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Very good sentences
...it's been a revelation and confirmation of an intuition: in some ways, gay men may benefit from marriage more than any other group.
That's Andrew Sullivan, responding to the spot-on Megan McArdle, who also believes that men benefit more from marriage than do women.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 18, 2008 at 02:56 PM in Education | Permalink
Comments
"gay men may benefit from marriage more than any other group"
compared to children of married vs non-married parents, i very much doubt that.
Posted by: Chris at Jul 18, 2008 3:50:20 PM
Of course we see this intuition of Ms. McArdle's played out in
real life, right? All these men going and desperately trying to get
married when they hit 30...Megan's blog is a favorite of mine so this is where I will
shut up and refrain from mocking any further...
Posted by: v at Jul 18, 2008 4:10:15 PM
Well, I guess that explains why a husband traditionally comes with a dowry; to make up for the loss of benefit...
Posted by: anomdebus at Jul 18, 2008 5:14:42 PM
That she named her blog "Asymmetrical Information" is telling.
Posted by: Jason Armstrong at Jul 18, 2008 10:13:58 PM
Y'all realize that you're doing exactly what my model predicts, right?
Posted by: Megan McArdle at Jul 19, 2008 7:53:51 AM
I'm told I should lose weight, wear a seat belt, eat more vegetables. If I comply, somebody else will surely benefit! Otherwise why would society expend so much energy trying to persuade me?
Who is behind this shadowy conspiracy? Stop the madness.
Posted by: at Jul 19, 2008 10:09:57 AM
Society, i.e. advertisers, the media, etc. tells you to eat worse and take risks (and get skinny, if you're a woman). That is the real "institution." And far and away that is who you listen to. But those nags you allude to *do* benefit. Insurance companies lower their risks by putting us all in seat belts and making us lose weight. As does the government covering the insurance gaps. As does your poor nagging wife, who gets more good earning years toward the end of your short(er) life.
Posted by: Joel Barnes at Jul 19, 2008 3:40:17 PM
Of course we see this intuition of Ms. McArdle's played out in
real life, right? All these men going and desperately trying to get
married when they hit 30...Megan's blog is a favorite of mine so this is where I will
shut up and refrain from mocking any further...
Megan's quite right about the marriage benefit. While the culture is full of stories of women desperately trying to snare men into commitment & marriage, and men trying to hold on to their happy-go-lucky bachelor lives, the strongly supports the view that marriage benefits men more than women on most dimensions. Even if you want to stick with stereotypes, consider your intuitions about the likelihood of a single vs a married man visiting the doctor to take care of a health issue, for instance.
Posted by: Kieran at Jul 19, 2008 10:31:22 PM
the strongly supports the view
This should of course read, "the wife strongly supports the view". No, wait. I mean the data. The data strongly supports the view ...
Posted by: Kieran at Jul 19, 2008 10:33:41 PM
I wish someone would explain to me why, in India, women must have a dowry to pay to the groom in order to get married, when it is the man who seems to gain so much from the marriage. He gains a household slave who will do all the cooking and cleaning, and raise his sons (and dutifully abort his daughters, as is too often the case).
Especially now that the gender balance has been tipped such that women in India are in short supply, and there's an overabundance (relatively) of men.
I cannot understand why Indian men don't have to pay women for the privilege of marrying them.
Posted by: Erik at Jul 20, 2008 1:16:12 AM
Isn't there another way to interpret the association between having kids and being less happy? Perhaps young couples who are very happy with their lives decide not to have kids, because they're already happy the way things are and don't want to rock the boat. On the other hand, people who feel less happy and fulfilled might be more likely to have children, in the hope that this will make them happier and give their lives more meaning.
I assume that these sorts of things were controlled for in the relevant studies (unfortunately, you can't do a randomized control trial for this sort of thing), but it seems equally plausible to me that the causation could go the other way. Couldn't happiness make you less likely to have children, rather than the other way around?
Posted by: Ari at Jul 21, 2008 2:38:13 AM
