Why do married men make 44% more than single men? | Hacker News Reader

Why do married men make 44% more than single men?

econlib.org

12 pointskvee14 comments

Why look far for the reason? The upkeep of a proper household is a half time job at the very least. If you live alone, you need to that work on top of your daytime job, or suffer a loss of living standards, usually in the form of consuming crappy food. Both options are detrimental to the energy you can invest in your career. I'm not saying that a man should find a partner so (s)he can do the cooking and the cleaning for him. I'm saying that if you're a couple, you can divide the work which saves a lot of energy.

The reason to care is that married women do not see a corresponding bump in their pay after marriage.

Married working co-upkeeper of a marginally proper household here. Having both partners work full time careers means that both of you are typically engaged with the same kind of task during the same spans of time throughout the day, making it quite difficult to divide up housework efficiently. Productivity gains in some areas are typically offset by losses in others due to solving coordination problems and access to somewhat mutually constrained resources, such as only one kitchen, only one garage, sometimes only one car, and so on. There's a certain background miasma of stress involved in every decision about dividing labor, because if you are both building your careers it becomes a burden to risk a promotion for the sake of making sure the dog has a regular bath, instead of using that bandwidth to pull a couple extra hours this month to stay ahead of your metrics.

This is especially true if you have children, who need eyes and hands nearby at all times when they're very small, and need transportation and enriching activities such as vacations with their whole family when they get older. You seldom can split that time up between partners in a satisfactory way.

Because a family gives you a mission and focus to produce income in a way that being single doesn’t. Mouths to feed is perhaps the strongest motivator.

Mouths to feed, mortgage, education, healthcare. I had a business with two single friends as associates, a guy and a girl (me a guy). Both of them checked out at five, they had many chat windows with friends open during the workday (MSN/Yahoo chat era), had friends visit and play Age of Empires in our LAN., while I stayed working late, very focused, not because I was smarter or wiser but because I had an obligation, a duty to bring home the bread. We spoke a couple of times about it, things changed for a week or two and then all back to "normal". Finally I came to accept it: I was no longer in much need of social interactions because I had a spouse, while they were still on the market.

An explanation not found in the article:

Married men negotiate their salaries with more skill than unmarried men. Marriage is often associated with the wish to raise children. Children are expensive. Therefore there's more to lose if you don't negotiate your salary well.

Theory: For men in heteronormative relationships (which I don't hold up as an ideal but do believe are prevalent enough to heavily influence the stats): Married men are more loyal to a company while the company is paying them. If you fire a single man, you just punish them. If you fire a married man, you punish their family. Therefore they are more trusted in senior positions where they might have to make calls on the organisation's behalf which might conflict with the individual's ethics (as they are made secondary to the primary motivation of breadwinning), and these positions tend to come with higher salaries.

Or.. why do women marry/stay-married to men making more money..

The article covers that.

If at 28 I made what I did at 33 (when I married), I'd quite possibly have married then. The American women of the late 20th and early 21st centuries may not be looking for someone to support them, but I believe that all but a few outliers are looking for someone who will be a contributor to the family's financial stability.

> Married men make a lot more money than single men. In the NLSY, married men make 44% extra, even after controlling for education, experience, IQ, race, and number of children. How is this possible?

Age is conspicuously absent from the controls

Thought the same but experience is a good proxy.

I am not married, bit since living with my partner and she managing many aspects of daily life I am definitely more productive when I want to. I do contribute that to her.

Because they have to.

Two CAN NOT live as cheaply as one, no matter what the old proverbs say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com