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Knocked Up
This humorous and philosophical film -- strongly recommended -- also offers an implicit market failure argument: raising children is the main thing that goes on in a marriage, yet few of us choose life partners on that basis. The film suggests that a random allocation might be better than selecting a partner on the grounds of smarts, common interests, attractiveness, how good he or she makes us feel, and so on.
I can think of a few hypotheses:
1. Common interests in life are correlated with common philosophies of child-rearing, so all is well in the marriage market.
2. High-status men and attractive women are also best at raising children, so seek those sorts of partners in any case.
3. Forget what your utility function seems to be telling you, seek a partner who is willing to do all the dirty work when it comes to kids. Seek submission. This is worth way more than you at first think.
4. Common interests hinder effective child-rearing, since it means the partners have more to lose when children take over their lives. Opt for a low expectations marriage.
5. We should require prospective marriage partners to play sophisticated computer games, mimicking the familial struggles they will later face. In the limiting case, dating should be replaced by joint kid-raising sessions, using small and unruly robots if necessary (the film in fact portrays this).
6. Judith Harris was right, genes matter but not how you raise your kids. Marry whomever you want, following nature's dictates, and neglect the little buggers that result, it doesn't matter.
None of these hypotheses, in my view, replace the default option of simple market failure. And yes this is one of the biggest institutional failures in the entire world.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 2, 2007 at 10:14 AM in Film | Permalink
Comments
This post is probaly intended partly as a reductio ad absurdum of the view that the goverment should fix every market failure. I have to admit, it does make that point well.
Posted by: Johan at Jun 2, 2007 10:37:13 AM
I disagree that market failure is endemic in this area. The vast majority of children manage to grow up to be self-sufficient and law abiding. To me, those are the minimum benchmarks by which we should judge parents' performance: The kids aren't on welfare, and they're not in jial.
Posted by: Kevin B. O'Reilly at Jun 2, 2007 11:38:49 AM
great movie. and I agree with the film's insights, which you noted in your post.
the attitude that we only have one (or maybe a few out of millions) perfect partners creates angst in our society.
In college, I noticed that the most successful relationship started in a drunken one night stand.
Posted by: thehova at Jun 2, 2007 12:09:22 PM
Here's a question. Ebert and Roeper, when going over their top ten movies of the year, both wanted to put The 40-Year-Old Virgin in the top 10. I now can't remember if they did, but I seem to remember that they didn't, and they said it was because it's hard to call a comedy the best movie of the year. So, here's my question. If this movie is as incredible as people are saying (with Leslie Mann saying Hiegl deserves an Oscar for her performance), will it make top ten lists? And secondly, going back to Ebert's point about why it's hard for a comedy to be considered tops, why is that case? Why do comedies so rarely win Best Pitcure at the Academy Awards, for instance? Annie Hall won, but are there others?
Posted by: jason voorhees at Jun 2, 2007 1:42:51 PM
I don't think it's as problematic as you suggest. Happy parents make for happy families. There's a trade-off at the margin, of course, but there's little evidence to suggest that searching for a mate based on what you think will make you happy results in a non-optimal level of familial happiness or child-rearing success. There is some kernel of truth, as you suggest, in each of your hypotheses, but still no evidence that the strategy of "marry the person you like best who is willing to marry you" isn't optimal. Also, your point about Judith Harris is (I presume intentionally) overstated. That's not really the implication of her work. Nevertheless, her work (and others') does pretty clearly indicate that genes are an enormously significant factor in your offsprings' welfare, and thus, again, choosing the most satisfying partner may be key part of effective child rearing.
Posted by: geoff at Jun 2, 2007 2:05:03 PM
Some people claim that the movie has an anti-abortion message.
Posted by: Peter at Jun 2, 2007 2:49:58 PM
Could it be that extended family (including local community) was involved in raising children in the earlier times and it is becoming rarer now?
Posted by: gaddeswarup at Jun 2, 2007 2:55:53 PM
Judith Harris does leave one avenue where parents can have large effect on their kids (other than through genes): determining who their peers are.
Posted by: TGGP at Jun 2, 2007 3:13:49 PM
Peter - read Newsweek from a few weeks ago which had an interview with Seth Rogen. Neither Seth nor Judd Apator are anti-abortion. The absence of abortion as an option is apparently unexplained, but is justified as a plot contrivance. If there is the abortion option, then there is no movie and no crazy pregnancy hijinks.
Posted by: jason voorhees at Jun 2, 2007 4:10:59 PM
Isn't the relevant comparison here, arranged marriages (particularly among Indians) vs. those who have chosen to "modernize" and select partners on an individualistic basis? While there is certainly selection bias at work, I wonder how the offspring of modern American-Indians do vs. children of those who still allow the parents in the Old Country to find their mates for them?
Posted by: nvh at Jun 2, 2007 4:14:35 PM
You are going to have to live with this person, and hope not to be betrayed by them.
That's something to bear in mind.
Posted by: anon at Jun 2, 2007 4:45:19 PM
Harris's hypothesis is not that it doesn't matter, only a parent's effect is like an ArcTangent function. So you can create a psychopath or an insecure kid with enough neglect or meanness, but if you are decent, yeah, there's only so much you can do.
Posted by: eric at Jun 2, 2007 6:06:39 PM
Of course any market analysis would have to start off with the fact that having children is absurd. They drain you of huge sums of money, large chunks of your leisure time, drastically curtail your social life, fill you with angst of really unimagined proportions and strain your relationship with your spouse. There is no "rational" reason to have children.
With that out of the way, and as a parent of a 14 year old and having been a husband for 19 years, it is an utter and amazing crap shoot marrying somone with whom you will share child rearing duties. You can have the same basic political outlook, be equally religious/non religous, have similar degrees of education, like the same sort of life style, have many interests in common and even roughly agree about the manner in which children will be reared and you can still end up fighting like banshees over this little intruder in your lives. Raising our son has been the source of extraordinary conflict in my marriage on a virtually daily basis for as long as I can remember. You can fight about eating, TV viewing, homework, bed times, going out, schools, discipline, academic expectations, praise versus punishment and a number of other things that I've probably repressed.
I have no idea how you evaluate a prospective mate for these kinds of issues. The only thing that comes to mind is beware people who really sweat all of the small stuff in life, unless I guess, you are one of those people too. I feel utterly unqualified to offer advice beyond this. I guess you can think of it as an extremely interesting venture, "interesting" here being used in the same sense of the old Chinese curse.
Posted by: Klein's tiny left nut at Jun 2, 2007 6:24:52 PM
an implicit market failure argument: raising children is the main thing that goes on in a marriage, yet few of us choose life partners on that basis
Here's an analogous argument: eating nutritious food is the main thing that allows people to survive, and yet few of us choose what to eat on that basis.
I think that the response to both arguments is that a tremendous amount of what goes into our choice is built into the way we've evolved. Our taste buds, for example, can give a good indication whether something is edible or not, and whether it has lots of calories or not (more useful to our ancestors than now). Similarly, standards of beauty, awareness of social status, and so forth contribute to our evaluation of a potential mate.
Posted by: RSA at Jun 2, 2007 7:31:08 PM
"seek a partner who is willing to do all the dirty work when it comes to kids. Seek submission. This is worth way more than you at first think."
Jesus Tyler, your wife could read this.
Posted by: adrian at Jun 2, 2007 7:37:54 PM
Natasha is (sometimes) a loyal MR reader, but of course the claim you mention is one I disagree with.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Jun 2, 2007 8:52:36 PM
The 90% of the population that aren't high-achieving-attractives don't make good parents?
Posted by: ricpic at Jun 2, 2007 9:03:10 PM
As part of fairly high achieving couple, many days I question whether we are even competent parents.
Posted by: Klein's tiny left nut at Jun 2, 2007 10:00:05 PM
Maybe the solution is to marry someone who's already raising their kid(s) in a way you approve of.
Posted by: Nancy Lebovitz at Jun 2, 2007 10:01:15 PM
With ever-increasing life expectancies, one could expect to spend more of your marriage in the empty-nest and retirement periods. So maybe one should look for somebody that you will enjoy going on senior cruises with.
Posted by: Brett at Jun 2, 2007 10:23:13 PM
Maybe it's the same as a successful marriage. Find someone who's willing to work with you to make it work, who won't quit.
Posted by: ElamBend at Jun 2, 2007 11:14:50 PM
First wife is for raising childre, second much younger wife is for all the fun stuff.
Posted by: republican pol at Jun 3, 2007 12:01:32 AM
maybe i'm not the kind of person to answer this question. I'm in my early 20's, single, never had a really serious relationship. but here's my advice: marry someone who you think looks cute (not hot, that's trouble). everything else works out in the end.
Posted by: thehova at Jun 3, 2007 3:47:19 AM
"raising children is the main thing that goes on in a marriage, yet few of us choose life partners on that basis"
And for those of use who decide with our partners that we are not going to have children? (specifically for point #4)
Posted by: pwedza at Jun 3, 2007 3:51:51 AM
Shared values and culture seem pretty important with raising children and dividing up the work. This is easy to overlook when you're single or childless, but the more you both have the same set of default assumptions about who does what, how you'll handle school and discipline and safety and such, the less time you'll waste negotiating out an answer to those questions.
Posted by: albatross at Jun 3, 2007 10:02:39 AM
