Robert J. Stonebraker, Winthrop University
The Joy of
Economics: Making Sense out of Life
Robert J. Stonebraker, Winthrop
University
The Untied Knot: Marriage on the Skids
Love and marriage, love and marriage,
Go
together like a horse and carriage.
....songwriter Sammy Cahn
Is that right? Could the classic song be correct? Yes and no. When Frank Sinatra crooned "Love and Marriage" back in the 1950s, the analogy was apt. But times have changed. Love still blooms, but fewer couples are saying "I do," and many who tie the knot quickly backpedal and cut loose when the honeymoon limo hits a pothole. Check the table below: the percentage of Americans has been falling for many years.1
U.S. Population: Age 18 and over
Year % married % never married % widowed % divorced
1970 71.7% 16.2% 8.9% 3.2%
1980 65.5% 20.3 8.0 6.2
1990 61.9% 22.2 7.6 8.3
2000 59.5% 23.9 6.8 9.8
2006 58.1% 25.2 6.3 10.4
Part of the trend results from couples postponing marriage until a later age -- often because of increased years of schooling. However, the percentage of people married in every age group has taken a dive (see the next table).2
Percentage of U.S. Population Married (by Age)
Age 1970 2006
15-19 7.6% 1.8%
20-24 62.5% 17.7%
25-34 89.7% 54.7%
35-44 86.9% 68.7%
45-54 84.5% 70.3%
55-64 82.6% 71.5%
65 and older 61.0% 58.5%
What is happening? Is it a decline in family values? Moral turpitude? No. You can't get off that easily. I have two more pages to go in this reading. Such exhortations may suffice for election-year sound bites, but they don't cut the scientific mustard. Changes in marital patterns cannot be explained by hushed references to some media catchphrase. Economists demand substance.
What does economics have to do with love and marriage? Plenty. Economics explains everything. It is not just about trade deficits, taxes and unemployment rates. It's about choices, all kinds of choices. The same logic used to set wages and prices can be applied to decisions about marriage and divorce.3
Costs and benefits
It's all costs and benefits. Every decision we make involves an implicit comparison of costs and benefits. If expected benefits exceed costs we act; if not, we don't. That innocuous statement has powerful implications. If people make decisions on the basis of costs and benefits, it follows that behaviors change only when their costs and benefits change. In other words, changes in marital patterns must be driven by changes in the underlying costs and benefits of marriage. Two significant changes have occurred, and both have had the same impact; both have cut the willingness of women to marry.
The first change has been women's increasing success in the labor market. The ability of women to earn competitive wages has fundamentally altered the costs and benefits of marriage, especially from the women's perspective. With the potential for successful careers, women need not depend on male partners for economic security. If women can earn their own way in the market, they consider marriage as less beneficial and more costly. When women had no lucrative prospects outside of marriage, the opportunity cost or sacrifice in assuming traditional housewife roles was minimal. With few other options available, women looked to marry. But when career opportunities emerged, many women chose to embrace them. The marriage market was transformed.
The marriage market? Sure. If a Florida frost drives down the supply of oranges, we know we'll see fewer oranges on the shelves and a higher price tag slapped on those that remain. Marriage markets work the same way. When attractive alternatives to marriage evolve for women, the supply of women to the marriage market drops. This lowers the quantity of women available for men to purchase and raises the market price.
Purchase? Prices? Yes. When women face increasingly attractive job opportunities, men must bid more -- up the ante -- if they want women to choose them over these alternatives. Of course, the price is rarely explicit. Very few men shop for wives as they shop for oranges. Women seldom are arrayed on grocery store shelves in quite the same way as fruit. When last I checked, not even Wal-Mart listed a spouse selection aisle.
Nonetheless, implicit prices do rise. Men must now accept wives whose ambitions reach beyond the front yard, wives who expect their spouses to share in activities from peeling onions to scouring toilets. To most men, for better or for worse, such change is costly.
Are you ready to see the graph? Do I care?
The increase in job opportunities has shifted the supply curve of wives to the left (from S0 to S1) causing a drop in the equilibrium quantity of wives from Q0 to Q1 and an increase in the equilibrium price from P0 to P1.
Economic logic would predict that changes in the percentage of women who marry should mirror changes in the ratio of female-to-male wages. The more that women can earn relative to men, the less likely they should be to marry. And that is exactly what we find. As this ratio has risen over time, the percent of women marrying has fallen. Simple economics. This also can shed light on racial differences. Because the female-to-male wage ratio is higher for African-Americans than for whites, the economic model successfully predicts that white women are more likely to marry than are African-American women.
The availability of better contraception and abortion have magnified this effect. According to rumor, sexual relationships can be enjoyable for women and men alike; even if they are unmarried. But sex also carries the risk of an unwanted pregnancy, a cost disproportionately paid by women. An unmarried male partner easily can walk away from such a pregnancy; an unmarried woman cannot. Not surprisingly, since women bear more of the cost of unmarried sex, women traditionally have been more reluctant to engage in such practices. At least in the past, no marriage often meant no sex.4
The introduction of birth control pills in the 1960s launched women into a new world. By providing a safe, reliable, and convenient method of avoiding unwanted pregnancy, women suddenly could participate in unmarried sex with little risk of pregnancy. The pill dramatically lowered the cost to women of unmarried sex. And, with the pleasures of sex more readily available without marriage, the willingness of women to supply their services as wives declined. In effect, the pill lowered the cost to women of waiting for marriage.
Shifting employment patterns
The plot thickens. Why have job opportunities for women risen? Why has the female-to-male wage rate risen? Again, economists are not satisfied with arguments like "gender discrimination is falling." An economist will ask why this is happening now rather than in 1723 or in 2223. To an economist, gender discrimination is not likely to change without some underlying change in the costs and benefits of such discrimination.
Luckily, such changes are easy to find. First, the nature of work has changed. We have moved rapidly from an economy that depends on muscle power to one that depends upon brainpower. Men have a comparative biological advantage in muscle power, but not in brainpower. It is far less costly to exclude women from a "muscle-power" workplace than from a "brainpower" workplace.
Second, industrialization slashed the need for women to work within the home. In the not-so-distant past, in-home production of such staples as food and clothing were essential. However, as technological advances increased worker productivity and made factory-produced food and factory-produced clothing less and less expensive, traditional patterns changed. By the middle of the twentieth century it was becoming cheaper to buy such things in the marketplace than to produce them within the home. It became more profitable for women to enter the workplace and earn income to buy such commodities than to stay at home and produce them themselves.5
Better contraception has been a third factor.6 In the pre-birth-control-pill world, women faced costly obstacles in their quest of equal employment status. The threat of pregnancy meant that women often were less willing to build the needed human capital. Why invest in a grueling and lengthy education if an unexpected pregnancy might cut short their careers? Abstinence provided the only sure way to earn a long-term return from their educational efforts. Not surprisingly, few women thought of this as an attractive option.
But with the introduction of effective contraception, women became able to pursue professional careers without risk of pregnancy. In effect, the pill cut the cost to women of long-term career investments and increased their supply in the marketplace. The pill indirectly raised the demand for women in the market as well. Prior to the advent of the pill, those women who did invest in education faced a second barrier: employer discrimination. Employers were reluctant to hire and train young women who might become pregnant and leave the firm. However, with better contraception and less probability of unexpected pregnancies, employers became more willing to hire female applicants.
Interestingly, the same factors that make marriage less attractive to women make divorce more attractive. When the relative benefit of marriage falls, the relative costs of divorce also fall. Lucrative employment opportunities create attractive alternatives for single women; they also enable women trapped in unhappy relationships to escape more easily.
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Notes:
1. The data reported in the table are derived from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Table A1. Marital Status of People 15 Years and Over, by Age, Sex, Personal Earnings, Race, and Hispanic Origin: 2006, http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/cps2006/tabA1-all.csv
2. The 2006 raw data can be found at http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/cps2006/tabA1-all.csv. For 1970 raw data see http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/CT1970p1-02.pdf.
3. Much of this literature stems from the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker. The traditional reference is Becker, Gary, A Treatise on the Family, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1981.
4. Of course, pre-marital sex frequently did occur, but it often did so with an implicit promise of marriage should pregnancy result. See Moral Decay.
5. Miles, Carrie A., "A Testimony to Motherhood: LDS Response to Changing Women's Roles, 1940-2006," paper presented at the annual Meetings of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture, Portland, OR, October, 2006. Interestingly, this decreased need to produce items such as food and clothing within the home same trend led to the demise of home economics as a popular college major for women. See Stevenson, Betsey and Juston Wolfers, "Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces," Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2007, volume 21, number 2, p. 43.
6. See Goldin, Claudia and Katz, Lawrence F., "The power of the pill: contraceptives and women's career and marriage decisions," Journal of Political Economy, August 2002, volume 110, number 4, pp. 730-771.
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Testing Yourself
To test your understanding of the major concepts in this reading, try answering the following:
1. Explain why women’s willingness to supply themselves as wives has fallen in recent decades and illustrate with an appropriate graph.
2. Explain how and why women today charge higher “prices” in marriage than they did in the past.
3. Identify three different reasons for why job opportunities for women have risen over time in the U.S. and explain each.