In defense of polygamy?

Will Wilkinson defends polygamy at the Economist Democracy in America blog.

I think the distributional consequences of polygamy are poorly understood. In a large sense, the policy redistributes from women to men. By constraining the "best" husbands from taking more than one wife, it reduces the implicit price of wives for less desirable husbands. Put differently, it constrains the choices of women about whom to marry, which can hardly make them better off. There is also, though, important implicit within-group redistribution as well.

One wonders if polygamy's good friend polyandry will make an appearance in China and India as the effects of selective abortion of women make themselves felt in the marriage market.

Interview with Maggie McNeill's husband ...

... on what it is like to marry an escort.

He seems to have his feet pretty firmly planted on the ground.

Gay marriage in NY

Kudos to NY for legalizing gay marriage, and doing so via the legislature rather than the courts. This is a big victory for freedom, equality and human decency.

Plus a bonus bit from the Onion (via various economist pals on FB).

Now if we could just get the government out of the marriage business entirely ...

On beauty and bargaining power

A thoughtful post from Marina Adshade on the costs and benefits of having a partner who is attractive to others and about research on how the inherent trade-off plays out in practice.

The video presents the musical version of the post. I chose it because it looked like the couple is having so much fun. The poster at youtube claims the song was the bride's idea.

Thin marriage markets

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Living together

Hard to imagine, but a new UM study finds important gender differences in perceptions of the costs and benefits of living together. Key bits from the summary in UM Today:

Overall, three key reasons for living together emerged: wanting to spend more time with one's partner, wanting to share life's financial burdens, and wanting to test compatibility. But the way men and women talked about these three broad reasons was very different.

Women volunteered "love" as a reason to live together three times as often as men did, while men cited "sex" as a reason to live together four times as often as women did.

Both men and women saw cohabitation as a temporary state in which to gauge compatibility, but major gender differences emerged in the underlying goals of living together. Women saw it as a transitional arrangement preceding marriage, while men tended to see it as a convenient, low-risk way to see if a relationship had longer-term potential, using terms like "test drive" to describe the arrangement.

But the strongest gender differences emerged in the perceived disadvantages of cohabitation. Women believed that living together meant less commitment and legitimacy than marriage, while men saw the greatest disadvantage as a limitation on their freedom.

Who would have thought? But it is still very useful to quantify, and to show the importance of gender differences relative to other subgroups.

The full text of the article can be found here; it may be gated.

Intermarriage in the US

Alert reader (and UM economics Ph.D.) Jon passes along a pointer to a recent Pew study on intermarriage in the US in response to my earlier post on intermarriage in Canada.

The rates are much higher than I would have thought, particularly for blacks. The aysmmetry in intermarriage rates between black men and black women is large and has important implications for the "marriageable men" theory of William Julius Wilson. Indeed, I long intended to write a paper on just that point but never got around to it. That's another free paper idea ...

The geographic differences are interesting as well, though that one case where the multivariate analysis would be of interest, as Asians in the US are concentrated on the coasts and are generating a lot of the intermarriage. More broadly, there is a great "economics of intermarriage" paper waiting to be written as well, I suspect ...

Intermarriage in Canada

These statistics were on the front page of the National Post, with no accompanying article, a few weeks ago when I was in Ottawa for a one-day conference on the Canada Student Loan Program.

The percentage of mixed couples for black Canadians is particularly notable and, I suspect, much much higher than the corresponding rate in the US. An interesting question is whether this results from differences in preferences between the two countries or from the fact that, both relatively and absolutely, blacks represent a much smaller fraction of the population in Canada, and so have a smaller within-group choice set. Of course, it could be some of both.

That's a free paper idea ...

Journey into self-obsession

Tyler Cowen ecommended this NYT piece on marriage over at marginalrevolution.com but after reading it I am not sure just why. It is nice that these two whiners have each other to tangle with (thus sparing the rest of us) but really, what is the point?

Whatever Tyler saw in this piece, I missed.

Recommended only as voyeurism, and even then maybe not so much.

Marriage advice

Some thoughtful relationship advice from the Washington Times. The advice does not only apply to wives, though it is framed that way. It actually applies to husbands and to other sorts of relationships more generally. I think there is an old saying (that one does not hear much anymore) about what to do with your mouth if you do not have something nice to say.

But in the marriage context the point is deeper than just being nice. The point of marriage, in one economic model, is to increase exit costs from a relationship and thereby to induce investment in relationship-specific capital. A positive view and appreciation of your spouse is one very important component of the relationship-specific capital in a marriage. One way to invest in that capital is to focus on the positive when talking and thinking about your spouse.

Marriage advice and causation

This Yahoo! column lists ten keys to avoiding divorce. It also inadvertantly illustrates common confusions about the difference between correlation and causation.

Take the first one: a two-year courtship. I am sure it is true that courtships around this length have the lowest probablity of divorce. I am also sure that this relationship is not causal in general. Going from a very short courtship up to two years likely has some causal effect via the extensive margin - that is, by leading poorly matched couples to forgo their marriage plans. It may also have some positive causal effect on the intensive margin by allowing for greater discussion and agreement on the rules of the marriage before it starts. But simply taking two people who think it is a great idea to get drunk, drive to Vegas and get married and having them simply delay their drunken nuptials for a while seems unlikely to accomplish much. Similarly, very long courtships may be a sign of one partner being pushed into marriage, something the list itself suggests is a bad idea in point 10. This part of the relationship between courtship length and divorce probability seems likely to be all selection. An interesting thought question concerns where one might go looking for some exogenous variation in courtship length to use to sort all of this out empirically.

A similar point holds in regard to the living together issue in the second item. There is a literature on this. The literature, well, at least some of it, recognizes the difficulty in sorting out correlation from causation. The lack of exogenous variation on this front is a problem here too. Some sources of variation that might seem plausible, such as religion, are likely to affect divorce probabilities in ways other than through their effect on the probability of living together.

I will support the idea of talking about the big issues before you marry. Lisa and I did this and it had a very large payoff. We have recontracted away from some of the deals we made, but the pre-marriage deals gave us a starting point for the renegotiation that was very helpful. Popular culture emphasizes the romantic aspects of marriage, which are very nice indeed, but it is also an economic arrangement that involves team production of some goods like children and sex (not necessarily in that order), division of labor in the production of other things and so on. Making concrete decisions about these practical aspects makes the transition to marriage easier and also provides a lot of valuable information about your prospective partner.

My advice: negotiate seriously and bluntly before marriage and also be careful about advice columns.

Where the boys aren't

http://www.slate.com/id/2188684/

As far as I know, this blog has exactly two readers. This article on the eligible man paradox will interest one of them.

I am really unsure about the settling issue. Being single can be a lot of fun if approached with the right attitude and celbrated rather than endured, thought it is tough to take that road and still have children if that is what one wants. On the other hand, sometimes high standards are cover for not really wanting to pull the trigger and make a choice.

Of course, at bottom the really frustrating thing is that you can't convexify. You can only pick one wife or one husband (at any given time). I remember reading Richard Bach's book, I think it is "One", about his first marriage to nurse Chapel from the original Star Trek TV series. Prior to being married he had a number of female friends who were each matched to particular activities. He had convexified! He argues in the book that when he left that equilibrium to get married that he was better off, but it is hard to see how that could be, since no one person is going to be a great match for all the activies one wants to undertake (even putting aside the utility loss associated with the loss in variety). I found the book less than compelling for this reason.

This is a bit of a ramble but I have no good answer here.

Hat tip: Marginal Revolution