Dollars and Sex (23 page)

THE VALUE OF A UNIVERSITY DEGREE? A MORE STABLE MARRIAGE

In 1970, only 28 percent of husbands had more education than their wives, but, despite this, only 4 percent of women earned more than their husbands. In 2007, only 19 percent of husbands had more education than their wives, but now 22 percent of women earn more than their husbands.

The big change in last thirty years has been that women are not only more likely to have as much, or more, education than their husbands; they are far more likely to outearn them as well.

Having more education and a higher wage may make it easier for married women to leave an unhappy marriage, but does that imply that higher rates of education for women are responsible for high divorce rates?

According to a paper by Philip Oreopoulos and Kjell Salvanes, the answer to this question is “No”; they find that more-educated people are significantly less likely to have ever been divorced.

For example, they find that a person who didn't complete high school has a 16 percent chance of being divorced. A person with a high school diploma, but no more, has a 10 percent chance of being divorced. And a person with a postgraduate degree has less than a 3 percent chance of ever having been divorced.

If you think these numbers look low compared with the 50 percent divorce rate we have all heard before, you are right. That is not only because the 50 percent divorce rate is inaccurately measured (it really is), but also because these numbers are for everyone—not just for people who have been married. But because educated people are more likely to have ever been married than are less-educated people, these results that suggest that educated people are less likely to have been divorced are an even more convincing argument that educated people divorce less frequently.

Why do educated people divorce less frequently? Perhaps they are hotter commodities on the marriage market and end up in higher-quality marriages. Or, maybe, because they are older when they marry, they choose their marriage partner more carefully. Perhaps educated people are more skilled negotiators, making it easier for them to navigate rocky patches in their marriages. Divorce is more expensive for high-income couples, so it would be reasonable for educated people to avoid that expense. Or, as we will discuss shortly, it could be because educated people suffer less job instability, avoiding that additional stressor on marriage.

As an aside, one interesting observation made by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers is that not only are less-educated people more likely to divorce—they find a 10-percentage-point difference between college graduates and those with less than a college education in the probability that their marriage would still be intact when they are 45 years old—but also that less-educated people are less likely to remarry following a divorce and, if they do remarry, they are more likely to divorce again.

While I have no direct evidence to prove that when women have more say in their marital decisions that their marriages function better, low divorce rates for educated couples suggest that the gains women have made in terms of equality in decision making are not leading to more unhappy marriages.

THE RICH GET RICHER, AND THE POOR GET DIVORCED

According to economists Adam Levine, Robert Frank, and Oege Dijk, the rich are getting richer, and marriage is paying the price.

We already know that the growing divide between the rich and poor has influenced sexual mores, and we will see more evidence of this in
chapter 7
when we discuss teen promiscuity, but it also seems to be driving up divorce rates.

Just to give you an example of how wide the divide has become, consider this: The bottom 20 percent of income earners have experienced
only a 9 percent increase in income in the years between 1979 and 2003, while those earning in the top 1 percent have seen their incomes increase a remarkable 201 percent.

At the same time, everyone seems to be saving less. The personal savings rate in the United States, for example, has fallen from 10 percent in the mid-1970s to close to zero in recent years, an observation that has led many analysts to suggest that excessive consumption contributed to the severity of the most recent recession.

There are several reasons why personal savings has fallen, but the main reason has to be that we are consuming more than ever before. Not only are we spending all of our current income, but we are also borrowing against our future income so that we can consume more today than we earn. One of the reasons for this is that, as the incomes of wealthy households increase, everyone spends more in an attempt to keep up with their consumption.

To understand how, imagine that you are in a community in which everyone has the same level of income, lives in the same size house, drives the same car, and everyone is good-looking (just for good measure).

Now imagine that one family, let's call them the Joneses, gets a big increase in their income and decides to build a bigger house and buy a nicer car. This increase in consumption encourages the people who live around them to think: “Well, if the Joneses deserve a bigger house and a fancier car, then so do I!”

Other families start to spend more of their income to buy things that compare to those owned by the Jones family. The families in the Joneses' neighborhood can probably manage to pay for this increase in consumption by reducing their savings. But as this effect spreads out into lower and lower income communities, it can lead to an increase in consumption that can cause real economic hardship—especially when people start mortgaging their homes to pay to the bills.

Keeping up with the Joneses' family consumption has encouraged everyone to consume too much and save too little.

So, the rich get richer, and everyone else races to keep up with their consumption. Excess consumption puts stress on families: people start working longer hours, making longer commutes to work so they can own bigger homes, and bankruptcies become more common. Not surprisingly, this race to consume and the financial hardship it causes put a big strain on marriages.

Robert Frank and his coauthors find that in counties where inequality is high, divorce rates are high as well; a 1 percent increase in inequality in a county is associated with a 1.2 percent increase in the proportion of people in that county who are divorced. In just ten years (1990 to 2000), the increase in income inequality caused a 5 percent increase in the number of divorces.

One possible explanation for this relationship between divorce and income inequality, besides the stress created by excess consumption, is that high levels of inequality encourage men and women to seek out new marriage partners whose better income makes it possible for them to buy the things they feel they need to compete in a highly unequal society. If that is the case, it is good news for them that there is a cheap way to look for a new marriage partner—the Internet.

LOVE IN CYBERSPACE FOR THE ALREADY MARRIED

If you have ever searched online for the phrase “why do people divorce,” you know it is popular for pundits to blame access to online dating and social networking sites for infidelity and divorce. This conclusion is based on the assumption that because searching online is so easy (and so private), men and women who might otherwise have remained faithful are instead shopping online for a new partner.

A new paper by Todd Kendall presents some compelling evidence that despite the popularity of the claim that access to the Internet is responsible for marriages breaking down, it is simply not true. In fact, the ease with which married people can now find new lovers online might actually be reducing divorce rates, not increasing them.

Remember the model of searching for love that I used to explain why single people migrate to urban centers in search of love? The Internet operates just like a city in that it reduces the cost of searching for new love with the added bonus of allowing married people to search without their partners finding out.

As we already know, when search costs are high, marriages are generally of lower quality since men and women choose to settle on an inferior partner rather than incur the high cost of searching for longer (earlier we referred to this as setting their reservation value at a low level). When search costs are low, however, marriages are generally of higher quality since men and women can continue to search until they find someone closer to their perfect match without paying the high cost (they set their reservation value at a high level).

Inasmuch as access to online dating and social networking sites lowers the cost of searching for a mate, having greater access to the Internet should lead to higher-quality marriages in general.

The implication is that increased access to online dating and social networking will both decrease the probability of divorce (because the quality of marriages increases) and increase the probability of divorce (because married people can continue to search privately for new partners). In order to say which of these two factors has had the greatest influence on divorce, we need to take a look at the data.