Gold diggers

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." -- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

All else being equal, a household with two earners bringing in two incomes will obtain twice as much money as a household with a single earner bringing in a single income.

Conversely, all else being equal, a household with a single earning bringing in a single income will obtain only about half as much money as a household with two earners bringing in two incomes.

Or, in other words, 2 > 1. How much greater? Some experts say nearly twice as great. (See Fig. 1; Fig. 2.)

Depending on your political agenda, the is either: A) a restatement of the fantastically obvious and a waste of time; or B) "scientific" evidence supporting "pro-family" legislation that "encourages" marriage while discouraging, stigmatizing and punishing divorce.

CJR Daily's Liz Cox Barrett examines the latest "scientific" repackaging of 2>1 in an article titled, "Marriage Boosts Income, Says Media Because Someone Said It":

This study, published in the Journal of Sociology and conducted by Ohio State University researcher Jay Zagorsky, found -- as the CNN headline tells readers -- that "married individuals have almost double the net worth of those that are divorced [or] single" with wealth being defined "by such factors as home value, stocks, cash, and savings vehicles." Double the net worth, you say? As in two times the size? Intriguing. Tell me more.

Well, the reason that "married individuals fared better building wealth," says Zagorsky, is -- hold on to your hat -- "primarily because they share expenses and may have two incomes." ...

Was it really necessary to mount a study of "9,055 young baby boomers aged 41 to 49" to figure this out?

Barrett is right -- the study was an absurd example of research as the statistical approximation of the known. There is nothing newsworthy about the fact that married couples "share expenses and may have two incomes." Yet, as Barrett notes, this utter lack of newsworthiness didn't prevent this study from being reported as breaking "news" in dozens of newspapers and broadcasts.

But, as noted above, there is a political -- even a partisan -- reason that such flagrantly useless "studies" are conducted and promoted as news: They provide supposed statistical evidence for "traditional marriage" and "family values."

But this is an oddly pragmatic, utilitarian argument for the "pro-family" crowd to be making: Marriage as an economic contract and a means to income security. This is, indeed, a traditional view -- but it literally sells off the argument that marriage is also a "sacred" institution.

Comments

[pharoute]

Wow! Compelling argument for marriage indeed, numbers don't lie you know. But how exactly does a marriage bring in 2 incomes if the wife stays at home raising the replacement units? Hubby works 2 jobs? Wife does side work selling eggs, spinning wool blankets? The little ones learn the value of an honest day's work down in the mines?

[Andy]

I'm still waiting to see the research demonstrating that civilization will collapse if two men get married.

[Jeff G.]

It's not surprising that they publish this now that they got that absurd "marriage penalty" tax reform through.

The idea that a single person would be devoting a higher percentage of their income to household expenses than two people collectively would was a scientifically based and reasonable approach.

Then the Republicans decided it was a "penalty" against being married.. sigh...

[moonbiter]

Now Fred, didn't you write about how to these folks securing income is indeed sacred? Given the sacred nature of marriage and the sacred nature of money, don't they both together make it sacred-squared?

[Mnemosyne]

But this is an oddly pragmatic, utilitarian argument for the "pro-family" crowd to be making: Marriage as an economic contract and a means to income security. This is, indeed, a traditional view -- but it literally sells off the argument that marriage is also a "sacred" institution.

To me, this was just another compelling argument that marriage should be opened up to gay couples as well, since clearly they suffer a financial penalty when they are not allowed to marry. And is it fair to force someone to give up income because of something they can't help, their sexual orientation?

[Lila]

So do couples living together without being married somehow magically not share expenses while bringing in 2 incomes?

[Sarah Jane]

See, the odd thing about using this material to boost "traditional marriage" and "family values" is that most folks who want to promote such things also believe that wives should stay at home and raise children, thus negating the second income. Beverly LaHaye would certainly not approve.

As far as marriage being both a sacred institution and an economic contract, I don't see why there needs to be a conflict between the two; after all, we live in a world where we struggle with both sacred and earthly concerns. That the union of two people in a lifetime commitment should reflect both is only logical. It makes sense that my husband should concern himself both with my physical and my spiritual well-being.

However, this study reminds me of the youth pastors who tell highschoolers, "See, you don't want to have premarital sex because you'll get pregnant, and you'll get AIDS and other STDs, and you'll destroy the good sex that you could have with your future spouse, and it will RUIN YOUR LIFE. Oh, yeah, and also because it's in the Bible." Extremely legalistic Christians seem to revel in any random statistics that support their point of view, while systematically ignoring any evidence to the contrary. Another example would be pro-life campaigners who cite the dangers of abortion, while failing to mention that pregnancy and childbirth are actually more risky than most abortions.

It seems like many of these legalistic Christians are most concerned with controlling the way that others behave -- marrying and having families, in this instance -- and do not bother themselves with *why* people should behave this way. Thus, any reasonable evidence is adequate; the argument as a whole does not need to be cohesive, so long as it convinces people to take the right course of action. I'm not sure that I can intelligently analyze why someone would think this way. Perhaps someone can take the baton and further this argument for me?

[Sarah Jane]

pharoute said: "Wife does side work selling eggs, spinning wool blankets?"

As a young, healthy, college-educated white woman with a higher-than-1400 score on my SAT, my eggs are worth a LOT of money, thankyouverymuch. Significantly more, for example, than my husband will make this year. ;)

[Kristin Hill]

I'm almost certain Bev LaHate would not approve. She has no problem telling other women to stay home and make babies while she rakes in hundreds of thousands a year, as a speaker, author and lobbyist. Just thinking about the sex book her and hubby wrote makes me ill.

[Mikael Johansson]

In Sweden, during the 60s, a married couple - Gunnar and Alva Myrdal - spent quite a lot of political energy on setting up a tax system that would force emancipation. Basically, they made it impossible to survive as a family on one income, thus forcing the families to get two incomes, with the wife working instead of being a stay-at-home wife and mother, thus getting Sweden to where it is today in some aspects.

As a side effect, I don't believe that two incomes translate immediately to twice as much money for Swedes. I haven't crunched the numbers, but I think the tax effects punch through that.

[g]

Er, I think this may be unfair. A married couple has to eat about twice as much as a single person, has to buy about twice as many clothes as a single person, needs more space to live in than a single person, and so on. There are certainly enough economies of scale that it's no surprise that married people are materially better off than single people, but if it's really by almost a factor of 2 then I think that *is* interesting.

Than again, it *looks* as if Zagorsky counted a couple's home as wholly belonging to each partner. That would be absolutely nuts, and if he did that then his study deserves all the scorn being heaped on it and then some.

[Irrational Entity]

This discussion reminds me of a popular pun that emerged after "In God We Trust" was added to our money. The joke went that they forgot the "L" and the real phrase was "In Gold We Trust." The attitude fits with the name-it, claim-it philosophy that is propogated by so many televangelists.

[Edward Liu]

I remember my math class said that 3 > 1. Someone will have to check my figures, but I'm pretty sure that 3 is also greater than 2. Therefore, it seems that a marriages of THREE people would TRIPLE the income available to a family, which would make the economic benefits even GREATER.

In fact, I believe 4 is bigger than 1, and is still bigger than 3 (but maybe not 2 -- all that math crap I learned in high school was HARD). We may need to fund a study to prove that the optimal number of people for a marriage is FOUR, not TWO.

I could try this with 5, but I'm afraid I can't count that high, even after taking my shoes off.

[Cosmic Dancer]

If two people getting married increases household income, and if men already make more money than women, TWO men being married to each other would really increase the money coming in.

[Garnet]

Which is all the argument they need against gay marriage, of course; who will support the women if all the men get married, huh?

[Jason]

I concur wholeheartedly with the statements regarding the way studies like this are used to front a political agenda, and agree that the article peddled by CNN (and others) is so lacking in facts as to be worthless. But depending on the data that was used, the conclusions are not entirely obvious.

I heard this report on CNN the other morning, and here were my immediate questions about the sample: Are we comparing dual-income spouses with working singles? If we're talking about single-income marriages, then the results are interesting. (Although there's a chicken/egg issue of whether a higher earner is more likely to marry or is a more attractive marriage prospect.) And then there's the elephant in the room: kids. If married couples are accumulating double the net worth of singles (without kids) in spite of paying for diapers, braces, and college, then, yeah, that's pretty interesting.

But without knowing facts like, there's no way to evaluate this study, and the "news" stories on this study are worthless. Why can't reporters do more than read the one-paragraph abstract of a study?

[Spike]

With all due respect, I'm really not sure how this study occasioned our scorn for the "pro-family" lobby. The survey was conducted by an economist at an OSU think tank, and published in the Journal of Sociology, hardly a shill for the right wing. Yes, the conclusion is pretty obvious - but the realization that social scientists conduct a lot of pointless research (and newspapers print a lot of pointless information) is about as newsworthy as the revelation that a two-income household makes for a better financial situation.

On top of which, I'm unclear as to how these results are particularly helpful to any lobby in the first place. The marriage lobby has plenty of people who would prefer if married women with children chose NOT to work; moreover, it certainly doesn't discourage unmarried couples from living together and pooling their incomes. In fact, the only place where the pro-family crowd seems to enter the picture is...in this post. The study results are, indeed, an "oddly pragmatic, utilitarian argument" for marriage. But the person presenting that argument here is a research scientist, not a theologian.

In short, this seems like the wrong occasion to pull out the "pro-family" strawman (men?). Why don't we note the obviousness of the study and leave it at that?

[Seth]

Maybe I'm missing something -- twice the net worth, divided by two people, gives you the same per capita net worth as the single person.

[BA]

Fred, Keep writing, thinking, writing, thinking... You are inspired and you inspire. (Thankfully, time changes some things, never.) BA

[pharoute]

Sarah Jane: LOL, good point about "eggs" which is a perfect segue for me to rant about how pro-life individuals seem to be the same people that are against subsidized pre-natal care for poor women; that see a couple mainline fertility drugs, spend tens of thousands of dollars and call the result a "gift from God" as opposed to more accurately "a triumph of science"; and are hell bent in turning unwanted pregnancies in teen girls into some sort of divine punishment. /rant
What was this thread about? Oh yeah the media and unnewsworthy studies...

[Mainline Protestant]

slack: "...Marriage as an economic contract and a means to income security. This is, indeed, a traditional view -- but it literally sells off the argument that marriage is also a "sacred" institution."

Unless you believe that capitalism is God's own economic system, a sacred institution itself. Then a marriage as an economic contract remains sacred as well. But then why deny gays the right to an economic contract...?

[grenadine]

god bless CJR Daily. i think that was the site that first led me to slacktivist. in any case, i agree that the reporting of OSU study is sadly lacking - the questions of one versus two wage earners and whether child-rearing was accounted for are pretty huge variables.

i don't suppose anyone has hunted down the actual study? CNN has a bad habit of not linking to such things (lest we examine the raw info for ourselves).

[grenadine]

and another mini-rant: the US is not in any way a pure capitalist society. if all the government subsidies, protections, and special deals were taken away, you'd hear the screaming in the next solar system (yeah, i know there's no sound in space. work with me.)

"capitalism" as it used today is just a word to make successful corporations and businessmen feel as if they did it all on their own, when really they are as indebted to government aid as much as any welfare recipient. it's just a slight difference in method, is all.

[Passacaglia]

Beware - assaulting scientific research is the approach of the right wing, who are becoming more and more uncomfortable with facts and reality. As for the obviousness of the result, remember that for thousands of years, everyone knew that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones, and it took someone actually testing this assumption to discredit it.

Yes, scientists have biases; a well-designed study will minimize those. Yes, the press is unbelievably bad at the reporting of science.

As another poster has pointed out, if this study is sound (i.e., survives the critical examination of the author's peers), it is a powerful argument in favor of gay marriage.

[Spike]

Respectfully, I am still just not getting this. Did I miss the memo declaring that we must jump at any occasion, no matter how tenuously connected, to bash the right wing? I'm not questioning the assertion that scientific (or pseudo-scientific) research can be used to further a political agenda, but this is by no means the exclusive domain of the right. Several posters have pointed out that this study, in fact, would seem to undermine some of the claims of the pro-family lobby, but again, the pro-family lobby is nowhere to be seen here. It's just us, bringing them up in order to tear them down.

As for the study itself, I found this link to a slightly more in-depth look at the study results: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/divwlth.htm
It seems that the "big news" of the research is that while you might assume that divorce would cut a person's assets more or less in half, actually, their losses can be quite a bit greater. These results have a number of practical implications, for instance, having a more realistic picture of each partner's situation during or after a divorce.

[Katxena]

While I agree whole-heartedly with the criticisms of how this study was reported in the media, I think it is a mistake to blame the researcher, Zagorsky, for this or to characterize his work as a waste of money. As another commenter pointed out, his study is about the effect of marriage AND divorce on net worth. Futhermore, his findings about divorce are important and novel.

The abstract of the article (which can be found here http://jos.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/4/406) says that individuals who divorce experience a decrease in wealth 4 years before they divorce -- that's fascinating, and suggests that the financial effects of divorce are the result of more than just the splitting of the couple's wealth. I don't recall ever reading that before -- and I'm a professional sociologist, so I read a lot of this sort of thing. However, I haven't read the whole text of the article (Journal of Sociology is not a well known or prestigious journal), so my statements here are based only on the abstract.

I'm all on board with the media bashing, and share other commenters' concerns about the potential of such articles for political abuse. But Zagorsky appears to be doing useful and interesting work.

[grenadine]

spike, katxena, thanks for the links.

[Scott]

married individuals have almost double the net worth of those that are divorced [or] single

Net worth is individual worth. From what I can find, it's more accurate to characterize this as being $1 each for singles, vs. $4 for a married couple ($2 each). The details I found are below:

The study of the month is Jay Zagorsky’s “Marriage and divorce’s impact on wealth” in the Australian publication the Journal of Sociology. Zagorsky, an Ohio State sociologist, followed young Baby Boomers from youth to their 40s through the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Zagorsky found that on average, a couple’s net wealth increases 16% for each year they stay married. By their mid-40s, marrieds will have 77% more wealth per person than singles will....

Zagorsky used data from 13 NLSY surveys conducted between 1985 and 2000. All the respondents were between 21 and 28 years old in 1985.

People who remained single had a steady, but slow growth in wealth – from less than $2,000 at the start of the surveys up to an average of about $11,000 after 15 years, according to the study.

People who got married and stayed married showed a sharp increase in wealth accumulation after marriage, growing to an average of about $43,000 by the 10th year of marriage.

In fact, married people increased their wealth about 4 percent each year just as a result of being married, with all other factors held constant, Zagorsky said.

For people who married and then divorced, there was a slow build-up of wealth during the early years of marriage and then a steady decline beginning about four years before divorce. Total wealth bottomed out the year prior to divorce, to an average of about $3,500.

“Many of these people may have separated before the divorce became official, which would help explain why wealth starts falling so early,” Zagorsky said....

[Scott]

The results were "with all other factors held constant", so it's entirely possible he compared poor marrieds to poor singles, middle class singles to middle class marrieds, etc, so there may not be a "chicken and egg" problem w/ poor people having trouble finding mates (reversing the cause and effect) skewing the results. I can't make a claim on that either way.

[Lisa]

If marriage is so wonderful and sacred, people should want to get married even if it LOSES them money.

[Bo]

Okay, I don't know the details of the IRS rules here...but it seems to me to make sense that:

1. If two people living together pay more taxes after getting married...well that does seem like a penalty and would seem to be a deterance to people making a committment to their relationship and family. (By saying this, I'm not buying into all the other "right wing family values stuff...just point out, people shouldn't be penalized for getting married.)

2. On the other hand, a single head of household should get a break. But that is different than two people living together, right? Isn't there a "head of household" designation on the tax forms. Does provide a tax break for a single head of household?

[Bo]

One further thought on the above: Would people agree that government policy should ideally reward or encourage positive behavior, and discourage negative behavior?

I'm not saying everything should be regulated in this way, just saying, when a rule or a law does exist, it should ideally be designed in this way. I.e. you hurt someone else, you go to jail. You give money to charity, you get a tax break.

Therefore, again I don't know all the details, but in general I would support the statement that "your taxes shouldn't go up by getting married."

This line of reasoning is one reason I opposed state lotteries...because government is promoting a vice that has harmful effects to individuals and society.

[Ray]

I think the problem is that there can be a large cross-over between "discouraging bad behaviour" and "punishing people who make mistakes" (or even worse "punishing people related to people who made mistakes").

[Bo]

Ray: Yeah, I certainly agree...it is a fine line...and some people want to use laws to enforce their personal version of morality. Now that being said, the laws _are_ there to enforce a moral code on some level. But there is always debate as to how far that should go.

Therefore, my distinction of: where the rules exist...we desire for them to encourage/reward positive behavior (as opposed to: lets try to legislate punishments or rewards for every behavior).

I remember my parents trying to help a homeless family get stabilized and find jobs, and when they would, they'd immediately lose certain government benefits while made life unbearable in the short-term (like losing food stamps or health care or welfare benefits)...so they were contistently discouraged from moving in a positive direction. This was back in the 1980's, so I'm not entirely sure the same situation would apply after welfare reform.

I'm a big supporter of the concept of welfare as a safety net for the poor, but also advocate for a system to not breed dependency. That being said, a co-worker of mine was a homeless single mom who turned her life around over a two-year period in the early 90's by getting into a program that provided housing and support while she went to college...and she got her Associate's Degree and got a job as a case manager with the organization...she then helped other moms. But welfare reform's rules requiring certain levels of work to receive benefits made it more difficult for women to accomplish similar goals in the same two year program (i.e. try being a parent, working at least 25 hours a week, and going to school full-time). This rule sometimes keeps people at low-paying jobs.