be turned back.

Are you willing to walk out of a room, or a social gathering, rather than be disrespected by your wife?

Are you willing to live in such a way that you are easier to respect?

Does your wife reciprocate the respect you make sure that she experiences?

Yes, providing, giving money, and being that kind of man in some ways should be enough to get respect from a thankful wife. But if your wife works, why would she need to respect your ability to provide? Also, there are plenty of men who can provide, and probably a lot more than you can, as a lot of men learn from painful experience. Why should you be respected for doing something that you would have to do if you were single anyway? Sure, over time many women will generally come to appreciate their man’s provision. But not always, and sometimes it is how he commands respect in other ways that actually builds that appreciation.

Do you see the conundrum, young men? There is often a disconnect between what you think should get you respect, and what actually will. There is a reason that the bad boy, who might not even hold a steady job, has plenty of interest from women, when the solid middle manager on a decent income might not have had a second date in several years.

Do you have the temperament that commands respect? Does your wife look to you and feel secure in your arms? Do you have the ambition that will build a life where your wife is able to thrive and be freed from many of the burdens that modern women face? Does she see other men look at you with respect?

This is where I bring in church again. Many men get their professional respect at work, and maybe in some social environments with their friends. But Church, alongside also giving you the chance to fellowship with believers and be challenged about how to be a better man of God, gives you the chance to have your wife see how other men evaluate you in the context of a group dynamic.

Especially if their husband does the right thing at home, and then leads in the context of the gathering in some way. If your wife is a true and genuine believer, this will make a difference to how she views you. Every woman, whether or not they believe in Jesus, wants to see her husband respected by other men; the difference is simply that Christian women, who take the Bible seriously, reframe that within a Christian framework and context. But the same principles apply across the board in other social contexts.

Note, though, men, that living in a way that commands respect needs to be consistent. If you are one thing in one environment, and another in the other environment, those closest to you will lose respect for you. That is one of the reasons we often see men who appeared to be notable guys in the church lose their marriages. Along with what we spoke about in part one of this series, the disconnect in his behaviour bred contempt in the home.

Now, someone at this point might want to exclaim, “Matt, that song was talking about sex, not respect. Men are sex obsessed; that is what he wanted!”

But stop, pause and reflect on this: how much does a woman want to go to bed passionately with a man that she does not respect? It is a turn-off, isn’t it? We all know this. Whereas a man she respects, looks up to, and admires is a man she is also more attracted to. There is a reason some women leave their husbands for their boss, or other men in authority over them. Because this dynamic of respect matters.

It should not surprise us, then, that the street culture in Redding’s day brought “sex” and “respect” together, because they are very closely linked in a marriage relationship. Show me a marriage where, for whatever reason, a woman does not respect her husband, and I will show you either a sexless or very low sex marriage. This is not rocket science.

Men, you need to understand that if you present a compelling banner under which your wife can reframe her own life, your chances of ever having the difficult wife decrease massively.

If you already have a difficult wife, this is going to be a lot harder for you to achieve, because she is probably holding a lifetime of your failures to lead, or inability to set adequate boundaries, against you, as these mistakes cause women to feel unsafe. But the sooner you start to be wise and seek to be a man of respect in the home and outside, the more chance you have of turning things around.

On 18 August, United States gross federal debt passed $40 trillion for the first time. Two days later, the Australian Government Securities passed $1 trillion for the first time.

The standard explanations are mostly just excuses. Washington will point to COVID debt, to the rate cycle, to the tax bill. Canberra will point to the NDIS, to aged care, to hospitals. None explains why every developed democracy is doing the same thing at the same time, under governments on every side of politics, in defiance of what all of them say they believe about fiscal discipline.

Each of these explanations is a distraction from the core issues: runaway consumptive spending, declining spending efficiency, expansion in the very conception of what government should be responsible for and inability to pursue any significant structural reforms.

Here is what drives everything as the underlying foundational demographic challenge: declining generational stake. The marginal voter and the marginal politician in each of these countries hold a shrinking personal stake in what happens after they die. Not zero. Shrinking — and moving in one direction for nearly 200 years.

In exploring questions like these, Prothean Institute looks to the political and philosophical approach of James Madison: not moralistic, just assume people are self-interested and will act to maximise their own outcomes within the incentive structures that exist.

Therefore, it’s not a moral observation. It is an arithmetic one, and it predicts the budget, the policies and the outcomes we are seeing today.

The calculation nobody says out loud

A person with no children, or one child, can protect their line by accumulating personally. Save enough, buy the house, top up the super, and the inheritance divides by one. A deteriorating country is survivable if your sole heir and his wife get the accumulated assets of 4 grandparents. Personal accumulation works.

A person with four children cannot do this. The estate divides by four, then by sixteen when grandchildren arrive. And with more than four children, the consequences are exponential. There is no savings rate high enough to ensure a large line of descendants against a shrinking economy.

The only strategy that scales is to create a flourishing country over the long term in which descendants can create their own economic prosperity.

Why low fertility erodes economic performance

What matters here is what it does to fiscal policy and the budget.

Four direct impacts are evident:

First, consumption. For a household that has opted out of children, the rational plan is present enjoyment plus a retirement pot or extraction from government pension plans. There is no inter-generational investment to fund. Politically, that household votes for what makes the present comfortable: transfers, subsidies, cost-of-living relief, protection of asset values and avoidance of significant structural reforms.

It does not vote for anything whose cost is now and payoff arrives in the medium to long term, and will happily borrow money for present consumptive spending.

Consumptive spending now accounts for more than the entire government tax revenues in most anglosphere countries, with little federal spending on real intergenerational productive infrastructure.

Second, debt. This is where fertility bites hardest, through a design flaw that low fertility exposed rather than caused. Social Security, the age pension, and every European state pension are pay-as-you-go. Today’s retirees are paid by today’s workers. That is a claim by one cohort on the earnings of another. When the second cohort shrinks, a government has two options: cut the benefit, or borrow from descendants that are likely not even born.

Cutting is possible, but it is politically expensive enough, particularly in a low-fertility environment, that neither Washington, London nor Canberra has seriously attempted it in a generation.

So they borrow from future generations. American net interest is now over $1 trillion per year. In Australia, public debt service costs exceed the budget deficit itself: had Australia lived within its means historically, it could be running budgetary surpluses despite the enormous government spending programs such as NDIS.

Neither country set out to put themselves in these precarious financial situations. It is the compounding cost of incremental decisions and structural reforms consistently deferred.

There is a number that gives this mechanism a formula. Across twenty-three advanced OECD economies from 1980 to 2010, every one-year increase in the median voter’s age is associated with a public debt-to-GDP ratio about 4.5 percentage points higher. A study measuring the age of the electorate (rather than the fertility of the people running it) — but it is what the generational stake predicts.

Third, deferral. Work published in February by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group modelled the American budget under continued low fertility and under an immediate return to replacement fertility in 2026. Deficits are unsustainable through 2055 in both cases — and replacement fertility makes the primary deficit worse by 0.2 to 0.5 per cent of GDP a year for the next three decades, because children cost money long before they pay tax. The fiscal payoff arrives around 2075. It’s the very definition of intergenerational investment.

Read that again, because it is the whole problem in one sentence. A politician who fixed the birth rate tomorrow would spend their entire career, and their successors’ careers, paying for it. The same calculus applies to all significant structural or spending reforms that might yield significant benefit in the long term, but require short-term austerity.

The incentive to act on any significant civilisational issue is not merely weak. It is negative at a political level in a low-generational-stakes political environment.

Fourth, immigration as a ‘cheap’ substitute for children. Once fertility repair or structural reforms to improve productivity are written off as too hard or uneconomical, the rational policy is to substitute population and economic growth with migration, and the low long-term consequences of these policies are not considered relevant to a low-generational-stakes electorate.

In Australia, net overseas migration accounted for 73 per cent of population growth in the year to December 2025. Migration levels have been fought over at recent elections in all Anglosphere countries. What has never been put to a vote is migration as a demographic replacement strategy — the quiet substitution of imported adults for domestic births. It arrived because it is the only lever that shows results inside an electoral cycle.

That is what managed decline is. Not a plan. A sequence of individually rational decisions by people whose personal calculation is satisfied either way.

The biggest problem of our time

Apply the inheritance calculation to the people currently in office, and it makes an awkward prediction.

The senior figures of the American executive have unusually high fertility: Trump (five children), Vance (four), Hegseth (seven), and RFK Jr. (six). Between them they have twenty-two children — an average of 5.5.

Set against the recent leaders of other major Western democracies — Macron (none), Scholz (none), Merkel (none), Albanese (one), Sunak (two), Starmer (two), Trudeau (three) — the average falls to roughly 1.14. The gap is striking.

Yet the high-fertility group is also running one of the largest structural deficits in the developed world.

Elon Musk is the cleanest illustration of the problem. A man with more than ten children entered government specifically to attack the long-horizon fiscal problem, at considerable personal cost to his companies and his public standing. What happened next is an informative bit. The effort achieved a fraction of what it claimed, ran into an entrenched appropriations structure that no executive could break through, and wound down. A high-stakes individual attacked the problem directly, and the low-generational-stakes incentives won. If that does not settle the question of whether personnel can substitute for institutional design, nothing will.

We will not pretend this away. On the most visible short-term test available, the mechanism appears to get the wrong answer.

There are two compounding explanations:

1. The inheritance calculation is a claim about long-horizon incentives, not about the next budget cycle. The same administration has pursued (with mixed success) spending restraint (in particular Musk), reshoring, energy expansion, and family-formation measures — projects whose payoffs, if any, arrive well beyond the current electoral window.

2. Perhaps more important for the argument of this piece: a high-fertility executive still faces low-fertility voter preferences and the same institutional incentives that produced the deficits in the first place. Personnel alone does not rewrite the incentive structure across a population.

Which is, in the end, the point. The deficit is downstream of what the median voter demands and what the institutional design rewards. Changing the people at the top, even when those people have strong personal generational stake, does not automatically change the outcome.

The clearer tests of the underlying mechanism are the structural cases of Singapore and Israel.

The Israeli exception

Israel is the only country in the OECD with fertility above replacement — 2.87 in 2024. If the generational stake operates at population scale rather than only through individual leaders, this is where it should show.

It does. Israel cut general government gross debt from 269.8 per cent of GDP in 1984 to 59.3 per cent in 2019, and ran a budget surplus in 2022.

No other developed country has managed anything close. Over the same thirty-five years, every low-fertility peer moved the other way.

Israeli fertility did not rise during the deleveraging — it sat between 2.8 and 3.1 the whole time. That is the point: the generational stake is not a switch that gets flipped; it is a standing condition that biases policy toward long-term investment. Israel held it continuously and deleveraged continuously. The Anglosphere and Europe held the opposite continuously and did the opposite.

The war since October 2023 has added roughly ten points to Israel’s debt ratio. But borrowing to resolve a problem permanently rather than manage it indefinitely moves cost into the present so that the future inherits a solved problem instead of a costly running one.

Israel did not choose 7 October. What it chose afterwards was to prosecute the problem to a resolution rather than return to managing it — at eight per cent of GDP, three credit downgrades, and sustained international diplomatic cost.

A low-stakes political class facing the same attack has an obvious alternative available: absorb it, restore the prior equilibrium, defer the underlying problem, and protect the status quo. And that is what the west has chosen repeatedly to for its significant challenges.

The Singapore objection

The other obvious rebuttal is Singapore. A fertility rate of 0.87, among the lowest in the world. Yet a budget surplus, a AAA rating, and a net asset position. If low fertility drives debt, Singapore should be a wreck.

Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had three children, together with a near-dynastic attitude toward generational stake, and he built its institutions, economy and government with this long-term vision. He made sure Singapore voters had little influence for half a century.

He built its retirement system to require workers to contribute to their own retirement over their productive lifespans, rather than draw on the next cohort’s payroll. Half the long-term real return on the national reserves must by law be reinvested rather than spent. Intergenerational investment is built into its economy.

None of that requires virtuous politicians. It is Madisonian design in the strict sense: long-horizon outcomes out of ordinary self-interested people. The recent history of Singapore is also instructive on two points:

1. Voter power growing - As Lee Kuan Yew stepped back progressively from leadership, and the voter influence grew from around 2000, we see the emergence of the very consumptive spending trends evident in other Western democracies.

2. The primary balance — budget excluding investment returns — went negative this year for the first time since the pandemic. The system is now funding current spending from the yield on inherited capital, exactly as the West does

Singapore has not solved low fertility. It bought several decades of insulation from the fiscal consequences with its capital accumulation, and it is now spending the yield.

What follows

Asking the political class to think longer term is wasted breath, and it does not much matter how many children they have.

A voting public that rewards consumption, debt and reform deferral will produce consumption, debt and reform deferral.

Moral exhortation asks people to act against their interest, and Madison’s entire point was that durable institutions never require that, and those that do, fail.

And read the debt figures and intergenerational theft as the cost of failed institutional design.

Forty trillion and one trillion are not the problem; they are the reckoning — addressed to the grandchildren of the people who still have a generational stake.

The corrective is structural, or it is nothing.

The Prothean Institute is an independent strategic research organisation dedicated to understanding, preserving, and renewing the foundations of thriving societies. All policy recommendations and strategic analyses are grounded in strict epistemic rigour and the reality of real-world conditions and human nature. We reject abstractions untethered from reality and seek to equip leaders with tools that work in the world as it is — not as we might wish it to be.

Notes and References

US Department of the Treasury, Debt to the Penny. Total public debt outstanding was $39,986,657,878,071.92 on 17 August 2026 and $40,047,425,768,420.22 on 18 August 2026. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/

The $1 trillion figure derives from the Australian Office of Financial Management’s issuance schedule as calculated and released by Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson, 20 August 2026, which puts AGS on issue at $1,000.8 billion on 20 August and $994.8 billion on 21 August following $6 billion of maturities. AOFM’s own last published stock figure was $983.7 billion as at 14 August. Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2026–27, Budget Paper No. 1, Table 7.1 projects AGS on issue of $982.0 billion in 2025-26 and $1,051.0 billion in 2026-27. https://www.miragenews.com/australia-hits-1-trillion-of-commonwealth-debt-1730112/ | https://www.aofm.gov.au/

Prothean Institute, The Generational Stake: Why Different Fertility Patterns Produce Different Incentive Structures — and What That Predicts About Political Behaviour, Policy Brief, May 2026 (Paper 3, The Divergent Societies series).

Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036, February 2026. Mandatory outlays $4,529 billion of $7,449 billion total in FY2026 (60.8%); $7,028 billion of $11,416 billion in 2036 (61.6%). https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61882

Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2026–27, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 3, Table 3.1 (payments 26.6% of GDP in 2025-26, 26.8% in 2026-27) and Statement 11 historical series (1986-87: 26.9%). These are budget estimates, not outcomes. https://budget.gov.au/content/bp1/download/bp1_bs-11.pdf

Congressional Budget Office, Monthly Budget Review: July 2026, August 2026. Fiscal year to date: Social Security $1,373 billion; net interest $963 billion; Medicare $952 billion; Department of Defense (military) $763 billion. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61983

Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2026–27, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 7, Table 7.9 (AGS interest $27,690 million in 2026-27 rising to $40,425 million in 2029-30, +46.0%) and Statement 3 (public debt interest averaging 8.8% annual growth over the projection period, against hospitals 7.3%, defence 6.4%, aged care 5.4%). https://budget.gov.au/content/bp1/download/bp1_bs-7.pdf

Ernest Dautović, ‘The weight of the median voter ageing on public debt’, Constitutional Political Economy, vol. 29 no. 1, 2018, pp. 69–92. Panel of 23 advanced OECD economies, 1980–2010. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10602-017-9248-8

Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees, 2026 Annual Reports, 9 June 2026. OASI depletion fourth quarter 2032 (78 per cent payable); Medicare HI depletion second quarter 2033 (89 per cent payable); seventy-five-year OASDI actuarial deficit 4.42 per cent of taxable payroll, widened from 3.82 per cent, of which approximately 0.33 points is attributed to lower fertility, 0.18 to reduced immigration, and 0.16 to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TR/2026/

Lisa Dettling and Luke Pardue, Low Fertility and Fiscal Sustainability: The Effects of Past and Future Fertility Rates on the US Federal Budget Outlook, Aspen Economic Strategy Group, 24 February 2026. https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/publication/pardue-dettling-budget/

Australian Bureau of Statistics, National, state and territory population, December quarter 2025, released 18 June 2026. Total population growth 412,500; net overseas migration 301,000; natural increase 111,500. Australia’s total fertility rate was 1.481 in 2024, a record low: ABS, Births, Australia, 15 October 2025.

Statistics Canada, ‘Canada’s total fertility rate reaches new low’, 22 April 2026. https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/9140-canadas-total-fertility-rate-reaches-new-low-2024

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, ‘OBBBA Dynamic Score Comes In At $4.7 Trillion’, on CBO’s dynamic estimate including debt service, FY2026–2035. The conventional provision-only score is $3.4 trillion. https://www.crfb.org/blogs/obbba-dynamic-score-comes-47-trillion

Israeli Government Israel Economy Recent Trends 2026 economic update:
https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/reports/israel-economy-recent-trends/en/Files_eng_israel-economy-recent-trends.pdf

Singapore Department of Statistics, Total Fertility Rate 2025, 26 February 2026 (preliminary resident TFR 0.87, from 0.97 in 2024); Speech by Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong, Committee of Supply Debate 2026. South Korea’s 2025 provisional TFR was approximately 0.80. https://www.singstat.gov.sg/news/total-fertility-rate-2025

Singapore Ministry of Finance, Analysis of Revenue and Expenditure, Financial Year 2026. Net Investment Returns Contribution S$28.48 billion, 17.4 per cent of total revenue (21.1 per cent of operating revenue); primary balance −S$2.57 billion in FY2026 against +S$6.40 billion in FY2025. https://isomer-user-content.by.gov.sg/153/b25a4bb9-db1b-428d-ab48-4528e0ee0d37/fy2026_analysis_of_revenue_and_expenditure_2026.pdf