Marriage, children and happiness

The chain of posts referenced on marginal revolution begins with Will Wilkinson then moves on to Megan McArdle and then on to Andrew Sullivan.

My thoughts:

I do not buy Megan's idea that the culture tricks women in marriage, most particularly because it is then hard to explain second marriages. The cultural push is much less and presumably the woman is then fully informed.

This point is really, really true with children, where you have to explain why anyone has more than one. Lisa and I are puzzled at those who have more than one but there seems to be some process whereby early trials are forgotten over time. You can see why evolution would want this to be so.

On marriage, I also think that part of the "men benefit more" view comes from looking at outcomes that women (or researchers) think are more important than the typical man does. There is an amazing passage of four or five pages in Linda Waite's "The Case for Marriage" book wherein she explains the health benefits of marriage by describing how wives basically prevent men from having as much fun, and from eating and drinking as much as they want. There are present utility costs from these limitations!

More important, I think, on both scores are heterogeneous treatment effects. We really have no evidence for the claim that "marriage makes men better off". Most of our evidence is for the claim that marriage makes the men who are married better off. I think the same is true for children. Putting aside search frictions in the marriage market and artificially high prices in the adoption market, the marginal spouse and the marginal parent should both be indifferent and the inframarginal single and childless people should be those for whom getting married or having children, respectively, has costs that exceed its benefits.

Hat tip: marginal revolution (who should be thinking more about the margin in this case)