Comments on: Mormon Marriage Markets and the Shidduch Crisis

By: Bill

Bill — Sun, 06 Sep 2015 04:40:17 +0000

These are interesting articles (as always), but haven’t women already solved this “problem”? Don’t they just have sex with the men they really want/can get, eventually having a child out of wedlock, then get additional support (if needed) from the supreme polygamist, the Great Sultan, Uncle Sam (i.e., the rest of us).

Shucks, haven’t there been times in human history when the DNA evidence shows that there was, on average, one man fathering children for every 17 women having children? Just like there are men today who’ve fathered a dozen children with a half-dozen women, and never married any of them. Or men who’ve been married 3 or 4 times, and had kids with all of the wives.

I’m not sure what problem is being referred to here; this is not the 19th century, when a man and a woman married for life and took their chances (“for better and for worse”, etc.), the family was the basic unit of society, out-of-wedlock bastards were systematically discriminated against, and so forth.

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 05 Sep 2015 02:11:17 +0000

Most religions reject polygamy because lonely, sexually frustrated women are less likely to become mass shooters than lonely, sexually frustrated men (Islam being the exception because it *wants* its men to kill). Might there be a middle ground, allowing just enough polygamy that everyone who wants to marry can?

By: Handle

Handle — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 16:17:18 +0000

In economics, we say that it makes no sense to talk of ‘shortages’, so long as prices can adjust to match supply and demand. If the population ratio is still near 50% (i.e. supply is fixed), then there should be a market clearing price for ‘acceptable mate’. So the key question in these situations is better framed in terms of why isn’t the price adjusting (I.e. why are people being stubborn in their preferences and holding out) rather than as if it’s really a matter of skewed demographics.

That is, instead of simply accepting increasing preference for assortative marriage as if it’s some exogenous variable, the key question to address is an accounting for this stubbornness, from which all the other observations flow as dependent variables.