Category: Marriage

Left at either end

Rising sex ratios in Asia and other parts of the world have been getting a lot of attention lately. Or at lest, I see them a lot. The idea that men at all socioeconomic levels are being left behind in the marriage market as women become more scarce is one that promises to have effects on everything from gender-based violence to construction inefficiencies as time goes on.

While perhaps a smaller problem, it’s clear that there are women losing out in Asia, too, when it comes to the marriage market, though not for the same reason. As much as economist might love the concept of ceteris paribus, changes in the sex ratio aren’t the only changes sweeping the world. In cities in particular, as women become more highly educated than men and begin to close the wage gap, a culture of “marrying up” means those highly educated, paycheck-earning women are having a hard time finding wives.

I have no idea how many women this might actually be affecting, but I do think it poses interesting questions of social and economic mobility. Like, is the entire distribution of women shifting towards more education and higher incomes? Or is there only movement at the top? And if there’s only movement at the top, then does that mean men are reaching “lower” into the pool, to less and less educated women? Or are the education and income differentials relatively constant?

Counting, miscounting and counting again

The Census Bureau reduced the number of same-sex couples it counted in the 2010 decennial census. Originally, when numbers were released in August of last year, more than 900,000 couples were counted, but now there are only 646,000, which is a pretty big drop.

The Census Bureau claims that the distribution of same-sex couples has remained unchanged. It seems rather unlikely that the distribution remained unchanged. For this to be true, I think a few things would have had to happen. Since the problems in identifying couples had to do with identifying the sex of respondents,a uniform process of identifying sex would have to have been done over all recorded Census questionnaires. This part, particularly if computerized, is not that hard (in STATA-speak–replace gender=1 if firstname==”Patricia”, replace gender==0 if firstname==”Michael”, etc). But it also is necessary to have taken proportional numbers from each state or region, which seems like it would be difficult to maintain over such a large area as the US. For instance, if 5% of the same-sex couple households reported in August were in Colorado, then exactly 5% of that extra 30% would have to be misclassified Coloradans. And the same for every state. It just seems like regional differences in naming and willingness to self-report same-sex household status would be different enough over states and urban/rural to skew it somehow.

I know that the Census Bureau imputes a lot of values and also works very hard to be accurate in the face of a lot of problematic data, but for almost 30% of the sample to disappear and still have the same geographic distribution seems unlikely.

But maybe I’m not giving us or the Census Bureau enough credit.

Good for mothers or for others?

The NYTimes Economix blog published a post today on how measures of well-being for women throughout the world fail to take into account mothers. Ability to access higher education, higher echelons of management, salary parity, etc, are all measures of how well women are doing in relation to men, but doesn’t say much about how able women are to care for their children. We know that women who have children take more time off of work, are more vulnerable to poverty and unemployment and likely suffer decreased salaries over time as a result of their decisions to raise children. A ever more limited focus on social safety nets like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) makes them even more vulnerable.

Less than a week ago, the Times also published a piece lamenting the status of single people in the US. In particular, single people are not entitled to things like family leave and pay higher rates of insuranc.

So, who should we actually be worried about? Most likely the answer is that who worries us changes depending on what outcome we want to achieve. Both groups, mothers and single people, have a lot to contribute to society. Single people are more likely to be engaged in their communities, to volunteer and maintain social connections, contributing to a sense of community, perhaps, and mothers, well, they contribute their children. From an equity standpoint, it doesn’t make much sense to deny single people the benefits afforded to married people. And if we’re interested in overall climate for women, ignoring singleness in an analysis of economic well-being is (perhaps not quite) as deleterious as ignoring the plight of mothers. But perhaps that’s impetus for more clarity in our work and precision in our assessments. Measures of subjective analysis should identify the population that benefits, and if we’re going to include things like maternity leave, we should shoot for gender and marital status equality in those measures. Can father’s take time off after the addition of a child to the family (by birth or by adoption); can single people take time off to care for ailing siblings? I’m not necessarily advocating for equality within these sorts of things, just that if we’re going to ask the question of one group, we should ask it for all groups.

To market, to market

I often have to convince people that I what I do is actually economics. While most economists take it at face value, I find that many non-economists, i.e. most people in the world, find it odd that I would consider my process of analyzing investments in children and marriage markets and relationship quality economics. The reason, though not always expressly put, is that most people think economics is about money. An economist, they think, should talk about GDP or the stock market or inflation or the debt crisis.

Lots of economists do, and I do, too. Despite being a microeconomist, I have enough knowledge and background and read the news enough to talk at least somewhat intelligently about macroeconomic issues. Although, once a student asked me in an intermediate macro class to explain credit default swaps. I declined to answer due to time constraints, but really, there are better people who can answer that question than me. Just like there are better people than me to answer questions about why the stock market tanked again today.

But I’m getting off topic. I started reading the NYT this morning after a weekend in the mountains and stumbled upon the Magazine’s Modern Love column, about blogging exes, and another that seemed to call out for my own blog post, before I had even read it. I hadn’t gotten two paragraphs through it before this line appeared: “In short, there really is a marriage market in countries around the world, and economic principles apply to it.” The author, Robert H Frank, had spent the preceding paragraphs discussing dowries, implying that you actually need money to have a market.

Though Frank goes on to discuss how principles of supply and demand have shifted cultural expectations and allows for the existence of a market where money doesn’t change hands, the initial statement does something of a disservice to the field. Markets exist without money. Marriage markets certainly exist, both with and without money. His sentence could have been easily modified to say something about markets how they are popularly understood, or something. It’s semantics, I know, but semantics are important when you’re faced with reinforcing stereotypes. And for the people who don’t make it past that third graf, they perhaps stay with that idea that markets need money to function.

Regardless of the initial misstep, the rest of the piece suggests something rather extraordinary, but also astoundingly simple. While much of the cultural phenomena of later marriage, sex outside of marriage, women going back to work and getting more schooling have, at least in economics papers, been attributed to the introduction of reliable birth control and time-saving devices like the in-home washing machine, Frank suggests that, at least in the US, an oversupply of women in the baby boom generation “bent cultural norm towards men’s preferences.” That is to say that as men were scarce, society played to their more open sexual attitudes, leading to, in particular, more sex outside of marriage and perhaps the decline of marriage as an institution. It’s the war’s fault, essentially, that we’re promiscuous and we cheat and we divorce our spouses at a high rate.

He goes on to use the US, post-war example as a parallel to the much-hyped sex ratio imbalance in China right now. He cites a paper where the authors show that families with sons are spending more on conspicuous consumption goods, particularly housing, in order to display their wealth and better attract a wife for their son. The sudden oversupply of men in China (and other countries in Asia) means that men are changing their spending habits to appear more stable, more able to provide for a wife and children long-term.

The comparison doesn’t seem quite right to me, though. In particular, there is a tremendous waste of resources associated with building bigger homes (or homes that just look like they’re bigger) for the purpose of attracting a mate. For families who are building with money that is marginal, that might otherwise be saved for retirement, or a child’s education (the son they’re trying to marry off or a future generation), spending on house improvements, though necessary according to the authors, is not necessarily the best use of money, nor is it sufficient to find a wife. One could argue that delaying marriage is a waste of resources in terms of producing quantity of children as women spend their most fruitful childbearing years on other things, but I think we can agree that more education for women is not necessarily a bad thing. Even if you want to go that route and get into money spent on IVF for older women, etc, it’s not as overtly wasteful as building sham third stories.

But more importantly, in societies where decisions about marriage are often still made by a family elder (a patriarch?), the shift might not really be towards women’s preferences–the preferences of the scarce resource, as it may be–but preferences of women’s fathers, or both parents. In fact, it’s pretty thinly justified by evolutionary biology and even downright sexist to suggest that women are just in it for bigger houses. Then the comparison breaks down entirely. Supply and demand may be giving more influence to one group, but it’s not the underrepresented group, it’s the group that controls the scarce resource.

The idea that an oversupply of men would shift a world to be more accepting and respectful of women and girls and their wishes and desires is wonderful. The pull of a simple economic explanation (particularly one that is backed by another science, biology in this case) is strong, but likely missing much of the story. Evolutionary biology likely does play a role in cultural norms, but the preponderance of gender-based violence, bride-buying, trafficking of women, son preference, bride burning, etc should make us wary of explanations that rely on assumptions that women are suddenly powerful and influential due to being scarce without exploring their cultural roles in shaping their own lives.

Polygamy and Social Insurance

I’m currently reading Unnatural Selection, by Mara Hvistendahl, while I’m sitting here trying to tie up the loose ends on my thesis. Or at least, they were only loose ends before yesterday evening, when a small coding error (really, Erin, ‘<‘ instead of ‘>’) meant that I had written this great paper about why we don’t see any result when in fact there might be a really important result. Good work. It’s not like I had plans this weekend, anyway.

At any rate, losing myself in my dissertation means thinking a lot about ‘nontraditional’ unions and the evolving concept of the family, and reading Mara’s book means thinking a lot about all of the men that are going to spend their lives as bachelors in Asia. What I haven’t been thinking much about is the other end of the spectrum, polygamous marriages, which suddenly came up today. A good friend and PhD candidate at UCLA is working in Kenya right now as a field researcher and is occasionally sharing her thoughts on development and field work, etc. Having spent some time in that part of the world and always eager to read anything I can get my hands on, I keep close tabs on what she’s doing.

She posted recently about polygamous marriages and made a joke about how one episode of the TV show Big Love was the extent of her knowledge of polygamy in America. With the same-sex marriage becoming more and more part of our understanding of marriage, I’ve heard a few mutterings that polygamous marriage might be the next ban that is tackled. Ignoring for a moment the torrid history of polygamy in America and its association with forced marriage of children, it’s interesting to think about the value that additional help might afford. In a place with high rates of mortality for young men (from HIV, for instance), the ability to raise one’s children alongside another person, even that person is not a romantic partner and even once shared your romantic partner, seems much more palatable than knocking it out alone.

And, just to bring this full circle, Mara’s prologue starts with the story of her own youth, where two newly single women, Mara’s mother and a friend, banded together to raise their children. They weren’t co-wives or sister-wives, but it seemed to be an arrangement that worked. If you were in a polygamous marriage, you don’t even have search costs associated with finding someone to help you.

Same-sex marriage makes me better off

I laughed out loud a bit reading this article on how same-sex marriage is actually good for straight women. With only the title to guide me, all I could come up with in terms of expectations was that there would be some long rant about how if gay men can marry, maybe that will reduce the stigma associated with being gay which means that fewer gay men will marry straight women, or that women who had foregone marriage in solidarity would now be able to get married. Let’s say I was pleasantly surprised when the article rather took on equality within marriages as opposed to making some tenuous, crazy link (what was I thinking?!).

Key (first time I laughed out loud) quote:

As same-sex couples marry, things get better for us, too. Remember the scary (and since-discredited) stories about how a woman is more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband after she turns 40? Or the one about how suitors are fleeing from Maureen Dowd because they’re afraid of her Pulitzer Prize? The poll showing evangelical women in patriarchal marriages are happier than Sarah Jessica Parker? Well, same-sex marriage shows that people can make long-term, loving, sexual bonds with each other even where neither is naturally inclined to tell the other what to do.

It’s a cheeky way of putting it, of course, and I’m railing inside against the insinuation that women harp on their partners, but I like how the author takes a historical perspective on women’s rights within marriage. She starts with how marriage stripped a woman of civic personhood and describes various efforts to maintain women in that lesser role until it evolved to where we are today.

As an economist, of course, I think she skipped one of the most salient examples of justifying inequality in marriage. The man who is credited with essentially founding family economics, Gary Becker, argued, and rather convincingly, that gains from marriage, in an economic sense, at least, came from specialization. Men earned higher salaries in the market than women did, so men should work for pay in the market and women should stay at home. It’s a lesson in comparative advantage taken from trade theory (one of my least favorite lessons in teaching principles). If you’re relatively better at something than your partner, you should each specialize in one thing and then trade to maximize gains. This makes your feasible consumption higher than if you tried to do both kinds of work yourself. Interestingly, it doesn’t really matter if you’re technically better at both things, you can still gain by agreeing to specialize and trade. Becker’s work doesn’t rule out that women might actually be better at both market work and home work, but since men did (and still do) earn higher wages than women, they’re going to be relatively better at bringing home the bacon than doing laundry and cleaning.

The scary part is that at face value, it almost seems reasonable. It’s only in reading the work carefully that it smacks of machismo. Becker’s ideas echo (although his work precedes some of it) several other scholars (of sorts) and others mentioned in the article whose work was used to justify keeping women from working and at home, cooking, cleaning and raising the kids. A lot of scholarly work has, unwittingly or not, served the interests of those desiring to maintain unequal marriages.

So, will same-sex marriage make us all more equal? It’s an interesting hypothesis, and one that might even be testable, but I’m not sure we have all the information yet. Legalizing same-sex marriage doesn’t mean same-sex marriage ‘works’ in the sense the author is proposing and we certainly don’t have the same kind of happiness data on same-sex marriage, yet. It’s also problematic that our most recent census won’t count any of these people as married, but the next one will (all these problems again of how we define family). However, there is hope. The process of state-by-state legalization of same-sex marriage means that we have something of a natural experiment. Though not randomly assigned (although you might argue that Iowa’s same-sex marriage law was more random–put in place by the judiciary–than New York’s–put in place by the legislature), the different timing of these laws means that we can measure how other things change within the states. I imagine, as the data become fuller, that lots of papers will come out about how same-sex marriage influences gay ‘brain drain’, women’s wages, etc. It’s exciting to think about.

Changing a marriage paradigm

A few days ago, I mentioned the problem in the DRC of using rape as a weapon of war. Unfortunately, that weapon’s popularity only seems to be increasing, as my twitter feed overflows with news bites of 60 women raped in the DRC, 11 women raped in Sudan, etc.

In Syria, rape is being used as a weapon of war not only to wear down and instill fear in the masses, but also in the name of shame. In Syria, like in many Middle Eastern countries, women who are raped are thought to bring extreme shame upon their families, and are often murdered in ‘honor killings’ to restore the honor of the family.

A small group of men in Syria has publicly declared their intention to marry some of these rape victims in what I’m sure they see as resounding self-sacrifice to the cause of the revolution and a new Syria. I think it is laudable that men are leading the way to change a paradigm in Syria, but it’s also troubling that no one seems to have asked the women about their preferences.

Turning around the war on girls

A new book about the infamous “missing women” by Mara Hvistendahl is gathering quite a storm, at least if you look at it from the perspective the Wall St. Journal (subscription required, my apologies if you can’t read the article), twitter, and my inbox. Unfortunately, I cannot comment on the book itself yet, as I haven’t read it (don’t worry, I will!), but there is a lot of fodder provided by the book review’s author, Jonathan V. Last, and the literature in economics.

The question of missing girls as a result of sex-selection is not a new topic, by any means. Amartya Sen, a revered development economist and Nobel Prize winner, sounded the alarm more than 20 years ago now with an essay in the New York Times claiming that 100 million women were missing in the world, mostly in India and China, countries known to show strong son preference. He showed this by pointing out that while in the US and Europe, we see women outnumbering men, this does not hold true in much of the world. In fact, it’s quite the opposite, and the ratios are becoming worse. He doesn’t get much into the evolutionary science that guides the numbers, but he reminds us that boys outnumber girls at birth, but girls babies are more likely to survive, leaving countries like the US (where son preference is present, but perhaps not enough to encourage sex-selective abortion or infanticide) with a few extra women per one hundred men. Despite the fact that girls seem to be a bit hardier than boys, many developing countries–particularly in Asia and particularly those with a history of government-backed population reduction initiatives–are experiencing an outsize number of male births and an increasingly imbalanced sex ratio in older cohorts. Instead of a few extra men for every one hundred women, we start to see 110, 115 or more men for every one hundred women.

Emily Oster made waves and a career when she (erroneously, it seems) claimed that Hepatitis B, not sex-selective abortion, infanticide, femicide, or the systematic discrimination against girl children, was the root cause for much of the case of the missing women. (Note to budding PhD economists, write your job market paper on a really controversial topic). Women who had contracted Hepatitis B, the story went, were more likely to give birth to boys, thus skewing the ratio of boys to girls. Her arguments have been shown to be rife with problems in a number of papers and the question of missing girls remains a hot topic in economics. Last year, a colleague attended a conference in which her session was only for papers on “Sex-selective abortion in India.” For reference, most sessions at large conferences bring together diverse papers for sessions on “Topics in Education” or “Monetary Policy”. Rarely do we see four papers on the same subject.

Without reading Mara’s book, what’s interesting right now is that there should be natural economic consequences, right? A skewed sex imbalance means that women are suddenly a scarce resource and we should see that scarcity leads to higher prices in the market. Unfortunately, this does not always translate into desirable outcomes when we look at the big picture, and it does not necessarily mean that women are suddenly more valued (culturally), just more valuable (financially, opportunity-cost wise). In the marriage market, we might expect to see dowry payments dropping, or even reversed, where men are paying a bride price instead. We should see increased wage rates for work that women tend to do. The lack of women available to do “women’s work”, should push other individuals–either children, men or older women–into that work. Older women working is probably not sustainable. While putting more children to work is certainly not a desirable development goal, it might end up being the eventual outcome for communities with strong social norms against men doing women’s work. To some extent, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence of all these scenarios playing out in various communities.

An extreme sex imbalance also creates a serious problem with regard to who can get married and may even lead to increased violence. In the case that women now have more bargaining power in a relationship because they can earn more money, they are perhaps more likely to delay marriage. In the case where women don’t have more bargaining power and cultural norms dictate marrying them off anyway, we might see younger women getting married to older men (perhaps men who have gained enough standing to ‘earn’ one of the scarce wives), which reduces the pool of marriageable women for men of their age. Regardless of which scenario (or an alternate one) plays out, the lack of women entering the marriage market has the ability to create, in all these different ways, a group of young, directionless men who are more apt to engage in criminal, or merely unsavory, activities or take out their aggression on women.

One email I received concerning the book suggested that we should try to change cultural attitudes about the value of women in these societies. Perhaps, she suggested, we could provide cash payments to women who give birth to children or other incentives. It’s an interesting idea, but one that could easily backfire.

Before we can talk about incentivizing the birth of female children, we have to figure out whether the sex imbalance is hurting or helping women, whether it is hurting or helping societies and what exactly would happen to those girl babies if they were born. As for hurting or helping, I think the general consensus is that it’s hurting, but I don’t know that we know that much about the outcomes associated with sex imbalances, yet, and it may be different in different places. Sex imbalances are still, I believe, much more skewed in younger populations than older ones, so we’re still not seeing the full effect on the marriage and labor markets of the lack of brides and female workers. Even if they are in place, there’s certainly not a consensus on what they are.

If we’re going to pay people to have girls, that raises all sorts of policy issues. On the one hand, though perhaps unlikely, it does run the risk of tipping the imbalance in the other direction. It may be that we have to wait for cultural norms to play themselves out to see a natural increase in the value of girl babies as dowry payments decline. Alternatively , there is evidence that social norms marketing sorts of programs have indeed altered some social norms and could have an effect on the value of girls, which may be more useful than paying parents.

The saddest part of just paying parents to have the girl children is that we might see more infanticide and general neglect of girls. Much of sex-selective abortion has been shown to be a substitute for infanticide and neglect of girl babies. Though certainly not relevant in every case, this also not a situation in which we can restrict abortion in order to repopulate the world with women. Cultural norms and attitudes are what economists would call ‘sticky’ and how best to change them, if we even should change them (there’s another benevolent dictator argument to be had here), or let them run their course, is a complicated question. It’s certainly one for which we don’t have all the answers.

Sex for money is about more than the sex or the money

With Canada looking to decriminalize prostitution, and Sweden touting the success of its increased penalties for pimping and trafficking (the link’s a bit old now), it only makes sense, as economists, to ask why people would engage in transactional sex at all.

Psychologists and anthropologists, I’m sure, have plenty of their own answers. Economists, surely, could come up with a theory of prostitution (if they haven’t, I should get on that). Without too much effort, most people could name the most likely characteristics of women in the sex trade–low self-esteem, from families with a history of abuse, low educational attainment, etc. But there is also reason to ask why women would stay in the sex trade, which is actually a very different question than why do women enter the sex trade. At least one recent paper has explored the relationships between purveyors and consumers of transactional sex. They found, interestingly, that complex relationships form between the two parties, even to the point of providing extra income in times when sex workers couldn’t work or were experiencing a negative “shock”–i.e. illness, death of a family member or an STD outbreak.

The authors of the paper, which comes out of Busia, Kenya, a community rife with development economists testing their theories, found that transfers, or gifts of money, from regular customers increase by 67-71% on days around when a sex worker reported illness and 124% on days around death of friend or relative. In some sense, these regular customers are providing a form of insurance against negative shocks, or events that prevent them from working. The customers are still not providing full insurance for these shocks, meaning though they’re essentially gifting money to their favorite sex worker in order to make the burden of not working or of the extra expense less burdensome, they’re not making up a whole day’s pay, or covering the entire cost of a funeral.

But the question of whether sex workers are fully insured by their relationships with regular customers is less important than whether they are covering themselves better than they would be covered in other professions. Full insurance in poor communities and developing countries is unlikely to come by anyway, so it makes more sense to compare different insurance mechanisms. Here, economics actually does a pretty good job. We are good at comparing two situations in which only one small part of the equation is different (or rather, when we can assume that only one important part is different–if the other different bits are unimportant to the story, we don’t care that they are different, we assume that they do not affect our outcomes). So long as the average amount of the gift is more than the average amount of the transfer she would get had she not been in the sex trade, there is an incentive to enter or remain in the sex trade (the authors here don’t distinguish much between entering and remaining, though I think that’s an important topic for another day). The authors also show this difference to be quite large. Even if a transfer covers only 19% of the cost of a funeral–the average amount reported by the sex workers–that’s far more than zero. On the margin, at least, the incentive seems significant enough to induce women to enter the sex trade as the only arrangement with full insurance, or perhaps just more insurance, is likely marriage.