The stability of marriages might be affected by a form of ‘market’ dynamics. Sadly, the way men treat women seems to follow a ‘supply’ type indication that suggest supply and demand plays a role in the strength of marriages.

In areas with high incarceration rates, women seem to marry less, women marry worse and they benefit less from the mutual benefits that come from marriage. This is due to the effect of supply on the ‘Marriage Market’.

The Research

The theory of a Marriage Market was initially studied back in the 1970’s by Gary Becker at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In our museum room we illustrated the basics of this market.

The effects of prison incarceration rates was studied by Kerwin Kofi Charles and Ming Ching Luoh. You can find links to the study here.

I’ll let them summarize:

“We find strong evidence that women have been affected by rising incarceration precisely as the standard marriage market model would imply. Higher male imprisonment has lowered the likelihood that women marry, reduced the quality of their spouses when they do, and caused a shift in the gains from marriage away from women and towards men. We find that women increase schooling and labor supply in response to these changes, but this investment has been insufficient to prevent an increase in female poverty.”

Importance of this Study

This study and the effect is critical to understanding an element of the cycle of poverty. It shows that incarceration applies a large cost to society that is mostly born by women and children. Let’s put in simply – throwing bad people in jail makes other innocent people worse off. This creates a cycle that makes jail more likely for others, which hurts, others, which creates more jail-able people, ad inifitum.

This suggests the sooner we can reform and integrate a person back in their family and society, the better off all families will be. This will lower costs to society.

The studies also show that this is more important in smaller marriage markets. In the US, African Americans suffer the most from this effect. In Canada the same effect is probably a key contributor to poor social outcomes for our funds invested in First Nations (native) communities.

Aboriginals are about 4% of Canada’s population but they currently make up nearly 23% of our prison population. This means this effect probably effects Canada although to a much smaller extent than African Americans due to Canada much lower incarceration rate.

Other implications of the Marriage Market

Going beyond incarceration rates, this Marriage Market effect is probably changing marriages in other ways. Social media is making the cost of arranging a new relationship lower than it ever has been. This will likely continue to disrupt the institution of marriage for the next few decades.

Solutions

There are many solutions here to the many aspects of this issue. It’s complicated because Strength of Marriage should not be the goal. Marriages of previous generations were stronger and more confining than the modern marriage due to the women economic dependence. This means likely – many women stayed in poor marriages strictly for lack of a better option. The trick now is to balance things.

First, reducing incarceration rates, especially of minorities will strengthen their marriage market. To do this we need a stronger focus on rehabilitation and reform. Other countries seem to have done a better job here. We should follow their lead. Crime and punishment is explored more in a future exhibit so I’ll save many details for that. Watch for it here or on our social media. We should recognize that rehabilitation costs more but it saves us money by strengthening marriage markets therefor reducing domestic violence, child poverty, etc.  Rehabilitation is a price we need to pay to break the cycle of poverty.

On the other aspects of the Marriage Market – there are other things that can be done as well. Dating websites likely impose a cost on society by making marriages less stable. They also help singles by improving dating outcomes. Maybe a small surtax on dating sites is possible to help balance that externality. The surtax can be used to provide better support to divorcing couples. This too will be explained and explored in another example.