The mean length of marriages does seem likely to have declined in absolute terms though the decline in maternal mortality will have somewhat offset the rise in the number of divorces and separations.
Of course, marriage as a proportion of a person's adult life will have declined even more. Jimmy Carter was married for 77% of his total life and a much higher proportion of his adult life. If adult life is deemed to begin at 21, Rosalynn Carter was married for more than 100% of that time.
Men are not getting married anymore. They do not wish to be destroyed in divorce court by the ex-wife. The economics of divorce? The man has to pay child support and alimony to an ex that poisons the children against him (called parental alienation) and for children he is no longer allowed to see. Augustine Kposawa found that the man's risk of committing suicide increases 8 times after divorce, but for women, it remains unchanged.
Men are also shunning women and dating in large numbers, too. I think it was a Pew Research study which found that a sizable percentage of men would rather stay home and watch pron than go out on a date.
I'm happy to see you citing that essay by Sayers. I first read it back in the 20th century, in her collection Unpopular Opinions, and reread it much more recently. I very much like Sayers as an essayist; she often has intelligent points to make and she expresses them well.
I was kind of taking that for granted; her fiction is much more widely known than her other writing. But I agree to the extent of finding Gaudy Night (which I'm currently rereading) not merely my favorite mystery, but one of my favorite novels. I can't think so highly of Busman's Honeyman, which strikes me as having shallower characterization, more suited to a stage comedy (which I believe it appeared as before publication as a novel), and rather too much humor. If I were to pick a second best, I think it would have to be The Nine Tailors, though I confess to especially liking Murder Must Advertise, the first Wimsey I read.
While I don't disagree with your analysis, I think we need to be much more serious about this and consider it a major negative that divorce has gone up.
Children of divorced couples have significantly worse life outcomes. It's to the point that having divorced parents grants an ACE score - the same score that childhood abuse grants.
It may seem to make sense from an individual perspective (the husband or the wife, maybe both), but from a family perspective and a society perspective it's a huge problem. The children's needs are often under-prioritized, and I doubt individual divorcing couples think about society much at all.
We should work to strongly encourage couples to stay together, even if the economic argument for the individual members seem to indicate divorce would be net-positive for them.
"Children of divorced couples have significantly worse life outcomes. It's to the point that having divorced parents grants an ACE score - the same score that childhood abuse grants."
You have that about half right. It's the children of single-mother households that have much poorer outcomes. Divorce courts very often give the mother full custody.
I'm not the marrying kind, particularly if the marriage is required to be heterosexual, so I'm speaking from theory and observation, not experience.
What I suspect is that the benefits of marriage for women have decreased significantly in both our lifetimes - at least in the west. There's your point about the reduced need for child bearing and child rearing, but there's also a significant increase in the desirability of alternate investments of a woman's time and effort.
As a child, the best possible career that appeared to be available to me was wife. I'd have to pick the right husband, and perhaps work hard to keep him - the financially successful were developing a reputation for dumping middle aged wives in favour of younger women, perhaps their secretaries. But well paying jobs - especially powerful executive jobs - were pretty much a male preserve. Good professional jobs were mostly for men. But even blue collar jobs for men paid better than those for women. The excuse given - if one were even thought to be needed - was that men needed to support a family. So if I wanted to live well, financially, my best choice was to find an up and coming man, marry him, and support his career.
Things _were_ changing. On the one hand, a few women were breaking into male-assigned jobs. On the other hand, there were some adequate - if not luxurious - choices assigned to women, such as teacher and secretary. You certainly could live decently as a single woman, even without inherited wealth. But it was harder, and ambition and talent wouldn't take you very far, compared to a man with lesser talents and ambition.
By the time I was in my late teens, it made sense to me to trust my own talent and ambition, rather than my limited social skills (ability to choose a good man, get him to marry me, and then get him to stay married) as the foundation for a career. It still might have looked different if a traditional marriage had any non-financial attractions for me, or if I hadn't been quite so good at what was not yet called STEM.
But basically, from where I sat, a woman without a man was like a fish without a bicycle. I could live as well on my own earnings as I could sharing the earnings of the quality of man I was likely to be able to "catch", and had far less risk of being fired and unable to get a satisfactory new job, than divorced and unable to get a satisfactory new husband.
It seems to me that this is still true. Now, though, in all classes, not just the poorest, a wife is expected to work outside the home, as well as perform all the remaining aspects of the "wife" job. Fortunately the work required for that role as diminished. But the "second shift" is a lot less work if one lives alone, or with only other adults who do housework, emotional labour, cooking etc.
"Wife" just doesn't pay adequately these days, compared to alternate investments of the same time and energy.
You may well be correct. The fraction of jobs that require physical strength is lower, and that is the obvious thing where men have an advantage. But your account assumes one does not want children, and a lot of people, both men and women, do.
A different form of your argument would be that, with high infant mortality and a lot of household production, most of the female population had to be wives to maintain the population, and that led to a demand for wives and a "price" for wives at which wife really was the most attractive job open to most women. On that story the lack of other jobs for women was an effect, not a cause, of most women being wives.
True. I think I might have been fine with being a father in a traditional marriage, even favored having children over not having them, in those circumstances. But if I'd been forced to be a mother, aka a primary caretaker for children, things would have ended very badly. I observe there are people who like these tasks, and it's doubtless good for species survival that these people exist. But I don't want any.
I mistrust arguments where "society" decides based on the general good. I think individuals mostly decide based on their own individual idea of good, with disproportionate emphasis on their own good. I figure that widespread availability of contraception, along with alternative careers, will either create heavy selection for people - women especially - who want children - or a steep decline in population that may end with the end of the species. Most likely both a steep decline and strong selection pressures.
Society - or rather, many individual members of a society - often push hard against change, possibly citing the good of society in the process. But I suspect large chunks of their real motives are a mix of "I'm all right, Jack" and dislike of change.
Meanwhile, many societies had alternatives. I've heard it plausibly claimed that some Puritan girls kidnapped by natives and taken to French Canada refused opportunities to return home, because French Canada offered them alternatives not available back home. They could become nuns, specializing in teaching children and/or nursing the sick, rather than having no alternative beyond wife. Having done so, they preferred the life they had to the life they'd get at home.
"I mistrust arguments where "society" decides based on the general good."
So do I. If you thought I was making such an argument I must have been insufficiently clear.
I was describing an outcome driven by individual choice, not societal welfare, one in which the demand for wives by men who wanted them was high enough to make the price paid, the terms offered, superior for most women to alternative professions.
Men fear being destroyed in divorce courts, so they are shunning marriage in record numbers. I think you should incorporate that fact into your analysis.
I'm afraid that was a plausible reading of what you wrote. " ... most of the female population had to be wives to maintain the population, and that led to a demand for wives and a "price" for wives at which wife really was the most attractive job open to most women. On that story the lack of other jobs for women was an effect, not a cause, of most women being wives ...".
How would that lead to such a demand? And to have that effect based on demand, wouldn't it be necessary for wives to be paid *more* than other working adults? Whereas what happened in practice was that working women were paid _less_ than working men (on average, and even ignoring jobs requiring strength, etc. etc.) Being a "wife" (house husband?) was a lousy deal for most men, even if it were offered. But it was often a woman's best choice, _even if she had no particular interest in sex with a man, or producing and rearing children_.
For this situation to arise _because children were needed_, it seems to me it would require social agreement to limit women's other options "for the good of society". Individual males might outbid each other for wives, raising the renumeration, because they personally wanted children. But once they had a wife, why wouldn't (male) employers employ women in other roles, on the same terms as men?
Certainly there were rationalizations available once the question was raised, such as "she's likely to leave to get married" or (if married) "she's likely to have a child and quit". But I doubt they were much more than rationalizations. After all, the poorest stratum of women had managed to work outside their homes from time immemorial (beginning of the factory system? end of "putting out" and similar).
It doesn't require any social agreement, just men wanting wives, where what they want is a full time wife because that is needed to maintain a household and produce at least two children who survive to adulthood. The terms of marriage adjust until they are favorable enough so most women choose to be wives, given that most men want wives. Like other prices it goes to where demand equals supply.
I don't assume that working women were paid less than men for doing the same jobs with the same ability. If they had been, an employer could have increased his profit by hiring only women.
You are assuming a cartel agreement among all employers to hold down female wages, when each employer would be better off hiring more women and by doing so bidding their wages up. Such agreements are very hard to maintain if there are many firms — in this case all firms with employees doing work that men don't have any special advantage in.
I don't have data on m/f wages c. 1900 but my understanding is that present data do not support the widely believed claim that women are paid less than men under comparable circumstances.
I'm not assuming a cartel agreement. Such an agreement isn't required, i.e. I can come up with other explanations for the same effect.
I don't have statistics either. I merely have memories, but not from 1900. There were jobs for women, and jobs for men, listed separately in newspaper want ads. If a girl took the line of least resistance, encouraged by educators and parents, they were steered into less renumerative activities, and away from training for the more renumerative ones.
By my time, they weren't absolutely banned from e.g. becoming a CPA rather than a bookkeeper, or a doctor rather than a nurse. But it was a truism that a woman had to be twice as good as a man to get those jobs. (As I recall it, that aphorism was usually followed with "fortunately, this isn't difficult" ;-))
In my experience, they also had problems getting good salary offers, and routine raises. The style of negotiation required was deemed "unfeminine"; most had been trained out of it in childhood - those that hadn't often got typed as "aggressive" - thus hard to work with - if they dared to act like male coworkers. This, too, became something "everyone knew", with a self-help industry to teach women to thread the needle, and be (acceptably) "assertive" rather than "aggressive".
"I think I might have been fine with being a father in a traditional marriage, even favored having children over not having them, in those circumstances."
Did you try to investigate that option? It is possible, either by marrying a man willing to run the household while you supported it with your earnings — I knew one couple like that — or by pairing with a woman who wanted to be a housewife and having her bear the children. The first option still requires you to bear the cost of pregnancy and possibly nursing the infants. The second doesn't, but results in children that are not genetically both of yours — although if the sperm donor is the brother of the non-bearing partner you can come close.
Or you can adopt. The one ff couple I know has an adopted daughter who has turned out very well — a happy young woman who obviously gets along well with both her mothers.
Both of those options would at the time have involved both partners accepting a mildly stigmatized pattern of life, but I would not expect that to be something of overwhelming importance to you. I knew an ff couple of my parents' generation who seemed to manage fine. I don't know whether they would have been able to adopt — probably not legally, but perhaps informally. One of them was divorced with a son, an adult when I knew her; I don't know if any of his growing up was in their household. She was one of my parents' closest friends and one of my favorite adults when I was a child.
Potential house husbands were in really short supply, and from what I saw, a lot of those expressing openness to such a possibility were poor risks - lots of losers who didn't work, did do drugs, etc. etc.
They've become more available over time, and I might have found a decent one if I'd made an intensive search. But it just wasn't that important to me.
I should have thought a lot more seriously about forming a household with another woman, ideally one somewhat more "femme" than me. I did eventually do precisely that, but not for child rearing purposes. And in any case, we were both well into the riskier pregnancy age ranges by then. (We're now both well past menopause.)
That seems to be a "thing" among a certain section of the upper middle class, observing my sons and their friends (30s). Such men won't consider marrying a woman without either a successful high-paying career of their own or a postgraduate degree. I think it's about reflected social status; my wife thinks it's about finances.
I agree with your wife, based only on my eperiences since entering grad school at age 40. I had a different take than my younger collegues on the mating games. Most of the men upper middle class men who married women with grad degrees (just any grad degree? Like Gender Studies?) seemed to be going more after finances than social status. (And hot blondes with undergrad or only HS degrees seemed to marry well, regardless.)
A graduate degree isn't financially useful if the woman is not pursuing a remunerative career. One other possible explanation it that the man wants a wife who shares his intellectual world. One of the attractions of the woman I married 40+ years ago and am still married to is that I felt I could talk with her without needing a translator.
Another possible explanation is that the man wants a wife who will bear smart children and help create an environment suited for them.
I believe that there are indeed some women who get graduate degrees and then choose to be stay at home mothers.
Moreover, the women who do this aren't always those whose degree does not in fact give them good employment prospects.
But what conclusion do you draw from this? Invalid conclusions include any variant on "some women choose x, therefore all women choose x, or should choose x, or would be happier with x".
Also, as it happened a casual conversation today mentioned a man who was unhappy enough with his marriage to enter therapy. His wife had chosen to be a stay at home mother. He wasn't happy, in part because he'd come home exhausted from work, and she'd be eager for adult, intellectual company - while all he wanted to do was veg. I believe other issues were mentioned, including her developing a rather bad temper.
I find this plausible. Some women who make this choice don't like the consequences, or don't handle them well. As a child, I lived with a mother who was one of them. (Of course, given the date, she arguably hadn't had a very free choice, so isn't precisely the same case.)
That does NOT mean that other women, even smart women with graduate degrees, have the same experience. Some seem to be fine with this choice, or as fine with it as they are with anything else.
"You may well be correct. The fraction of jobs that require physical strength is lower, and that is the obvious thing where men have an advantage. But your account assumes one does not want children, and a lot of people, both men and women, do."
Men do the dangerous jobs, whether physical strength is required or not. Men account for 93% of industrial accident fatalities. There is also widespread discrimination in office employment against men, and especially White men.
Men are shunning women, dating, and marriage in record numbers, both out of fear of being destroyed in divorce court by the ex-wife, and women with high demands of men that bring very little to the table. Now there are women that openly discuss poisoning random men on TikTok and Twitter - and the FBI calls that "protected speech". When World War III breaks out, the women that professed to believe in equality will head back to the kitchen, and want to be the "bicycle" of an affluent man that will provide for and protect them. There was a recent study bt psychologists that found that women were shunning marriage because men were poorer than before, so they were unable to find "virtual husbands" that made 58% more than they did. It's very easy to dismantle the cancer that is feminism, but the far better option for men is to avoid feminists like the plague, and stick with the non-feminist women that value and respect men.
Interesting. I may point out that in my marriage I also gained the services of a hetaera at no additional cost.
Anyway, While teaching State and Local Government I often brought up marriage license (a 'license' to do what?) as an example of the state treating it as a binding contract that the state then used to divide up assets (among other things) when the 'contract' was dissolved whether by death, divorce, abandinment, or whatever. That is one reason "bastards" couldn't inherit from the estate. Some of my students really dug into examining more aspects.
Why "register" your marriage, and why at the county seat? The simple answer is that counties existed to deliver state-level services locally. Otherwise you'd have to spend a lot of time walking many miles to the state capitol, unless you were wealthy enough to own a horse.
Counties had Recorders. Persons who kept records of contracts, like mortgages and marriages, and deeds, and births and deaths, etc. The had courts (or a circuit court -- today medium to smaller counties in Illinois have judges who are both county and circuit judges although they no longer "ride a circuit"), and sheriffs and constables and Justices of the peace), and coroners (to certify a death (for purposes of the estate) AND ro assure the death was properly recorded with the Recorder, And a County Clerk, and a County Treasurer, and so on.
The marriage license was fundamentally treated as a two-person contract that had extended responsibilities to some others.
I recall being disappointed to learn that, in some jurisdictions at least, the engagement ring was a “conditional gift” that the fiancée could be forced to return, at least if she could be shown as at fault for the marriage being called off. I had naively assumed that it was an absolute gift which thereby demonstrated the man’s unwavering commitment. If he was jilted, the prestige of having assumed the risk would be the only compensation; though it might be a very considerable benefit when he proposed to someone else. Under the conditional gift principle, I suppose jewelers might seem to benefit, because a prospective husband would be willing to buy a more expensive ring; but under the absolute gift scenario, jewelers might sell two rings instead of one.
The bond forfeiting only makes sense if it is the man who is responsible. The legal rule it substituted for was liability for the man jilting the woman.
Thank you again for applying the logic of economics to gain insights that escape most people. Allow me few remarks:
- concerning marriage a facilitator in-house production, the fact that in-house production is not taxed creates a big wedge working against its market equivalent. Limitations on tax enforcement however work in the opposite direction: I am very bad at DIY, but fortunately I know a handyman that will fix my house against payment strictly in cash. I guess however you do not need to be married to arrange in-house production reasonably efficiently;
- fiscal considerations enter the picture not only from the taxation but also from the benefits side. I suppose DinoNerd (who makes otherwise good arguments) expects her pension to be paid by the work of other people’s children;
- has marriage declined essentially because of technological developments reducing the need for household-specific investment? Could not the causality runs from institutions/culture to declining investment? If divorce becomes easier, then a woman would run a bigger risk in investing in marriage (under the assumption that the woman is more invested in household-specific capital);
- the discussion of costs and benefits of stronger or weaker forms of ‘marriage’ is conducted exclusively in terms of the interests of the two partners. What about the interest of the children, insofar as not incorporated in those of the parents?
- one could compare the love motive in marriage to the non-profit motive in some activities where assessing/enforcing quality is inherently difficult, typically, care activities: non-profit (eg religious) organisations tend to thrive in such activities precisely because they may be less prone to reduce quality even when the consumer will be unable to detect and defect.
Actually, I expect my pension to be paid by the stock market, via investments I've made over my lifetime. Of course in some ways that amounts to the same thing - the people working for those firms will be other people's children.
There is a risk - one I did not anticipate - that there simply won't be enough working age people, proportionately, compared to retirees, leading to supply and demand raising retiree costs beyond what most people can afford. We haven't yet reached a stage where firms require no labour at all, just capital. And that's especially true with regard to the kind of services older people frequently need.
But if you make arguments like "you have a duty to breed, because there will be a catastrophe unless most people breed", do you also make arguments like "you have a duty to drastically reduce your energy use, because otherwise there will be a catastrophe"? Or do you expect technology to solve the impending problems? Or disbelieve the problem exists?
Your answer is the one I was going to make for you — your pension is paid for by work you did, whether assets you bought or the obligation of a firm to pay you some of your wages after you retire.
Many people do at least claim that we are obligated to do things for the general good. California, where both of us live, imposes substantial costs on us to hold down CO2 output, although the state's share of world output, which is what matters, is far too small to justify those costs in terms of the interests of the state's inhabitants.
Broadly, I agree that the rationality of an individual's having some "thing" in their life—doing certain things, being in certain relationships, etc—is determined by the benefits to them, and that there are many circumstances in which certain relations between people offer the prospect of mutual benefit and so the motive for some agreement to this effect. So far with the economists.
Amongst these "things", marriage (and friendship) rate highly. But can such /personal/ relationships, /as we understand them in our own lives/, be included in this calculus? True, they provide various benefits,—eg meals, domestic cleaning, child care. These benefits are at least in part extrinsic, ie someone else could provide the same, if not greater, benefit (eg, the toy I made for my son could have been made by someone else, even better as a toy). So marriage is /in part/ a firm. But you can also think that they are also in part intrinsic, ie that there is some (extra) benefit that comes from their occurring in the context of that particular relationship (viz, there was some extra value in my having made a toy for my son, even though, considered in itself, it was not of great quality). So marriage is /more than/ a firm. Or at least the rest of us seem to think.
DF's explanation for the presence of love in marriage seems to canvass only extrinsic benefits, but, as we understand them in our lives, marriage and other personal relationships are necessarily experienced (perhaps mistakenly) as /intrinsically/ beneficial. Is the economist debarred from saying this?
No. Economics can be used to investigate that sort of thing. I plan at some point to do a post on the economics of altruism, based on Becker's work (and Margolis' critique of it).
I think such issues are particularly interesting for economists because they are not usually considered economic and so have not been already worked over by smart economists. Becker got a Nobel prize for economics of the household, Buchanan for economics of politics, both at the time new fields. I like to describe that as working on the extensive margin in economics, as opposed to working on the intensive margin — trying to find something new to say about an issue that smart people have been thinking about for a century.
I had a field in biopolitics that examined both politics and households, frequently trying to "marry" economic and biological elements to human relationships. There seems to me to be a great deal of entanglement between the two when it comes to choosing whom to marry.
I don't like saying "designed" when talking about Darwinian natural selection. So I think I would say "selected by Darwinian evolution to produce increased likelihood of reproductive success in our environment of evolutionary adaptiveness".
But those were the arguments we made in the Evolutionary Psychology seminar Larry Arnhardt taught. we had some folk who were pretty unhappy with the whole idea of evolutionary psychology.
And of course the selection is for things that "worked" in the immediate past, more or less. It is not forward-looking.
No. Even if there is an objective morality, there is nothing inherently bad about an increased divorce rate. If, for example, the objective morality was utilitarianism, whether an increasing divorce rate was bad or good would depend on whether it increased or decreased total utility — it could do either.
As it happens I am a moral realist, although not a utilitarian.
If the increased divorce rate has led to many more children being raised with single parents or step parents, and statistically that is associated with significantly worse outcomes for the children, would that be evidence of it being inherently bad?
Yes. And fewer people finding themselves trapped in failed marriages evidence of it being good.
Your statistics are comparing children of successful marriages to children of failed marriages. I don't see how the statistical evidence can tell you what would have happened to the children of parents who divorced if those parents had not divorced.
The mean length of marriages does seem likely to have declined in absolute terms though the decline in maternal mortality will have somewhat offset the rise in the number of divorces and separations.
Of course, marriage as a proportion of a person's adult life will have declined even more. Jimmy Carter was married for 77% of his total life and a much higher proportion of his adult life. If adult life is deemed to begin at 21, Rosalynn Carter was married for more than 100% of that time.
Seeing that word by itself, my mind invariably respells it as "Mawwiage".
Wear an impressive hat when you say that.
Men are not getting married anymore. They do not wish to be destroyed in divorce court by the ex-wife. The economics of divorce? The man has to pay child support and alimony to an ex that poisons the children against him (called parental alienation) and for children he is no longer allowed to see. Augustine Kposawa found that the man's risk of committing suicide increases 8 times after divorce, but for women, it remains unchanged.
Men are also shunning women and dating in large numbers, too. I think it was a Pew Research study which found that a sizable percentage of men would rather stay home and watch pron than go out on a date.
I'm happy to see you citing that essay by Sayers. I first read it back in the 20th century, in her collection Unpopular Opinions, and reread it much more recently. I very much like Sayers as an essayist; she often has intelligent points to make and she expresses them well.
She was also a good novelist, at least in the last two Wimsey books.
I was kind of taking that for granted; her fiction is much more widely known than her other writing. But I agree to the extent of finding Gaudy Night (which I'm currently rereading) not merely my favorite mystery, but one of my favorite novels. I can't think so highly of Busman's Honeyman, which strikes me as having shallower characterization, more suited to a stage comedy (which I believe it appeared as before publication as a novel), and rather too much humor. If I were to pick a second best, I think it would have to be The Nine Tailors, though I confess to especially liking Murder Must Advertise, the first Wimsey I read.
While I don't disagree with your analysis, I think we need to be much more serious about this and consider it a major negative that divorce has gone up.
Children of divorced couples have significantly worse life outcomes. It's to the point that having divorced parents grants an ACE score - the same score that childhood abuse grants.
It may seem to make sense from an individual perspective (the husband or the wife, maybe both), but from a family perspective and a society perspective it's a huge problem. The children's needs are often under-prioritized, and I doubt individual divorcing couples think about society much at all.
We should work to strongly encourage couples to stay together, even if the economic argument for the individual members seem to indicate divorce would be net-positive for them.
"Children of divorced couples have significantly worse life outcomes. It's to the point that having divorced parents grants an ACE score - the same score that childhood abuse grants."
You have that about half right. It's the children of single-mother households that have much poorer outcomes. Divorce courts very often give the mother full custody.
I'm not the marrying kind, particularly if the marriage is required to be heterosexual, so I'm speaking from theory and observation, not experience.
What I suspect is that the benefits of marriage for women have decreased significantly in both our lifetimes - at least in the west. There's your point about the reduced need for child bearing and child rearing, but there's also a significant increase in the desirability of alternate investments of a woman's time and effort.
As a child, the best possible career that appeared to be available to me was wife. I'd have to pick the right husband, and perhaps work hard to keep him - the financially successful were developing a reputation for dumping middle aged wives in favour of younger women, perhaps their secretaries. But well paying jobs - especially powerful executive jobs - were pretty much a male preserve. Good professional jobs were mostly for men. But even blue collar jobs for men paid better than those for women. The excuse given - if one were even thought to be needed - was that men needed to support a family. So if I wanted to live well, financially, my best choice was to find an up and coming man, marry him, and support his career.
Things _were_ changing. On the one hand, a few women were breaking into male-assigned jobs. On the other hand, there were some adequate - if not luxurious - choices assigned to women, such as teacher and secretary. You certainly could live decently as a single woman, even without inherited wealth. But it was harder, and ambition and talent wouldn't take you very far, compared to a man with lesser talents and ambition.
By the time I was in my late teens, it made sense to me to trust my own talent and ambition, rather than my limited social skills (ability to choose a good man, get him to marry me, and then get him to stay married) as the foundation for a career. It still might have looked different if a traditional marriage had any non-financial attractions for me, or if I hadn't been quite so good at what was not yet called STEM.
But basically, from where I sat, a woman without a man was like a fish without a bicycle. I could live as well on my own earnings as I could sharing the earnings of the quality of man I was likely to be able to "catch", and had far less risk of being fired and unable to get a satisfactory new job, than divorced and unable to get a satisfactory new husband.
It seems to me that this is still true. Now, though, in all classes, not just the poorest, a wife is expected to work outside the home, as well as perform all the remaining aspects of the "wife" job. Fortunately the work required for that role as diminished. But the "second shift" is a lot less work if one lives alone, or with only other adults who do housework, emotional labour, cooking etc.
"Wife" just doesn't pay adequately these days, compared to alternate investments of the same time and energy.
You may well be correct. The fraction of jobs that require physical strength is lower, and that is the obvious thing where men have an advantage. But your account assumes one does not want children, and a lot of people, both men and women, do.
A different form of your argument would be that, with high infant mortality and a lot of household production, most of the female population had to be wives to maintain the population, and that led to a demand for wives and a "price" for wives at which wife really was the most attractive job open to most women. On that story the lack of other jobs for women was an effect, not a cause, of most women being wives.
True. I think I might have been fine with being a father in a traditional marriage, even favored having children over not having them, in those circumstances. But if I'd been forced to be a mother, aka a primary caretaker for children, things would have ended very badly. I observe there are people who like these tasks, and it's doubtless good for species survival that these people exist. But I don't want any.
I mistrust arguments where "society" decides based on the general good. I think individuals mostly decide based on their own individual idea of good, with disproportionate emphasis on their own good. I figure that widespread availability of contraception, along with alternative careers, will either create heavy selection for people - women especially - who want children - or a steep decline in population that may end with the end of the species. Most likely both a steep decline and strong selection pressures.
Society - or rather, many individual members of a society - often push hard against change, possibly citing the good of society in the process. But I suspect large chunks of their real motives are a mix of "I'm all right, Jack" and dislike of change.
Meanwhile, many societies had alternatives. I've heard it plausibly claimed that some Puritan girls kidnapped by natives and taken to French Canada refused opportunities to return home, because French Canada offered them alternatives not available back home. They could become nuns, specializing in teaching children and/or nursing the sick, rather than having no alternative beyond wife. Having done so, they preferred the life they had to the life they'd get at home.
"I mistrust arguments where "society" decides based on the general good."
So do I. If you thought I was making such an argument I must have been insufficiently clear.
I was describing an outcome driven by individual choice, not societal welfare, one in which the demand for wives by men who wanted them was high enough to make the price paid, the terms offered, superior for most women to alternative professions.
Men fear being destroyed in divorce courts, so they are shunning marriage in record numbers. I think you should incorporate that fact into your analysis.
I'm afraid that was a plausible reading of what you wrote. " ... most of the female population had to be wives to maintain the population, and that led to a demand for wives and a "price" for wives at which wife really was the most attractive job open to most women. On that story the lack of other jobs for women was an effect, not a cause, of most women being wives ...".
How would that lead to such a demand? And to have that effect based on demand, wouldn't it be necessary for wives to be paid *more* than other working adults? Whereas what happened in practice was that working women were paid _less_ than working men (on average, and even ignoring jobs requiring strength, etc. etc.) Being a "wife" (house husband?) was a lousy deal for most men, even if it were offered. But it was often a woman's best choice, _even if she had no particular interest in sex with a man, or producing and rearing children_.
For this situation to arise _because children were needed_, it seems to me it would require social agreement to limit women's other options "for the good of society". Individual males might outbid each other for wives, raising the renumeration, because they personally wanted children. But once they had a wife, why wouldn't (male) employers employ women in other roles, on the same terms as men?
Certainly there were rationalizations available once the question was raised, such as "she's likely to leave to get married" or (if married) "she's likely to have a child and quit". But I doubt they were much more than rationalizations. After all, the poorest stratum of women had managed to work outside their homes from time immemorial (beginning of the factory system? end of "putting out" and similar).
It doesn't require any social agreement, just men wanting wives, where what they want is a full time wife because that is needed to maintain a household and produce at least two children who survive to adulthood. The terms of marriage adjust until they are favorable enough so most women choose to be wives, given that most men want wives. Like other prices it goes to where demand equals supply.
I don't assume that working women were paid less than men for doing the same jobs with the same ability. If they had been, an employer could have increased his profit by hiring only women.
You are assuming a cartel agreement among all employers to hold down female wages, when each employer would be better off hiring more women and by doing so bidding their wages up. Such agreements are very hard to maintain if there are many firms — in this case all firms with employees doing work that men don't have any special advantage in.
I don't have data on m/f wages c. 1900 but my understanding is that present data do not support the widely believed claim that women are paid less than men under comparable circumstances.
I'm not assuming a cartel agreement. Such an agreement isn't required, i.e. I can come up with other explanations for the same effect.
I don't have statistics either. I merely have memories, but not from 1900. There were jobs for women, and jobs for men, listed separately in newspaper want ads. If a girl took the line of least resistance, encouraged by educators and parents, they were steered into less renumerative activities, and away from training for the more renumerative ones.
By my time, they weren't absolutely banned from e.g. becoming a CPA rather than a bookkeeper, or a doctor rather than a nurse. But it was a truism that a woman had to be twice as good as a man to get those jobs. (As I recall it, that aphorism was usually followed with "fortunately, this isn't difficult" ;-))
In my experience, they also had problems getting good salary offers, and routine raises. The style of negotiation required was deemed "unfeminine"; most had been trained out of it in childhood - those that hadn't often got typed as "aggressive" - thus hard to work with - if they dared to act like male coworkers. This, too, became something "everyone knew", with a self-help industry to teach women to thread the needle, and be (acceptably) "assertive" rather than "aggressive".
"I think I might have been fine with being a father in a traditional marriage, even favored having children over not having them, in those circumstances."
Did you try to investigate that option? It is possible, either by marrying a man willing to run the household while you supported it with your earnings — I knew one couple like that — or by pairing with a woman who wanted to be a housewife and having her bear the children. The first option still requires you to bear the cost of pregnancy and possibly nursing the infants. The second doesn't, but results in children that are not genetically both of yours — although if the sperm donor is the brother of the non-bearing partner you can come close.
Or you can adopt. The one ff couple I know has an adopted daughter who has turned out very well — a happy young woman who obviously gets along well with both her mothers.
Both of those options would at the time have involved both partners accepting a mildly stigmatized pattern of life, but I would not expect that to be something of overwhelming importance to you. I knew an ff couple of my parents' generation who seemed to manage fine. I don't know whether they would have been able to adopt — probably not legally, but perhaps informally. One of them was divorced with a son, an adult when I knew her; I don't know if any of his growing up was in their household. She was one of my parents' closest friends and one of my favorite adults when I was a child.
Potential house husbands were in really short supply, and from what I saw, a lot of those expressing openness to such a possibility were poor risks - lots of losers who didn't work, did do drugs, etc. etc.
They've become more available over time, and I might have found a decent one if I'd made an intensive search. But it just wasn't that important to me.
I should have thought a lot more seriously about forming a household with another woman, ideally one somewhat more "femme" than me. I did eventually do precisely that, but not for child rearing purposes. And in any case, we were both well into the riskier pregnancy age ranges by then. (We're now both well past menopause.)
Not to disagree, but I've heard it plausibly claimed that women get graduate degrees and then choose to be stay at home mothers.
That seems to be a "thing" among a certain section of the upper middle class, observing my sons and their friends (30s). Such men won't consider marrying a woman without either a successful high-paying career of their own or a postgraduate degree. I think it's about reflected social status; my wife thinks it's about finances.
I agree with your wife, based only on my eperiences since entering grad school at age 40. I had a different take than my younger collegues on the mating games. Most of the men upper middle class men who married women with grad degrees (just any grad degree? Like Gender Studies?) seemed to be going more after finances than social status. (And hot blondes with undergrad or only HS degrees seemed to marry well, regardless.)
A graduate degree isn't financially useful if the woman is not pursuing a remunerative career. One other possible explanation it that the man wants a wife who shares his intellectual world. One of the attractions of the woman I married 40+ years ago and am still married to is that I felt I could talk with her without needing a translator.
Another possible explanation is that the man wants a wife who will bear smart children and help create an environment suited for them.
I believe that there are indeed some women who get graduate degrees and then choose to be stay at home mothers.
Moreover, the women who do this aren't always those whose degree does not in fact give them good employment prospects.
But what conclusion do you draw from this? Invalid conclusions include any variant on "some women choose x, therefore all women choose x, or should choose x, or would be happier with x".
Also, as it happened a casual conversation today mentioned a man who was unhappy enough with his marriage to enter therapy. His wife had chosen to be a stay at home mother. He wasn't happy, in part because he'd come home exhausted from work, and she'd be eager for adult, intellectual company - while all he wanted to do was veg. I believe other issues were mentioned, including her developing a rather bad temper.
I find this plausible. Some women who make this choice don't like the consequences, or don't handle them well. As a child, I lived with a mother who was one of them. (Of course, given the date, she arguably hadn't had a very free choice, so isn't precisely the same case.)
That does NOT mean that other women, even smart women with graduate degrees, have the same experience. Some seem to be fine with this choice, or as fine with it as they are with anything else.
"You may well be correct. The fraction of jobs that require physical strength is lower, and that is the obvious thing where men have an advantage. But your account assumes one does not want children, and a lot of people, both men and women, do."
Men do the dangerous jobs, whether physical strength is required or not. Men account for 93% of industrial accident fatalities. There is also widespread discrimination in office employment against men, and especially White men.
Men are shunning women, dating, and marriage in record numbers, both out of fear of being destroyed in divorce court by the ex-wife, and women with high demands of men that bring very little to the table. Now there are women that openly discuss poisoning random men on TikTok and Twitter - and the FBI calls that "protected speech". When World War III breaks out, the women that professed to believe in equality will head back to the kitchen, and want to be the "bicycle" of an affluent man that will provide for and protect them. There was a recent study bt psychologists that found that women were shunning marriage because men were poorer than before, so they were unable to find "virtual husbands" that made 58% more than they did. It's very easy to dismantle the cancer that is feminism, but the far better option for men is to avoid feminists like the plague, and stick with the non-feminist women that value and respect men.
Not an economic analysis but an amusing story about the possible benefits of 5-year term marriage is The Marriage Contract" by H.L. Mencken.
I can't find any reference to it online. Do you know what book or journal it was published in?
Interesting. I may point out that in my marriage I also gained the services of a hetaera at no additional cost.
Anyway, While teaching State and Local Government I often brought up marriage license (a 'license' to do what?) as an example of the state treating it as a binding contract that the state then used to divide up assets (among other things) when the 'contract' was dissolved whether by death, divorce, abandinment, or whatever. That is one reason "bastards" couldn't inherit from the estate. Some of my students really dug into examining more aspects.
Why "register" your marriage, and why at the county seat? The simple answer is that counties existed to deliver state-level services locally. Otherwise you'd have to spend a lot of time walking many miles to the state capitol, unless you were wealthy enough to own a horse.
Counties had Recorders. Persons who kept records of contracts, like mortgages and marriages, and deeds, and births and deaths, etc. The had courts (or a circuit court -- today medium to smaller counties in Illinois have judges who are both county and circuit judges although they no longer "ride a circuit"), and sheriffs and constables and Justices of the peace), and coroners (to certify a death (for purposes of the estate) AND ro assure the death was properly recorded with the Recorder, And a County Clerk, and a County Treasurer, and so on.
The marriage license was fundamentally treated as a two-person contract that had extended responsibilities to some others.
I recall being disappointed to learn that, in some jurisdictions at least, the engagement ring was a “conditional gift” that the fiancée could be forced to return, at least if she could be shown as at fault for the marriage being called off. I had naively assumed that it was an absolute gift which thereby demonstrated the man’s unwavering commitment. If he was jilted, the prestige of having assumed the risk would be the only compensation; though it might be a very considerable benefit when he proposed to someone else. Under the conditional gift principle, I suppose jewelers might seem to benefit, because a prospective husband would be willing to buy a more expensive ring; but under the absolute gift scenario, jewelers might sell two rings instead of one.
The bond forfeiting only makes sense if it is the man who is responsible. The legal rule it substituted for was liability for the man jilting the woman.
Thank you again for applying the logic of economics to gain insights that escape most people. Allow me few remarks:
- concerning marriage a facilitator in-house production, the fact that in-house production is not taxed creates a big wedge working against its market equivalent. Limitations on tax enforcement however work in the opposite direction: I am very bad at DIY, but fortunately I know a handyman that will fix my house against payment strictly in cash. I guess however you do not need to be married to arrange in-house production reasonably efficiently;
- fiscal considerations enter the picture not only from the taxation but also from the benefits side. I suppose DinoNerd (who makes otherwise good arguments) expects her pension to be paid by the work of other people’s children;
- has marriage declined essentially because of technological developments reducing the need for household-specific investment? Could not the causality runs from institutions/culture to declining investment? If divorce becomes easier, then a woman would run a bigger risk in investing in marriage (under the assumption that the woman is more invested in household-specific capital);
- the discussion of costs and benefits of stronger or weaker forms of ‘marriage’ is conducted exclusively in terms of the interests of the two partners. What about the interest of the children, insofar as not incorporated in those of the parents?
- one could compare the love motive in marriage to the non-profit motive in some activities where assessing/enforcing quality is inherently difficult, typically, care activities: non-profit (eg religious) organisations tend to thrive in such activities precisely because they may be less prone to reduce quality even when the consumer will be unable to detect and defect.
Actually, I expect my pension to be paid by the stock market, via investments I've made over my lifetime. Of course in some ways that amounts to the same thing - the people working for those firms will be other people's children.
There is a risk - one I did not anticipate - that there simply won't be enough working age people, proportionately, compared to retirees, leading to supply and demand raising retiree costs beyond what most people can afford. We haven't yet reached a stage where firms require no labour at all, just capital. And that's especially true with regard to the kind of services older people frequently need.
But if you make arguments like "you have a duty to breed, because there will be a catastrophe unless most people breed", do you also make arguments like "you have a duty to drastically reduce your energy use, because otherwise there will be a catastrophe"? Or do you expect technology to solve the impending problems? Or disbelieve the problem exists?
Your answer is the one I was going to make for you — your pension is paid for by work you did, whether assets you bought or the obligation of a firm to pay you some of your wages after you retire.
Many people do at least claim that we are obligated to do things for the general good. California, where both of us live, imposes substantial costs on us to hold down CO2 output, although the state's share of world output, which is what matters, is far too small to justify those costs in terms of the interests of the state's inhabitants.
Broadly, I agree that the rationality of an individual's having some "thing" in their life—doing certain things, being in certain relationships, etc—is determined by the benefits to them, and that there are many circumstances in which certain relations between people offer the prospect of mutual benefit and so the motive for some agreement to this effect. So far with the economists.
Amongst these "things", marriage (and friendship) rate highly. But can such /personal/ relationships, /as we understand them in our own lives/, be included in this calculus? True, they provide various benefits,—eg meals, domestic cleaning, child care. These benefits are at least in part extrinsic, ie someone else could provide the same, if not greater, benefit (eg, the toy I made for my son could have been made by someone else, even better as a toy). So marriage is /in part/ a firm. But you can also think that they are also in part intrinsic, ie that there is some (extra) benefit that comes from their occurring in the context of that particular relationship (viz, there was some extra value in my having made a toy for my son, even though, considered in itself, it was not of great quality). So marriage is /more than/ a firm. Or at least the rest of us seem to think.
DF's explanation for the presence of love in marriage seems to canvass only extrinsic benefits, but, as we understand them in our lives, marriage and other personal relationships are necessarily experienced (perhaps mistakenly) as /intrinsically/ beneficial. Is the economist debarred from saying this?
No. Economics can be used to investigate that sort of thing. I plan at some point to do a post on the economics of altruism, based on Becker's work (and Margolis' critique of it).
I think such issues are particularly interesting for economists because they are not usually considered economic and so have not been already worked over by smart economists. Becker got a Nobel prize for economics of the household, Buchanan for economics of politics, both at the time new fields. I like to describe that as working on the extensive margin in economics, as opposed to working on the intensive margin — trying to find something new to say about an issue that smart people have been thinking about for a century.
I had a field in biopolitics that examined both politics and households, frequently trying to "marry" economic and biological elements to human relationships. There seems to me to be a great deal of entanglement between the two when it comes to choosing whom to marry.
One of my articles is on economics and evolutionary psychology. They are similar fields, but with some essential differences.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/econ_and_evol_psych/economics_and_evol_psych.html
I don't like saying "designed" when talking about Darwinian natural selection. So I think I would say "selected by Darwinian evolution to produce increased likelihood of reproductive success in our environment of evolutionary adaptiveness".
But those were the arguments we made in the Evolutionary Psychology seminar Larry Arnhardt taught. we had some folk who were pretty unhappy with the whole idea of evolutionary psychology.
And of course the selection is for things that "worked" in the immediate past, more or less. It is not forward-looking.
We said that "selection is against, not for".
> The increased divorce rate is neither inherently good nor inherently bad, evidence neither of increased freedom nor of declining moral standards.
Isn’t this the standard line on all behavior, though? That nothing is intrinsically good or bad because there is no objective morality?
No. Even if there is an objective morality, there is nothing inherently bad about an increased divorce rate. If, for example, the objective morality was utilitarianism, whether an increasing divorce rate was bad or good would depend on whether it increased or decreased total utility — it could do either.
As it happens I am a moral realist, although not a utilitarian.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/An%20Argument%20I%20Lost.htm
If the increased divorce rate has led to many more children being raised with single parents or step parents, and statistically that is associated with significantly worse outcomes for the children, would that be evidence of it being inherently bad?
Yes. And fewer people finding themselves trapped in failed marriages evidence of it being good.
Your statistics are comparing children of successful marriages to children of failed marriages. I don't see how the statistical evidence can tell you what would have happened to the children of parents who divorced if those parents had not divorced.