Authors: Marina Adshade
Dollars and Sex (14 page)
The third, and perhaps most economic, example is the production of goods and services within the home such as food, laundry, and a clean house. The reason these goods and services can be produced more cheaply by a married couple is based on the same reasoning that applies to two countries that are better off when they are trading with each other than they would have been had they both imposed autarky (i.e., completely closed their borders to trade).
People, like countries, differ in what they are good at doing. If one person can undertake a household chore more efficiently than another person can, then there are gains to be made from allowing that person to specialize in doing that particular task while leaving the other person to do other tasks.
Let me give you an example that comes from a couple who I know, Jordan and Alex, who have a 20-month-old baby. Jordan and Alex have two tasks that need to be taken care of every evening: putting their child to bed and cleaning the kitchen. According to what they tell me, Jordan is better at both of these tasks in that Jordan can accomplish both tasks in less time than Alex can.
To be specific, Jordan can clean the kitchen in forty-five minutes, while the same task takes Alex sixty minutes, and Jordan can put their daughter to bed in thirty minutes, while Alex needs sixty to complete that task as well.
Now maybe what this couple should do is designate Alex to watch TV while Jordan spends a total of an hour and fifteen minutes cleaning the kitchen and putting their child to bed. But with this distribution of responsibilities, as a couple they are not exploiting the gains from trade; they can allocate chores in a way that is more efficient for the household.
In order to accomplish this, they need to determine the task at which each person has a
comparative advantage
âthe task at which each is relatively efficient. Jordan may be able to complete both tasks more quickly than Alex, but in the amount of time that it takes Jordan to put the baby to bed (thirty minutes), he/she would have been only two-thirds of the way through cleaning the kitchen (which takes forty-five minutes). On the other hand, in the same amount of time that it takes Alex to put the baby to bed (sixty minutes), she/he could have finished cleaning the kitchen.
This means that Jordan has the comparative advantage in putting the baby to bed, and Alex has the comparative advantage in cleaning the kitchenâthese are the tasks that each is most efficient at doing relative to the other task that needs to be done.
The best allocation of tasks in this household would be to let Jordan put the child to bed while Alex cleans the kitchen. Given that these are the only two tasks that need to be done in the evening and that Jordan will be finished putting the baby to bed before Alex finishes the kitchen, Jordan could always help Alex finish cleaning the kitchen once their little one is sleeping. If they can further exploit the gains from trade by each doing the kitchen-cleaning task at which they are most efficient, for example, one person empties the dishwasher while the other person cleans countertops, they should be able to finish up quickly and both be relaxing within forty-five minutes of starting their evening chores.
I know that if you are a parent you are currently thinking: “Good luck with that!”
The gains from trade are not always realized in the form of more free time, as they were in this example. Sometimes they are realized in higher quality of household outputâthe house is cleaner and the children better cared for, for example. What couples do with the gains from trade is a decision they make together, but research suggests that, on average, couples choose to do a little of bothâconsume more leisure and produce a higher quality of output.
Comparative advantage in marriage doesn't apply just to housework and childrearing. Women have a clear comparative advantage in pregnancy and childbirth because men cannot bear children as cheaply as women can, obviously. As for how individuals in a relationship can exercise their comparative advantages in sex, I am going to leave that one for you figure out for yourself.
Exploiting the gains from trade is not just an important reason for why an individual might want to marry rather than stay single, it also predicts something important about how people choose their future mates; in theory, at least, the most efficient marriages are those in which the two people differ in terms of activities at which they excel.
For example, if an individual who earns a high wage wants to have children who are cared for full-time by a parent, then he/she would be better off marrying someone with the comparative advantage in child care so that she/he can specialize in earning an income while the partner cares for the children during the workday.
This observation explains why traditional marriage evolved into what is called the “male breadwinner model” at around the same time as the Industrial Revolution; it was not because women were naturally endowed as caregivers, but because physical labor was arduous, giving men the comparative advantage in market labor and women the comparative advantage in the care of the home. Household arrangements began to change, and married women with children began to move into the workforce, only after jobs became available that rewarded brains over brawn and the gap between men's and women's market earnings declined.
WHAT IS A HUSBAND WORTH?
New research by Victoria Vernon finds that some married women have thirty-four more minutes a day of (gloriously) free time than their single counterparts, suggesting that they are able to exploit the gains from trade in the production of household goods. But only women in high-income households have this benefit. Married women in low-income households work an extra fifteen to thirty-four minutes each day if they have children and thirty-seven to forty-eight minutes more if they do not.
There is no gain in terms of free time for men who are married, but married men in higher-income households spend an extra thirteen minutes a day working for wages if they don
'
t have children and thirty-five minutes if they do. Men who are in the lower-income bracket work significantly more if they are married: eighty-three minutes more if they have no children and one hour and fifty minutes more if they have children.
The fact of the matter is that even though high-income married women have more free time than do comparable single women, they are also doing more housework than their single counterparts
â
the increase in leisure time results only from their spending less time in the labor market. In fact, married women with children spend an extra thirty-one to forty-one minutes cleaning, forty-one to fifty minutes cooking, and eight to eleven minutes running errands each day over women who are single.
This doesn
'
t mean that married women are disadvantaged; it means that they are exploiting their comparative advantage in home production while their spouses exploit
their comparative advantage in the labor force. The reason for this comparative advantage probably has nothing to do with these women
'
s extraordinary powers of folding laundry; it has to do with fact that men can earn more on the labor market.
You would expect that having a whole other person in the family would save a woman more that thirty-four minutes a day, but one possible explanation for that finding is that the quality of home production is much higher in a married woman
'
s home. A second possible explanation is that some married individuals fail to exploit the gains from trade because they do not understand comparative advantage and instead rely on absolute advantage to allocate tasks; the person who is better at doing a job relative to their spouse does that job, instead of doing the jobs they are better at, and allowing their spouse to do the same.
The efficiency of marriage in which two people bring different talents also explains why, traditionally, it has been more common for older men (who have a comparative advantage in earning) to be married to younger women (who have a comparative advantage in fertility) than it is for older women to be married to younger men. That, however, is changing quickly, and better-educated, high-income women are now, more than ever, marrying younger men.
This also explains why it is that some men in higher-wage countries look for, and can find, spouses in foreign countries where both men and women earn low wages. Those men have an advantage over their foreign wives, in terms of their earning ability, and have no difficulty competing
with foreign men for desirable women. The wives on the other hand, at least in perception, are better at keeping a home and raising children than are women in the man's home country.
This is a topic we return to in
chapter 6
, when we talk about bargaining within marriage because, of course, it is not comparative advantage that has the final say on how couples divide household responsibilitiesâit only suggests how tasks should be divided if a married couple is collectively interested in doing things with the least amount of effort. If one or both people in a marriage are only interested in minimizing their own effort, then what really matters is who has the power to decide who does all the work and who has all the fun.
SEXLESS IN THE CITYSingles looking for love flood into large cities for two reasons: the search costs are lower in densely populated areas, and matches are of better quality when the population of potential matches is higher.
The cost of searching for a mate is lower in more densely populated areas simply because singles come into contact with far more people on a daily basis in a city than they do in less-populated areas. People in large cities go to busy coffee shops, restaurants, and bars and meet different people every dayânot the same people as they might in similar establishments in a more rural area. You might argue that in urban centers people are less open to speaking to strangers, and that might be true, but the sheer volume of people suggests that search times for a mate should be shorter in densely populated urban areas.
Let me give you a somewhat trivial example of why this is the case. Say you work in an office with five other people. One day you announce to your coworkers that you would like their help in finding love and ask if they have any single friends. In a densely populated urban area, if each of your coworkers suggests one single friend, then you will likely have five potential match opportunities. This is possible because each of your coworkers likely operates on a different social
network. In a sparsely populated area, however, it is likely that some of your coworkers operate on the same social network, in which case you may end up with only one or two potential match opportunities since some of your coworkers will have suggested the same person.
Fewer possible matches in less densely populated areas mean that you are less likely to find “the one” with this attempt to turn your coworkers into matchmakers, and since you now have to search far longer, the search for love is more costly. (If the concept of costly searches is unclear, consider the example of a woman who knows that if she doesn't marry in the next few years she will significantly reduce her chances of having children. For her, the “cost” of a longer search is directly measurable by the value of the children she may never have. For others, the cost may be just the time spent being lonely when they could have been part of a pair.)
The second option when there are few match opportunities is to discontinue the search and “settle” for one of the available matches, even if the match is not ideal, because the prospect of continuing to search is too daunting.
This brings us to the second reason why singles move to cities looking for love, and that is that the quality of matches should be higher in urban areas where search costs are lower.
Let's go back to our example where you have asked your coworkers if they have any single friends. Imagine that you have in mind a set of minimum qualities your future mate must possess. This set of requirements is your reservation value for a marriage partner; you will only marry if you can find someone whose value on the market exceeds this level.
If you know that your potential dating pool will consist of only one or two people, as it was in the rural example, you will set your
reservation value
very low because otherwise your search costs could be very high. If you know your potential dating pool will be very large, however, as it was in the urban example, you will set your reservation value at a higher level because you can hope to achieve this level with lower search costs.
When search costs are low, reservation values for a mate tend to be higher because people are willing to search longer in the hope of finding a better-quality match.
This is the same argument that explains why access to the Internet has the potential to increase the quality of marriagesâit is because low-cost online searches encourage people to set their reservation value at a higher level.
This implies that because singles in more densely populated areas can search more cheaply for a mate, they increase their odds of finding a higher-quality mateâso it isn't surprising that single people flood into cities looking for love.