Marriage and the City

Carrie Bradshaw once said that “Some people are settling down, some people are settling, and some people refuse to settle for anything less than butterflies."

Somehow the quote comes to my mind when I was reading an article in the Economist on Japan economy which said:

"Under the traditional (Japan) system, companies hired graduates and then invested heavily in their training and development. To keep workers loyal and protect their investment, they offered lifetime employment on steadily increasing pay, with generous fringe benefits and a lump sum on retirement."

Replace hired with marriage, companies/graduates with women/men and it could transform you to an episode to Sex in the City (by the way, the movie will be release soon)

In earlier (and better?) time, the women can focus on gaining skill on household chores and raising kid since they know the marriage is likely to last until death. The men would focuses on income generating skill. Division of labor works those days. But now marriage is not necessarily for life and people know it. What would be the rational response?

The Logic of Life (LIF) by Tim Hartford in the page 91-92 said that,

"The more people divorced, the more divorcees – that is, potential marriage partners – you could meet. …Because divorce was conceivable, women preserved career options. But because women had career options divorce became conceivable."

An interesting part of independence is that you depend less on other, and other less on you. Education and career bring all the above to both women and men. But it brings the credible threat (in game theory lexicon) that one can bail out of marriage in less hesitation than in earlier time. Maybe men refusing to marry up has rational reason (beside pride) after all since the outside option would greater as well for the woman.

LIF concludes on page 95 that,

'In the long run, the rational response is not for the couple to marry early and marry often; it is to divorce less and marry less… romantic couples are moving from boom and bust of marriage and divorce to a more stable arrangement where marriages are delayed… We know there exist something called an optimal divorce rate, and we’re 100 percent sure it isn’t zero”

I think Carrie Bradshaw would agree with that.