Bryan Caplan says the marriage premium (pdf) - the well-established fact that married men tend to earn much more than single ones - is due in large part to causality. Being married, he says, causes men to earn more, rather than there being selection effects, whereby men who are attractive marriage prospects are also attractive to employers. Several things make me agree with him.
- Introspection. I strongly suspect that if I'd been married, I would have earned more. This is partly because a wife might have inspired me to overcome my distaste for job search, and partly because having someone to provide for would have caused me to move along the wage/job dissatisfaction indifference curve. It's also plausible that a wife can nag a man to get a job.
- The marriage premium is bigger for straight men than gays (pdf). This is not obviously consistent with selection effects; if it were the case that the same things that make a man attractive to an employer also make him marriageable, shouldn’t this effect be as powerful for gays as straights? It is, however, consistent with a causal effect. Having a wife frees a man from housework, thus allowing him to focus on his job, and gives him a chance of having children for whom he must provide.
- Top baseball players earn more if they are married. Again, this is inconsistent with selection effects; most such men are surely highly marriageable. But it is consistent with a causal role. Maybe employers discriminate in favour of married men, believing them to be more reliable. Or maybe a wife emboldens a man to take a more aggressive stance in wage bargaining.
- Even a study which favours the selection hypothesis finds that there's a causal effect at the lower part of the wage distribution.
However, on the other hand, something else leads me to favour the selection effect. It comes from happiness research. There's good evidence that married people, on average, are happier than singletons. However, Andrew Clark has shown that the effect on happiness of marriage fades away quite quickly. How can we reconcile these facts?
Simple. Happier people are more likely to be married; who wants to marry a miseryguts? Marriage doesn't cause happiness, but it selects for it.
And here's the thing. There's evidence (pdf) that happier people earn more (pdf) than less happy ones.
Perhaps, therefore, the positive link between marriage and wages (for men) isn't wholly causal, but reflects the fact that happiness increases both wages and marriage chances.
If all this sounds like an abstruse issue of labour economics, it shouldn't. There's an ideological undertow here. Bryan thinks that poverty (in the US) is due to individual bad behaviour, and so changing behaviour "get married!" is a route out of poverty. His interlocutors, however, disagree.
However, we must avoid the trap of motivated reasoning. The marriage premium is causal or not, whether you want it to be or not. I suspect that some of it is causal. But this doesn't mean I have to accept that poverty is simply due to individuals' failings.
"Having a wife frees a man from housework"
In my dreams.
Posted by: pablopatito | March 25, 2013 at 02:53 PM
Statistics suggest you're an exception:
http://www.ippr.org/press-releases/111/8831/eight-out-of-ten-married-women-do-more-housework-than-their-husbands
Posted by: chris | March 25, 2013 at 06:13 PM
Chris, I'd be interested to know if you have any thoughts about Gove's McCarthyism: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2298146/I-refuse-surrender-Marxist-teachers-hell-bent-destroying-schools-Education-Secretary-berates-new-enemies-promise-opposing-plans.html
Posted by: David | March 26, 2013 at 10:33 AM
Caplan *says*. He does not *argue*. He puts forward a lot of Bayes-as-football-club guff, and also says this:
After controlling for observables, do married and unmarried men really seem radically different? What unmeasured pre-existing traits of married men could conceivably lead them to earn 40% more than unmarried men?*
This is a case of Hemingway's corollary ("The very rich are different to you and I." "Yes, they have more money.") The "trait" is that they earn more, and earning more makes you more marriageable. I mean, the English language has the phrase "eligible bachelor" as a polite way of saying "rich". Jane Austen created an enduring life's work entirely based on this theme.
Caplan is a libertarian and therefore a bullshitter. Also, as an Austrianist he doesn't believe in evidence. The answer is not logic-chopping, it's horselaughing, that and (to be brutally frank) ideological policing.
Posted by: Alex | March 26, 2013 at 11:51 AM
There ain't nothing going on but the rent...
Posted by: Bruce | March 26, 2013 at 01:47 PM
I think there is probably a large causal effect from marriage to earnings. People really do seem to take marriage as a signal of being a serious person. (Why I don’t know.) I’ve been married 18 months and the difference in the way I’m treated is huge. Perhaps it’s because I’m fairly young and unprepossessing, but the ring has given me an instant gravitas bonus without me acting any differently.
If you’re standing somewhere you shouldn’t and a security guard tells you to bugger off, tell him ‘I’m waiting for my wife’. Next time say ‘I’m waiting for my girlfriend’. In the first case they’ll let you be; in the second you’ll be out on your ear.
Perhaps someone could do an experiment: how do interviewers rate an interviewee? There could be three groups of interviewees: (1) unmarried men, (2) married men and (3) unmarried men wearing a fake wedding ring. I’m sure both (2) and (3) would do better than (1). (Whether (2) would do better than (3) I’ve no idea.)
But it’s probably yet another economic relationship that falls apart as soon as you try to use it as a lever ("get married!"). If everyone starts wearing rings then it’ll not be able to signal anything.
Posted by: Steve | March 26, 2013 at 02:37 PM
Isn't Bryan Caplan the chap who cheerleads for mass immigration, because it makes the abolition of the welfare state more likely?
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/09/the_political_e_6.html
"Diversity undermines solidarity. People don't mind paying high taxes to support people "like them." But free money for "the other" leads to resentment and political pushback. If you're a social democrat, this implies a tragic trade-off between social justice for natives and social justice for potential immigrants. But if you're a libertarian, the opposite is true. The welfare state doesn't make open borders impossible. It's open borders that makes the eventual abolition of the welfare state imaginable."
Oh, and the privatisation of everything ?
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/09/ethnic_diversit.html
"The claim isn't that open borders will "destroy" solidarity or the welfare state, but merely that open borders will undermine both. And while free-marketers may well agree that some degree of solidarity is good, it's also hard for free-marketers to deny that current levels of solidarity are excessive. Solidarity stands in the way of free-market reforms in pensions, education, health care, taxation, agricultural policy, and much more."
Posted by: Laban | March 28, 2013 at 10:14 PM
wow nice post
Posted by: check it | March 29, 2013 at 10:27 AM
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Posted by: owl | April 16, 2013 at 03:40 PM