Resacralizing Marriage: The Covenant Option

Covenant marriage---presently an option in 3 states (Louisiana, Arkansas, and Arizona) is essentially marriage 1.0---marriage before no fault divorce.  Presently it's used by less than 2% of the population in each of the three states where it is authorized by law.

Since the overwhelming majority of divorces are initiated by women, and most of those aren't for the '3 A's', it follows that covenant marriage supports patriarchy and improves the position of the man within marriage.  For this reason even highly secular MRAs ought to get behind it.  In addition, because the popular narrative is so at odds with reality (husbands trading wives in on a newer model is actually pretty uncommon but it gets tremendous play in the narrative), it is quite feasible to get lots of feminist-leaning women to join as 'useful idiots'.

Here is a long term plan that would be useful.
Get more states to sign on to the plan.  Like the case with CCW, you can point to the existing states that have covenant marriage and have had it for quite a few years now and explain that 'look, the sky hasn't fallen there'.  Good places to start would be neighboring states like Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.  Sure most of your initiatives will fail but you generally only have to win once per state.  Seasons where there is a crowded ballot are pretty good too, because your enemies will generally have a lot more fish to fry.
The next step is to get several denominations to push covenant marriage hard in their congregations.  Perhaps they could even go to the extreme of only doing covenant marriage ceremonies in their churches.
This is what taking marriage seriously and resacralizing it means.
For a covenant to really be sacralized, it needs to be at least reasonably equitable to both sides.  Marriage 1.0 was equitable, and Covenant marriage basically IS 1.0, which is why the hardcore feminists are against it---they see it as turning back the clock on no-fault divorce.  They're quite correct, it is a flanking maneuver aimed at precisely that. 

Deciding Who To Free and Who To Blame?

To borrow from the departed Cash.

Suppose that in a nation, there were large numbers of partnerships that specialized in moving things.  These partnerships consisted of two partners, one specialized in moving the front, and the other in moving the rear of the objects in question.

Suppose further that on the order of 30-50% of these partnerships are highly dysfunctional, even to the extent of dissolving the partnership.
The front half-ers claim that the problem is the result of the back half-ers, that they aren't carrying their share of the load.  Of course the back half-ers claim precisely the opposite.

So who do you free, and who do you blame?  Or how do you apportion the criticism resulting from the massive wake of destruction they have left behind?

Well, from a status perspective, the answer is easy---you blame whoever will give you the most status points.
From a who---whom perspective, the answer is also easy---you blame whoever your Whom is and absolve your who.

But suppose you actually care about truth, believing that in this instance, a solution that sucks less in general is possible?

Well in that case, you're in a quandary---perhaps even a literal he said--she said.

But there's a way to resolve this.  You ask other furniture movers, ones without any dog in the fight---ideally...foreign furniture movers from cultures not highly alien to the one you are in these questions:
To the foreign front half-ers:  Hey, would you want to form a permanent partnership with a back half-er from this country?
To the foreign back half-ers:  Fancy a partnership with a front half-er from THAT country?

Even better than asking, you can just observe their revealed preference.  If you see that one group is much more desirable as a partner than the other, you have your answer, in proportion to the ratios observed.

The application of this parable to marriage in the US is left as an exercise to the reader.

Complementarian Versus Assortive Marriages

On a previous post in the comments, this little exchange occurred.

Steve Sailer May 18, 2012 1:35 AM


Thanks.
Along these lines, I was fascinated by a recent offhand comment by tech guy Jaron Lanier that nobody has yet written the history of the role of women in Silicon Valley. The impression I got was that very bright, very social ladies in Silicon Valley have introduced a lot of the extremely bright, not very social nerds at the core of successful start-ups to each other, the way salon hostesses in 18th Century France introduced so many of the philosophes to each other. But maybe that's the wrong impression ...


Jehu May 18, 2012 9:20 AM

Steve,

I agree that a lot of such men used to outsource an awful lot of their family social functioning to their wives. Are marriages of that sort (seriously complementary with heavy specialization) terribly common in Silicon Valley anymore?


This of course prompts me to wonder to what extent marriages have become less complementary than in the past.
First, let me explain what I mean.
When a man looks for a wife in the complementary model, he's looking for a wife that complements him in the sense that she covers his areas of relative weakness, making their partnership a more complete whole.  The classic example of this is the extremely social and extroverted wife who creates the social calendar for her introverted husband out of whole cloth.  Said wives are usually around 1 sigma lower in raw mental ability, but have far and away more social capability than their husbands  (read the term 'very' as typically being 2-3 sigma, and extremely as 4+ sigma, and you won't go very far wrong).
I'd say a majority of the wives I knew when I was growing up were of this type---these were baby boomer  and silent generation women.  There was even a conventional wisdom at the time---if you're introverted, get an extroverted wife, with the converse less frequently recommended for extroverts to pick an introverted wife.
 
Now though the model seems to be a lot more of an assortive one.  Your wife usually has a talent set not too terribly dissimilar to your own.  For instance, my wife and I are both INTJs, and we have several INTJ-INTJ couples as friends of ours.  Samson refers to this as 'Professional Class Incest' http://samsonsjawbone.wordpress.com/2010/10/30/professional-class-incest/
 
Whereas my father in law (an engineer) picked a gentle church secretary who studied drama in college as his wife, I went for another engineer.  His choice was pretty typical of his generation, and mine reasonably typical of my own.  Interestingly, we both have a complementary model for roles within marriage, with extremely similar divisions of labor and specialization, but his arrangement was far more common when he was my age than mine is presently.
 
Sailer is probably on target that the wives of engineers in Silicon Valley had a major role in lubricating a lot of the ad hoc companies that got started there in their early days.  Wives of Engineers, or WOE for short was in fact a support group near a university that I attended back in the 90s--although the group was mostly at least a half generation older than me, so they were mostly complementary rather than assortively selected wives.  Anyone want to bet that said support group networked on their husbands' behalf like crazy?  Were I a betting man, I'd wager that 3-4 handfuls of Major Professors were more influential than the WOE equivalent, but they're probably the only group with more weight.  Major professor networking is still extremely strong---I've both been helped and have helped to get jobs through my major professor's network.
 
Assortively-selected wives is a pretty massive social experiment when you think about it.  It would be a topic for some bona fide social science to investigate what sort of impact it has actually had.  Performed with an honest search for truth, it could probably even meet the 'Smart Redneck' gold standard of social science---which is to say that it could produce superior predictions and insight to the group I described in
http://www.chariotofreaction.blogspot.com/2012/05/of-smart-rednecks-and-low-church.html
I did consult a smart redneck friend of mine when deciding whether to offer marriage to my wife, and he considered it to be a good idea, but one datapoint hardly constitutes a consensus over the whole class of which he is an exemplar over the whole notion of assortive mating.
 

Retrospective on the Japanese Earthquake of 2011 and One Reason Why She is Wired to Test You Occasionally

I recall the day of the earthquake in Japan pretty vividly.  My wife and I and our two little ones were spending some vacation time in a little motel on the southern Oregon coast right up against the shore.  That night I recall reading on the web that there had been a massive earthquake in Japan and later, that the initial estimate of the magnitude of that earthquake had been upgraded to 9.0.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami

My wife had just given birth to our youngest a few months earlier, and we were still in the grey months of the year in the Pacific Northwest, so her morale was pretty low.  Note to the wise:  if you can, try to arrange it so that your wife can deliver her babies in the late Spring to early Summer, it seems to mitigate the baby blues quite a bit, especially if you live in a place with dark, rainy winters like Oregon.

Around 2 or 3 in the morning, a siren starting going off for a tsunami warning.  Apparently they travel across the Pacific pretty quickly.  My wife was really shaken, pulled out of REM sleep by sirens and loudspeakers.  In the parlance of wargames, we'd say that she'd failed a morale check and was shaken.  Therefore it was to me to gather up the little ones and our things and give her specific and simple commands as we executed a speedy evacuation from the waterfront.  One recommendation if you find yourself in such a situation:  give simple and specific orders to the shaken, you need to micromanage them quite a bit more when their morale is in that state.  As it was, we got downstairs with the little ones and packed into the minivan with everything I'd be terribly upset about losing in record time.  One other note:  little babies and toddlers can tell when one of their adults is shaken, and they tend to get really pliable---their instincts are pretty good.  A mile or two away from the scene and the constant sirens and my wife's morale returned to normal, and she was a bit embarassed about the matter.

So what does this have to do with her 'testing' you occasionally---referred to as 'shit tests' or 'fitness tests' in parts of this sphere?  What her hindbrain is looking for is assurance that, should the shit hit the fan, you will be able to exercise what we'll call emergency command authority.  Lots of women have been put to far scarier circumstances than this (as it turned out, the promised tidal wave never manifested at our motel room, although some did hit further south and caused significant damage), and her gut, if not her intellect, still understands such things.  She needs to be able to rely on you to keep your head when hers is temporarily impaired.

What is Cheap and What is Dear in the Marriage Market

Continuing the thread from my last post, let's discuss what will cost you serious 'currency' in the marriage marketplace and what will not.  Readers should be warned that there is some reductionism here as well as more than the usual dose of candor.

Whether this constitutes something akin to value investing depends greatly on what you, the reader, actually value (actually value, not say for public consumption that you value).  Since we're writing primarily for the benefit of the non-neurotypical male, we'll look at the marketplace from that perspective.  Readers with other perspectives will need to translate accordingly.

By far and away the most 'expensive' thing is her looks---as in, the approximate percentile where she falls relative to women her age when viewed from a male perspective.  This is what will cost you dearly.  The only thing even close to as pricey as this is her age relative to yours.  If you know these 2 things, you know probably 90% of her value in the marriage marketplace viewed by the average male participant.

The good thing for you is that if you followed my advice in previous posts, you've accepted enough first dates that you now have a pretty good idea just how desireable you are in the marketplace yourself.  My personal observation is that, when dealing with marriage-minded women (i.e., women who are consciously aware that they're in the marriage marketplace and not merely the sexual marketplace), women who are of similar marketplace value to you will actually tend to react the most favorably towards you.  It's actually NOT the women who are lower on that hierarchy than you that will usually do so---they'll avoid investing too much if they see you as nearly unobtainable.  Note also that the mere fact that you're 'interviewing' lots of applicants will improve your status in the whole process, and it'll probably also protect you from becoming overly committed too early.

Here are some things that will cost you a little---they're not free in the marriage marketplace but you might be interested in them.
Her grace in movement:  The classic example is the woman who did ballet when she was younger and probably still enjoys dance, yoga, or similar pursuits now.  This does command a bit of a premium in the marketplace.
Particular hair/eye/skin coloration combinations that some, but nowhere near all, guys have a minor fetish for:  e.g., blue eyes/blond hair, fair skin or red hair/green or blue eyes/fair skin with a few freckles
How pleasant and agreeable her disposition in general is and her overall level of mental stability:  This, IMO, is seriously undervalued.  I give it a strong buy regardless of who you are.

Here are some things that cost almost nothing---this is to say, a woman with them experiences only a trivial increase to her average value in the marriage market
Intelligence:  In general she ought to be within 2 sigmas of you, and most women prefer that you be the smarter one.  But in itself this doesn't make her any more marketable, although it may make her harder to find.
Artistic ability:  Only will cost you much if its pretty seriously out there--e..g. 3-4 sigma ability in singing
Cooking and other domestic ability:  Again, only costs you if its seriously out there, and even then, not much
Height:  Won't cost you much at all---it doesn't seem to matter much for women unless they aspire to be models.  This isn't true of guys, who seem to get the maximum bonus around 6' to 6'2"--tall enough to be noticeably taller than the average, but not to trigger any uneasiness
Athletic ability:  Again, this costs you almost nothing (although any woman who has a significant amount of it nearly guarantees herself around 60th-70th percentile in looks by the simple expedient of NOT being significantly overweight).  This also isn't true of guys, who actually do get fairly significant mileage out of being visibly athletic.
Quality of her family, especially her parents:  This costs you almost nothing, most guys aren't even smart enough to consider it early on.  If her relationship with her father is solid, and her mother is married to her father still and treats him with consistent respect, this is a VERY good sign, and one that the marketplace IMO seriously undervalues.  STRONG BUY once again
Level of Religious Commitment:  Unless she's an Amish or the like, this costs you almost nothing.  As before, I've advised readers that generally only women who have strong, credible, and expensive signals of piety are good risks in the present marriage environment.  The good news is that the marketplace hasn't caught up to that recommendation (IMO, that reality) yet, so you won't need to pay much for it.
Non-neurotypical tolerance:  I'm guessing you want this quite a bit also.  You're in luck, it's practically free.  Being an 'engineer's daughter' like my wife doesn't tend to make you significantly more or less desired by the average man, but for you, gentle reader, such a woman is likely to be a much better fit.

Some people like to say that a house is likely to be the most highest stakes negotiation you'll ever be involved in---I disagree, I think selecting your mate is by far.

Is an Efficient Marriage Market Hypothesis Supportable?

By this I mean, is there a very strong correlation between the percentile rank of the groom's desirability with respect to the female population and the bride's desirability with respect to the man population.
By this, we'd expect 70th-80th percentile males to marry 70th-80th percentile females most of the time, with outliers being rare and noteworthy.

I'm inclined to think that the evidence for this is pretty strong, although I'll concede that measuring the bride's desirability with respect to the male population is amenable to much more rigor than the reciprocal.  In the vernacular that neurotypicals use, we say that the two are almost always 'in the same league', and refer to a partner as 'out of his or her league' if there's a serious mismatch---sometimes also---'what does she or he see in him or her'.

Clearly also we see substantially higher rates of divorce when one partner's effective desirability shifts significantly with respect to the other's.  The classic examples include a formerly fat wife losing a lot of weight and suddenly noticing that her market position has changed and a husband whose career really starts to take off and thereby gaining a large push in status looking at younger women.  It is also clear that as the number of potential marriage partners for the average marriage market participant increases, we should expect to see the market become more efficient over time, since that vastly increases the pool of people that each partner is ranked against.

We could reasonably model these circumstances as saying that each potential bride or groom has a certain amount of 'currency' in the marriage market with which to purchase their opposite number.  Oddly, one could reasonably expect this would apply in polygamous circumstances also, since the quality of mate willing to be a 2nd spouse will be lower on average than that willing to be a one and only.

It is this model that I'm going to attempt to develop in more detail with the aim of extending my remarks in

http://chariotofreaction.blogspot.com/2011/02/solutions-that-dont-scale-decline-of.html 

The goal is to provide a useful framework for the non-neurotypical contemplating seeking a suitable partner for marriage, although I suspect it will have value to neurotypicals as well.

A Free Suggestion to the Catholic Church Regarding Marriage

I've recently written about the need to synthesize a Marriage 3.0, one that is closer in spirit to Marriage 1.0 than the Marriage 2.0 that prevails in most Western countries today.  The Catholic Church's orthodoxy and tradition, if perhaps not its current praxis, almost certainly agrees on these points.

Here I have a suggestion for Pope Benedict.  You almost certainly have, through the prestige of your organization, the ability to get the sort of marriage covenants I talk about here:
http://chariotofreaction.blogspot.com/2011/10/mens-rights-activistsmgtow-would.html
enacted in at least several of the states of the US, and possibly in some European countries as well.

You've also got some other cards in your hand that other reactionary elements do not.  For instance, you could decide that the only marriages that your churches will celebrate will be the hardcore form described previously.  If that's too harsh for your sensibilities, there's another option---you could discount the tuition of any child attending a Catholic school whose parents are in a 'covenant' marriage.  I bet you wouldn't even have to discount it much to get quite a bit of adoption of the new marriage standard, especially if you got the ability to easily upgrade an old standard marriage into the relevant statutes.  10% would probably be more than enough to entice the faithful (and frankly, lots of the less than faithful), into it.  You've also got the ability to orchestrate peer pressure that most reactionaries can only dream of, and, should you choose to employ it, even a fairly strong measure of  moral authority.

One other note, because divorce is one of the most financially devastating mistakes most people make, I bet you'll more than make up the cost of the tuition discounts in increased tithes and offerings anyway.  Sometimes the correct moral and doctrinal choice is also the correct financial one.

Men's Rights Activists/MGTOW: Would the Following Tempt You?

Some time earlier this year I inquired of the MRA/MGTOW crowd what they wanted in order to be willing to play the marriage and child rearing game once more.
http://chariotofreaction.blogspot.com/2011/08/mens-rights-activistsmgtow-what-do-you.html

From the various comments, I believe that a reasonable accomodation could be reached between this group and the social conservatives at large.  Here's what I suggest:

Create a new available class of marriage.  This will have a lot of similarities to the 'Covenant Marriage' that is available in several states in the US.  The specifics would include:

1.  Much more difficult divorce--basically only the 3 A's (adultery, abuse, abandonment).  Nothing like no-fault divorce would be permitted.  MRA/MGTOW know very well that most divorce is initiated by women, but this could be sold pretty easily I suspect to social conservatives and would-be white knights as making it more difficult to dump a faithful wife for a newer model.
2.  In the event of a divorce, the children will default to the full custody of the father.  This could be sold based on statistics (children with only a father do better on most metrics than children with only a mother) and as nipping the whole 'deadbeat Dad' meme in the bud.  MRA/MGTOW will of course realize that this puts some shackles on the rationalization hamster by increasing the perceived cost of a divorce to the female partner.
3.  Prenuptial agreement would be mandatory.  In addition, filing for divorce in a state without this flavor of marriage recognized in statute would trigger a provision in the prenup making is VASTLY more unfavorable to the one so filing.  Basically, if you try to get around Provision 1 by divorcing in a state that doesn't recognize this flavor of marriage, the prenup will punish you severely.  The arbitrating agency for the prenup should also probably be required to be defined at time of signing, be it a secular or religious agency.

So would this arrangement tempt you sufficiently?  One could probably get a reasonable facsimile of this via contract + covenant marriage in the states that have covenant marriage presently, and getting something like this codified into law in at least one state is probably not an unachievable goal. 

Rational Economic Man Strikes Back

http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2011/08/court_decision_denigrates_marr.html

Back last year, I wrote of the consequences of the desacralization of marriage and the outcomes we should expect to see as Rational Economic Man increasingly shows up on the scene.

http://chariotofreaction.blogspot.com/2010/05/rational-economic-man-marriage-and.html

At the time, some of my predictions seemed a bit far-fetched to some, but the advance of history seems to be bearing out my thesis.

In essence, what happened in this case is a number of airline pilots and their wives saw the following circumstance:
1. The pension plan they were in was underfunded
2. Underfunded pension plans are not allowed to give accelerated or lump-sum distributions because doing so would capsize the plan early and create a prisoner's dilemma among the participants
3. There is an exception to this rule for the case of a divorce because of the logistical hardships and public sympathy.

So what did they do? They conjured Rational Economic Man and did something nearly unthinkable to most people, especially neurotypicals.

They divorced, got a skewed settlement, transferred the entire pension more or less to the wive, who rolled it into her IRA without creating a taxable event, and then they remarried. Sounds an awful lot like the scenarios in my previous post does it not?

Now they were very blatant about it, which is why there was a court case. In practice marriage and divorce are incredibly messy. My father and mother, for instance, were married, to each other, twice and divorced, from each other, also twice, before they both married other people. It would be terribly difficult to adjudicate whether a given divorce is a 'sham' or not when ordinary reality deals up such a dog's breakfast as a matter of course.

Of course every time this sort of thing actually occurs, it makes it more thinkable to others. At some point you may see ad hoc dissolution of civil marriages almost considered a due diligence issue in financial, tax, and estate planning. This of course will require the rules of society to change as those who game the system less are outraged.

I predict we've not seen the last of Rational Economic Man. His hour is come at last.

Mens Rights Activists/MGTOW: What do you want?

I ask because a significant number of you now are opting out of the marriage market and the task of child rearing.

Now, most traditionalists conservatives would insert the cue to the shaming language here, with some vague nonsense about how you need to 'step up' or 'be the man'. Attempting to shame you isn't my style, and it is rarely my intent to make a moral language appeal to you. I find that sort of thing generally insulting, partly because of the implicit parent->child communication mode that it tries to invoke. I'd prefer to address you adult to adult, as peers and potential allies. Now that we have that out of the way.

Let me explain what I want. I'd like you to get married, stay married, and have lots of children and grandchildren who will give a damn about you and form your true social security when you get old. I want this partly because I believe this will make you and yours happier in the long term, but let's be honest, a large part is because I know your primary demographic I'd rather live in a world where your children and grandchildren are numerous than one where they are few. So this isn't about anything universal, it is very particular and I make no bones about it.

So what is it that you want? What changes to laws, culture, or social attitudes or contracts would be needed for you to be able to contemplate what I want without the need for too much alcohol or harder drugs to make it seem like a good idea?

Now, obviously I can't wave a wand and make your desires happen. But articulating what it is exactly that you want is generally a prerequisite to obtaining it. It also points the way to the path of alliances and exchanges that you may need in order to obtain it.

Solutions that don't scale: The Decline of Marriage in the West

Several of my favorite bloggers have been writing lately about the unravelling of the institution of marriage in the US.
http://mangans.blogspot.com/2011/02/clueless-conservatives-and-marriage.html

I really do have a lot of sympathy for men younger than myself contemplating whether to seek a marriage partner (I'm pushing 40 these days with a wife and two children so far). They are quite correct in their complaints that the institution has been distorted such that it is, rationally speaking, a very bad deal for men in a distressingly large fraction of cases. The conservative then typically replies something to the effect that 'Not all women are like that'. I am NOT a conservative. It's probably far more accurate to say that I am a reactionary, and perhaps even a counter-revolutionary. But let's give the conservatives their due. It is true that Not all women are like that (NAWALT is the popular acronym in such circles). Unfortunately a large fraction, probably a majority are, because, as several of my favorite bloggers love to point out---Incentives Matter. What's worse, women by and large are wired such that they become unhappier when they perceive themselves to have the upper hand in a relationship. This isn't a new observation. A careful study of the Book of Genesis will tell you this. The problem is that the future belongs to those who show up for it----childlessness is metadeath. Put another way, God may or may not hate homosexuals, but Darwin most assuredly hates those without offspring.

So what the young man looking for a suitable wife needs are some recommendations for separating the sheep from the goats, or whatever metaphor he prefers. This solution DOES NOT SCALE. The reasons why should become clear very shortly.

1. Get a wife who is hardcore religious. The rational incentives working to slant the relationship (and, in particular, its dissolution and the rules governing same) are pretty strong---there is a strong legal and cultural headwind--so you need God on your side in a big way. You want a woman who's genuinely religious and not merely socially or culturally so. My recommendation is to get one that actually tithes. That's rare enough (average charitable contributions in the US are on the order of 2%) to be a high-information costly signal of piety. It even has Scriptural support (where your treasure is, your heart will be there also), if that means anything to you. If she takes that difficult aspect of her faith seriously enough to obey, she'll probably take the whole honor, respect, and obey part reasonably seriously also.
2. Make sure she lives within her means. Key indicators are very little debt (and none on depreciating assets) and a strong credit rating. This typically means two things: She's less materialistic than average, probably due to lower saturation with bad cultural messages and she's conscientious about money. Coupled with the tithing in 1) and you're decidedly unlikely to have significant financial issues in marriage---a key contributor to divorce. BTW, you CAN and many do have serious financial problems in ordinary circumstances even when both partners work and make more than 100k each.
3. Make sure she has a very short sexual history. Ideally nobody but you. A well known country music singer sings about a young man's first experience with an older woman
"And I have rarely held another when I haven't seen her face" (Garth Brooks)
Human beings tend to bond with those they have sex with---it's the nature of the beast--and that is significantly more intense for women than for men. Our friends in the blogosphere have ample evidence of the escalating probability of divorce as the length of sexual history increases if you don't choose to believe me.
4. You should know about how attractive the opposite sex considers you by now. Aim for your counterpart. If you're 80th percentile attractive to women, it's reasonable for you to aim for a woman in that same general area. It's probably also wise for you to get a woman 3-6 years younger than you or thereabouts.
5. If you're a guy, and at least moderately religious, Eharmony is actually a pretty good deal. Their touchy-feely survey heavy approach with a somewhat opaque matching algorithm seems to appeal to women pretty strongly. This is to say, you'll likely be issued more matches who are at least vaguely plausible mates than a similarly situated woman would. This is opposite the usual trends online. Yes, the surveys, ads, and such probably grate on your nerves. But that's the price you'll pay for a favorable gender ratio.
6. When seeking a church---look for one that is close to 50-50 in gender balance. Large numbers of single women with children or married women where the husband is never there is a red flag. You really don't want a church that systemically undermines your prospective position as the head of your household. The beauty though is that very little investigation is needed to determine if a given church is properly orthodox in that respect. Men will go where they're wanted and stay where they're well treated. If you see a church with nearly 50% men in attendance, it's probably a good place for you to be. The only exception category I've seen are churches with lots of widows but an otherwise even gender balance. Women tend to live a fair bit longer than men, and are often married younger than their husbands. This isn't their church's fault.

It's pretty obvious now why this isn't scaleable, isn't it? Probably less than 10% of all of the women in the US are good marriage risks. The good news for you though is that generally you don't have to pay a significant sexual/marriage market value premium to attract and woo a woman from this subset of the population. Since my blog is a fairly botique operation, it's unlikely that this post will change that appreciably.

Rational economic man, marriage, and assorted social institutions

Rational economic man, that construct beloved of many economics textbook authors, is hardly a superhero. Indeed, a nontrivial fraction of the population behaving as him can seriously weaken a number of our social institutions.

For instance, imagine that rational economic man is getting up in years and wants to leave his estate to his heirs, but to avoid all estate taxes and the like. Normally, we don't allow this, imposing a rather stern estate tax on large estates. But rational economic man is clever, and gives not a damn for any transcendent properties of our institutions. So he strategically divorces his wife, strategically marries his granddaughter in law with a clever prenuptial agreement, and then divorces her to remarry his former wife while his grandaughter in law remarries his grandson. Trampling of course all over the spirit of marriage, but transferring an arbitrary portion of his estate to his grandkids and dodging all the clever barriers society has deemed fit to place in his way. Rational economic man can also make use of the institution of marriage to transfer citizenship (in India, for instance, such is generally valued at around 100k in their marriage markets), to enjoy privilege against having to testify against one's spouse, and as a general way of transferring assets beyond the limits of the gift tax without creating a taxable event. He can also use it to confer his health plan to a spouse and their children for primarily financial reasons (generally health plans do not expect that spouses and children will be adversely selected...but rational economic man will certainly do that). To top it off, he can also arrange to game the Social Security system after his death by transferring his benefits to a vastly younger woman.

But rational economic man is just getting started. During the real estate boom, he purchased a house valued at 400,000 dollars, taking out a standard 30 year mortgage in a non-recourse state (California of course). Owing to the housing market collapse, his house is now valued at 200,000. Rational economic man therefore stops bothering to send his mortgage checks (which he can still easily afford, as he is RATIONAL economic man, and did not take a mortgage that he couldn't afford). He knows that it'll be upwards of a year before he is foreclosed upon, and might even accept a principal reduction (to 200,000) if such was offered by the lender. He's quite the ruthless borrower. He knows that inside 7 years any damage to his credit rating will be effaced, and rationally values the 200k (and the 12-18 months of rent-free living) more than it. In essence, he treats the non-recourse option on mortgages in his state like a put option on the property that he purchased. Want to know what happens when lots of people take this position? Just wait, you'll see. Non-recourse mortgages, bankruptcy forgiveness after 7 years, and a number of other laws were put in place to avoid putting the genuinely needy into debt slavery as a result of bad luck or mishap. They won't survive a lot of people gaming the system and the rest of us feeling like suckers for playing by the spirit of the rules. Previously, social sanction, shared values, and mild social ostracism limited the gaming of such systems, but one can presently seriously question whether there actually IS an overall society now, and certainly whether it shares values. With corporations and banks freely defaulting whenever it is profitable to do so, and frequently being bailed out by the government, it is very hard to argue that the little guy should still be required to play according to the spirit of the rules...to stay cricket, so to speak.

So where am I going with all this? The common thread is the desacralization of our social institutions---marriage, lending, and the like. We have put in place a number of refinements to our rules regarding these institutions that have the effect of shielding most people from a number of onerous hardships. For instance, we wouldn't feel right about holding Joe in debt bondage indefinitely when his life takes a turn out of the book of Job. Our bankruptcy laws, for instance, go back to the tradition of Jubilees described in the Old Testament. Our rules surrounding marriage are based on a presumption of a transcendent quality in said relationship. We would all be poorer if we had to drop all of the privileges of marriage and of borrowers in general that could not be sustained in the presence of the Rational Economic Men. So clearly we need to avoid taking actions and setting policies that encourage this desacralization. This is, IMO, one of the strongest arguments against extending marriage to gay couples. It is also a pretty strong argument against no-fault divorce.

Alternatively, we can dump the notion of the income tax and the estate tax in general, opting to raise money in some fashion that doesn't care about the particular economic unions that exist in the society as a whole, probably a consumption tax. We would also have to make significant revisions to our immigration law and make pretty much all loans full-recourse (in addition to returning to the days of at least 10% down so the borrower has 'skin in the game'). We would also have to seriously evaluate the bankruptcy laws and most likely make them far more punitive in general. To invert the words of Bush the First, we would have to establish a meaner, harsher society.