If you crave attention, you can always toss a rock at a hornets’ nest.
The Forbes magazine Web site must have known it would get a reaction when it published an article that advised, “Don’t Marry Career Women.” The piece, by editor Michael Noer, explains why doing so is likely to result in marriages characterized by unhappiness, unfaithfulness and failure. The article generated buzz; hornets do make noise when you get them riled up.
Much of the negative reaction to the article was predictable and contained unseemly amounts of the name-calling that often passes for criticism these days. Still, it was fun to consider the irony of Noer’s views being tagged as anachronistic by critics who wanted him “tarred and feathered.”
Forbes.com did publish a thoughtful rebuttal by one of its own reporters, a mother and career woman, but her argument did not really demolish Noer’s cautionary advice.
The content of the article that stirred up the buzz was not written in ranting or inflammatory language. It was, in fact, an almost academic compilation of social science research papers dealing with how the higher proportion of women working outside the home has been affecting marriages.
Economists have an abiding interest in marriage as an institution. It has been, and still is, central to our economy’s consumer spending patterns as well as its accumulation and distribution of wealth. Gary Becker’s Nobel Prize in Economics, for example, was awarded in part for his work in analyzing marriage as a “small factory” involving complementary labor specialization. (This illustrates not only Becker’s brilliant analytical insight, but also why economists are almost never asked to write romance novels.)
The studies cited in the controversial article certainly lead us to the conclusion that the structure of our economy puts a lot of pressure on marriages.
According to the researchers, career women, defined as those with four-year degrees earning more than $30,000 a year working outside the home – are more likely to engage in extramarital affairs, and to be unhappy if they make more money than their husbands (who are also likely to be unhappy about it). Significantly, women putting in more hours at work tend to raise the odds of divorce, while men doing the same thing have no apparent effect on the likelihood of marriage dissolution.
There are other interesting statistics cited in the piece – certainly enough to justify the cautionary advice – but there is a big difference between compiling statistics and understanding what they mean. Probabilities do not determine outcomes. If they did, the people who assemble the data on the NFL teams would be rich and living on some tropical island. Instead, they are assembling data.
If we defined career not in terms of economics and education but in terms of attitude, we could get some insight into the problem. When an individual begins to prefer the workplace to the marriage, the job becomes a career in the sense of absorbing the person’s attention and energy and the marriage often suffers – not because of the hours worked but because of the preference.
There are good reasons why an increasing number of people now have careers and failing marriages. The workplace is in many respects a more pleasant place than home. People dress and behave better there. Responsibilities are both clearer and more limited, and it is an environment more tolerant of behavioral quirks and personal shortcomings. All kinds of self-absorbed people can enjoy advancement and rewards in the workplace, and as a general rule it is far easier to succeed in business than it is in life.
Analyzing marriage by compiling the statistics of failure is interesting, but at this point less productive than looking at good marriages. Those who study psychology eventually came to realize that however brilliant Sigmund Freud was in his analysis of his patients there was a practical limit to how much we could learn about human behavior from the cuckoos of the world.
Just as we try to learn from successful businesses and successful athletic teams, we can learn something from successful marriages, certainly a lot more than by tracking down the odds of whether Jill, with a master’s degree, a high-paying job, two kids, a husband and a mortgage, will run off with the marketing manager.
From an economics perspective, while households are no longer exclusively marriage-based, substantial increases in the rate of marriage dissolutions would be quite challenging for our economy to absorb, given the energy, globalization and terrorism issues it is already wrestling with. In the interest of our own prosperity, we should be doing more to find out what makes marriages successful. The answer might not make good drama, or good comedy, but it would be good economics.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant. He also writes “Business 101” monthly for the Snohomish County Business Journal.
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