In terms of what is the best policy, if we believe that eliminating polygyny in poorer nations would make children better off (there is mixed evidence on whether or not this is the case), then one way to achieve that goal would be to increase education levels. Increased education for all workers should encourage industrialization and increase the wages paid to well-educated workers. Educating women also increases their bargaining power within marriage and should have the effect of reducing the number of wives, and children, in each household.
In my mind, the most important implication from this economic approach to marriage institutions is that even if Western nations did legally allow polygamy, very few people would choose that arrangement. I know I said that legalizing polygamy would not be a Pareto improvement because poor men would be excluded from the marriage market. But if very few people choose to live this way, then that effect would be very, very small. Plus, the reality is that many women prefer to remain single rather than marry a man that they don’t desire as a husband. In that respect, economic independence for women is a much bigger contributor to bachelorhood than legalized polygamy ever could be.
HOW AMERICA CAME TO ACCEPT SAME-SEX MARRIAGE
The biggest change to the institution of marriage in the last decade has been the legal recognition, in many jurisdictions, of the union between people of the same gender.
As I said at the beginning of this chapter, institutions are the rules and beliefs that govern human social behavior. If institutions change, it is often because beliefs change, and that change in beliefs leads to a change in the rules that formally enshrine the institution.
Attitudes toward same-sex marriage have changed in a surprising way over the past two decades. What makes this an interesting story for us here is that it illustrates not only that institutions can evolve, but also that institutional change does not depend on everyone within a particular community changing personal beliefs.
Let me tell you a story that illustrates this evolution.
Several years ago a very close family friend was searching our family name on the Internet and had the good fortune to meet up with the wife of my cousin in South Africa. The two women became friends and eventually fell in love. Divorce (from my cousin) and marriage between them followed (or something legally akin to marriage, since South Africa didn’t have equal marriage rights at that time). Immigration laws in Canada allowed my cousin’s now former wife to enter the country (with my little second cousins in tow) as the wife of our good friend, and they lived (very) happily ever after.
At the time the big question was this: who was going to tell Dad? I loved my father, but he had not exactly left us with the impression that he was on board with same-sex marriage. But, as it turned out, we underestimated him; he didn’t need to be told (while he may not have had liberal views, he certainly wasn’t naive), and to our surprise he was thrilled that they had found happiness in each other.
I never would have predicted his radical change in opinion toward same-sex relationships.
The point of the story is that people do change their beliefs, and it is through that evolution of beliefs that institutional change takes place.
As we discussed in chapter 1, public opinion of same-sex relationships has been evolving quickly over the past couple of decades. According to Gallup, in the United States in just fifteen years, there has been an incredible 23-percentage-point decline in opposition to the legal recognition of marriage between people of the same gender.
Part of this trend toward greater acceptance of same-sex marriage has come about because the younger generations are more accepting, and as these generations make up a greater proportion of the population, beliefs, on average, change. This is the “cohort effect.” But most of the change in beliefs over the past fifteen years has occurred not because of a cohort effect but because people, like my father, have changed the way they feel about same-sex marriage.
A paper by sociologist Dawn Michelle Baunach analyzes this change and finds that the cohort effect is only responsible for 33 percent of the change in attitudes toward same-sex marriage between 1988 and 2006. This is the last year of available data, but if we were able to look right up until 2011, with the polls showing that a change in opinion is accelerating over time, I suspect that we would find that even more of the trend is attributable to change in beliefs rather than a cohort effect.
So the institutional change has been made possible because many people have changed their beliefs about same-sex marriage and not just because the less-accepting older generation has been replaced with a more-accepting younger generation. As it turns out, though, acceptance is not uniformly distributed over groups of individuals; in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
SHACKING UP BEFORE MARRIAGE
Two-thirds of recently married Americans lived together before they married and, empirically at least, that seems like a bad idea. On average, couples who live together before marriage have lower-quality marriages that are more likely to end in divorce. They also fare much worse economically, accumulating less wealth over their marriages, than do couples who do not cohabitate before marriage.
New research by Jonathan Vespa and Matthew Painter suggests some hope for couples who want the benefits of living together before they are ready to take a walk down the aisle. It finds that while it may be true that cohabiters as a group fair worse later in their relationships, a subset of cohabiters actually do better over time than couples who didn’t live together before they married: couples who have no previous history of cohabiting relationships.
They find that serial cohabiters, even those who had only one prior cohabitation experience, have both lower incomes and lower wealth levels in their marriages. Those who are “spousal cohabiters” (having lived with only their spouse), however, may start their marriages with less wealth (about 5 percent less) than those who did not live together before marrying, but their wealth level grows twice as fast after marriage (about 2 percent per year).
What this means is that over time the wealth levels of people who lived together before marriage, with only their current spouse, eventually converge to the same level as those who married without living together first.
One of the reasons cohabiters look so financially unsuccessful in their marriages, and in their wealth levels, is not that cohabitation is bad for marriage; it is that those who marry without first cohabitating are more confident about the success of their marriages and are therefore willing to invest more heavily into their relationships and their joint portfolio. For example, they are more willing to pool their resources together and buy a house than might someone who has more experience with relationship dissolution, like a serial cohabiter.
A second explanation for why spousal cohabiters do better than serial cohabiters is that they appear to delay marriage for different reasons. While serial cohabiters might consider living together as a trial period to see if the relationship will work, spousal cohabiters are more likely to delay marriage because they want to finish school or because they want to be able to afford a house when they marry. It seems that delaying for these reasons makes the marriage more successful in the long run.
Probably the most important element of this research is that rather than observing that opinions are converging in favor of equal marriage rights, in reality individual communities are diverging in terms of their opinions. So, for example, people who are white have become more accepting of same-sex marriage over time, while the opinion of the black community has remained almost unchanged (71 percent opposed same-sex marriage in 1988, compared with 69 percent in 2006). Democrats have become more accepting relative to Republicans, and non-evangelical Christians have changed their opinions by a greater percentage than have evangelical Protestants.
Baunach argues that the reason for the growing divide is that people in some groups have come to accept that the legalization of same-sex marriage is about equal rights, rather than about morality, while people in other groups have not.
/> I wonder, though, if the real issue is that the individuals in the more-accepting groups are more likely to have had an opportunity to observe marriages between people of the same gender firsthand. Not only was that the experience in my family, but seemingly the experience of President Barack Obama’s family as well. The record shows that it is much harder to be opposed to same-sex marriage when you see your neighbors, your colleagues, or your family members happily united.
Just as an aside, you might try to use the Pareto efficiency test to see if allowing same-sex marriage makes anyone better off at the expense of making others worse off. If they have not, and I would argue that no one is made worse off in any measurable sense when people of the same gender are allowed to marry, then changing those laws has to be a welfare improvement according to that criterion.
FINAL WORDS
Marriage is a fine institution, and one that is better understood when viewed through an economist’s lens. What both these examples, monogamy/polygyny and same-sex marriage, illustrate is that marriage institutions can change over time and that economic factors play an important role in their evolution. Institutions are, by definition, external to the beliefs of the individual whose behavior they govern because, in theory at least, they represent the beliefs of the collective rather than that of a few individuals within the collective. The beliefs of the collective themselves are, in turn, shaped by the nature of the economy in which we live.
Societies in largely industrialized nations have rejected polygamy as a marriage institution because in those economies mental ability is highly valued in the labor force. Thus, men prefer to have fewer, educated, children over having many, less-educated, children. Since monogamy helps them achieve that goal, the collective has come to adopt the view that monogamous marriage is preferred to polygamous marriage.
More recently, in many of those same industrialized countries, the belief in equal marriage rights for same-sex couples has led to a change in marriage institutions. Acknowledging the importance of those rights is currently shaping public opinion, and that change in opinion has made it possible for the institution of marriage to change as well.
The evolution of the institution of marriage, in the legal sense, is not necessarily determined by public opinion in the short run but rather by the opinion of those who have the power to set policy. If the polygyny story teaches us anything, though, it is this: unless policy makers have the power to change public opinion, in the long run, democratic societies (and as we have seen, even authoritarian societies) will ultimately have institutions that reflect the beliefs of the majority, regardless of the personal preferences of those in power.
I said that Bill Gates would probably have only one wife even if the laws permitted him to have two because the economic conditions have given his wife, Melinda, sufficient bargaining power within their marriage that she can insist on a monogamous arrangement. These same conditions that have made the need for anti-polygamy laws irrelevant to most couples in industrialized nations have led to dramatic changes in the way in which couples organize their relationships. Economics has played a big role in shaping the modern family.
CHAPTER 6
BRINGING HOME THE BACON
MARRIAGE IS ALL ABOUT COMPROMISE
Let me start with a story that does a much better job than I might in introducing the material we will discuss in this chapter. It is the continuation of the story of Jane that I promised you earlier, and it tells of the marriage that she entered into in the year after she left her life of post-high school debauchery. You already know how well that marriage worked out, since in the third part of her life she is again unmarried. But while she might not have found her Prince Charming, her not-so-happy-ever-after is an apt description of how marriage is evolving as a result of some powerful economic forces.
Without a university degree or gainful employment, Jane soon discovered that her marriage market deficiencies in terms of her education levels and earning potential were more than compensated for by her youthfulness; at the tender age of 19, she began living with a man who was nine years her senior and well equipped to provide her with much-needed stability. This stability came at a cost, however, as she had to move halfway around the world to live with a relative stranger, having only met him twice before making that decision.
Jane brought youth to the relationship and a willingness to start a new life but was forced to forgo the opportunity to have a husband of similar age who lived in the home country she loved. Her husband, John, brought education and income but was forced to forgo having a wife with similar education and income levels to his own. Neither Jane nor John got what they wanted, but for this particular stage of their lives, they got what they needed.
Now Jane, having moved all the way around the world to live with John, was deeply unhappy. Besides being lonely and isolated, she found herself in a relationship in which, because of both her inability to contribute to the household income and her inferior age, she had no bargaining power. Decisions that other couples would have made together, John made alone and independently of Jane’s wishes. Where they lived, whether or not they had children (and how many), who they were friends with, how they divided the household chores, and when they did, and did not, have sex were all decisions made by John alone.
To make matters worse, economic conditions were poor, and, despite his education, John was incapable of keeping a job for more than a year at a time. In five years, John and Jane moved nine times, five times to different cities (including a move back to Jane’s home country), all in pursuit of employment opportunities for John. The moves meant Jane was constantly underemployed, continually isolated, and unable to gain any ground on decision making within her relationship. In fact, her say in household decisions eroded over the years as a new baby and John’s repeated job losses put the family in a more and more desperate financial situation.
Jane’s big break came after one particularly long spell of unemployment in which John had been out of work for more than a year. He announced that he was returning to university to complete a graduate degree in the hope of improving his employability. He decided that in order to pay for the additional education, Jane would find a job and work full time. But twenty months of John’s unemployment, and the fact they had been living with Jane’s parents, had shifted the balance of power in their relationship, and against John’s wishes, Jane decided to take a stand. She applied, and was accepted, to earn a bachelor’s degree in the same university as John.
WIVES PAYA PRICE FOR TAKING THEIR HUSBAND’S NAME
Taking her husband’s name at marriage suggests to potential employers that a woman is less intelligent, less ambitious, inclined to work fewer hours, and more focused on family. And according to experimental research by Marret Noordewier, Femke van Horen, Kirsten Ruys, and Diederik Stapel, women who make the choice to change their name can expect lower wages and fewer job offers as a result.
Women who choose to keep their name upon marriage are far more likely to be educated than women who take their husband’s name. According to data collected by Gretchen Gooding, a U.S. woman with a master’s degree is 2.8 times more likely not to take her husband’s name than a woman who is educated at a lower level. A woman with a professional degree is 5 times more likely, and a woman with a doctorate is 9.8 times more likely not to change her name than a woman with less than a bachelor’s degree.
Women who keep their name also have fewer children. In the Netherlands, the source of the experiment I have cited above, a woman who takes her husband’s name has 2.2 children on average while a woman who keeps her own has only 1.9. Perhaps because they have more children, or perhaps because they have more traditional values regarding family, name-takers work fewer hours outside of the home per week (22.4) compared with name-keepers (28.3). Even after controlling for education levels and work hours, a woman who took her husband’s name earns less—€960 compared with €1,156.
In an experiment, a set of participants was given one of two e-mail
s from a hypothetical woman applying for a job and asked to assess the woman’s prospects for securing the position and to state their expectation of her salary. The participants assessed the applicant who took her husband’s name as less intelligent, less ambitious, and more dependent. They expected her to be far less likely to receive a job offer and assessed her salary as being €861 per month less than the woman who kept her name.
Can a woman’s name really matter when she applies for a job? If the stereotype of a woman who takes her husband’s name is that she is more committed to family and less to the workplace, then we shouldn’t be surprised that she is disadvantaged in seeking employment compared with women who are stereotyped as being independent and ambitious.
In a matter of weeks John, Jane, and baby were living on campus in family housing with John committing all his time to his program and Jane balancing caring for the needs of their young child and studying for her very first degree.
When John found a job in another city two years later, Jane refused to move with him. When he lost that job three months later, she let him come back, but by then the writing was on the wall for their relationship.
For years they had built a relationship in which John had the power to make all the decisions, and the transition to a new equilibrium, in which equal education and employment gave Jane more say, was untenable.
Dollars and Sex Page 14
