Follow up on todays celebrating

The thing that got Ann Althouse and Emily Bazelon started on that discussion I posted earlier, was this Pew study on marriage. There is a lot in that study but Althouse and Bazelon particularly notice that the study shows that men now seem to benefit more economically from marriage than previously and that marriage roles are changing because women are increasingly the main breadwinner in a marriage. Bazelon links this to the greater success women are having in education now.

Some observations about this, some of which may appear contradictory and others are bound to offend:

1. The most important information in the entire study is this part: "... those with more education are far more likely than those with less education to be married, a gap that has widened since 1970. Because higher education tends to lead to higher earnings, these compositional changes have bolstered the economic gains from being married for both men and women."

With these sorts of social phenomena, it is important to remember that the causality is potentially reversible. The wording above says married people earn more because they have more education. But it strikes me as considerably more likely that that getting married and staying married is a cultural trait of the upper middle class and is, therefore, a marker for success in all fields.

2. The Jane Austen point: marriage is an agreement people enter into for sexual, moral and practical reasons. A big part of practical is economic. If you want a successful marriage, you will pay due consideration to all three. If you want to fail, you will allow one to predominate.

Any socially competent person will meet hundreds of people they could fall deeply in love with. Meeting someone you could have a successful marriage with is far rarer and a far more important goal to have in life than erotic love. Contrary to what thousands of books, songs, movies and television shows tell us, erotic love is a trivial and easy thing to do. We're biologically programmed to fall in love and any idiot can do it. Having a successful marriage is a far greater achievement in every way.

3. We pay people in the professions far too much money and this has been made possible by gross distortions placed on the market by the very idea of professional status and state management and regulation of professional fields. This imbalance cannot be maintained and the salaries of lawyers, doctors and, especially, high school teachers should and will drop about a third in real terms in the coming decades. Once the artificial incentive to go into these professions has been removed, fewer people, including fewer really smart people, will be attracted to them and this will make for a better society.

4. The education bubble will burst. A post-secondary education costs too much money and gives too little benefit. The market will adjust for this.