Freakonomics Radio - 155. Why Marry? (Part 1)

Episode Date: February 13, 2014

The myths of modern marriage.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Marriage, or as it's sometimes called, marriage, is what brings us together today. It is an institution unlike any other in human history. One could imagine there are countless reasons why two people would marry. So we asked some people in New York City, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and San Francisco why they got married or why they want to get married. We got married because we love each other. To have a family, to probably continue with the tradition. It's great. It's liberating. There's a whole world out there that unmarried people

don't realize. To experience life well. To be happy. Being part of a community, part of a household, part of a marriage. I think it's just the right thing to do. I was 17 when I got married. I didn't know any better. I think it was what I was supposed to do. Thankfully, I haven't regretted it yet. In India, it is a social thing to get married.

I'm Catholic, so tradition is a big part of our lives. I guess I don't really see why I wouldn't get married. It was the right thing to do to raise a family, I thought. Finances is a big part of it, especially living in a tri-state area because it's so expensive. His visa was expiring, and so it was either pay for him to go out of the country to get a new visa, or we could get married and have a party. We were in love, and then she got pregnant, and it seemed like the right thing to do. She was a Lithuanian girl. Not exactly green card, but it was a decision I had to make up my mind pretty quick.

We came from broken families, so we were sort of determined not to repeat the same mistakes both our parents made. She's a surfer chick from L.A., and I liked her. We just finally decided it was easier to conform. Uh, why should I marry? Yikes. That's something my mom asked me all the time from WNYC this is Freakonomics Radio

the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything here's your host Stephen Dupner. On today's program, we're talking about an institution that Americans in particular love. Americans love marriage. That's Justin Wolfers. He's an economist at the University of Michigan and the Brookings Institution. Wolfers says that Americans, especially when you compare them to Canadians, the French, the Germans, the Italians, the British, and the Swedes, especially the Swedes, compared to all of them, Wolfers says, Americans, they marry earlier, they marry more often, and more of them get married.

So does this mean that marriage is more popular than ever in the United States? It most definitely does not. We'll get into that later. For now, let me note that Wolfer's himself is importantly not married, technically at least. It could be my essential Australian-ness. I mean, there is actually, quite seriously, in many other countries, there is a competing institution to marriage, cohabitation. And it's a huge competitor to marriage in countries like Sweden, and increasingly in Australia as well.

Many of my high school friends are not formally married, but they live as husband and wife. So Wolfer's, an Australian who's lived for many years in the US, is one of those cohabitors with children. The person he cohabits with happens to also be an economist, Betsy Stevenson, who's currently serving on President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors. So I met Betsy while I was in graduate school. You know, it's a very standard thing that happens in economics.

You see the cute girl across the room at the labor economics seminar. That's how many great relationships form. Just the way they draw it up in all the great romantic novels. Exactly. And later that week was Halloween. There was a Halloween party. So I brought a six-pack of Newcastle Brown, which at the time took a big chunk of my student budget. And this rather brazen lass came and took one of them and struck up a conversation.

And I knew she was an economist, which sets anyone's blood racing straight away. Yes. And what was it like for you as the with some other lass who would have a very different paycheck. So this choice pays off. So you're a total mercenary. You just sold yourself to the highest bidder, essentially, it sounds like, Justin. We all do, Stephen. It's just whether we admit it and the currency in which we count it. Now, I know that you're not not serious, but I also know that you were thinking beyond the amount that she would contribute financially to your household bottom line. Right.

What was it? I thought she'd be fascinating. Okay. What did you love about her? This is a family show, isn't it, Stephen? It's okay. We have a great bleep button here. Going to graduate school in economics is an incredibly intense experience. I know that sounds strange to say, but it's a transformational, intense, intense experience. And I had someone who I could share it with, who understood what I was going through, who had great notes, by the way, that I could study from.

And we could talk about our passions. Ah, they could talk about their passions. This, according to Wolfers, is one of the big changes in marriage. Think about all the reasons that people have historically married. Out of love, sure, but also in order to have children together, in order to have sex together. People marry to fulfill a religious impulse or a traditional impulse, maybe a financial impulse. So here's the story I tell. And actually, I should say we tell. My partner and co-author, Betty Stevenson, I tell. There was a model of marriage that we all believed in in the 1950s.

We saw it on Leave It to Beaver. Oh, it's sort of traditional, I guess. You know, they say a woman's place is in the home, and I suppose as long as she's in the home, she might as well be in the kitchen. This was the style of marriage that Gary Becker first described. The idea of marriage is sort of like a factory. And the point is you get married because you can do more together than you can apart. And it's just like Adam Smith's pin factory. The way you do more together is by specializing.

And the specialization was dad would go and work in the market and mom would stay at home and do the enormously complex part of running a household. And she would be really, really good at it because she's got a lot of practice. She'd be much better at it than dad. And as a result, the pie is bigger for both of them. So marriage is productive and it makes mom and dad both better off. So marriage used to create, in economist speak, productive complementarities. This meant that a man, the CEO of the household, wanted a spouse who could do the things he didn't do, most of which involved running the household. But as we all know, a lot has changed in the past few decades, especially for women. Better birth control, more labor-saving devices in the home,

and a lot more work outside the home. So the share of married women who are employed has risen from 6% in 1900 to 30% in 1960 to nearly 70% today. We've moved to what economists would call consumption complementarities. We have more time, more money, and so you want to spend it with someone that you'll enjoy. So someone with similar interests and passions. We call this the model of hedonic marriage, but really it's a lot more familiar than that. This is just economists giving a jargon name to love. So you want someone actually who's remarkably similar to you or has similar passions that you do. So it fundamentally changes who marries who, but that's not the only change it produces. And so then the question is,

why does anyone get married anymore if these productive complementarities have gone away? Yes, that is the question. Why do we still get married? We live in a country where people don't want to be locked into a two-year cell phone contract. So why opt for a 30 or 40 or 50-year monogamous partnership? Now, one reason is a belief that marriage makes us happy. We hear that a lot, that married people are on average happier than the non-marrieds. Is that true? Most people get this wrong. It turns out at any point in time, the people who are married are happier than the people that are not married. People then infer from that, oh boy, marriage must make you happy. But the alternative explanation is reverse causation.

If you're grumpy, who the hell wants to marry? And so this is selection effects. I think this is really important because selection effects that people who are married are selected. They're not a random group of the population is something that economists and statisticians talk about all the time. And so it seems to me to be completely obvious that the grumpy, the hard to employ, the selfish would all be far less likely to be marriageable and therefore less likely to be married than others. And we actually see that married people look better on almost every dimension, life expectancy as well, they're healthier than non-married people. But I think almost all of that is because spouses are looking for happy, healthy, functional people. Okay, that makes sense. Happy, healthy, functional people are more likely to get married,

which makes it seem as if marriage itself is responsible when maybe it's not. But if all these happy, healthy, functional people are marrying each other, why is the divorce rate so high? For years, we've all heard that half of all marriages end in divorce. Is that true? Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, we find out. I cannot tell you, there's not a week goes by when I don't read in the major newspaper

that in a period of rising divorce, we've got to do something. And how is marriage doing overall? I wouldn't say that marriage is still the institution that it once was. Marriage is a big commitment. It's comfortable. You enjoy being with that one person and you don't have to worry about a date. I would love to get married. I think it's kind of ridiculous sometimes. I feel like I should get married. I don't think I should get married. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. On today's show, we're talking about marriage, and we are asking, with so many changes to

society over the past century or so, why people still marry. After all, we've heard for years that half of all marriages end in divorce. With the divorce rate as it currently is, like, so high. I'm divorced. And do I want to get married again? No. I think divorce is really scary, and with how common it is these days. So is it true that divorce is so frightfully common today? False.

In fact, almost everything you hear about divorce is false. That's the economist Justin Walters. I cannot tell you, there's not a week goes by when I don't read in the major newspaper that in a period of rising divorce, we've got to do something. Guess what? Divorce has been falling for 30 years. Reached a peak in either 1979 or 1981, depending on how you want to count. And it's fallen each and every year since. We live in a period of more stable divorces than our parents. That's right. The rate of divorce is lower in the US today than it's been since 1970.

Now, why is that? So the great and terrible thing for social scientists is the overwhelming fact is divorce rose sharply through the late 60s and early 70s. Guess what? A lot of other stuff changed through the late 60s and early 70s. And that means every social scientist just picks their favorite ill and says it's due to that. It's due to feminism, it's due to women in the workplace, it's due to declining masculinity, TV, crime, the loss of conservative social values, changing laws, ABBA music. It's ABBA's fault. So Justin Wolfers doesn't really have an answer for why divorce rose so much in the 1960s and 70s, but he does think he knows why it's fallen since then.

I think the primary driver of the lower divorce rate is my generation partnered with people with whom they had shared interests and passions. So they partner with the right people for the style of marriage they end up living in. So it's not just that we love our partners, but we actually chose a partner who was compatible with the way we're actually going to live our lives. It was my mother's generation who got stuck with, they bought the wrong partner, then life turned out different. Pardon my interruption and my personal question, but shall I assume then that your parents got divorced? My parents got divorced. My parents are a part of the spike in divorce. And that's because your mother was married in an era where her opportunities were just emerging, but they hadn't been evident to her at the time of her choice. Or maybe they wouldn't have been socially acceptable even at the time of her choice.

She thought she would be a homemaker or maybe a teacher sometimes. My mother is now an entrepreneur. That sounds like an unmitigated victory, right? But it's not that simple, depending on what set of numbers you're talking about. If you look at the rate of divorce per 1,000 people in the U.S., that has fallen about 33 percent since 1979. If, however, you look at the divorce rate per 1,000 married couples, it's fallen substantially less, about 27 percent. Now, what does that mean? Here's Claudia Golden, an economist at Harvard. Marriage, let's face it, is on the decline in many different ways. It's true.

Even in marriage-loving America, the marriage rate today is at an all-time low. So in 1960, two-thirds of all Americans 15 and older, yes, 15 and older, that's how it's measured, were married, 67.6%. By 1990, that number had fallen to 58.7%, and now it's around 50%. Claudia Golden tells us there are at least two big changes that account for this. In the U.S., one group of individuals who eventually marry, marry late. The current median age of first marriage has never been higher. It's 27 for women and 29 for men. Now, compare that to the 1950s when it was 20 for women and 22 for men.

Now, that's very good because we know from lots of different work that later marriages causally reduce the probability of divorce. So this helps explain not only the lower marriage numbers, but also the lower divorce numbers. But that's not all. One group is not marrying. There's the lower educated, lower income Americans are not marrying for lots of different reasons.

So I wouldn't say that marriage is still the institution it once was, what does that mean? How does this affect the rest of society? That is the question we will try to answer on next week's episode, which is part two of Why Marry? Turns out we are not the only ones who are asking that question. It doesn't make sense, the whole institution of marriage. I prefer to being single and free. I think finding a partner is damn hard. Why people get married? I have no idea. And a lot of people asking me why I'm not getting married, you beautiful and this and that, it doesn't work with me.

In next week's show, we'll bring in a new cast of characters to look at some of the consequences of the marriage drug. In just six years, half of every kindergarten class in this country is going to be the children of single moms. And if the old model of marriage is less attractive, how about a new model? What you're describing is a move away from a one-size-fits-all contract that's written by the church to a couple sitting down and writing their own contract. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalski, Greta Cohn,

Beret Lam, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more. So should I do it full out? Okay, ready? Knowledge. Knowledge.

Knowledge. Knowledge. Knowledge. Knowledge is what brings us together today. That was good.