The Price of Everything (16 page)

One of the world’s demographic mysteries is why, considering the current changes in the structure of the family, Americans still have so many kids.

Religion is one possibility. It is more popular in the United States than in pretty much every other wealthy nation. I heard a story on the radio about a small evangelical movement called the Quiverfull, a name based on Psalm 127 in the Bible, which says, “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” The group frowns on contraception. Apparently, its members believe that if they have enough children, they will be able to take over the Congress in a few generations. “The womb is such a powerful weapon,” suggested one of their leaders. “It’s a weapon against the enemy.”

The reason for America’s prolificacy could also be that pensions in the United States are particularly stingy, making kids more useful as old-age insurance. A typical worker in the United States receives as little as 40 percent of his or her last wages from Social Security. European pensions are more generous. In Italy, fertility started rising slowly in 1996 after plummeting for ages. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was the year in which pension reform kicked in, reducing the payments promised to younger workers from 80 percent of their last wage to only 65 percent. Indeed, economists found that the odds of having a kid rose 10 percent for those workers who had their pensions cut, relative to those who hadn’t.

But the most convincing explanation seems to be that the United States has been better at accommodating work and childbearing than other nations. In the United States and some other countries, such as Sweden and Denmark, men have taken over some household tasks, lowering the cost of childbearing for women, allowing them to juggle kids and work outside the home. Some analysts also suggest that the weakening of the marriage bond has had a comparatively mild impact on American fertility because American women chose to have kids on their own. Countries like Italy or Spain, where traditional sexual roles are more entrenched, have had a tougher time overcoming beliefs that tie childbearing to marriage and a more traditional division of labor. Where mothers are expected to rear the young single-handedly, women face a starker choice: either employment or reproduction. As job opportunities have appeared, many have opted to work, dropping out of the mothering business altogether.

The fact that the archetypal marital transaction has been rendered obsolete does not mean modern marriage has nothing to offer. Marriage can yield substantial savings on everything from rent to magazine subscriptions. One study comparing the expenditures of single and married men and women in Canada found that singles living by themselves can spend substantially more than half of what a couple spends to achieve the same standard of living.

Marriage is also a form of insurance. Families with two sources of income are more financially secure than one and are thus more willing to take financial risks. A study of Italian women found that single women invest less in risky assets than married women, suggesting they feel more financially vulnerable. Other researchers found that the legalization of divorce in Ireland in 1996 led to higher savings rates among couples, as they hedged against the higher probability of breaking up and bolstered their finances. Married couples became 10 to 13 percent less likely to be in debt. And savings grew fastest among those who weren’t religious and thus were more likely to divorce.

Marriage in the United States is a more symmetrical institution than it has ever been: both parents work; both care for the children. Today, in 57 percent of married couples, both spouses earn money. In a quarter of these the wife makes more than the husband, up from 16 percent two decades ago. Partners are more similar, in age, education, and earnings prospects. Rather than a kid factory, it is now more like a club, where husbands and wives pool the resources they earn from work to buy leisure and other goods—like child care—from the market.

The classic Hollywood formula where the rich executive married his secretary after discovering she was a pretty young woman once she took off her glasses no longer has any purchase on reality. Today, Americans are about four times as likely to marry someone with the same level of education as they are to marry someone who is more or less educated. And if one spouse in a marriage has more education than the other, it is likely to be the wife. As husbands and wives have become less dependent on each other to produce what the family unit needs, marriage, once meant to last until death, has become a more diverse arrangement than it ever was.

 

 

THE CHANGES HAVE
taken a toll. Marriage has become unstable among poorer, less educated Americans. They marry and have children at a younger age, but divorce relatively soon, cohabit, and remarry. Among the least educated—people with no high school degree—marriage has become a rarity, and single mothers abound.

College graduates, by contrast, are marrying more. In the 1960 census 29 percent of women in their sixties with a college degree said they had never been married. By the 2000 census the share of never-married women in their sixties with a college degree was 8 percent. The better educated are marrying later, in their thirties and forties rather than their twenties, but they are much more likely to stay married. Twenty-three percent of white women with a college education who married in 1970 divorced within ten years. By 1990 the share had fallen to 16 percent.

These different experiences of marriage have a clear economic rationale. For the poor and less educated, marriage retained the old rationale of the shared production unit—where women and men trade complementary skills in the workplace and at home. Husbands make money in the workforce and trade it with their wives for child care and domestic labor. Marriage couldn’t adapt to the fact that women now often had more stable jobs than men.

For the more educated, the transformation was easier to take in stride. They could allow marriage to be transformed into a partnership built not around production but around consumption. For those who could more easily buy goods, services, and leisure, marriage became more about sharing the fun. Yet the experiences of women like Cathy Watson-Short, the former Silicon Valley executive, suggest that even highly educated American families are still learning to cope with some of the changes. The tension between the workplace and the home seems to be prompting some to reconsider working. The share of prime-aged women in the workforce peaked almost ten years ago, at 77 percent, and has declined modestly since then. The participation rate of married mothers with kids of preschool age in the job market dropped some 4 percentage points from its peak in 1998 to 60 percent in 2005. A 1997 survey by the Pew Research Center found that a third of working mothers said they would ideally work full time. By 2007 the share had declined to about a fifth.

Until the financial crisis of 2008, which put many families under increasing financial strain, fertility rates had been edging up for the first time in many years. Many of the young women who had delayed marriage and childbirth fifteen years earlier to start a professional career had become older professionals considering children for the first time. In the late 1970s only about 10 percent of forty-year-old women reported having a young child at home. By the early years of this century, the share had jumped to 30 percent. Some economists suggested this burst of late childbearing could put a lid on the labor supply of women.

It seems unlikely, however, that this pause means that women have rejected their new identity forged in the workplace. After nearly a century of women marching into work, I don’t see any signs suggesting a wholesale retreat back into the home.

On a visit to India several years ago, I fell into the habit of doodling with a new pastime while I sipped my morning coffee, trying to decipher the matrimonial ads in the
Times of India
. The ads were mystifying and fascinating. One suitor described himself as a “boy 27/171/4-LPA B.E. Sr S/W Engr in IBM,” which I decoded as a twenty-seven-year-old boy who was 171 centimeters tall, earned four somethings, had a degree in engineering, and worked for IBM.

Another beckoned “handsome Hindu Mair Rajput Swarnkar boy M.Sc. Mtech PhD (IIT) 32/170/23000 pm. Central Government Class 1 Officer,” which probably means the prospective groom was a civil servant and had gotten a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology.

Beyond the economy of words and the similarity in cadence with American real estate classified advertisements, the section underscored just how different mating is in India from, say, New York City or London. I was struck by the chastity of the advertisements, a far cry from the latex-clad suggestiveness of similar entreaties in the lonely-hearts section on Craigslist, and by the narrow segmentation of love. Ads were segregated not merely into main social classes, like Brahmin, Kshatriya, or Vayshia, but divided into dozens of castes, regional ethnic groups, and languages, nested one within the other like Russian dolls.

In India, 70 percent of marriages occur within the same caste, and the Indian public disapproves of intercaste marriage. Among middle-class families in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, women will consider a husband with no education from the same caste over one with a master’s degree if he comes from another. A survey of Indian men found that marrying within their caste had twice the value of marrying a “very beautiful” woman over a “decent-looking” one.

But the most notable quality of the matrimonial classifieds was their blunt businesslike tone. Matrimony, the ads made clear, is a family business, negotiated by the parents of the bride and groom, designed to ensure the passage of the bloodline to the next generation and beyond.

Marriage has changed around the world as a growing number of employed and increasingly assertive women have subverted the archetypal mating transaction. But despite the power women have attained in places like Paris, Berlin, or even Mexico City, in others, age-old marital patterns have resisted change. These happen to be the places where women are cheapest.

In India, many matrimonial ads offer boys. But despite appearances, this isn’t about empowering women. India is not the flip side of polygamous societies in which men go shopping for girls. Brides in India are very nearly powerless. Their parents may still usually pay a dowry to the groom, but brides are still the groom’s property.

Dowries are onerous. Research among a subcaste of potters in Karnataka found the average dowry to be equivalent to six years’ worth of the bride’s family income. In Goa, on the west coast, average dowries rose from about 2,000 rupees in 1920 to between 500,000 and 1 million rupees in 1980.

They are rising. One study estimated that dowries across India rose by 15 percent a year between 1921 and 1981. Some suggest it is due to economic development and rising income inequality, which has allowed richer lower-caste women to bid up the prices for higher-caste grooms. Others suggest that fast population growth since the 1920s tilted the male-to-female ratio in favor of men. That’s because women marry at a younger age than men. As the population grew, there were more young brides available for each successive cohort of older grooms. Indeed, among the Karnataka potters, one woman complained that her fifteen-year-old daughter was among thirteen girls competing for six men.

Yet the high prices brides’ families pay to the grooms do not afford women much security in marriage. Even upper-class women are reportedly threatened, beaten, and even killed by husbands and their families demanding higher dowry payments after marriage. India’s National Crime Bureau reports some 6,000 “dowry murders” a year, in which the husband’s family burns the wife alive. Another study put the figure at 25,000 deaths.

The payment of a dowry is relatively rare compared to bride prices, but it is not exclusively an Indian dynamic. In the Chapainawabganj, Chittagong, and Sherpur regions of Bangladesh, researchers in 2001 reported dowries ranging up to 160,000 taka, which is almost four times Bangladesh’s gross domestic product per capita. The researchers also reported extreme violence against women. Lower dowries usually led to higher levels of domestic abuse. Yet women who paid no dowry reported similar low levels of domestic abuse to those who paid the highest dowries of all. Perhaps this is because they had another source of power.

This naturally leads to the question of why would brides pay to be beaten? Why do dowries exist at all? Mostly, it’s not up to the brides. Their parents cut the marriage deal. India is a patrilineal, patrilocal culture. Men carry on the family line, stay in the parental household, care for their parents, and inherit their estate. Daughters, by contrast, are a liability. Parents expect them to leave their parents’ house to live with their husbands. Parents pay whatever it takes to marry them off.

For poor Indian families this can be costly, however. That’s why they often cull female fetuses to get rid of the problem before they reach the age of marriage.