Consider Marriage Markets, by June Carbone and Naomi Cahn. They write,
At the top, there are more successful men seeking to pair with a smaller pool of similarly successful women. In the middle and the bottom, there are are more competent and stable women seeing to pair with a shrinking pool of reliable men.
. . .the conclusion is short and simple: it’s the economy, stupid. And any analysis or proposed solution that does not take growing inequality into account is based on a lie.
Thanks to a commenter for mentioning the book.
I will read it with some skepticism. I certainly see a strong arrow going in the other direction, from assortative mating to inequality. If there is a reverse causal arrow, then that implies a sort of positive feedback loop.
I am not sure what they mean by the first sentence quoted above. If you define success as “college-educated,” then it is the sucessful women who have to compete for a relatively small pool of men.
Consider the following alternate universes:
1. Boys grow up in households with their fathers in households with decent finances.
2. Boys grow up in households with their fathers in households with fragile finances.
3. Boys grow up in households without their fathers in households with decent finances.
Pretty much everyone assumes that in alternate universe (1) we would have fewer problems than we have today. If the authors really believe that “it’s the economy, stupid,” then it seems to me that they either believe that (3) would work about as well as (1) or that income redistribution would be sufficient to create (1).
I read conservatives as saying that scenario (2) leads to boys who can function well as adults, and that scenario (3) does not. And conservatives see income redistribution as leading to (3) rather than (1).
But lawyers have a hugely profitable “business” in punishing successful people who pair up with less successful people and failing to sustain the marriage.
The law is very clear on this, as it is with many “offences”. Commit it, and you are punished, either by confiscation of assets and/or even prison, depending on the offence.
Thus the law is telling people to marry those with equal wealth, or risk facing the consequences, just as you risk consequences driving a car and failing to keep up with traffic legislation and rules.
This.
Family law punishes success very severely, arguably worse than much white-collar crime.
So wait, is Jeff Bezos going to be punished by the law for failing to sustain his marriage with his less successful, former spouse?
Yes – unless, as may be the case, he has a very powerful legal team.
A more rational approach to divorce could be that the parties get a division of the joint pot in proportion to that which they had at the start of the marriage. But, of course, this would not earn so much for the legal profession as a whole.
When a public company fails and leaves some assets the shareholders get money in proportion to their shareholdings. They don’t get proportions in equal amounts per person regardless of the number of shares owned.
Maybe Helmholz can tell us, whether this also applies to private business partnerships.
You’re confident you (or a jury of your peers) can figure out, ex post, how much each person contributed to the joint pot?
And why does it get pegged only at the start of the marriage? When a public company dies, the pot isn’t divvied up among the shareholders in proportion to when it was formed, it’s divvied up according to the capital owned at the termination of the corporation. If a spouse doesn’t run the business, but takes on other familial responsibilities to allow the other to run the business, why isn’t there credit for that? Or does division of family labor play not role?
Also, there’s no equitable adjustment for fault? So if the marriage dissolves because a spouse cheats, that gets ignored in divvying up the pot (even though the marriage, and the family wealth, would not have been split absent the cheating)?
Thank you Taimyoboi for your comment.
The proportion of the share capital that is divided amongst shareholders is proportional to the number of shares they own. The amount of share capital is obviously the value of what remains after debts and professional fees have been paid. The shareholders don’t get an amount that is the same for all shareholders regardless of original holding.
Thus if a company has 185 shares each worth $6 on dissolution:
Mr A has 10 shares and each share is worth $6 he gets $60
if Mrs B has 100 shares she gets $600.
if Miss C has 75 shares she gets $550.
they don’t all get 185*6/3 = $370
Another point about marriage divorce:
When partners insure each other’s lives, the insurance salesman suggests that the husband includes cover for having to buy the services of the wife in keeping house. That is to say a large capital sum the interest from which will pay the wages, insurance and taxes of employing a housekeeper.
So why not include this large capital sum in the joint assets of the couple when calculated for the purposes of forcible transfer of wealth on divorce? Also many men perform household duties such as building maintenance or gardening. Why not include these in life insurance in a similar fashion?
I suspect that lawyers have discovered that the capital required to fund a live in housekeeper is a lot more than a jobbing gardener or handyman for a few hours/week. By including this the sum forcibly transferred is much smaller, and hence the percentage for their fee.
taimyoboi: “If a spouse…takes on other familial responsibilities to allow the other to run the business, why isn’t there credit for that?”
It turns out that we have been going about this inequality problem all wrong. I didn’t realize that some people have magic homemaking skills that boost the incomes of their spouses. Bezos’s wife should teach her special dishwashing skills to all the wives of low-income husbands, after which those husbands will surely become billionaires!
Yes, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. And he will be made her human property, and will be ordered to continue earning and paying dividends from those earnings to her.
If he has a prenup, and it was well drafted, and Washington State’s family law courts will uphold it, it might only cost him tens of millions.
States have begun to uphold prenups, apparently reflecting growing numbers of successful women complaining about getting soaked and thrown into servitude by their ex-es.
Family law presumes that marriage is in fact a legal partnership, and that success of that partnership is credited to the pair rather than the individuals within it, and that the non-economic contributions of the partners are not presumed to be subordinate to the economic contributions. Your comment, on the other hand, presumes that “success” means financial success.
The “punishment” for a failed partnership is essentially the same “punishment” that happens when dissolving a business partnership (without limited liability).
No partnership in history has required one of the former partners to support the other on an ongoing basis.
And, yes, non-economic contributions ARE deemed subordinate. That’s why the breadwinner gets ordered to make support payments, but the non-economic contributor does not get ordered to continue making non-economic contributions.
Partnership is emphatically not what this is.
When one person’s earning ability is property of another, in any other context, it’s called something else.
Of course, it’s true that marriage is not completely like a business partnership, and things impermissible to include in a commercial context are put into a marriage contract. Specifically, both partners’ economic earning potentials are put into the partnership and become the common property of the partnership.
In general, a partner who becomes responsible for non-economic contributions has to sacrifice some part of their future economic earning potential to do so. In return, they receive a guarantee that the partnership’s economic earning potential will accrue in part to both members of the partnership, even if the partnership is dissolved.
None of this is to deny that in real life, this can be implemented poorly, based on outdated assumptions about family structure.
Why do non-economic contributions justify economic remuneration?
Is everything one does in a marriage effectively transactional then, with payment to be collected upon dissolution? I don’t think that’s what most people think marriage is. I think most people understand their non-economic contributions to marriage as voluntary and not conditional upon payment. Only when they’re getting divorced do they retroactively want payment. (It’s also worth noting that some states impose the assumed, non-voluntary contracts on partners even who aren’t married, on the basis that it’s a ‘common law marriage’, so it’s not even necessarily a legal partnership, but an unchosen obligation the judge considers concomitant with a category of voluntary relationship).
I don’t believe payment for services rendered is something most people think about when they get married.
It is something that lawyers make them think about when the marriage dissolves. Lawyers make money in proportion to the money they can forcibly transfer between people.
If there was a referendum in any country about what divorce law people really want and consider to be fair and reasonable, what would be result, I wonder.
The comments in English speaking newspapers after high profile cases suggest dissatisfaction with the status quo.
“Is everything one does in a marriage effectively transactional then, with payment to be collected upon dissolution? I don’t think that’s what most people think marriage is.”
“Marriage is buying a house for someone you hate.” That’s the definition offered in one classic of sociology called The Nice Guys starring Russell Crowe.
While I suppose it makes more sense to consider divorce when getting married, I never did, and I suspect that most people don’t. If you think there is a good chance of getting divorced, I can’t see why you would marry. So the primary question is you own evaluation of the likelihood of divorce, less what happens when it does happen. Kind of like how “likelihood of getting caught” is a bigger issue in deterring crime compared to “3 years or 5 years in jail”.
The primary issue is why all these women (since its mostly women initiating) want divorces. I saw a study one time that while something like 1/3 of divorces are the “he beats me” kind that we all agree should end in divorce, about 2/3rds are what you might call “ennui” divorces. The kind of Eat, Pray, Love blow up my marriage kinds. What in our sick culture promotes that?
“likelihood of getting caught” is a good comparison, given that divorce lawyers can punish one of the partners as severely as if he has committed a serious crime.
If boredom initiates proceedings, and the bored person can receive a reward tantamount to a lottery win, then indeed ours is a sick culture. I have heard rumours of law firms actively touting for custom on the basis of what can be acquired.
I know of a case where a middle aged partner received over a million after a marriage of about a quarter of a century and blew it all off in a few years, and is now living on state benefits. Not only was the other partner shafted, but also the taxpayers.
“I read conservatives as saying that scenario (2) leads to boys who can function well as adults, and that scenario (3) does not. And conservatives see income redistribution as leading to (3) rather than (1).”
I think this is good, but we can amend it.
First, its not a given that redistribution will lead to #3 instead of #1. It’s just the way we’ve set things up. Note that all redistribution is designed to provide a household (with or without a husband) to achieve some kind of semi-poverty that isn’t pleasant but is workable. Then it taxes most additional income a husband could provide at an effective tax rate close to 100% (when benefit phase out is considered), at least until you start to reach more professional income levels and that effective marginal tax rate goes down.
So I think women correctly realize that adding a man to their life won’t improve their finances (though it won’t necessarily hurt them, the choice between #2 and #3 is a bit false here). The question is “why do these women not see any non-financial value in having a father around.” Or at least, “if they do see value, why are they unable to actualize that.” Or possibly, “women do see value, but they see value in something else more.” And all of that leaving aside the question of if people really making accurate rational or moral choices.
Many of the answers to the above are cultural, not economic. After all, in most cases having a husband around isn’t going to hurt finances (even if it doesn’t help). And certainly it can’t be worse than the string of boyfriends you usually see in these cases.
At the professional socioeconomic level it’s clear that having a husband is an economic improvement. Even if that man doesn’t have a college degree or earns less. I think the problems here are cultural fit and status based. Would a cubicle drone and an HVAC tech get along? Could the cubicle drone handle explaining her husbands job at cocktails with her friends.
There was this plot line in Fraiser where Roz was dating a garbage man and it was obvious that he was a great potential husband and father, but Roz couldn’t handle the social status hit of having to tell people at work her boyfriend was a garbage man. In the show it was played up as her being shallow and silly. Though in that case she was a single mom and her kid talked her out of her shallowness because she liked the guy. Perhaps if she was single and could hold out hope of meeting Mr. Right then she would have just dumped him. That’s real life. Hell later in the show Roz and the garbage man breakup and she goes on to get a promotion in the final episode and continue to be a single mom.
You write, “I am not sure what they mean by the first sentence quoted above. If you define success as “college-educated,” then it is the successful women who have to compete for a relatively small pool of men.”
Most people don’t define success as “college-educated”, they define it as “high income”. Despite the fact that 2 out of 3 college degrees go to women, men continue to be a majority of those generating high incomes, and women continue to not be. Men don’t necessarily “marry down” out of choice; they do it because most of them have no alternative if they want to marry at all.
Correction: High income men don’t necessarily “marry down” out of choice…
Good point, you beat me to it.
What income constitutes successful can vary greatly.
If you define success as “college-educated,” then it is the sucessful women who have to compete for a relatively small pool of men.”
I am surprised you fail to intuitively understand what they mean. In this case college educated is the” middle”. 90% percentile by income is successful and bottom is the bottom half who lack college degrees.
Think of the inference gap between the authors and non-college degreed men. You read the news.
Would your analysis of commonplace and conservative intuitions about the 3 alternate universes differ if the child is a girl rather than a boy?
That’s a great point. I remember reading some popular press/blogoshpere coverage of research showing that growing up without a father in the home (and in neighborhoods with high prevalence of matriarchal family structure) impacts boys much, much, much more negatively than girls. Not to say that girls aren’t impacted also, just that boys seems to suffer more.
And yet we have a trope that girls with bad/no relationships with their fathers have all sorts of issues, and I’ve certainly observed that in my life.
Then again who knows what “impacted” means. Girls generally don’t end up in jail or the gutter no matter what.
Good point. Girls might be negatively impacted in different ways than boys. Girls with “daddy issues” tend to get into lots of bad abusive relationships, which means long-run, lower chance of ending up in a stable marriage, higher likelihood of winding up as a single mother.
My recollection was that they looked at grades and employment, among other things. So even all of those girls with “daddy issues” who may tend to get into abusive relationships still suffered less at school in terms of grades, and then still went and got jobs. The boys, not so much.
. . .the conclusion is short and simple: it’s the economy, stupid.
I am not convinced here, mostly because the main aspect of a successful marriage is having partners that are similar in nature. So very successful women tend to marry men because they happen to be more similar in nature than a very successful women and a marginally successful man. (Note just because a marriage may statistically have a disadvantage does not mean there are some marriage of successful women and marginally successful men.)
1) The reality of the 1970s divorce ‘boom’ was it was led by college educated successful people. (Think Charles Murray, Michael Medved, and Dr. Phil as examples) My question is why did this happen this way? How did the successful people in the 1970s have a higher chance of divorce? (Born in 1970 I can only read about and nobody has a good answer. My simple belief is very successful people married later but I am maybe missing something here.)
2) The other issue I have here is before 1970 we had a labor market that enforced sex discrimination so any comparison of marriage and success is vastly different. So measuring the past using today standards of assortative mating are not meaningful. (So George and Barbara might not be considered assortative mating by today standards, which is ridiculous.)
3) I really wish we consider the 1950s as a historical outlier and we act local societies and working class life was not significantly different before WW2.
4) I really wish people would focus more on early and late marriage. I suspect late marriage (28 – 30) has more chance of success because 1) As people age they tend to close in their contacts more like themselves so dating is more assortative 2) By 28 – 30 adults have a better sense where they are going 3) Early 20s life requires a lot of failures and it is easier to have them without a family.
1) College educated people decreased their divorce rate but lowering their marriage rate and fertility rate. You avoid catastrophic failure by avoiding risk. This isn’t necessarily a good solution.
3) It probably was, but that’s sad. “Normal” for most of humanity most of the time has been miserable. If there existed a golden age when regular people had good lives I can see why people would mourn it.
4) It’s really hard to not be working towards marriage till 30, then turn it on and suddenly have two people that are ready and prepared to be married. In reality, while some people manage it, a lot of people fail to pair up in that 30-35 range and then they are too old so they either don’t marry or do but don’t have many (or any) kids. It’s better to take your relationships a bit more seriously when your younger, even if a college boyfriend isn’t who you’ll marry, and start really looking by your mid 20s instead of five years later.
It may be a bit different for guys and girls.
Getting serious in their mid-20s is probably fine for guys.
Girls probably want to at least seriously consider marriage as early as early 20s.
1) College educated people decreased their divorce rate but lowering their marriage rate and fertility rate.
Is it are lowering marriage rate or putting marriage until 30? I believe it is putting off marriage here but the average 23 expects to be married. And that the average 23 is not quite established in their life and career yet.
3) Before WW2 or even 1800, mankind was still mostly happy with existence but there were a lot of issues. Of someone working the in 1800 didn’t know anything else and would today was king of glory paradise. However it does seem most people act the beginning of time was Andy Griffin Post WW2 years.
4) Again it is less somebody wakes up 28, we need marriage now but probably a gradual transition. In my case my career, life and other aspects starting really settling at 25, getting bored of doing the early Friends reality, and moved more interested in marriage. (The ease of birth control compared to 1960 is one HUGE contributing factor.)
1) It’s not just putting off. Putting off turns into more people never getting married at all before middle age. Childless and single child households within those that do marry has also risen.
3) Dude, people live and died working in shit 70 hour a week for some lord and hoping 25% of their children reached adulthood. All live before the industrial revolution was total garbage.
4) Thats great. Good for you. Statistically people who try to follow that life path end up falling through the cracks more than they did before the sexual revolution.
Thought you might find this paper interesting (I got the link from Marginal Revolution):
“We find that 35% of the decline in fertility between 2007 and 2016 can be explained by declines in births that were likely unintended, and that this is driven by drops in births to young women.”
And also:
“Young women and unmarried women have seen the largest declines in fertility in recent years while women older than 30 and married women have actually experienced increases.”
My thought is that if we want to raise fertility rates, an overlooked policy would be turning middle school into a two year experience, and having grades 8 through 10 be high school, with folks who need more education to be ready for basic numeracy and literacy offered more education past that, as well as more education for people who don’t have literacy and numeracy skills sufficient to be able to complete serious vocational training. The idea being that if folks are increasingly following the upper middle class lifescript of “education/vocational training, career, marriage, children,” then you need to get folks to the career part sooner so that they have a larger window of time to have kids while they are still fertile. Also, my impression is that kids who have the ability to complete college are ready for intro level college classes by 16 anyway. And I do realize that there are plenty of places that have “early college programs” for high school students and AP classes as well.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w25521
It’s not-PC, but there are books suggesting women in college be far more serious about relationships leading towards marriage.
While in college. Since there are so many mostly eligible guys.
I have to agree that this has nothing to do with the economy. We just need to look at in terms of psychology. Women generally want to marry a man who is more successful than them. The trend over the past few decades is that women, as a group, are becoming more successful, whereas men, as a group are not (and they may actually be growing less successful). This means that women have fewer options for men who are higher than them on the success ladder.
Their point that, “At the top, there are more successful men seeking to pair with a smaller pool of similarly successful women,” sounds extremely unlikely to me. Men at the top are overwhelmingly the most desirable and thus are not fiercely competing over anything. More likely it’s the extremely successful women fighting over the small pool of equally or more successful men.
My question on why women are becoming more successful over the last several decades is whether it is really Modern Economics or is it that potentially successful women are socialized differently. In 1960 we did have a society that (softly) enforced sex discrimination labor market. (Private companies and governements did this is small ways like increasing the chances of married men being promoted over a single woman.)
Again, think how Barbara Bush was socialized in the 1930s/1940s and assume if she was a generation or two younger, that she would have been successful in the private sector.
Embrace the healing power of and.
The transition from soft enforced sex discrimination to soft enforced reverse sex discrimination
and
Heavy socialization toward marriage and child-rearing to heavy socialization toward employment
and
Poor control over pregnancy to strong control over pregnancy (the pill)
There’s a correlation between “the chances of married men being promoted” and how much those married men work.
There’s even been some research on this. Cybill Shepherd plays the daughter in the movie and Ellen Burstyn her mother, but I’ll quote the novel instead. It’s The Last Picture Show, by Larry McMurtry.
“But I don’t care about money,” Jacy said solemnly. “I don’t care about it at all.”
Lois sighed. “You’re pretty stupid then,” she said. “If you’re that stupid you ought to go and marry him–it would be the cheapest way to educate you.”
Jacy was so shocked at being called stupid that she didn’t even cry. Her mother knew she made straight A report cards!
“You married Daddy when he was poor,” she said weakly. “He got rich so I don’t see why Duane couldn’t.”
“I’ll tell you why, beautiful,” Lois said. “I scared your Daddy into getting rich. He’s so scared of me that for twenty years he’s done nothing but run around trying to find things to please me. He’s never found the right things but he made a million dollars looking.”
Being the commenter that recommended the book, I feel like I have an obligation to leave a comment to this post.
My TLDR takeaway from the book was this:
Non-college educated folks are trapped in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma when it comes to finding romantic partners/ potential spouses in which the dominant strategy is to defect, which is why marriage and family stability has collapsed among that part of the population. College educated folks are instead faced with a pool of potential mates that is more like a repeated prisoners dilemma game in which tit for tat is the dominant strategy. So college educated folks have a much greater incentive to be on their best behavior, and so are able to trust each other much more and form stable families, though of course things don’t always work out for the upper middle class either.
Here’s the argument supporting that point of view, so far as I understand it:
I find it interesting that my takeaway from the book wasn’t that inequality was the main driver of what is happening to family formation. My takeaway from the book was that it was the changed legal landscape of family law (from the 1950’s) and to some the increased earning power of women and the increase in women’s security from the safety net that drove a lot of the changes. That is, as asdf has pointed out, the added value (from a material standpoint) from a man’s income in bottom two (or three?) income quintiles went way way down over this period of time, especially as laws tightened up about child support payments.
In addition, at higher levels of income, men also have the money to pay for lawyers, allowing them to both have much more access to their kids in the case of divorce and to also reduce their child support payments. So those changes in the family law system impacted college educated men and women differently than non-college educated men and women. Part of the thing that the book emphasized was that for white collar professional men and women, both men and women still bring a great deal of value to a marriage in terms of income and in unpaid labor, such that both men and women suffer quite a bit from a divorce (or breakup if they are cohabiting parents). The book makes the argument (I thought) that one of the reasons that college educated men and women can still follow the “career, marriage, children” lifeplan is because the costs from defecting from a spouse/co-parent are still sufficiently high and evenly distributed that men and women can still reasonably trust each other as potential partners.
But for working class/poor men and women, neither side is bringing enough to the table in terms of both value and personal risk to produce a pool of potential mates that are trustworthy. Women can back out of the relationship without all that much financial risk, and they keep the kids, and they can make it very difficult for men to be a presence in their children’s lives. Part of that calculus is that the men aren’t making enough money to afford lawyers or for the women to lose a lot of material well-being from a split, but I think that it is mistaken to attribute that to inequality, as I believe that the wages of non-college educated men have been stagnant, not declining. But their wages relative to women’s earnings and government benefits has been declining. Also, since the men know that the women can split without suffering too much in the way of negative consequences, they themselves don’t invest or make much effort in being good boyfriends/husbands.
“In addition, at higher levels of income, men also have the money to pay for lawyers, allowing them to both have much more access to their kids in the case of divorce and to also reduce their child support payments.”
It appears you don’t know much about family law… The only thing a higher income does, in family court, is deepen the financial hole you find yourself in, and the vigor with which the system will pursue you. No force on earth is going to reduce your child support payments. And enforcement of visitation rights is not something your lawyers will be able to help with, in practice.
Does anyone else occasionally get the impression that some men’s hostility towards the rising status and employment prospects of women has something to do with the potentially reduced sexual availability of them?
I.e. Women can’t be getting those jobs and degrees because then they will be less likely to want to have sex with men like me!
That’s actually the first time I have heard that theory.
Though I would think that if it is true, it wouldn’t be “Women can’t be getting those jobs and degrees because then they will be less likely to want to have sex with men like me!,” but rather “women don’t seem to want to have sex with me, and they have gotten those jobs and degrees, so maybe those are the problem.”
The Theory of Moral Sentiments is part sociology and part economics, but there’s one line that ought to be in a novel instead: “In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.”
Adam Smith was talking about why people are spurred on to work and to fight and to suffer. They get themselves killed in battle or shipwreck or at the point of a sword, and it’s because of a mistake. People are under the misapprehension that they will make themselves better off the more successful they are, climbing higher in rank, the more trinkets they get: “How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility?”
There’s one character in Game Of Thrones who does it all for his family, and he does not like his family. His children are about as disappointing as any children can get. But he’s been led by a force more powerful than any human hand, more powerful than any one man’s will, to sacrifice himself: “Your mother’s dead, before long I’ll be dead, and you and your brother and your sister and all of her children. All of us dead, all of us rotting in the ground. It’s the family name that lives on. It’s all that lives on. Not your honor, not your personal glory, family.”
What makes it worse for him is that he’s not entirely deluded, is he? Having seen through the misapprehension that Adam Smith and Charles Darwin were talking about, this character in Game Of Thrones goes on regardless, fully aware of his failure and the pointlessness of what he’s achieved. Imagine if Ozymandias was in on the joke and went on all the same.