The effects of wealth on (Swedish) marriage and fertility
nber.org
nber.org
He who is being left usually has walked away first.
If a similar system of incentives were created that strongly benefitted fathers in ways that fathers would respond to, we would probably see similar dysfunctional behavior from fathers.
1) It doesn't seem to follow from the paper. Which states that the wealthier partner tends to retain most of the married wealth.
> While the richer spouse redistributes some assets to the poorer spouse in the typical settlement, the amount of redistribution is smaller than the amount required to ensure an equal split of the assets. This empirical finding suggests that the <lottery winning> spouses in our samples may anticipate retaining a larger share of the prize money in the event of divorce
2) If the only thing keeping a marriage together is the lack of wealth necessary for one party (the woman) to adequately survive after the divorce, then this is not a stable marriage.
You seem to have come into this with an already formed opinion. Which is fine, but the opinion seems to be about circumstances not addressed by this study.
Intimacy matters to people.
Noone cared about alimony until women started having to pay and now there's suddenly a movement to remove it.
> The only discernible effect on female winners is that wealth increases their short-run (but not long-run) divorce risk.
Women still divorce their sucky husbands. It just takes longer. This could result in fewer kids, or it could result in kids whose homes are broken during later childhood or adolescence.
Reading the actual paper, this is, in fact, the conclusion the authors come to: "In contrast, the only exception to the pattern of null results for female winners is that lottery wealth almost doubles their short-run probability of divorce. One interpretation of the absence of a discernible long-run increase in divorce risk among these women is that wealth accelerates the dissolution of marriages that were already underway."
> We also report results which suggest that when married men win the lottery, the windfall has a tendency to stabilize their existing marriages
Winning a lottery helps men feel secure enough that they aren't as sucky to their spouse.
> lottery wins cause the largest increase in marriage rates and the biggest reduction in divorce rates among unmarried men with low incomes.
So if you want stable marriages that have children the best thing to do is make people wealthier, especially those of lower income. Make men wealthier and they'll get married more and have more children. Make women wealthier and the men they stick with will be ones they like sticking with. I can't see this latter leading to fewer children, on average. I'd expect it would lead to more.
Where'd you get your idea from?
Contrary what OP wrote, typical result is that women becomes poorer after divorce and men had more money. (And no, alimony are nit given out like candies).
It is not only reason, but practically not having money and risking poverty or homelessness means you need to plan divorce very carefully.
It's become the standard in some companies to bitch about men and presume they're suckers and abusers is any situation that involves both sexes. Let's keep in mind that it's not science saying this, but woke ideology.
> the best thing to do is make people wealthier
Far-fetched. Winning a lottery makes you much wealthier relative to other people, it puts you in maybe 10-20% richest people of your country. You can't fit everyone in those 20%.
Look at something like Uzbekistan. Country is miserably poor compared to Sweden and they still reproduce like they win lotteries all the time.
One would hope these are fringe groups, but as an example my wife is on a few that bridge into breastfeeding groups, where the women actively malign their husbands who provide their living, and do most household chores, but are still considered inept.
Even in the seemingly equal marriage, it would seem the battle for equality rages on.
Lets call it for what it really is - battle for power and "freedom" to dominante others (those being husbands, wifes, coworkers - other humans in general). There seems to exists this general urge in some to search by all means necessary to make others an extension of their minds and not free and equal human beings.
Just my 2 cents of intuition acquired by observing some members of my closest family :(
> Winning a lottery makes you much wealthier relative to other people, it puts you in maybe 10-20% richest people of your country. You can't fit everyone in those 20%.
The average lottery winnings this paper is looking at is equal to ~$140,000 USD. According to wikipedia, Credit Suisse says the median net worth of individuals in Sweden is $95k USD. And the paper says the wealth effect on Swedish males is greatest among unmarried men with low incomes.
This is a one-off gain. It is not the continuous gain of a high-paying job. So this lottery win can provide immediate stability and opportunity, but it cannot, in itself, provide longevity of income gains.
You are making the claim that gains relative to population are most important. While I can see this as being important in supply-limited countries, I am not sure that Sweden is such a country.
> Country is miserably poor compared to Sweden and they still reproduce like they win lotteries all the time.
Which is why you control for experimental factors. If you want to see what factors boost marriage rates, marriage stability, and reproduction in Uzbekistan, you want to study Uzbekistan. This study was about Sweden.
If you're pulling in divorces from the future, shouldn't the long term rate go down? Sounds like the total divorce rate goes up.
> sucky husbands
That's odd framing.
> > the absence of a discernible long-run increase in divorce risk among these women
> > > the absence of a discernible long-run increase in divorce risk among these women
> If you're pulling in divorces from the future, shouldn't the long term rate go down?
If it was the men who were, on average, disproportionately divorcing their wives the framing could be reversed. As divorce has costs, the act of divorcing someone indicates that they are worse as a spouse than the alternative.
I had remembered reading that women tend to be less happy in marriages than men, but this appears to be wrong. Still:
> happiness increases when low-quality marriages dissolve—again, that’s true for both men and women.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/is_marriage_re...
However, that is besides the point? I find your question in very poor taste and not conducive to discussing the article.
Another is that some men are uncomfortable with a wealthier partner. I know a few like this who say it plainly, but it showed up recently in "Crazy Rich Asians" with the tech CEO husband.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-12-13/lottery-w...
This man had his entire life destroyed after winning the lottery.
Apart from divorce, other men sued him for ruining their marriages by making them look like losers and actually won!
Wait, what?!
I would not be surprised because, trial by jury.
I find that highly dubious because in my experience bank clerks talk a lot and there is effectively no banking secrecy.
To me it sounds like one of those cases that likely got widely distorted in media. I have seen it multiple times where when you dig into the case, it turned out to be something else entirely.
Everyone knows a bachelor with an inheritance is in need of a wife.
Opening line of Pride and Prejudice.
In a good neighbourhood the women dont have jobs.
In a bad neighbourhood it's the men that don't have jobs.
Just kidding, of course - that movie works precisely because it upends well-accepted norms so thoroughly. Likely wouldn't work the other way around.
The critique would be that the findings don’t necessarily generalize outside of the lottery participating population, but why wouldn’t they?
Well, could be that the lottery participating population has less than average satisfaction of their current life situation. Seems reasonable.
Because normally when people earn their wealth, they build up a whole set of experiences and social networks that assist them in managing their wealth. Contrarily, winning the lottery has often been reported as "the worst thing that can happen to you", and lottery winners are frequently broke in a few years: https://www.ngpf.org/blog/question-of-the-day/question-of-th...
It gives you exactly the opposite of that. How many financially prudent individuals do you know who buy lottery tickets? It is not a representative sample.
Read the details of the “save to win” program in the Data section. Save to win was not a conventional lottery program. (Two more conventional lottery programs are also included for which your criticism is more accurate.)
For the countries and peoples moaning about low birthrates, the simplest solution is to go back to being destitute. The poorer a country or region the more children there are.
Not to say that's a realistic solution, of course. But the cause-and-effect seem fairly clear that more monies equate to less kids.
Go ahead and google fertility rates for any developed country that comes to mind and compare it to when birth control became legal. For the US, UK, Australia, South Korea, etc its the EXACT year.
Wealth doesn't seem to explain it exactly: the main reason people who want kids don't have they in developed countries is a lack of mean (wealth). Wealth itself doesn't seem to be it (all else equal, having more means doesn't seem like the obvious cause).
I wonder what percent of children born for all of human history were simply unplanned. The data seems to suggest something like 50%+ of them. As family planning becomes more accessible, we're finding that people just keep postponing having them and a big part of the reason they had them before was simply "oops".
No surprise in hindsight. There's not a single animal on earth besides us very recently that do any kind of family planning. They just have sex and offspring happen. Why should Homo Sapiens be any different.
Now that birth control exists, there will be much stronger selection for actually wanting children. People who only want sex will be removed from the gene pool.
Why would you have ten children? what is the need, or the benefit, or the reason.
Statistically, they have more behavioral problems including in educated not poor Christian families.
In 2023 I know a lot of bougie American parents who cannot fathom making siblings share a room. 40 years ago, bunk beds were normal. 100 years ago, all the kids would probably be in one room, possibly with their parents, grandparents, etc and that type of living is still endemic in poorer nations. But how many people can afford an American house with another additional room?
I do not see how our experience justifies tens of thousands of dollars per year. Other than a general commitment to providing "the best" to their kids.
Before: everyone had one wage earner per household. Prices for goods meets this reality.
After: everyone has 2 wage earners per households. Prices for goods meets this reality.
Nothing has changed except now you need 2 people earning to live just as well as before. More aggregate output means "more GDP", but who cares when your life is relatively worse in many ways.
> Before: everyone had one wage earner per household. Prices for goods meets this reality.
This was only relatively well-to-do couples. Industrial economies were really good at expanding the middle class, but they never got rid of the lower classes in which both spouses had to work (and, of course, unmarried adults had to work regardless of sex). Labor force participation rate for women increased from a low of about 32% in 1948 (the earliest this chart goes) to a high of about 60% from about the mid-1990s to 2009. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
According to table 2 (page 4) of this BLS document (https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2001/05/art3full.pdf ), a four-person family in 1947 could have a "modest but adequate" lifestyle on a budget of $2904. The median income for a family then was about $3000, while the median income for an individual not in a family was about $1000 (https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1949/demo/p60-00... ). The federal minimum wage of $0.40/hour in 1947 would gross about $800/year for 40 hours a week. So the income necessary for a modest but adequate lifestyle for a family was about 3.75x the minimum wage at our current labor standard hours. Today, with a minimum wage of $7.25/hour, that 3.75x would be $27/hour, or about $54,000/year.
I'd speculate that even today a person with a typical engineer's salary, like then, could support a family at at least "modest but adequate" standards on a single income. But a typical laborer's salary would be stretching it, whether back then or today. Heck, the Turpin parents managed to do it with 13 kids, though they abused the hell out of those kids.
The original family planning, infanticide, or abandonment of eggs for egg laying species, is practiced by a variety of animals.
Used to be true but now has changed. The richer have more children. See a recent survey on the new economics of the family by Mathias doepke of northwestern.
I don't think that this is true anymore. We have crossed the Rubicon, birth rates will only increase if people can maintain a good standard of living with less stress and more available time.
I disagree. I would guess the cause is women gaining agency to dictate how many children they birth, from a combination of being able to control when they have sex, birth control, and access to abortion.
It just so happens that women generally do not have these things in poorer societies.
It's not just that. There's a level of wealth where people just choose to delay having kids
Also, in poorer countries, one’s physical securities may be more strongly related to the size of one’s family.
> Estimates suggest that more than 160 million women and adolescents who wanted to avoid pregnancy were not using contraceptives in 2019, despite significant progress in the use of modern contraceptives globally over the previous 50 years.
> Major disparities in contraceptive use still exist between regions – with more than half the women with unmet need for contraception living in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Some women in some subcultures may choose to have more kids than others, but by and large, giving birth and raising a baby is not a walk in the park, so I cannot see many women jumping up and down to have more than 2 or 3 kids.
Because, in fact, life of existing children matter to poor too and new child often means that older gets less food or have to stop education.
Generally means that there are exceptions, with those Indian states being one of them. Good for India to have made significant progress on women’s rights.