Marriage as Complementary Consumption Preferences

Sometimes high theory and low reality mesh together just beautifully.  I'm still reading Simmel, who has a wonderful observation about marriage from 1907:  "The declining frequency of marriage which is to be found everywhere in highly civilized cultural circumstances is undoubtedly due, in part, to the fact that highly differentiated people in general have difficulty in finding a completely sympathetic complement to themselves."  Translated, this means that in a modern society where people are "more different" from one another than they were, I would argue, pre-capitalism, it is harder to find a marital partner whose personality and, as Wolfers and Stephenson argue, consumption preferences, are sufficiently complementary to yours to render the person "marriageable."  Thus, we get later and fewer marriages and people seem to be "picky."  So there's the theory.

In Sunday's New York Times Book section, there is an article exploring the way in which a prospective romantic partner’s book preferences (or lack thereof) signal the likely success of the relationship in the highly competitive upscale romance market. If one is seen reading a book that the other person does not think much of, the relationship might be over. Conversely, choosing or saying you read the right books can be an important positive signal.  What is the signal about?  Complementary consumption preferences, or in Simmel's words: "finding a completely sympathetic complement" to oneself. When marital choice is taking place at this level of detailed complementary consumption preferences, we should not be surprised that marriage is taking place later and less frequently. 

This is also a sign that the economic benefits to being married have fallen.  Folks can afford to be this picky because they don't need marriage to survive economically, just to make them happy.  That, I would argue, is a Good Thing.

Comments

[matthew mueller]

My response will borrow from the work of Thorstein Veblen, who himself was a master of the written word. My interpretation and attempted exposition of his combined "high theory" and "low reality" is clearly inadequate to do justice to this revolutionary satirist.

I suppose I could begin my arguing that if you are interested in researching the origins, character, and development of the "family", then you have to read Veblen's account of it, which can be found in the second chapter of his "The Theory of the Leisure Class."

Chapter 2 is a continuation of Veblen's theory of societal development (ch. 1), which can be explained by the general desire to differentiate oneself from others by the types of labor one performs. Conquest, wealth seizure, and enslavement consequently became marks of success and superiority, the outcome of which was the institution of private property. The "able-bodied" were expected to lead predatory lives, since "industrial employments" were relegated to slaves and women.

Now I would like to quote Veblen in the vernacular, since his writing style is so entertaining. Here he is on the family:

"The ownership of women begins in the lower barbarian stages of culture, apparently with the seizure of female captives. The original reason for the seizure and appropriation of women seems to have been their usefulness as trophies. The practice of seizing women from the enemy as trophies, gave rise to a form of ownership-marriage, resulting in a household with a male head. ... The outcome of emulation under the circumstances of a predatory life, therefore, has been on teh one hand a form of marriage resting on coercion, and on the other hand the custom of ownership. The two institutions are not distinguishable in the initial phase of their development; both arise from the desire of the successful men to put their prowess in evidence by exhibiting some durable result of their exploits."

Wow. Say what you will, but I have never enjoyed reading something so much. The argument can be "translated" to read that the modern institution of the family is essentially an outgrowth or product of the systematic enslavement of women for the purpose of demonstrating the "prowess" of certain "able-bodied men."

I will conclude by pointing out to Dr. Horwitz that theories relying on the peaceful evolution of cooperation and exchange misconceive the essential task of explaining societal evolution. Our past is filled with bloodshed, inhumanity and exploitation. Property, moreover, did not develop as an attempt to counteract these human proclivities; the institution of property is an essential feature of it!

Now I am sure Dr. Horwitz will produce an excellent book investigating the economic characteristics of the family --- and I look forward to reading it. But any desire for completeness must accomodate these "contrarian" views.

[Steven Horwitz]

I'd accommodate them if they were valid Matt. The "conquest theory of marriage" or the "male provider theory of marriage" are both not supported by the historical and anthropological evidence. The most important historical fact is that the earliest married couples did not live as a separate unit. Rather all were part of broader bands of multiple marital dyads in which resources were shared collectively. Such bands were not at all male-dominated in the way we think about that term today; in fact, some were female-centered.

Often our modern theories that look to the past to find precursors of modern arrangements we abhor (such as male dominance) are simply anachronistic, imposing on the past a conception of, in this case, marriage that is utterly inappropriate for the historical episode.

So instead of accusing me of being ahistorical for ignoring conflict and violence (which I do not), you should be accusing yourself of that sin for uncritically accepting Veblen's account of the origins of marriage as fact, when it's nothing more than a very convenient narrative that has not held up under the light of recent history and anthropology.

And it is worth noting, in case you feel in the mood to accuse me of cherry-picking my sources, all of my historical sources on marriage are from folks who are various degrees ideologically distant from classical liberalism.

As I've spent now the better part of a decade reading scholarship on marriage and the family, I'm pretty confident I've got a better handle on it than you do. Next time you might want to have actually read some historians or anthropologists contributing to the current literature before you try to tell someone who knows that literature what you think they have missed.

[Brian Pitt]

I think, and as you know Dr. Horowitz, that Simmel would totally agree.

Also, it seems pretty clear to me, Dr. Horwitz, that Simmel is viewing society through a "Mengerian lens," and he is a spontaneous order theorist.

Why do you think that he has been relatively neglected by latter 20th century spontaneous order theorists?

[Steve Horwitz]

Because he's a sociologist. :) Seriously.

Let me first say that I forgot how brilliant he is in that book. Mises, of course, cites Simmel in the Theory of Money and Credit, as does S. Herbert Frankel in his under-appreciated Two Philosophies of Money. But otherwise, Simmel goes neglected - well other than by me early on in my career. I honestly do think because he's in a discipline that classical liberals have largely dismissed, often because we perceived they had no interest or understanding of spontaneous order.

That might be true of much of contemporary sociology, but their founders, like Simmel and Weber (and Schutz) most certainly did. Those three are very much Austrians/spontaneous order theorists in most of the relevant ways. And we certainly need a classical liberal sociology. I see my family work as economic sociology, maybe even more of the latter.

Simmel is also a tough read. Note citations/notes. Very dense. But well worth the effort.

[Grant]

I think this round goes to Prof Horwitz, Matt ;)

If I were looking for a theoretical basis for the family, I think I'd look to evolutionary psychology long before Veblen.

I admit, though, that I always assumed the capture of a vanquished tribe's females to be a common practice in tribal societies (and not for "trophies", but breeding).

[Steven Horwitz]

Evolutionary psych helps, perhaps a lot, for some things, but it has its limits too. As the book is evolving, one of the things I'm headed toward arguing is that the evolution of the family can be seen as part of the longer process of the Misesian Law of Association.

The earliest families and kin networks were about getting access to resources and sharing the costs of defense against other groups as well as nature. These weren't exchange relationships in the modern sense but they were cooperation for mutual benefit.

[Daniel J. D'Amico]

Steve,

Zane's The story of Law argues that the first hunter gatherer bands were governed by matriarchal law. This was a product of human ignorance as to the ins and outs of where babies come from. Without knowing the relationship between intercourse, fathership, and birth the only sense that people understood familial relations were through women. Thus giving women a de facto control over rules and social structure. He says the early human tribes in structure looked like herds of cows. Bulls protect the herd but whos in and whos out is determined with relation to the females.

[Steven Horwitz]

Thanks Dan - that's very helpful.

[vilfredopareto]

Thanks to economics, I can now understand why I am still single. I like the idea that women can be seen as trophies...

At the end of the 19th century, communists (Fourier for example)used to say that family (and, thus, mariage) was one of the major characteristics of capitalism and that a communist society had to reject it.
Who should I trust? Communists or Institutionalists? Hummm. Not an easy question for an Austrian...

Perhaps mariage and other kind of non-economic relationships, like friendship, simply cannot be analyzed in economic terms. These forms of social interactions belong to the non-logic category to use Pareto's terms.

[Brian Pitt]

I am not sure that I totally agree with that VilfredoPareto. With more relaxed assumptions, the (Austrian) economic way of thinking may be applied here.

Look, in the more full and complete analysis of specific life-world situations (e.g., getting married, having kids, etc.), it may be insufficient merely to consider the deductive logic that people act on the basis of given preferences and constraints. I think that the more empirically-oriented the analysis, such as investigations of the family over the last 100 years or so, social scientists will need to incoroporate assumptions about expectations, experiences, ideology, etc. I am confident that this is the Horwitzian concern.