= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
army1987 comments on [Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (90)
Why would I rather work for money (hereafter “work”) 2n hours a week and marry someone who doesn't work at all than work n hours a week and marry someone who works n hours a week (assuming the former is what you mean by “have families of their own”)? I don't get it.
Because the n hours your wife is working is n hours not spent raising children.
But I am also working n hours less in the second scenario, so I can also spend n more hours raising children. Sure, there are things I cannot do (e.g. breastfeeding), but that's what maternity leaves are for.
Comparative Advantage.
The data don't seem to support the theory.
I can't access a lot of those papers unfortunately. Anyone have PDFs of them?
That is the reason the 2n/0 model is still sensible if you are raising more than 2 kids and/or consider raising the kids yourself (mainly by the /0 partner) has a higher value (e.g. by unavailable of comparable education) than the income you could earn in the time the children by school/kindergarten. This may depend on your country/views.
You are presupposing that you get to marry someone in either case, which kind of defeats the point. Well, one could still talk about the attractiveness of 0-hour working vs. n-hour working mates, but that's not as intuitively forceful.
So the choice that you're suggesting is probably not one that people ever actually face(d) frequently.
I, for one, am more attracted to the latter (and indeed my partner makes more money than myself), but I know that there exist men who are more attracted to the former. (Attractiveness is a two-place word.)
Yes, but when we're talking about a broad societal phenomenon, we need generalisations. And I would think that some decades ago, the average male found the wife they could expect to get with a 2n/0 arrangement, weighed by the probability of her existence, more attractive. Also, bogus below is quite right to point out that the 2n/0 arrangement used to give you higher social status.
As for today, I'm not sure. My impression is that the 2n/0 option is plainly unavailable for many people. And indeed, the meaning of a woman not working has changed, which may influence the attractiveness equation (including for the average male).
Economies of scale come into play here too. If you can get to the point where 2n is a typical job, then having two part-time jobs is likely to not offer as many benefits or long term opportunities as a single full time job. Even if n is a full time job, depending on the job, having one person work massive amounts of hours is probably better for long term promotion potential than two people putting in the bare minimum and constantly having to take time off to take care of children.
Also, as others have noted, a stay-at-home parent is not someone who "doesn't work at all." Most stay-at-home parents tend to be responsible for raising children, cleaning, money management, shopping, general home repair, and a host of other things that if you outsourced so that the partner could traditionally work, could potentially cost more than the partner's earnings.