Changing economics of marriage: The rise of the Sri Lankan wife - Following is the speech by Dr...
Following is the speech by Dr. Harsha de Silva read out at the Zonta Club International Day Forum on 9 November 2011
Good evening. Before I begin let me sincerely apologise to Lilamani for having given false hope that I will be by her side this evening! I am sure the women in the audience are saying “Men! Never keep promises! Useless.”
Ladies, seriously, I was intending to talk to you about ‘Changing Economics of Marriage: The Rise of the Sri Lankan Wife,’ but, unfortunately my plans were rudely disrupted by no less than the President and his Cabinet.
That is because they decided to expropriate 36 enterprises owned by private entrepreneurs like yourselves, through an ‘urgent bill’ in a most unfair and undemocratic manner.
The Speaker announced in Parliament yesterday that the Supreme Court had agreed with the President and his Cabinet that this ‘Revival of Underperforming Enterprises and Underutilised Assets’ Bill was consistent with the Constitution of Sri Lanka; albeit not having heard any arguments to the contrary within the 24 hour deadline given to them.
So by the time you hear this, I would be fighting for your rights in Parliament. Given the two-thirds majority the Government has ‘purchased’ it is almost impossible for us to make any changes to the proposed bill, but I am battling to submit an amendment to at least give the owners some time to try and turn their enterprises around before arbitrary nationalisation. It will be very a sad day for private enterprise and economic freedom in Sri Lanka if this bill goes through as is.
Economics of marriage
Now let’s get to the subject. Perhaps you’ve heard of Gary Becker. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1992 for “for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including non-market behaviour”. He is really the person who contributed the most to the analyses of the broad subject I wish to speak on this evening; economics of marriage, and what I say would reflect Becker’s reasoning.
Generally in economics we speak of maximising self interest; or in technical terms, utility, given some budget constraint. Owning a Range Rover makes me very happy; it provides me with an enormous amount of satisfaction or utility. Note that the Range Rover has no feelings and it can’t decide for itself. However ugly I am, if I have the cash I get my Range Rover.
The global Range Rover market is in equilibrium. That is there are no surpluses or shortages in the market for these classy vehicles. However, you must bear in mind that it is the Range Rover dealer who is the counterparty to the transaction. So it does not matter at all if the Range Rover is happy with its ugly customer or not!
But unlike the Range Rover market, the marriage market is different. You are the Range Rover. You have feelings and you can decide. I am assuming that the power parents had in determining who one got married to, based solely on dowries, etcetera, is fast diminishing while the voice of the person getting married is increasing.
Now the interesting point is that the marriage market, which does not necessarily include a financial consideration for transactions to be completed, is also in equilibrium; by and large. In that there aren’t significant shortages and surpluses of want-to-be-brides and vis-à-vis grooms in this country.
Perhaps it is better to frame this argument to middle class Colombo for the sake of clarity. Okay, we all have a few friends who we wished were married, but most our friends are already married; hopefully to only one at a time!
Now let me ask the married women here how that decision to choose a husband was arrived at given the set of all eligible men available to you? Hold on. First of all, all eligible men were not available to you. You only imagined they were. That is because of the varying preferences of the men towards all eligible women including you! Remember other good looking women were also looking for eligible men!
Also, what about the preferences of other eligible women towards the eligible men? Perhaps you knew of other women who thought the man you preferred was ‘Oh my! What a handsome economist!’ So a woman finding a man to marry is a much more complex transaction than a man, however ugly, purchasing a beautiful Range Rover! If there is any man driving a Range Rover in the audience, please believe me it’s not you I am referring to. This guy is imaginary!
Why do men and women get married?
So why do men and women get married? I don’t intend to trivialise the reason for marriage to only economics. People get married for multiple reasons. Sure, they could be social, legal, emotional, spiritual or any combination of them. I don’t know about you, but I know people who have got married purely for a green card!
Having said all this, the truth is that economic benefits are by-and-large at the core of marriage. I am not saying this, but researchers who have conducted empirical studies across the world based on Becker’s work.
I am sure there are many of you here who got married purely because you loved your chosen partner so much! But there are others here who considered the economics of their marriages along with love and all its derivatives.
You did exactly what you were supposed to do because you are what we call a ‘homo economicus,’ or an ‘economic human’. In that you are a rational person with self interest who has the ability to make judgments toward your subjectively defined ends.
Now, not everybody agrees with this ‘homo economicus’ argument by showing that people to really stupid things all the time! That is why we economists can never agree on anything!
Harry Truman once got really mad that his economic advisers who always said ‘Mr. President on the one hand… and on the other hand…” and ordered that he be presented with an economist who had only one hand! Okay, agreed there are other views. But you see where I am going with this.
Changing economics or marriage
Honestly, life is cheaper when there’s only one housing loan to pay and someone else can make a damn-good pasta for half the price as Harpo’s. By the way his new menu is excellent and my wife and I are regulars!
You see, ‘they’ used to say to eligible women “if you want to get rich the best thing is to get married”. There is a reason why I said “used” to say. That is why the topic of this talk is “changing economics of marriage”.
In the past marriage enhanced the economic status of women, as a whole, more than men. Married women had greater household income than the unmarried ones. They were therefore richer than their single friends. So there was significant economic benefit from marriage.
So, when the woman attempted to maximise her subjectively defined individual satisfaction from marriage; what the empirical evidence suggests is that she considered economic factors more than the others; emotional, social, legal, spiritual, sexual, etcetera.
The reason is quite simple. ‘Then’ lot more men than women were employed, or shall we say, had well paying jobs because ‘then’ men were more ‘educated’; I mean had degrees and so on, than women.
A recent report by Pew Research shows that in America in 1970, 28% of wives in the 30 to 44 years age cohort (they used that group because that is the stage of life when the typical adult would have completed their education, gone to work and gotten married) had husbands better educated than them, outnumbering the 20% whose husbands had less education.
By 2007, these patterns had reversed. Only 19% of wives had husbands with more education. In contrast, 28% of husbands had less education! Flowing from this, the same study found that in 1970, only 4% of husbands had wives who earned more than them, but in 2007, this share had risen to 22%.
Interesting trend
The trend is interesting. In America, women’s earnings, in the same age cohort, grew 44% from 1970 to 2007 while for men it was a mere 6%. This has reduced the gender-wise earnings gap from women only made 52% of what men made in 1970 increasing to 71% in 2007.
To prove my point that economic factors played a much more significant role than all others in the woman’s marriage decision let me share with you the data on marriage in the US using the same Pew Report.
As women became more economically independent between 1970 and 2007, more women decided to live together, divorce, marry late or not marry at all. Among the same 30 to 44 year old cohort, only 60% were married in 2007 as opposed to 84% in 1970.
But hidden in the data is a very important finding. The decline in marriage rates has been the steepest for least educated men while it has been the smallest for the most educated women, in this case, college educated.
So what is happening is that Americans who have the largest incomes, here linked directly to college education, are fortifying their financial advantage over the less educated. The rich are getting richer immaterial of gender, and the poor men and getting poorer and lonelier. How the economics of marriage is changing in America!
Rise of the Sri Lankan wife
Now let’s us take a quick look at the ‘rise of the Sri Lankan wife’. Unfortunately there is no longitudinal data to analyse the trend in this country. Perhaps when the census is done next year – can you believe that it was postponed from earlier this year because the forms were printed wrong? – the Zonta Club should commission a research to study this social phenomenon. I can give you some advice on how to structure it, if you wish!
Having said that, we do have enough recent data to suggest that, Sri Lanka will also follow the American trend. We see more women getting employed. In 1993, 90.3% of men looking for work in Sri Lanka found employment while only 78.3% of women did. But by first quarter 2011, while the figure for men had increased to 97%, the figure for women had shot up 93.7%. So it is becoming easier for women to find jobs than before.
We also see, even though I don’t have the data to prove right now, more women joining the corporate sector and also beginning entrepreneurial journeys and becoming successful. This evening is a perfect example of my argument.
I am encouraged by the fact that your club is working hard to advance the status of women in this country particularly by helping them with skills training and entrepreneurship and mathematics for young girls. You are fuelling the changing economics of marriage, intentionally or otherwise!
Changing age dynamics
But I want to caution you about one trend; and that is the changing age dynamics of employed women. Did you know that while in 1990, women 40+ constituted only 38% of our workforce; it has increased to 54% by the first quarter of 2011.
Only time will tell how the increasing financial independence and economic power of the naughty 40 women will impact on marriage. I hope the men in the audience are now beginning to feel it. Slowly but surely we are losing out on this contract! The economic power men had in the marriage negotiation is certainly reducing.
I think my time must now be up. But before I stop let me give you some statistics to further strengthen my point. By 2009-2010 academic-year 58% of all new entrants to the State universities of Sri Lanka were… women! Let me give you a breakdown of some academic streams by gender:
- Architecture and quantity surveying: Men 52%. Women 48%
- Arts: Men 22%. Women 78%
- Computer science: Men 60%. Women 40%
- Engineering: Men 82%. Women 18%
- Management and commerce: Men 45%. Women 55%
- Medicine: Men 46%. Women 54%
A slippery slope
Gentlemen, we are down a slippery slope! And here is the killer. There are three faculties of law in the State university system. Of the 251 who entered the Law Faculty in Colombo for the 2009-2010 academic-year; 214 or 85% were women! It was 87% in Peradeniya and 78% in Jaffna!
Source: http://www.ugc.ac.lk/downloads/statistics/stat_2010/Chapter2.pdf
What all this means is that the economics of marriage is changing and the power of the Sri Lankan wife is rising. Most men will tell me that I need not have wasted all this time articulating it and they know it very well at home who is boss. That is because this group belongs to the changed economics and the already risen wife!
Thank you Lilamani and the Zonta Club for inviting me and once again I am sorry that I was unable to be with you. I must thank the kind person who read out my note to you. Hope all of you have a good evening. I volunteer my wife to answer any question you may have! Ha! Ha!!
