Since time immemorial, poets have sung paeans to love and romance. History is littered with examples of enduring love and spell binding romances; and the ultimate embodiment of lasting love – a successful marriage. Yet, economics, (to its credit?) has managed to reduce the hallowed institution of marriage to nothing more than business function supported by a ‘theory’.
What crap, right? Obviously, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences strongly disagrees, for in 1992, it awarded one G S Becker, the Nobel Prize in Economics for his use of basic principles of economics to address problems in sociology. So what exactly did this G S Becker do?
Gary Stanley Becker, in his pioneering “Theory of Marriage” argued that the existence of the marriage institution is associated primarily with the reproductive function. Thus the question of whether to marry at all, and to whom, are related to what happens within the marriage, specifically, what the gains are and how they are distributed and what division of labor they rest on.
According to Becker's theory of marriage, the decision to choose a particular individual is based on the assumption that a better match cannot be found within the marriage market. The mate selection process involves search costs: generally, the longer the search, the higher the costs, and each person must decide whether to continue searching or to settle for the match he or she has found.
Becker holds that people marry only if they believe that the total utility of the union will be maximized. Part of this utility is based upon assortative mating, or the process of mate selection in which partners choose their spouses based on the utility of the traits they will bring to the relationship, such as attractiveness, height, intelligence, education, and income. Positive assortative mating occurs for complementary personal characteristics: for example, highly educated women are likely to attract and marry highly educated men, white women marry white men, and so forth. Negative assortative mating may take place for characteristics that are substitutes: for example, highly attractive women may choose to marry men with high income, partly because men tend to place higher value than women on physical attractiveness, while women are less willing to marry men with low earnings and unstable employment.
How then, does the science of economics deal with divorce (love flying out of the window and the associated tribulations)? Simple: divorce is treated as a consequence of imperfect information in the marriage market and children are considered capital that stands in the way of divorce.
While Wordsworth and Keats are probably turning in their graves as I write, I have to agree that Becker certainly put forth his arguments in a logical manner. So the next time your girlfriend accuses use of being miserly about money, and having a calculator instead a heart, tell her, “yeah, you may be right, there’s an economic theory about it”. And for the eternal hopeful, who still believes in love, remember “love conquers all”.
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