155. Why Marry? (Part 1)

The myths of modern marriage.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:28Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:56Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Marriage, or as it's sometimes called, Marriage. is what brings us together today.

• 2:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  We got married because we love each other.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  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 things to do.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  I was 17 when I got married. I did no any better. I think it was what I was supposed to do. Thankfully, I haven't regretted yet.

• 3:38Speaker 05

  In India, it is a social thing to get married. I'm Catholic, so tradition is a big part of our lives.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  I guess I don't really see why I wouldn't get married.

• 3:47Speaker 06

  It was the right thing to do to raise a family, I thought.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Finances is a big part of it, especially living in a trusty area because it's so expensive.

• 3:57Speaker 07

  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.

• 4:06Speaker 08

  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 on my own pretty quick.

• 4:16Speaker 09

  We came from broken families, so we were sort of determined not to repeat the same mistakes both our parents made.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  She was a surfer chick from LA, and I liked her.

• 4:24Speaker 09

  We just finally decided it was easier to conform.

• 4:27Speaker 10

  Uh, why should I marry? Yikes. That's what my mom asked me all the time.

• 4:46Speaker 11

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  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...

• 5:34Speaker 12

  They marry earlier, they marry more often, and more of them get married.

• 5:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 know that Wolfers himself is importantly not married, technically at least.

• 5:56Speaker 12

  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.

• 6:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Wolfers, an Australian who's lived for many years in the US, is one of those cohabiters 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 Advisers.

• 6:32Speaker 12

  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 Labour economics seminar. It's how many great relationships form.

• 6:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just the way they draw it up in all the great romantic novels.

• 6:47Speaker 12

  Yep, 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.

• 7:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yes. And what was it like for you as the man in the modern era to be courting a woman who you knew would be at least your equal professionally?

• 7:26Speaker 12

  Yeah. Boy, it's the smartest thing I ever did. Because I get to see Betsy's paycheck every couple of weeks. And I could have had a 1950s partnership with some other lass who would have a very different paycheck. So this choice pays off.

• 7:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're a total mercenary. You just sold yourself to the highest bidder, essentially, it sounds like, Justin.

• 7:50Speaker 12

  We all do, Stephen. It's just whether we admit it and the currency in which we count it.

• 7:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 8:06Speaker 12

  Right.

• 8:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  What was it?

• 8:08Speaker 12

  I thought she'd be fascinating.

• 8:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. What did you love about her?

• 8:11Speaker 12

  This is a family show, isn't it, Stephen?

• 8:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's okay. We have a great bleep button here.

• 8:18Speaker 12

  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.

• 8:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 married to fulfill a religious impulse, or a traditional impulse, maybe a financial impulse.

• 9:12Speaker 12

  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.

• 9:26Speaker 13

  Well, 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.

• 9:37Speaker 12

  This was the style of marriage that Gary Becker first described. It's this idea of marriage as 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 Mum 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 Mum and Dad both better off.

• 10:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 10:49Speaker 12

  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.

• 11:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  But that's not the only change it produces.

• 11:16Speaker 12

  And so then the question is, why does anyone get married anymore if these productive complementarities have gone away?

• 11:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 cellphone 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?

• 11:51Speaker 12

  Most people get this wrong.

• 11:55Speaker 12

  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?

• 12:12Speaker 12

  And so this is selection effects. I think this is really important because, you know, 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.

• 13:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, that makes sense. Happy, healthy, functional people are more likely to get married, which makes it seem as if marriage itself is responsible. Well, maybe it's not. But if all these happy, healthy, functional people are marrying each other, why is the divorce rate so high?

• 13:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  For years, we've all heard that half of all marriages end in divorce. Is that true?

• 13:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, we find out.

• 13:32Speaker 12

  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.

• 13:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how is marriage doing overall?

• 13:45Speaker 14

  I wouldn't say that marriage is still the institution that it once was.

• 13:55Speaker 15

  Marriage is, it's a big commitment.

• 13:58Speaker 16

  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.

• 14:08Speaker 10

  I, I feel like I should get married. I don't think I should get married.

• 14:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 15:29Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 16:09Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 16:35Speaker 11

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 16:46Stephen J. 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.

• 16:59Speaker 10

  With the divorce rate as it currently is, like, so high.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  So is it true that divorce is so frightfully common today?

• 17:19Speaker 12

  False. In fact, almost everything you hear about divorce is false.

• 17:25Speaker 12

  That's the economist Justin Wolfers. 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.

• 17:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's right. The rate of divorce is lower in the US today than it's been since 1970. Now, why is that?

• 17:58Speaker 12

  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? 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.

• 18:27Speaker 12

  It's Amish fault.

• 18:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 18:47Speaker 12

  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 partnered 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.

• 19:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Pardon my interruption and my personal question, but shall I assume then that your parents got divorced?

• 19:18Speaker 12

  My parents got divorced. My parents are a part of the spike in divorce.

• 19:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 19:34Speaker 12

  She thought she would be a homemaker or maybe a teacher sometimes. My mother is now an entrepreneur.

• 19:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  So when you hear that the divorce rate is lower today than it's been since 1970, 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 US, that has fallen about 33% since 1979. If, however, you look at the divorce rate per 1,000 married couples, it's fallen substantially less, about 27%. Now, what does that mean? Here's Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard.

• 20:25Speaker 14

  Marriage, let's face it, is on the decline in many different ways.

• 20:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's true. Even in marriage-loving America, the marriage rate today is at an all-time low. So in 1960, 2/3 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 Goldin tells us there are at least two big changes that account for this.

• 21:00Speaker 14

  In the US, one group of individuals who eventually marry, marry late.

• 21:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 21:18Speaker 14

  Now, that's very good, because we know from lots of different work that later marriages causally reduce the probability of divorce.

• 21:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  So this helps explain not only the lower marriage numbers, but also the lower divorce numbers. But that's not all.

• 21:35Speaker 14

  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 that it once was.

• 22:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if marriage is not 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.

• 22:26Speaker 17

  I prefer it being single and free. I think finding a partner is damn hard.

• 22:32Speaker 05

  Why people get married? I have no idea.

• 22:35Speaker 17

  And a lot of people asking me why I'm not getting married. You're beautiful, and this and that. It doesn't work with me.

• 22:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  In next week's show, we'll bring in a new cast of characters to look at some of the consequences of the marriage drop.

• 22:53Speaker 18

  In just six years, half of every kindergarten class in this country is going to be the children of single moms.

• 22:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  And if the old model of marriage is less attractive, how about a new model?

• 23:05Speaker 12

  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.

• 23:19Speaker 11

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• 23:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  So should I do it full out? OK, ready?

• 23:50Speaker 19

  Marriage.

• 23:54Speaker 19

  Marriage. Marriage. Marriage. Marriage is what brings us together today.

• 24:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, that was good.

• 24:10Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 24:54Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 25:37Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 25:51Speaker 20

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