The effects of wealth on (Swedish) marriage and fertility

[epicureanideal]

So in other words, if we want stable marriages, we should not financially devastate men in divorce and give their wives cash and prizes and accolades for breaking up their families and pushing fathers out of their kids' lives. Got it. Most of us knew this already but it's nice to have a study to confirm it.

[anonymouskimmer]

Here are first-take conclusions I draw from the article:

> The only discernible effect on female winners is that wealth increases their short-run (but not long-run) divorce risk.

Women still divorce their sucky husbands. It just takes longer. This could result in fewer kids, or it could result in kids whose homes are broken during later childhood or adolescence.

Reading the actual paper, this is, in fact, the conclusion the authors come to: "In contrast, the only exception to the pattern of null results for female winners is that lottery wealth almost doubles their short-run probability of divorce. One interpretation of the absence of a discernible long-run increase in divorce risk among these women is that wealth accelerates the dissolution of marriages that were already underway."

> We also report results which suggest that when married men win the lottery, the windfall has a tendency to stabilize their existing marriages

Winning a lottery helps men feel secure enough that they aren't as sucky to their spouse.

> lottery wins cause the largest increase in marriage rates and the biggest reduction in divorce rates among unmarried men with low incomes.

So if you want stable marriages that have children the best thing to do is make people wealthier, especially those of lower income. Make men wealthier and they'll get married more and have more children. Make women wealthier and the men they stick with will be ones they like sticking with. I can't see this latter leading to fewer children, on average. I'd expect it would lead to more.

Where'd you get your idea from?

[GrigoriyMikh]

I don't understand why people, on, supposedly, intellectual resource like HN, are offended when people state that women attracted to success(which can be measured in a multiple things, but right now, in the most places it's money). Keep dialogue constructive, things are like they are.

[whatever1]

Alternative interpretation: Many women tolerate abusive relationships because they do not have the means to financially support themselves and their kids. Winning the lottery is a way out.

[geewee]

This seems like an oddly woman-hostile take that's only very tangentially related to the study.

[watwut]

I think that you are simply lying about the financial devastation divorce has on men and women. Obviously the material split differs between countries, but I literally no country I actually looked at what you wrote was actually true.

[77pt77]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Whittaker_(lottery_winner...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-12-13/lottery-w...

This man had his entire life destroyed after winning the lottery.

Apart from divorce, other men sued him for ruining their marriages by making them look like losers and actually won!

[warner25]

What's interesting to me is that all this happened after he already had a $17M net worth (20 years ago, so worth almost double that now with inflation, and in a low-cost-of-living area), per the Wikipedia article. That's far more money than I'll ever see. How does more money materially change the life of someone like that? It sounds like his troubles were the effect of publicity after winning the lottery, not wealth.

[kif]

> other men sued him for ruining their marriages by making them look like losers and actually won

Wait, what?!

[watwut]

Whittaker sounds to have had a lot of issues that had nothing to do with lottery.

To me it sounds like one of those cases that likely got widely distorted in media. I have seen it multiple times where when you dig into the case, it turned out to be something else entirely.

[readthenotes1]

Isn't there a Jane Austen quote that goes something like:

Everyone knows a bachelor with an inheritance is in need of a wife.

[quadcore]

"A woman loyalty is tested when a man has nothing. A man loyalty is tested when he has everything."

[AnimalMuppet]

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

Opening line of Pride and Prejudice.

[watwut]

I mean, in a society where all financial security of a woman is from man and she has no real way of getting independent income, this sort of thinking actually makes sense.

[djkivi]

Not just wealth...lottery winners.

[efxhoy]

If you want to estimate causal effects you need a randomly assigned treatment. When studying the effects of wealth a lottery gives you exactly that.

The critique would be that the findings don’t necessarily generalize outside of the lottery participating population, but why wouldn’t they?

[rysertio]

Please note this study is on men who got a wealth shock. But population wise high income households have less children for some reason.

[Dalewyn]

It's the case across entire countries: The richer a country or region the less children there are.

For the countries and peoples moaning about low birthrates, the simplest solution is to go back to being destitute. The poorer a country or region the more children there are.

Not to say that's a realistic solution, of course. But the cause-and-effect seem fairly clear that more monies equate to less kids.

[huitzitziltzin]

This study covers men and women who got wealth shocks through three different programs, two of which are fairly conventional lotteries and the last of which is a “save to win” program where your odds of winning are a function of your bank account balance (to encourage savings).

[vintermann]

The obvious explanation to me is that having children costs money, and having children is a big disadvantage for many effective money-making enterprises.

[dang]

Url changed from https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/04/th..., which points to this.