The Economics of Love and Marriage
This chapter consists of two parts. The first discusses the economics of marriage; it starts with an analysis of the marriage market and goes on to consider what marriage is and why it exists. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the economics of altruism: the analysis of rational behavior by an individual who values the welfare of another. It demonstrates that altruism, which one might think of as outside of economics, actually fits neatly into economic theory. The result is not merely to accommodate the theory to an important feature of the real world but also to use economics to derive some surprising results about the consequences of altruism.
THE ECONOMICS OF MARRIAGE
We start our discussion of marriage by taking marriage itself as a given. We assume that some people want to marry other people and that they prefer some potential partners to others. We also assume that although marriage partners, potential and actual, may put considerable value on each other's welfare (a phenomenon to be analyzed in the second part of the chapter) there is still room for some conflict of interest between them. There is therefore also room for some bargaining over the terms, implicit or explicit, of the marriage.
To add interest to the discussion, I will focus on a particular policy issue. In our society, only monogamous marriages are permitted--one husband, one wife. In various other societies, polygynous marriages (one husband, two or more wives) and polyandrous marriages (one wife, two or more husbands) have also been legal. What would the effect of legalizing polygyny or polyandry be on the welfare of men? On the welfare of women? On the net welfare of all concerned?
In order to answer this question, we require a formal model of the marriage market. I will work out the implications of two different ones. The first is designed to make the marriage market appear very similar to the markets with which we are by now familiar; the second is designed to emphasize two of the respects in which it differs from such markets.
One element common to both models is the assumption that women and men belong to themselves: The marriage partners are the only ones whose consent is required in order for the marriage to take place. This is appropriate if we are considering marriage in the United States or some similar society, since adults in such societies do, in that sense, belong to themselves. But in many past societies (and some present ones), unmarried women were to some degree the property of the male head of their household; his consent was required in order for them to be married. Economic analysis is as applicable to such a society as it is to ours, but the results must be modified to take account of the different property rights; gains that in our society would go to the bride may in such a society go to her father instead. Similar modifications would apply in the less common case where sons, as well as or instead of daughters, were the property of their families.
Model 1: A Market with Prices
In many societies, marriage is commonly accompanied by payments--bride price paid by the groom or his family to the family of the bride, dowry provided by the bride's family to the new couple, and so on. While explicit payments of this sort are not a part of our marriage institutions (unless you count expenditures on the wedding and the wedding gifts), one may still see a marriage as containing an implicit price. When two people get married, they do so with some general understanding of the terms they are committing themselves to: how free a hand each will have with the common funds, what duties each is expected to perform, and so on. One may think of the terms of this understanding as corresponding to a price and serving the same function as an explicit price in other markets.
Imagine, for example, that a plague kills off many young women of marriageable age. After the plague is over, young women find it easy and young men difficult to get married. One result we would expect is a shifting of the "price" associated with marriage. Men will find that they are implicitly bidding against each other for wives; the terms of the bidding may include the willingness of the men to accept marriage terms pleasing to the women. This is particularly likely in a society in which divorce is relatively easy, so that either partner can enforce the terms of the contract by threatening to dissolve it and find someone else. If, in a society where women are scarce, the man who promised before the wedding to do everything his wife wanted proves less accommodating afterward, some other man will be willing to take his place. Similarly, if a war greatly reduced the population of marriageable men, we would expect to find the terms of the marriage contract swinging toward the men's side.
For our first model, then, we will think of the marriage market as an ordinary market with a price. The price is defined relative to an arbitrary "standard" marriage contract. Any other contract can be viewed as a standard contract plus or minus a certain number of dollars paid by the husband to the wife; plus represents a contract more favorable to the wife than the standard, while minus represents one less favorable. Supply and demand behave just as they do on any other market. The quantity supplied of wives--the number of women willing to marry--will be higher, and the quantity demanded lower, the higher the price. The model is entirely symmetrical, as we will see on Figures 21-1a and 21-1b; we can just as easily speak of the quantity demanded and quantity supplied of husbands. As long as all marriages are monogamous, the number of husbands supplied and the number of wives demanded are the same, since a man seeking to become a husband is a man seeking to obtain a wife, just as, on a barter market, someone who offers to trade wine for beer is both supplying wine and demanding beer.
Figure 21-1
The monogamous marriage market. Figure 21-1a is drawn from the standpoint of a potential husband, who sees the market as a market for wives. Figure 21-1b is drawn from the standpoint of a potential wife, who sees it as a market for husbands. Pw is the price of a wife, defined as the terms of the actual marriage contract relative to the terms of some arbitrary standard contract. Ph is the price of a husband, defined similarly relative to the same standard contract. Pw is positive (and Ph negative) if the terms of the actual contract are more favorable to the wife than the terms of the standard contract.
Omissions. Before using this model to analyze the consequences of polygyny and polyandry, several additional points should be made. We have so far ignored quality differences in potential husbands and wives--the fact that some people are more desirable marriage partners than others. We can, if we wish, include this in our model by including quality in our definition of the standard contract. Marrying an unusually desirable woman at a price of 0 would correspond to a marriage contract in which the woman received specially favorable terms to balance the advantages the husband received from having a particularly desirable wife. Perhaps the husband would have to agree to wash all of the dishes.
Seen from this standpoint, attractiveness is simply one element of the initial wealth of an individual. A man or a woman who has good looks or a pleasant disposition is wealthier, has a greater command over the desirable things of life, than someone who has not, just as someone who has inherited a million dollars is wealthier than someone who has not.
We would still be failing to take account of another important feature of marriage: not everyone has the same tastes. The woman I recognized as a one in ten thousand catch was not even being pursued by anyone else, with the result that I married her on quite reasonable terms; I did not even have to agree to wash all of the dishes. Some of the women that my friends married, on the other hand, were of no interest to me at all. Yet my friends obviously preferred them, not only to remaining bachelors but to trying to lure my intended away from me.
This feature of the marriage market is not, of course, unique to it. We would observe the same thing in the market for houses or the market for jobs--indeed in most markets where both the good and the purchaser are very inhomogeneous, so that the problem is not merely the allocation of limited quantities but the proper matching of buyer and bought. One of the implications of such situations--high transaction costs--was mentioned in the discussion of barter in Chapter 18.
I think it would be possible to take account of this feature of the marriage market without substantially altering the results of our analysis, although I cannot be sure, since I have not actually tried. It would, however, make the model too complicated for our present purposes. We will therefore ignore complications associated with varying quality of potential mates until we come to the second model and ignore complications associated with differing tastes throughout this chapter.
The Effect of Legalizing Polygyny or Polyandry. Figures 21-1a and 21-1b show the same marriage market seen from two sides. In Figure 21-la, Sw is the supply curve for wives, Dw the demand curve for wives; in Figure 21-1b, Sh the supply curve for husbands, Dh the demand curve for husbands. In Figure 21-1a, Pw is a price (positive or negative) paid by husbands to wives--the price of a wife. Similarly, in Figure 21-1b, Ph is a price paid by wives to husbands--the price of a husband. Both figures convey the same information; Sw is identical to Dh except for the differing definitions of price. For Pw = + $10,000/wife, quantity supplied= 5,000,000 wives per year (point Xa); for Ph = - $10,000/husband, quantity demanded = 5,000,000 husbands per year (point Xb). A price of $10,000 paid by a husband to a wife is the same thing as a price of - $10,000 paid by a wife to a husband. Both prices represent the same contract, one that is equivalent to a standard contract plus a $10,000 payment by the husband to the wife. At this price, the quantity of wives supplied is greater than the quantity of wives demanded (or, equivalently, the quantity of husbands demanded is greater than the quantity supplied).
P*w on Figure 21-1a is the equilibrium value of Pw, the value for which quantity of wives supplied equals quantity demanded. P*h = - P*w is similarly the equilibrium value of Ph on Figure 21-1b. On the particular marriage market shown by the figures, the equilibrium price of a bride is $5,000; in order to get married, a man must offer marriage terms that are $5,000 more favorable to the wife than the standard marriage contract relative to which Pw is defined.
Figure 21-2a shows what happens if polygyny is legalized; Figure 21-2b shows what happens if polyandry is legalized (with polygyny still illegal). The essential thing to notice about the figures is that P*w is higher on Figure 21-2a than on Figure 21-1a, and P*h' is higher on Figure 21-2b than on Figure 21-1b. Wives get better terms, more attractive marriage contracts, when polygyny is legal than when it does not; husbands get better terms when polyandry is legal than when it is not. The result is exactly the opposite of what one might expect; polygyny benefits women and polyandry benefits men!
Figures 21-2
Polygamous marriage markets. Figure 21-2a shows the market for wives after the legalization of polygyny; Figure 21-2b shows the market for husbands after the legalization of polyandry.
Why? On Figure 21-2a, the supply curve for wives is the same as on Figure 21-1a. The legalization of polygyny does nothing to increase or reduce the number of wives willing to accept any particular marriage contract. Of course, a woman willing to accept a monogamous marriage may be unwilling to share the same husband with another wife, but that is already taken into account in the definition of Pw. Pw was defined relative to a standard contract, one of whose features was monogamy. A bigamist who offers a price Pw = 0 for a wife must be offering her terms sufficiently favorable to balance the cost to her of having to share him with another wife, making the marriage equivalent, for her, to a standard contract. The same applies at all other values of Pw; we define the price corresponding to any particular bigamous marriage contract as the price earlier assigned to that monogamous contract that potential wives consider equivalent to it.
We can now see why the equilibrium price in Figure 21-2a is higher than in Figure 21-1a. Suppose it were not; suppose the two prices were equal. Quantity supplied on Figure 21-2a would then be the same as on Figure 21-1a, but quantity demanded would be higher. Legalizing polygyny will hardly make a man who before wanted one wife decide that (at the same price) he now wants none, but it will allow some who before wanted one to marry two instead--even if they must offer terms at which potential wives are willing to accept half a husband apiece. So when polygyny becomes legal, quantity demanded at any price rises; the demand curve shifts out from Dw to D'w. At the old equilibrium price (P*w), quantity demanded is now higher than quantity supplied. So the price must rise; the new equilibrium price (P*w') must be higher than the old. Since price is defined in such a way that an increased price means a contract more favorable to the wife, this means that women are better off.
What about men? Those who end up with only one wife are worse off, since they must offer her more favorable terms than before. They are worse off by [[Delta]] P*w = P*w' - P*w, the increase in the price they must pay for a wife. Those who end up with two (or more) wives may or may not be better off. The fact that someone chooses to marry two wives shows that at a price of P*w' he prefers two wives to one; it does not tell us whether he prefers two at P*w' to one at P*w.
Is the change a Marshall improvement or a Marshall worsening? It is a Marshall improvement. To see this, imagine that we go from Figure 21-1a to Figure 21-2a in two steps. The first consists of transferring [[Delta]] P*w from every husband to every wife. That is a pure transfer; wives gain what husbands lose. The next step is to allow husbands and wives to adjust to the new price; quantity of wives increases from Qw to Qw'. That is a Marshall improvement. Men who do not change the number of wives they have are unaffected; men who reduce the number of wives they have from one to zero in response to the higher price or increase the number above one to take advantage of the legalization of polygyny, and women who at the old price did not choose to marry but at the new price do, are better off. A pure transfer plus a Marshall improvement adds up to a Marshall improvement.
Figure 21-2b shows the effect of legalizing polyandry. The logic is exactly the same as for polygyny, with the roles of women and men reversed. Since some women now buy two (or more) husbands, the demand curve for husbands shifts out. At the old price for husbands, quantity demanded is greater than quantity supplied, so the price rises. Women marrying only one husband must compete against the polyandrous women to get him, hence must offer better terms than before. Men are better off, monogamous women are worse off, and polyandrous women may be better or worse off. The net effect is a Marshall improvement.
To many readers, the conclusion may seem extraordinary--how can women possibly be made better off by polygyny and men by polyandry? That reaction reflects what I described in Chapter 2 as naive price theory. Naive price theory is the theory that prices do not change. If polygyny were introduced and nothing else changed, then it seems likely that women would be worse off--except for those who prefer to share the burden of putting up with a husband. But when polygyny is introduced, something else does change; the demand curve for wives shifts up, and so does the price for wives implicit in the marriage contract. Those wives who end up with one husband get him on more favorable terms--he must bid more for a wife because of the competition of his polygynous rivals. Those who accept polygynous marriages do so because the price they are offered is sufficient to at least balance, for them, the disadvantage of sharing a husband.
Another reason why you may regard the result as implausible is that in many historical societies, including some of the polygynous ones, women did not belong to themselves. In such a situation, a woman's father, or whoever else was in a position to control whom she married, could have ended up receiving a large part of the price implicit in the marriage contract. If so, the demonstration that women are benefited by the legalization of polygyny no longer holds. That is why, at the beginning of the discussion, I explicitly assumed a society in which men and women belonged to themselves.
The result would seem less paradoxical if we substituted cars and car buyers for wives and husbands (or husbands and wives). Suppose there were a law forbidding anyone to own more than one car. It seems obvious enough that the abolition of that law would increase the demand for cars. Sellers of cars would be better off. Buyers who did not take advantage of the new opportunity--those who bought only one car--would be worse off, since they would have to pay a higher price. Buyers who bought more than one car would be better off than if they bought only one car at the new price (otherwise that is what they would have done) but not necessarily better off than if they bought one car at the old price, an option no longer open to them.
One thing you may find confusing in all this is the time sequence. Am I describing a situation in which, after polygyny becomes legal, some men divorce one wife to marry two others, and some women insist on renegotiating their marriage contracts? No. What I am doing is comparing two alternative futures, one with polygyny (or polyandry) and one without. The man who would have married one wife if polygyny had remained illegal either marries one wife on different terms if polygyny is legal, marries two (or more) wives, or is priced out of the market and remains a bachelor.
The Second Model
So far, we have modeled the marriage market in a way designed to make it seem as similar as possible to more conventional markets. The next step is to switch to an entirely different model--one that some of you may find more realistic.
We start by assuming that there is no way marriage partners can offer prices to each other, implicit or explicit. One reason might be the difficulty of enforcing such contracts, especially in a society where divorce is difficult. The obvious strategy in such a situation is "Promise anything but don't wash the dishes." Actual cash payments between the mates are impractical if, after the marriage, all property is held in common; there is little point in bribing someone with what will belong to him or her after the marriage anyway.
In such a society, the marriage market is a market without a price. The absence of a price does not eliminate the fundamental problem of scarcity; it just means that some other means of allocating the scarce supply of desirable mates (of both sexes) must be found.
We will now explicitly include one of the features that we earlier pushed into the background--the varying quality of mates. We suppose that all of the potential mates of each sex can be arranged in a hierarchy ranging from "most desirable" to "least desirable" and that everyone agrees on who belongs where in the hierarchy.
We now have a very simple rationing mechanism. The most desirable woman has her pick of mates, so she accepts the most desirable man; he, having his pick of mates, is only interested in her. The second most desirable woman would gladly accept the most desirable man, but he is already taken, so she settles for the second most desirable man. The process continues until all the members of whichever gender is less plentiful on the marriage market have been paired up, leaving the least desirable members of the other gender unmarried.
Suppose we now introduce polygyny. The most attractive woman can no longer be certain of marrying the most attractive man. He may prefer two less attractive women--and they may each prefer half of him to all of a less attractive man. If fewer men than women want to get married, some women may be choosing half of a husband over the alternative of no husband at all.
The result is no longer an unambiguous improvement from the standpoint of women, as it was in the first model. Some women at the top of the hierarchy find themselves with less attractive men than before. Neither is it an unambiguous worsening; some women who were previously unmarried may now have (half of) a husband, while others may get half of a man instead of all of a dolt.
It may or may not be an unambiguous improvement for the men. Some men benefit by getting two wives instead of one. In addition, every time a man near the top of the hierarchy settles for two (lower quality) women instead of one (high-quality) one, he opens up a rung on the ladder; the men below him move up a step and end up with more desirable wives than they could have before. Figure 21-3 shows such a change; A, B, C, . . . are the men, in order of desirability, while 1, 2, 3, . . . are the women. When B chooses 7 and 8 instead of 2, whom he would have married in a monogamous society, C-G all find themselves with more attractive wives as a result.
How can the change injure men? A man is worse off if someone above him marries two wives, both higher in the women's hierarchy than the woman he was going to marry. That eliminates one step above him on the men's ladder and two steps on the women's, pushing his relative position down a step; he must be content with a woman one step below the one he could have gotten if monogamy were the rule. In Figure 21-3, that is what happens to H and everyone below him.
Just as in the first model, the argument can be repeated for the case of polyandry, with essentially the same results. When polyandry becomes legal, some men near the top of the hierarchy almost certainly lose; some near the bottom--in particular any who before could not find a wife--gain. Women may all gain, or those at the top may gain at the expense of those at the bottom.
Figure 21-3
The effect of polygyny in a marriage market without prices. Both men and women are ranked (A,B,C, . . . ; 1,2,3 . . .) according to their attractiveness as marriage partners. If polygyny is illegal, A marries 1, B marries 2, etc. If it is legal, A marries 1, B marries 7 and 8, C marries 2, etc.
Markets with and without Price--Some General Comments
Whenever it is suggested that something should be provided on the market instead of produced and allocated by government, one of the objections made is that such a proposal only benefits the rich, since if something is sold, "The rich get it all." The outcome of the marriage market I have just described--a market without price--is much more like that stereotype than is the outcome of an ordinary market with a price. On an ordinary market, differences in income are one of the factors determining who gets what, but not the only one. An individual who particularly values something--car, clothes, books--may end up with more of it than a competitor with higher income but different tastes. And the outcome is not all or nothing; the individual who spends more money gets, not all of the good, but an amount proportioned to what he is willing to spend.
On the monogamous marriage market without price, it does not matter how much a man wants an intelligent and beautiful wife and how many other things he is willing to give up to get her; if anyone above him on the hierarchy also wants her, he has no chance. Wealth--not in money but in whatever makes for an attractive mate--is the sole determinant of who gets what. And the competition, for any particular mate, is all-or-nothing; if you have half the attractiveness of your competitor, the result is not that you get a third of what you want and he gets two thirds but that he gets all of it.
In the Soviet Union some goods, such as meat and out-of-season vegetables, are sold at low prices but are frequently unavailable in ordinary stores. They can be found only in special stores to which ordinary citizens do not have access. In that respect, at least, inequality is greater under communism than under capitalism--precisely because goods are not allocated by the market. Similarly during World War II, when the United States had price control and rationing on food, what you ate often depended less on what you were willing to pay than on whom you knew.
Money, Beauty, and Folk Songs
"The Brown Girl she has house and lands, fair Ellender she has none."
--No. 73 of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads collected by Francis James Child
At the end of this chapter, there is a brief discussion of the anti-money bias of our culture, the attitude that regards money transactions, especially in a social context, as somehow base or corrupt. Those who do not believe such a bias exists may find it instructive to reread the earlier parts of this chapter or explain them to their friends and then examine their own and their friends' reaction to describing marriage as buying a wife or husband.
One aspect of this that is particularly relevant to our two models of the marriage market--with and without price--is a motif frequently seen in folk songs. A young man must choose between two women, one beautiful and one rich. Almost invariably he chooses the rich one. The result is tragedy; at least two and often all three of the parties end up dead. The lesson is clear: Marry the beautiful woman.
It is clear in such songs that marrying a woman for her money is bad, but marrying her for her beauty is fine. It is less clear why. True, the Brown Girl (dark complexioned, hence less attractive than "Fair" Ellender) has done nothing to deserve her wealth; one could argue that she therefore does not deserve to get Lord Thomas. But no more does Fair Ellender deserve her beauty. All either of them has done is to pick the right parents, the one for wealth and the other for looks. Why then is it good and noble for Lord Thomas to reject wealth for beauty and base and wicked for him to reject beauty for wealth?
One answer may be that the plot depends on something that I earlier assumed away. In the world of folk songs--and in many, perhaps most, human societies--the bride and groom are not the only ones whose interests are involved in their marriage, nor are they the only ones with some control over it. Both sets of parents are involved as well. What may really be going on in "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender" (and other songs with the same plot line) is a conflict of interest between the groom and his family. If Lord Thomas marries Fair Ellender, he will be the only one to benefit by her beauty; if he marries the Brown Girl, his parents may reasonably hope to get their hands on some of her wealth. Perhaps they are counting on it to support them in their old age. It is Lord Thomas's mother who persuades him to marry the Brown Girl.
If that is what is going on, it is clear enough which side of the generation gap the singer is on. Or, more precisely, which side he believes his audience is on.
What and Why Is Marriage?
(Miss Manners) also asks that you not bore her with explaining the comparative quality of marital and nonmarital relationships, especially when using the term "honesty" or asking the nonsensical question of what difference a piece of paper makes. Miss Manners has a safe-deposit box full of papers that make a difference.
--Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior by Judith Martin
So far in our discussion of the marriage market, we have taken the existence of marriage for granted. We will now turn from examining the market to examining the institution. Our first questions are "What is marriage" and "Why does it exist?"
Marriage as a Firm. One way of looking at marriage is as a rather odd sort of package deal, an exchange in which the two parties agree to share income, housing, sexual favors, and a collection of productive activities such as cooking meals, cleaning house, washing dishes, and rearing children. Seen from this standpoint, the motivation for marriage is, in part, the existence of economies of scale in production--it is easier to cook one meal for two people than two meals each for one person--and, in part, the advantage of division of labor. A marriage is simply a particular kind of two-person firm.
But a firm is not the only way of taking advantage of division of labor--there is the alternative of the market. Most of us take advantage of the comparative advantage of the butcher, the baker, and the brewer; but we do not have to marry them to get our dinner. The wife in a traditional marriage may have a comparative advantage over the husband in cooking, and the husband might have a comparative advantage over the wife in carpentry. But outside of the household, there are surely better cooks and better carpenters than either of them. Why does the couple limit itself to division of labor within the household?
The Reasons for Household Production. Few couples do; most of us obtain much of what we want by buying it on the open market. The typical family does, however, rely on household production for a considerable range of what it consumes--most meals, most domestic cleaning, much child care and education, and so on. Why are not these things too purchased on the market?
One reason is the existence of transaction costs. If you are going to build a house, it is worth hiring a carpenter. If you are simply fixing a few loose shingles, the time and trouble of finding a good carpenter, negotiating mutually satisfactory terms, and making sure he does the job may more than wipe out the carpenter's comparative advantage. The carpenter may be better at fixing the shingles than I am, but I am the one who gets wet if the roof leaks, so I have an incentive to do a good job even if nobody is watching me. And I have no incentive to waste time and energy haggling with myself over the price.
A second reason may be specialization--not in a particular product but in a particular set of customers. The cook at the restaurant my wife and I would go to if we spent less time cooking and more time earning money to pay for going to restaurants may be better at cooking than we are. But the restaurant cook is worse than we are at cooking for us. We, after all, are specialists in what we like. This may be still more true for some other forms of household production.
We now have at least a partial explanation for the existence of marriage. A second element worth investigating is the fact that marriage, in most societies, is a very long-term contract. Why?
Marriage and the Costs of Bilateral Monopoly. The answer was given back in Chapter 9, in the discussion of bilateral monopoly as a reason for long-term contracts. Before I went to work at UCLA, both I and the economics department were participating in a large and moderately competitive market. Once I had accepted the job and spent a year or two learning to do it, we were both to some degree locked into a bilateral monopoly. Both they and I had borne substantial costs associated with training me for that particular job and equipping the department to deal with that particular professor.
Marriage is a more extreme version of the same situation. Individuals choose their mates on a large and competitive market, however much they may protest that there could never have been anyone else. But once they are married, they rapidly acquire what in other contexts is known as firm-specific capital. If they decide to end the contract and find other partners, they incur very large costs that they would have avoided if they had chosen the right partners to start with. Their specialized knowledge of how to live with each other becomes worthless. One, at least, must leave a familiar and accustomed home. Their circle of friends will probably be divided between them. Worst of all, the new mate, whatever his or her advantages, is not the other parent of their children.
As I explained in Chapter 6, one problem with acquiring firm-specific capital is that it creates a large bargaining range between the two parties. Each may be tempted, in trying to get things his way, to take advantage of the fact that the other is locked into the relation and will choose to leave it only if things get very much worse. There is no way to eliminate such problems entirely, in marriage or in other contexts, but long-term contracting, explicit or implicit, is a common way of reducing them.
Enforcement Problems. The marriage contract involves two different elements, one a good deal more enforceable than the other. The agreement to remain married "till death do us part" is to a considerable degree enforceable; in many societies, although not ours at present, getting out of one marriage and into another is a difficult and expensive undertaking. Henry VIII, as you will remember, had to change the religion of an entire country in order to cancel his long-term contract with Catherine of Aragon.
But preventing the parties to a contract from backing out of it entirely does not solve the problem unless the contract specifies the precise obligations of each party--and does so in a way that can be enforced. Marriage without divorce can result in an even larger bargaining range than marriage with divorce, since one party can threaten to make the other's life so unpleasant that divorce would be an improvement. Whether the threat is a believable one may depend on the cost of carrying it out. If both parties know that when the argument is over they are still going to be married to each other, that may give them an incentive to avoid extreme strategies.
This suggests that the ideal solution would be a long-term contract that completely specified the obligations of both parties. Before the contract is signed, there is no marriage, no bilateral monopoly, and not much of a bargaining range. After the contract is signed, there is nothing left to bargain about.
To some extent, marriage is such a contract. It is, in principle, possible for a husband or wife to claim that the other is not living up to his or her responsibility--for a wife to sue a husband for failing to support her, for example. The problem is, first, that one can never write a contract detailed enough to specify all the relevant terms and, second, that even if one could, it would be almost impossible to enforce it. Here, as with price control, the individual who is legally obliged to provide a specified product at a specified price can generally evade the obligation by lowering quality. So far as I know, nobody has ever successfully sued his or her spouse for cooking--or making love--badly. So a considerable amount of bargaining room remains, and is used, even in marriages in traditional societies.
Love and Marriage. So far in this chapter I have said nothing about love, which is widely believed to have some connection with marriage. It may seem odd to ask why we marry someone we love, instead of marrying someone whose tastes agree with and whose skills complement our own and then conducting our respective love lives on the side, but it is a legitimate question.
There are two answers. The first is that love is associated with sex, for reasons that can be explained (by sociobiology--economics applied to genes instead of people) but will not be here, and sex with having children. Parents much prefer rearing their own children to rearing other people's, and much of child rearing is most conveniently done in the home of the rearer. So it is convenient, to say the least, if a child's parents are married--to each other.
The second answer is that love reduces, although it does not eliminate, the conflicts of interest that lead to costly bargaining. If I love my wife, her happiness is one of the main things determining mine; we therefore have a common interest in making her happy. If she also loves me, we also have a common interest in making me happy. Unless our love is so precisely calculated that our objectives are identical, there is still room for conflict, in either direction; if we love each other too much, my attempts to benefit her at my expense will clash with her attempts to benefit me at her expense.
A more precise discussion of the logic of such situations will have to wait for the second part of the chapter, where I work out in some detail the effect of altruism on the behavior of altruist and beneficiary.
The Decline and Fall of American Marriage. Now that we have at least a sketch of an economic theory of marriage, we might as well do something with it. One obvious thing to do is to explain the decline of marriage in the United States (and some similar societies) over the course of this century. Why has marriage become less common and why has the effective term of the contract become so much shorter?
The simple answer is that the amount of time spent in household production has declined drastically, and with it the amount of firm-specific capital acquired by the partners, especially the wife. Earlier I remarked that it was not necessary, in order to get dinner, to marry one's butcher, baker, and brewer. In fact, a few hundred years ago, it was not uncommon for a man to be married to his baker and brewer and a woman to her butcher--all three of those professions were to a considerable extent carried out within the household, especially in rural areas. Dorothy Sayers, in one of her essays, suggests that men who complain about women stealing men's jobs should be asked whether they wish to return to women all the industries that used to be conducted by housewives and have now moved onto the market, such as brewing beer, preserving food, and making clothes.
One factor reducing the amount of household production has been the increase in specialization over the past few centuries. Bacon, clothing, jams, and many other things are now mass-produced instead of made at home. A second factor has been the mechanization of much of what remains. Clothes and dishes are still washed at home, but a good deal of the work is really done by the firms that make the washing machines. A third factor has been the enormous decrease in infant mortality. It used to be necessary for a woman to produce children practically nonstop in order to be fairly sure of having two or three survive to adulthood, with the result that bearing and rearing children was virtually a full-time job. In a modern society, a couple that wants two children produces two children.
The result of all three changes has been greatly to reduce the amount of work done by an average housewife. Housewife is no longer a full-time profession, save in certain unusual cases--families that want a lot of children, couples going "back to the land," and the like. But household production in general and child rearing in particular are responsible for a large part of the specialized capital associated with marriage. If husband and wife each spend 80 percent of the day working at a job and 20 percent taking care of the household and if they have no young children, the costs of divorce are not all that great. Even for a somewhat more traditional family, with the husband working full time and the wife dividing her time between work, housekeeping, and rearing one or two children, the costs of divorce are much lower than they were a few generations ago.
Divorce is not all costs. There are benefits too; otherwise nobody would ever get divorced. If the benefits remain unchanged and the costs are reduced, the number of cases in which at least one partner finds that benefits are greater than costs will increase. Judging by the divorce rate, it has. Seen from this standpoint, the increase is neither inherently good nor inherently bad, neither evidence of increased freedom nor a consequence of declining moral standards. It is merely a rational adjustment to a changing world.
It is good insofar as it reflects, and accommodates, an increase in the range of choice available to individuals. We could choose to live in eighteenth century households, tanning our own leather and brewing our own beer. Some people do--you can read about their lives in Mother Earth News every month. The fact that most do not is evidence that, for most of us, the costs of living that kind of life instead of our present one are larger than the benefits.
The increased divorce rate, and the general difficulties with modern marriage, are bad things only to the extent that they reflect the failure of our institutions and expectations to adjust completely to new circumstances. The terms on which two people can live a happy and productive life together are not so simple that each couple can invent them independently in a few hours. The division of labor has a place in building institutions as well as houses. In a relatively static society, we can observe successful arrangements, patterns that have worked in the past and will probably work in the future. In a rapidly changing society, it is more difficult to figure out what kind of a contract we should or should not agree to and what kind of a marriage--or alternative arrangement--we should or should not choose. Hence there are likely to be more mistakes. Here as in most other areas, economic theory is more useful for describing the equilibrium than for describing the process by which we move from one equilibrium to another.
THE ECONOMICS OF ALTRUISM
A common argument against economics is the claim that economists either assume or advocate selfishness, whereas people in the real world should and do care for others. There is some truth to this charge, but not very much. Economists assume that people have their own objectives and act to achieve them, but, as I have pointed out several times, there is no reason why those objectives must be selfish; economists can and do assume that one of the things some people value is the welfare of other people.
Geometric Version
Someone who values the welfare of someone else is called an altruist. It is possible to use economics to analyze the rational behavior of an altruist and of the person whose welfare he cares about, and in the process to derive some surprising results.
Figure 21-4a shows the indifference curves of an altruist A, who is concerned with his own consumption, CA, shown on the vertical axis, and the consumption of a beneficiary B, CB, shown on the horizontal axis. Both CA and CB are goods for A, so his indifference curves slope down and to the right; both exhibit declining marginal utility, so the curves are convex toward the origin. In drawing the figure, I have assumed that both CA and CB are normal goods; as his income rises, he buys more of both. That assumption will be retained throughout the discussion.
Okay - It is sad that some people miss out on the LOVE. love marriage - Getting married because you are in love is not to save on bills or taxes. It is to have a partner with you through thick and thin. A friend who will love you no matter what and always be there for you.
The advantages do come finacially but that is not the reason to get married. Anyone who does so is getting married for the wrong reason. Real and true advantages are this:
Having a person who you can count on. They love you so you know they have your best interest at heart.
Gives your life excitment and meaning. You have a person to go places with, vacations, sports events, shopping - yes even the mundain things like shoping are better when you have your LOVE with you.
Cures Loneliness - Companionship is so important. When it comes from a person who has vowed to be committed to you for their whole life, this is wonderful.
Bring hope for future - That you won't grow old lonely.
Family - Some people want kids - When you are in love this just seems to come naturally. You want to have a child with the person you love.
There are so many advantages it's impossible to list them all.
The disadvantages are - if your love really wasn't true. You may end up heart broken and very resentful.
Vulnerable - you may put all your reliance on a person who isn't in love the way you are and it could lead to you being hurt.
The disadvantages above really don't relate though because the negative affects are only because the LOVE factor is not fully there or is missing all together.
I guess one disadvantage of LOVE marriage is this.
if you marry for love, you may have to go agaist what your family wants. If you marry for love, you may have to marry into less money - because if you are in love you are not looking for the riches guy around. If you marry for love, you may have to give up on some dreams if they conflict with what your partner wants or needs.
The advantages FAR OUTWAY the disadvantages in my oppinion. I've been "love" married for 13 years and we have had good and bad times. I wouldn't turn back!! no way.
