Freakonomics Radio - 156. Why Marry? (Part 2)

Episode Date: February 20, 2014

The consequences of our low marriage rate -- and if the old model is less attractive, how about a new one?

In last week's episode, we learned that there are a lot of different reasons why people get married. We got married because we love each other. To have a family. To probably continue with the tradition. I'm Catholic, so tradition is a big part of our lives. In India, it is a social thing to get married. 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 just finally decided it was

easier to conform. And there are a lot of reasons why people don't get married. Marriage is a big commitment. It doesn't make sense, the whole institution of marriage. I prefer to be single than free. I think finding a partner is damn hard. Why people get married, I have no idea. And a lot of people ask me why I'm not getting married. You're beautiful and this and that. It doesn't work with me.

Which brings us to today's program, Why Marry? Part 2. In which we continue to bust the myths of modern marriage and, while we're at it, we come up with a whole new idea for what marriage could be. When I was young, I used to think that might be a cool thing to do, but I don't think it's such a good idea anymore. It's a little unromantic to me. Sounds a bit too contractual to me. That's hilarious. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio,

the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dupner. In our last episode, we heard from the University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers about how marriage today is fundamentally different than it was 50 or 60 years ago. It moved from a factory model with the husband as CEO and the wife as homemaker and with what economists call production complementarities to something else. 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. It also changed how many people marry. Here's the Harvard economist Claudia Golden.

Marriage, let's face it, is on the decline in many different ways. That's right. Even though marriage is still more popular in the U.S. than in many wealthy countries, our marriage rate is at an all-time low. Okay, so who's still getting married and who isn't? Ivory Toldson teaches counseling psychology at Howard University and is a research analyst at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. People who are less educated tend to be married less than people who are more educated. People who have higher incomes are more likely to be married than those who have lower incomes. And people in smaller cities are more likely to be married than people in larger cities. And that's true across all races.

So education and income are correlated with marriage rates, which may not be so surprising considering what Justin Wolfer has told us earlier. 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. Okay, what other traits affect marriage rates? Well, religion is still a driving force toward marriage. And as the U.S. grows less religious, that means less marriage. This may also explain why Western Europe has even lower marriage rates than ours. And what about immigrants to the U.S.?

First-generation immigrants are more likely to marry. They may be more religious or traditional than their U.S. counterparts. But those numbers dip dramatically for the second and third generations. One area where marriage is rising is among gay couples, not surprisingly, since same-sex marriage has only recently been allowed. Since 2004, there have been an estimated 71,000 same-sex marriages in the U.S., with many more expected. So not a huge number,

but an upsurge nonetheless. And what about marriage rates by race? Let's look at the breakdown for men. Roughly 59% of Asian men in the U.S. are married, followed by white men at 54%, Hispanic men at 45%, and black men at just 36 percent. That low number for black men is especially an issue for black women. I am Nina Bruce. I am a native Baltimorean, born and raised. Like Nina Bruce. I'm 32. I work for the government and I'm actively dating in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. People want to know why you're single, which is a crazy question because you can't answer that sometimes. And they want to know what you're doing about it. So I've done everything.

Be dating. I did a lock and key party. Match.com. I've done eHarmony. And, of course, friends love to set me up. Like, oh, I know the perfect person for you. Everybody knows the perfect person for you. We asked Bruce why she wants to get married.

For me, marriage is important for a couple reasons. I would love to have that bond with someone. I know that that is the core of why I want to get married. And also, economically, I want to have kids. And I don't want to have kids on my own. But she hasn't been having much success. background, but someone who A, wants to get married, who B, is able to get married or be in a relationship, a healthy relationship, whether it be financially, physically, or mentally, even spiritually. It's important to me to date within my race. I think there's a lot of pressure. I would be open to dating outside of my race, but I think there's a lot of pressure. I would be open to dating outside of my race, but I think there's a lot of pressure. Nina Bruce is worried about the availability of eligible Black men to marry. Ivory Toldson, the Howard scholar we heard from earlier, says that Black men are overrepresented in the categories associated with not being married, lower income, education, and living

in bigger cities. But Toldson also says that the ratio of available black men to women in the U.S. is not as skewed as most people think. So you have about 800,000 more black women with at least a bachelor's degree than there are black men. But there are more black men, about 300,000 more black men who have incomes above $75,000 than black women. Toldson analyzed data from Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Both of these cities are seen as, you know, kind of these meccas of progressive black people. And so there was a lot of talk about, you know, the ratio, you know, what is the ratio of black women to black men in these cities? And you typically hear things like 12 to 1, 15 to 1.

If you all went to either one of these cities and just asked someone randomly on the streets, you know, what's the ratio of black women to black men in the city? I guarantee you, unless they have read my research, they would say something above 10 to 1. You guarantee us? All right, we'll take you up on that. We asked a bunch of people in Atlanta how many marriageable black women there are for every black man. Ratio of black women to black men, I don't know.

I would say probably three to one. There's a lot of ladies in Atlanta. Twenty women for every one black guy. I would say around two to one. I found a lot of women here have gotten to the point where they've dated so many guys that they're like,

I've been flaked over so many times. It wouldn't hurt to try dating a female. I think People's Guard is up. Incarceration, having a big factor in it as well, and maybe even, you know, people not being employed. Okay, and here's Ivory Toldson with the real answer. So the true ratio in both of these cities is 1.3 to 1. Then, of course, if you get into the educated population,

you'll see the ratio get even more skewed, and it goes up to about 1.8 to 1 in Atlanta and 1.5 to 1 in Washington, D.C. You know, if you're a young black woman and you want an educated black man, these corrected ratios may give you some comfort, but in real time, it still can be a challenge. successful Black men who are exposed to information like there's a 15 to 1 ratio in the city that you live in, they become less committal in relationships and more restrictive in what they believe they deserve. This is certainly not true of all. But, you know, we're just looking at the entire landscape and how a lot of this information could be misused, that there is a tendency for some men to exploit the data.

So as you can see, whenever you look at one big story about marriage, there are dozens of small ones lurking just beneath it. And yes, we have more of those stories coming up on Freakonomics Radio. If the marriage rate is so low, does that mean the birth rate is also low? 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 just isn't attractive anymore, how about a new one? 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. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

As we've been hearing today, marriage has many causes and, therefore, many consequences, which means that politicians will inevitably find something to say about it. Here's Marco Rubio, the Republican U.S. Senator from Florida. The greatest tool to lift people, to lift children and families from poverty, is one that decreases the probability of child poverty by 82%. But it isn't a government program. It's called marriage. Is marriage really a poverty-fighting tool? Probably not as much as Rubio says. Yes, higher income is correlated to a higher marriage rate.

But as Justin Wolfers told us earlier, a lot of the good things about married people are because of the people who choose to get married, not because of the marriage itself. That said, you can see why politicians care so much about marriage. For one thing, unmarried women are one of the most democratic voting constituency groups now in the country. That's Celinda Lake. She's a democratic pollster and strategist. She also co-wrote a book called What Women Really Want. She's also, in her own words, one of the political world's most avid whitewater rafters. It's very relaxing and really fun. And we often do it in Glacier National Park, which is my favorite.

Lake says that men who aren't married split their votes between parties, although they do lean Democrat. But unmarried women are almost a Democratic voting bloc. A diverse bloc, yes, of young and old, rich and poor. Right now, they make up about a quarter of the voters in the U.S., but they don't turn out like their married counterparts. We often talk, for example, about 22 million missing voters, 22 million unmarried women out there who don't vote. And so the question is, if they came in and when they come in,

they can really determine what happens. We could easily say that there are enough votes among unmarried women to easily determine which party would control the House and which party controls the Senate. Married women, meanwhile, are not nearly as monolithic, although there's a wrinkle to their voting patterns, too. We asked married men and married women, do you usually vote the same way as your spouse? And 73% of married men said confidently yes, and 49% of married women said yes. And I call that the sure honey factor. Celinda Lake has noticed one other marriage trend, really an unmarried trend, that is more dramatic than any of this. It's the number of unmarried women who are having kids.

In 1980, 18% of births were to unmarried women, and today it's 42%. I mean, that is a change within half of my lifetime. In just six years, half of every kindergarten class in this country is going to be the children of single moms. This inevitably has political consequences and economic consequences. Two-thirds of unmarried women say that there was some basic cost that they had in their families that they couldn't make ends meet in the last year, that they couldn't pay the bill compared to 40% of married mothers. So would these unmarried mothers necessarily be better off if they were married? To Celinda Lake, the answer is not so clear.

Does poverty produce being unmarried or does unmarried produce poverty? It's a bit of a circular phenomenon, but it is still very much true that poverty, the pressures of poverty, are producing more single families. There's a very provocative article that was written and said, what single moms need is not marriage, but more child care. In the immediate future, we just need a very, very different structuring of our social services. For instance? I think it's the question that hasn't been thought through very much at all. And I think that we don't have a legal structure, a societal structure, a political about marriage lead back to the same question.

Is it good for us? As an institution, does it make us happier, healthier, wealthier, more stable in all the ways that we deem important? The fact is that question is pretty hard to answer. The people who are more successful on all these levels are more likely to be married, but we can't say with any certainty whether marriage itself is responsible. But let's pretend for a minute that it is, that marriage, regardless of who the participants are, makes us better off. If that's the case, the downward trend in marriage is a bad thing, and it would be nice to reverse it. One barrier to marriage may be that it's such a big commitment, a permanent commitment, at least in theory. What if it weren't?

What if you could change the terms of a marriage? We went back to our marriage expert, Justin Wolfers. All right, Justin, one last question let me ask you. This episode came about in part because of an email we received from a listener who writes, let me, I'll read you one paragraph of his note. For about the last six years, he says, I've been developing a theory about how marriage should be legal social contracts. I feel that legal marriage, not marriage by the church,

should be treated more like employment agreements. These, quote, marriage contracts should bring with them a term that ranges from three to five years. The terms of the contract will be developed by both parties, but I feel that they should include things like expectation, key areas of responsibilities, and so on. He goes on a bit for why this is so. I'm just curious how you think an idea like that might work.

Would it defeat the very purpose that most people are seeking in a marriage? Would it enhance the strength of marriages that are good? Would it strengthen and release marriages that are bad? What do you think? So I think from an economist perspective, if 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, deciding what features are particularly important to them and what they want to promise to each other.

You're moving from offering one product on the shelf, traditional marriage, to many products on the shelf, traditional marriage and all these other variants that have to suit your lifestyle better. We usually think that increasing choice like that makes people better off. Now, Justin Wolfers and his partner, Betsy Stevenson, they did draw up a marriage contract. It spells out terms of their finances and inheritance, hospital visitation rates, issues related to their two kids. Is your contract with Betsy renewable or is it for the long run? Oh, that's the part I didn't actually address.

So your listener has a view that marriage contracts should be able to be rolled over in three to five years. Right. That's a part where as an economist, I think what he's suggesting is he's removing the freedom to contract over longer periods. And that's actually a terrible idea. So think about some of the most important decisions you make together as a couple. You want to go to business school and you want me to support you during that. You know, I'm willing to do that. But, you know, the payoff to me from doing that comes in 10 years' time.

So the only way we're going to be able to get to a place where I will support you through business school will be if I can write a 10-year contract. Basically, I think you want to let people write contracts of whatever duration it is that makes most sense to them. Now, we need to also be aware that people have psychological biases. My friends in behavioral economics are right about that, and sometimes we fail to understand the future well enough. So we want to write sophisticated contracts understanding our own limitations. But there's certainly a view that for things like supporting each other's careers

or the major investments we make through children, that we want to be able to make much, much longer commitments than just three to five years. On the other hand, if the problem with a failed marriage is that it failed, then a contracted marriage whose contract expires and is not renewed is not a failure. Would there not be an advantage to that? So this is trying to draw a distinction between not being renewed and being fired. Right. Essentially not being right. Exactly. I'm sure it's worth sitting down every few years and rather than just assuming the marriage is working out and continuing on, I'm sure it is worth sitting down and saying, is this employment relationship or is this marital relationship working out?

And if it's not, seeing whether there are ways to fix it. And if it's not working out, then separating. And so if the idea is that we need a forcing mechanism to actually have that conversation, I think that it's important to have that conversation. That's the sense in which I say I think you want to be aware of our own limitations. And if a listener seems to think one of our limitations is we never go back and revisit the choices we made, if that's true for you, then you should build in an annual review. Isn't that romantic? Yeah.

You all seem to think so too. No, I think that kind of ruins the commitment and the meaning behind it. I think that would be too much of an easy out for people. That's what cohabitating is for. No, I wouldn't want to do that. I like that we're kind of locked in. Having children changes everything about a marriage, and I think the kids need a little bit of stability.

You have to renew it every day, every moment of your life to maintain the true love. It would take emotion out of it. It would become a business deal. That's something like MBA, isn't it? So I mean maybe this contract thing could work. I don't know. I'd rather have that for friends, yes, but not for marriage. I told my husband last year, do you want a maid or do you want a lover? And he says, I want a lover. And I go, then we need to get a housekeeper. So I renegotiated a housekeeper last year. Hey, podcast listeners.

On next week's episode, the housing market in Japan is very different from the housing market in the U.S. Well, I don't know. It's hard to describe. Quite avant-garde, radical designs. Strange-looking, weird-looking. Of course, it's highly eye-catching. But it's not just how the houses look that's so different. It's how long they last.

The disposable homes of Japan. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. 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, with engineering help from Jim Briggs. 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.