Dollars and Sex

by Marina Adshade

  This doesn’t mean that married women are disadvantaged; it means that they are exploiting their comparative advantage in home production while their spouses exploit their comparative advantage in the labor force. The reason for this comparative advantage probably has nothing to do with these women’s extraordinary powers of folding laundry; it has to do with fact that men can earn more on the labor market.

  You would expect that having a whole other person in the family would save a woman more that thirty-four minutes a day, but one possible explanation for that finding is that the quality of home production is much higher in a married woman’s home. A second possible explanation is that some married individuals fail to exploit the gains from trade because they do not understand comparative advantage and instead rely on absolute advantage to allocate tasks; the person who is better at doing a job relative to their spouse does that job, instead of doing the jobs they are better at, and allowing their spouse to do the same.

  The efficiency of marriage in which two people bring different talents also explains why, traditionally, it has been more common for older men (who have a comparative advantage in earning) to be married to younger women (who have a comparative advantage in fertility) than it is for older women to be married to younger men. That, however, is changing quickly, and better-educated, high-income women are now, more than ever, marrying younger men.

  This also explains why it is that some men in higher-wage countries look for, and can find, spouses in foreign countries where both men and women earn low wages. Those men have an advantage over their foreign wives, in terms of their earning ability, and have no difficulty competing with foreign men for desirable women. The wives on the other hand, at least in perception, are better at keeping a home and raising children than are women in the man’s home country.

  This is a topic we return to in chapter 6, when we talk about bargaining within marriage because, of course, it is not comparative advantage that has the final say on how couples divide household responsibilities—it only suggests how tasks should be divided if a married couple is collectively interested in doing things with the least amount of effort. If one or both people in a marriage are only interested in minimizing their own effort, then what really matters is who has the power to decide who does all the work and who has all the fun.

  SEXLESS IN THE CITY

  Singles looking for love flood into large cities for two reasons: the search costs are lower in densely populated areas, and matches are of better quality when the population of potential matches is higher.

  The cost of searching for a mate is lower in more densely populated areas simply because singles come into contact with far more people on a daily basis in a city than they do in less-populated areas. People in large cities go to busy coffee shops, restaurants, and bars and meet different people every day—not the same people as they might in similar establishments in a more rural area. You might argue that in urban centers people are less open to speaking to strangers, and that might be true, but the sheer volume of people suggests that search times for a mate should be shorter in densely populated urban areas.

  Let me give you a somewhat trivial example of why this is the case. Say you work in an office with five other people. One day you announce to your coworkers that you would like their help in finding love and ask if they have any single friends. In a densely populated urban area, if each of your coworkers suggests one single friend, then you will likely have five potential match opportunities. This is possible because each of your coworkers likely operates on a different social network. In a sparsely populated area, however, it is likely that some of your coworkers operate on the same social network, in which case you may end up with only one or two potential match opportunities since some of your coworkers will have suggested the same person.

  Fewer possible matches in less densely populated areas mean that you are less likely to find “the one” with this attempt to turn your coworkers into matchmakers, and since you now have to search far longer, the search for love is more costly. (If the concept of costly searches is unclear, consider the example of a woman who knows that if she doesn’t marry in the next few years she will significantly reduce her chances of having children. For her, the “cost” of a longer search is directly measurable by the value of the children she may never have. For others, the cost may be just the time spent being lonely when they could have been part of a pair.)

  The second option when there are few match opportunities is to discontinue the search and “settle” for one of the available matches, even if the match is not ideal, because the prospect of continuing to search is too daunting.

  This brings us to the second reason why singles move to cities looking for love, and that is that the quality of matches should be higher in urban areas where search costs are lower.

  Let’s go back to our example where you have asked your coworkers if they have any single friends. Imagine that you have in mind a set of minimum qualities your future mate must possess. This set of requirements is your reservation value for a marriage partner; you will only marry if you can find someone whose value on the market exceeds this level.

  If you know that your potential dating pool will consist of only one or two people, as it was in the rural example, you will set your reservation value very low because otherwise your search costs could be very high. If you know your potential dating pool will be very large, however, as it was in the urban example, you will set your reservation value at a higher level because you can hope to achieve this level with lower search costs.

  When search costs are low, reservation values for a mate tend to be higher because people are willing to search longer in the hope of finding a better-quality match.

  This is the same argument that explains why access to the Internet has the potential to increase the quality of marriages—it is because low-cost online searches encourage people to set their reservation value at a higher level.

  This implies that because singles in more densely populated areas can search more cheaply for a mate, they increase their odds of finding a higher-quality mate—so it isn’t surprising that single people flood into cities looking for love.

  One additional consideration is that people who are married, those who are no longer searching for a mate, tend to move out of cities in search of lower property values and places that are more suitable to raise children. This means that cities not only have more single people, but also that single people make up a greater share of the population in the city than they do in rural areas.

  So your office friends, from our example, are more likely to have at least one single friend in the city than they are in rural areas where a greater share of the population is married.

  Having said that cities are better places to find romance, in general, there is one group of people that traditionally have struggled to find love in an urban market: educated women.

  According to Roderick Duncan, the reason there are so many single educated women on urban marriage markets is just a matter of numbers and preference; educated women greatly outnumber educated men because more women than men go to college and because educated women prefer to marry men who are better educated than themselves while educated men do not.

  We already know from chapter 1 that women have been attending, and completing, college at much higher rates than men since the late 1980s. We also know that women search for men who will allow them to exercise their comparative advantage and that historically, because of the gender wage gap, men have held a comparative advantage in waged employment and women have held a comparative advantage in home production.

  Over time this comparative advantage of men in waged employment has developed into a social norm leading women to expect to find men with higher incomes than themselves. Now that educated men have become scarce relative to educated women, however, at least some of the women who marry will not have that expectation met. Over time expectations are changing, but social norms evolve slowly, leaving many women in the mea
ntime struggling to find a marriage partner they deem suitable.

  In the past, when the majority of people were not educated above the high school level, most women married men who were less educated than themselves. This is principally because women have always been more likely to finish high school than have men. My own parents are a good example of this; my U.S.-educated mother has a high school diploma while my South African-born father never had an opportunity to finish high school, having been sent into military training at the age of 14. At the time that they married, there was nothing unusual about a high school-educated woman marrying a man who had left school earlier to join the workforce.

  According to Roderick Duncan’s paper, in 1940, 45 percent of women who had a high school diploma were married to men who did not complete high school while only 20 percent were married to men who had spent at least some time in college. By 1960, this had changed somewhat. At that time, 33 percent of women with a high school diploma were married to men who had not completed high school, compared with 23 percent who were married to men who had spent at least some time in college. By 1990, more women with a high school diploma were marrying men with at least some college than were marrying men who were educated at below the high school level.

  This evidence may run contrary to what I have just said about comparative advantage, but in the earlier decades even men who didn’t finish high school still earned more than their high school-educated wives—so women married up in terms of income at the same time that they married down in terms of education.

  This information brings to light the following observation: the women who have valued finding a husband who is better educated than themselves have been, for a long time, principally college-educated women. As the wage paid to less-educated workers has fallen in the last thirty years and women’s wages have increased relative to men’s, however, women with less education have also begun to seek men with more education than themselves. This is because men with less than a high school education no longer earn more than their high school-educated wives.

  More women seeking more-educated husbands has meant that educated men have becoming relatively scarce compared with educated women, not only because fewer men go to college, but also because changes in wages are encouraging less-educated and more-educated women to pursue the same men.

  Men do not appear to share women’s preference for a better-educated spouse, and because social norms dictate that women should be homemakers and men providers, traditionally they are happy to find a spouse who is less educated than themselves, allowing them to specialize in market labor. The evidence on dating sites we looked at in chapter 3 backs up this assertion; men looking for love online seem to care very little about a potential mate’s income.

  In addition to providing a superior marriage market, educated singles tend to move into cities because the wages paid to well-educated workers are higher in cities than they are in rural areas. While this is true for both men and women, educated female workers have an additional incentive to be in cities; they are significantly more likely to find an educated husband there. Less-educated women also have an incentive to move into cities for the same reason—they may not benefit from higher wages in the city, but they are much more likely to find themselves a well-educated husband than they would had they stayed in the country.

  Lena Edlund tests this hypothesis using Swedish data and finds that the higher the income earned by men (ages 25 to 44) in a particular city, the more women there are living in that city relative to the number of men. This is an interesting result since we expect that high male wages would encourage more men to move into a city. This might still be the case, but it appears that high male wages also encourage women to move into the city, in fact more women than men. This has to be true for the ratio of men to women to fall when men’s incomes are high.

  This leads to me to wonder if women take their marriage market prospects into consideration when they decide how much time to spend in school. Perfect foresight should tell women that the longer they stay in school, the more competition they will have when they search for a husband in the future (if women wait until they finish school before marrying, which many do). Because there are fewer potential partners for women at every education level, and many of those men are perfectly happy to marry women who are less educated than themselves, and because they are older when they start to look for a husband, educated women face competition from women who are both less educated and younger.

  New research by Canadian economists Sylvain Dessy and Habiba Djebbari tackles this issue and finds that one of the explanations for why men outnumber women in high-power jobs is that women decide to enter the marriage market when they are younger rather than risk being unsuccessful in that market later in life.

  It appears from the evidence that some women, at least, choose to invest less in their education in a competitive marriage market because time in school, if it delays marriage, consumes several years of their fertility. If educated men prefer younger but less-educated women over older but better-educated women, then there is an incentive for women to leave school and try to find a well-educated husband while they are young.

  This is especially true for women who feel that even with an education their comparative advantage is in caring for children and a home rather than working in the labor force.

  Either way, the current situation that leaves educated women with fewer marriage prospects doesn’t sound like equilibrium to me—a market is always out of equilibrium whenever supply exceeds demand. I can think of three things that might happen to bring this particular market back into equilibrium.

  EVEN IN HOLLYWOOD MARRIAGES, EDUCATION MATTERS

  Using information about the current marital status of the top four hundred movie actors, economist Gustaf Bruze finds that male and female stars are likely to be married to another person who has an education level similar to theirs.

  Of the men on the list of the top four hundred movie actors, 52 percent were married at the time the data were collected in 2008. Far fewer of the women were married, only 38 percent, despite the fact that women in the top four hundred actors had an average age of 41. Only about half of married movie stars are with people who are well-known, either because they are also actors or because they are models, singers, musicians, etc. For married stars, the average age at which they entered their current marriage was 38 for men and 35 for women. The vast majority of top actors have either never been married (27 percent) or have been married only once (45 percent), making them slightly less likely than the average U.S. citizen to have been married once and slightly more likely never to have been married at all. While they are slightly more likely than the average person to have been married twice (20 percent) or three times (8 percent), the differences are small enough to be insignificant.

  Despite our preconception that marriages in Hollywood are fleeting and frequent, the top stars seem to behave pretty similarly to the rest of us. The interesting thing about movie stars is that, unlike the rest of us, their income is not linked to their level of education but rather to a variety of other skills that are not learned in a classroom. In the Hollywood marriage market, we shouldn’t observe couples matching over education but rather other characteristics that increase income—like physical appearance.

  The odd thing is that even in Hollywood marriages, the education level of a potential spouse appears to matter; a movie star is almost as likely to be married to someone with the same education level as himself/herself as is anyone from the general public. This is interesting because it suggests that finding someone with a similar education level to yours brings something else to marriage besides an indicator of income. Presumably people who are similarly educated have more in common with each other and, even for celebrities, that commonality is important.

  The first is that men will increase their investment in education in the hope of improving their position on the marriage market. It is not likely that teenage boys take their marriage prospects
into consideration when making education decisions, but we could reasonably expect that they take into consideration their prospects for getting laid when deciding whether or not to continue in school. For that reason alone, given the evidence we discussed in chapter 2, you would think that there would be more men in college.

  The second is that educated women in cities will look in a different market for a mate—the rural marriage market. For the same reason educated women outnumber men in the city, less-educated men must outnumber women in rural areas—because women are moving to the cities. In the last decade, technology has advanced in such a way that educated workers have more flexibility about where they spend their workday. If women are prepared to marry men with less education—and in fact, according to the Pew Research Center the share of women currently married to men with less education (28 percent) is greater than the share who is married to men with more education (19 percent)—then, for some women, finding a city job that allows them to spend their workdays in rural areas might be the answer.

  MARRIAGE REINFORCES AN ECONOMIC CLASS SYSTEM

  At the end of the marriage market, couples seem to be tidily sorted over characteristics such as income, education, religion, height, beauty, and even body weight. A new paper by Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst, and Alexandra Killewald finds an additional element that appears to be important in marital sorting: parental wealth.

  If we randomly matched a man whose parents’ wealth was less than $1,000 with any woman, there would be only a 16 percent chance that he would end up married to a woman whose parents also had less than $1,000 in wealth. In reality, 35 percent of men with low-wealth parents have wives whose parents’ wealth is equally low.