Continuous Productivity

What Causes Divorce?

A nice synopsis of the root causes of divorce at EconLog.  I found the following most interesting, but you should head over and check out the entire post:

3.  Defection due to expected divergence in mate value. As evolutionary psychologists will tell you, female mate value peaks and starts to decline at a much earlier age than male mate value: It's a lot easier for a 45-year-old man to remarry than a 45-year-old woman. This creates a big incentive for men to promise lifetime fidelity, then jump ship.

4.  Defection due to unexpected non-culpable divergence in mate value. Remember the part of the contract that says "for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health"? When one partner experiences an unexpected rise in mate value (e.g. one becomes a successful novelist) or experiences an unexpected fall (e.g. develops a horrible disease), one of the parties has a temptation to back out - and some do.

6.  Punishment for unexpected and culpable decline in mate value - or in plain English, "You let yourself go!" The marriage contract may not explicitly say that you can't become a bum or morbidly obese or perpetually bitter. But you've heard about incomplete contracts, right? When one party falls far short of expected mate value due to deliberate action or inaction, divorce is not only likely, but easy for neutral outside observers to understand.

I especially like the incentive/economics angle in the above root causes.

Don't Be Cheap

According to E'temad, the woman, identified as Hengameh, decided to claim her entire dowry of 124,000 red roses after 10 years of marriage to "punish her very stingy husband".

"Shortly after marriage, I realised that Shahin was very cheap," she told the newspaper. "He even refused to pay for my coffee if we went to a cafe or restaurant."

An amusing article forwarded  by a loyal reader.  You know what they say about a woman scorned- she'll get her roses.

Honey Trapping

Interesting Reuters article on the field of "honey trapping":

Martinez is a "honey trapper" -- or as he likes to call himself, an "integrity tester" -- one of a growing team of private detectives who are hired by wives, husbands or partners to test the loyalty of their loved ones.

The private detective agencies are hired when a spouse or significant other suspects a partner of cheating.  The idea is to use "honey trappers" to test the person and see if he/she will succumb to temptation.  But, there is etiquette even within the "honey trapping" industry:

And Martinez has "rules of engagement": The target must not be drunk, there must be no touching, and the relative attractiveness of the trapper to the target must be equal.

"It's got to be a fair test," he explains. "So we make sure that we don't set a very attractive honey trapper on a not so attractive target, and vice versa."

Don't Believe the Hype

Again, cleaning out my inbox came across this excellent Op-Ed piece by Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson.  Apparently, the common belief (held by myself and everyone else) is utter bullshit.  And of course the media plays to that myth:

Last week’s release of new divorce statistics led to a smorgasbord of reporting feeding the myth. This newspaper warned readers, “Don’t stock up on silver anniversary cards” because “women and men who married in the late 1970s had a less than even chance of still being married 25 years later.” And apparently things are getting worse, as “the latest numbers suggest an uptick in the divorce rate among people married in the most recent 20 years covered in the report, 1975-1994.” Other major newspapers ran similar articles.

I have to admit, I have had this conversation with numerous friends, married/divorced/unhappily/happily, and the general consensus amongst us has been that most marriages led to divorce.  In fact, the divorce rate has been declining for decades:

...the divorce rate has been falling continuously over the past quarter-century, and is now at its lowest level since 1970. While marriage rates are also declining, those marriages that do occur are increasingly more stable. For instance, marriages that began in the 1990s were more likely to celebrate a 10th anniversary than those that started in the 1980s, which, in turn, were also more likely to last than marriages that began back in the 1970s.

The article goes on to explain a Census Bureau surveying glitch that leads to the disconnect, as well as the need for negative news.