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Forbe reveals why working girl makes a bad wife, and a bad mother.
Article in the Forbes Magazine:
By Michael Noer, the Managing Editor of Forbes.com
"Don't Marry Career Women"
Guys, a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.
Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women, even those with a "feminist" outlook, are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.
Not a happy conclusion, especially given that many men, particularly successful men, are attracted to women with similar goals and aspirations. And why not? After all, your typical career girl is well educated, ambitious, informed and engaged. All seemingly good things, right? Sure, at least until you get married. Then, to put it bluntly, the more successful she is the more likely she is to grow dissatisfied with you. Sound familiar?
Many factors contribute to a stable marriage, including the marital status of your spouse's parents (folks with divorced parents are significantly more likely to get divorced themselves), age at first marriage, race, religious beliefs and socio-economic status. And, of course, many working women are indeed happily and fruitfully married, it's just that they are less likely to be so than non working women. And that, statistically speaking, is the rub.
To be clear, we're not talking about a high-school dropout minding a cash register. For our purposes, a "career girl" has a university level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than 30,000 dollars a year.
If a host of studies are to be believed, marrying these women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Social Forces, 2006). You will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001). You will be more likely to fall ill (American Journal of Sociology). Even your house will be dirtier (Institute for Social Research).
Why? Well, despite the fact that the link between work, women and divorce rates is complex and controversial, much of the reasoning is based on a lot of economic theory and a bit of common sense. In classic economics, a marriage is, at least in part, an exercise in labor specialization. Traditionally men have tended to do "market" or paid work outside the home and women have tended to do "non-market" or household work, including raising children. All of the work must get done by somebody, and this pairing, regardless of who is in the home and who is outside the home, accomplishes that goal. Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker argued that when the labor specialization in a marriage decreases, if, for example, both spouses have careers, the overall value of the marriage is lower for both partners because less of the total needed work is getting done, making life harder for both partners and divorce more likely. And, indeed, empirical studies have concluded just that.
In 2004, John H. Johnson examined data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and concluded that gender has a significant influence on the relationship between work hours and increases in the probability of divorce. Women's work hours consistently increase divorce, whereas increases in men's work hours often have no statistical effect. "I also find that the incidence in divorce is far higher in couples where both spouses are working than in couples where only one spouse is employed," Johnson says. A few other studies, which have focused on employment (as opposed to working hours) have concluded that working outside the home actually increases marital stability, at least when the marriage is a happy one. But even in these studies, wives' employment does correlate positively to divorce rates, when the marriage is of "low marital quality."
The other reason a career can hurt a marriage will be obvious to anyone who has seen their mate run off with a co-worker: When your spouse works outside the home, chances increase they'll meet someone they like more than you. "The work environment provides a host of potential partners," researcher Adrian J. Blow reported in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, "and individuals frequently find themselves spending a great deal of time with these individuals."
There's more: According to a wide-ranging review of the published literature, highly educated people are more likely to have had extra marital sex (those with graduate degrees are 1.75 more likely to have cheated than those with high school diplomas.) Additionally, individuals who earn more than 30,000 dollars a year are more likely to cheat.
And if the cheating leads to divorce, you're really in trouble. Divorce has been positively correlated with higher rates of alcoholism, clinical depression and suicide. Other studies have associated divorce with increased rates of cancer, stroke, and sexually transmitted disease. Plus divorce is financially devastating. According to one recent study on "Marriage and Divorce's Impact on Wealth," published in The Journal of Sociology, divorced people see their overall net worth drop an average of 77 percent.
So why not just stay single? Because, academically speaking, a solid marriage has a host of benefits beyond just individual "happiness." There are broader social and health implications as well. According to a 2004 paper entitled "What Do Social Scientists Know About the Benefits of Marriage?" marriage is positively associated with "better outcomes for children under most circumstances," higher earnings for adult men, and "being married and being in a satisfying marriage are positively associated with health and negatively associated with mortality." In other words, a good marriage is associated with a higher income, a longer, healthier life and better-adjusted kids.
A word of caution, though: As with any social scientific study, it's important not to confuse correlation with causation. In other words, just because married folks are healthier than single people, it doesn't mean that marriage is causing the health gains. It could just be that healthier people are more likely to be married.
Forbes then makes the point in photographs:
In Pictures: Nine Reasons To Steer Clear Of Career Women
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The Sunday Times
Guy talk hits career women where it hurts
THEY are picky about who they will marry, tend to have flings, put off having children to the point of infertility, keep dirty homes and are miserable to boot. So why marry a career woman? The argument that working women make lousy wives was given a new lease of life last week by Forbes, a top American business magazine, prompting a slew of furious protests from women readers. One typical response was that the article was “blood-boilingly misogynistic”.
Written by Michael Noer, a senior editor with Forbes.com, it began: “Guys, a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.”
He went on: “While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it.”
Noer’s article was a particularly brutal and highly selective way of summarising recent research, which has revived the long-tarnished concept of the “happy housewife”.
To many readers it was infuriating that a respected magazine that features female leaders of industry and finance on its covers could publish such “retro-nonsense”. Michelle Peluso, chief executive of Travelocity, America’s fifth largest travel agency, said: “This article feels like one that would have been behind the times were it published in 1950, never mind 2006.”
Gloria Steinem, the pioneering feminist who famously worked as a bunny girl to expose sexism in the 1960s, rallied anew to the cause in Salon.com, where she praised Forbes sarcastically for “saving many women the trouble of dealing with men who can’t tolerate equal partnerships, take care of their own health, clean up after themselves or have the sexual confidence to survive”.
The glamorous Steinem, however, did not marry until she was 66 and does not have children. Struggles over issues such as childlessness and fertility, the “mommy wars” between stay-at-home mothers and working women and the alleged misery of wives who try to juggle home and career have become publishing staples, squarely aimed at the women’s market.
In the tabloids the topic is equally hotly debated. If celebrity magazines are to be believed, the marriage of Hollywood stars Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt foundered partly over Aniston’s desire to pursue a film career before babies. Meanwhile, Britney Spears’s marriage to the dancer Kevin Federline is under scrutiny because she wears the trousers.
So had Noer provoked a tidal wave of anger by telling a few home truths? And was his chief crime the fact that a man was saying it? It did not help his cause that Noer had previously earned his credentials as a male chauvinist pig with an article on the “economics of prostitution” in which he posed the question, “Wife or Whore? The choice is that simple”.
Under pressure from staff and readers, Forbes showed a distinct lack of confidence in Noer’s latest thesis, which was entitled Don’t Marry a Career Woman, by removing the juiciest bits from its website.
A section headlined: In Pictures, Nine Reasons to Steer Clear, which included the warning “She is more likely to cheat on you” accompanied by a photograph of a scantily clad woman lying across a man’s lap, was speedily replaced with a riposte by Elizabeth Corcoran, a Forbes executive, wife and mother of two. It was headlined: Don’t Marry a Lazy Man.
Gone too was a photo and caption for the claim that “she’ll be unhappy if she makes more than you”, taken from a report by two sociology professors, What’s Love Got to Do with It, published this year in the journal Social Forces. Noer failed to mention that other research suggested “increases in married women’s income may indirectly lower the risk of divorce by increasing women’s marital happiness”.
The much-pilloried Noer has been forbidden by Forbes to give interviews. Yet some of his most controversial assertions, including “You are much less likely to have kids”, had already been made by women. Noer cites research by Sylvia Hewlett in her much-discussed book Baby Hunger, which claims that only 51 percent of high-achieving women earning more than 100,000 dollars a year have had children by the age of 40.
He might equally have referred to the bestselling book "The Bitch in The House", edited by Cathi Hanauer, a collection of essays by career women who write of their rage at dealing with the kids, cleaning up after working husbands and coping with do-nothing men.
There is also To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Your Inner Housewife by Caitlin Flanagan, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, which Virago is bringing out in Britain next month.
In her book Flanagan compares the so called epidemic of sexless marriages today with the “repressed and much pitied 1950s wives” who were “apparently getting a lot more action”.
“Nowadays, American parents of a certain social class seem squeaky clean, high achieving, flush with cash, relatively exhausted, obsessed with their children, and somehow, how to pinpoint this?, undersexed,” she writes.
Inevitably much of the debate comes down to personal experience. Molly Jong Fast, a 27 year old writer, surprised her friends by getting married in white three years ago and giving birth to a son. “My experience with stay-at-home moms is that they are more depressed, more lonely, more obsessed with their kids, more unhealthy, more likely to be left by their husbands and more likely to be divorced,” she said. “They are dependent on their husbands for money, and that power balance is the kiss of death. I have my own life and it makes me more desirable to my husband.”
As Noer has found, when men join in the conversation they sound horribly sexist. Yet with women now making up 48 percent of the American workforce, men are going to have to live with career women, like it or not.
The website Salon.com suggested last week that the article might just as well have been called, If You Are Really Self Loathing and Weak, Try to Find Someone Who Doesn’t Work and Will Consent to Live With You Out of Financial Desperation For the Rest of Her Life.
THE RESEARCH
SHE’LL CHEAT ON YOU
A woman is more likely to have an affair if she is better educated than her husband. Work provides chances to meet new lovers
– Adrian J Blow, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 2005
SHE’LL DESERT YOU
Marriage to a career women is more likely to end in tears. Women who work longer hours are more prone to divorce, while men’s working hours have no effect
– Dr John H Johnson of Nera Economic Consulting, 2004
SHE WON’T BEAR YOU CHILDREN
A high-flying woman is less likely to have children. Only half of women earning more than 52,000 Pounds a year have had childen by the age of 40, compared with 81 percent of comparable men
– Sylvia Hewlett, author and economist, 2002
KIDS WOULD MAKE HER UNHAPPY
Wealthier couples with children suffer a drop in marital satisfaction three times as great as their less affluent peers. Researchers believe this is because wealthier women are used to “a professional life, a fun, active, entertaining life”
Twenge, Campbell and Foster, Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003
YOUR HOUSE WILL BE DIRTY
A wife earning more than 16,000 Pounds a year does 1.9 hours less housework per week. This can be remedied if the husband picks up the vacuum cleaner
– Achen and Stafford, University of Michigan, 2005
Comment: Forbes is now telling men of the 21st century that career girls are bad news, they destroy marriages: Women who climb the ladder of success are bad mothers and bad wives. The city chicks are incapable of rational thinking. Career minded ladies have no love for their children; how can they ever love their husbands. Working women put money first and home second. Office girls who are busy in furthering their careers are not interested in settling down with a family. For working girls money and position is the prime objective far above a stable family life with a husband and his children. If feminists could actually think then they would love their kids more than money and office. Men are sure to suffer if they married a working woman who is chasing a career. Boys will now be in turmoil over finding best partner for life.
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Showing posts with label noer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label noer. Show all posts
Saturday
Wife or Whore
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Forbes Editor rips women who have a career.
Article by the executive news editor for Forbes Magazine.
"The Economics Of Prostitution"
Michael Noer - American business writer and editor.
Wife or whore?
The choice is that simple. At least according to economists Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn, it is.
The two well respected economists created a minor stir in academic circles a few years back when they published "A Theory of Prostitution" in the Journal of Political Economy. The paper was remarkable not only for being accepted by a major journal but also because it considered wives and whores as economic "goods" that can be substituted for each other. Men buy, women sell.
Economists have been equating money and marriage ever since Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker published his seminal paper "A Theory of Marriage" in two parts in 1973 and 1974, also, not coincidentally, in the Journal of Political Economy.
Becker used market analysis to tackle the questions of whom, when and why we marry. His conclusions? Mate selection is a market, and marriages occur only if they are profitable for both parties involved.
Becker allowed nonmonetary elements, like romantic love and companionship, to be entered into courtship's profit and loss statement. And children, in particular, were important. "Sexual gratification, cleaning, feeding and other services can be purchased, but not children: Both the man and the woman are required to produce their own children and perhaps to raise them," he wrote.
But back to whores: Edlund and Korn admit that spouses and streetwalkers aren't exactly alike. Wives, in truth, are superior to whores in the economist's sense of being a good whose consumption increases as income rises, like fine wine. This may explain why prostitution is less common in wealthier countries. But the implication remains that wives and whores are, if not exactly like Coke and Pepsi, something akin to champagne and beer. The same sort of thing.
As with Becker, a key differentiator in Edlund and Korn's model is reproductive sex. Wives can offer it, whores can not.
To be fair, Edlund and Korn were merely building an admittedly grossly simplified model of human behavior in an attempt to answer a nagging question: Why do hookers make so much money? Prostitution is, seemingly, a low skill but high pay profession with few upfront costs, micro miniskirts and stiletto heels aside.
Yet according to data assembled from a wide variety of times and places, ranging from mid 15th century France to Malaysia of the late 1990s, prostitutes make more money, in some cases, a lot more money, than do working girls who, well, work for a living. This held true even for places where prostitution is legal and relatively safe. In short, streetwalkers aren't necessarily being paid more for their increased risk of going to jail or the hospital.
Notwithstanding Jerry Hall's quip when she was married to Mick Jagger, about being "a maid in the living room and a whore in the bedroom," one normally cannot be both a wife and a whore. "Combine this with the fact that marriage can be an important source of income for women, and it follows that prostitution must pay better than other jobs to compensate for the opportunity cost of forgone, marriage market earnings," Edlund and Korn conclude.
Ouch.
Another zinger: "This begs the question of why married men go to prostitutes (rather than buying from their wives, who presumably will be low cost providers, considering that they can sell nonreproductive sex without compromising their marriage)." Guys, nothing says "Happy Valentine's Day" more than "low cost provider."
Of course, it's easy to pour cold water on some of the assumptions made in Edlund and Korn's mathematical model. But these so called "stylized facts" are supposed to predict human behavior; they don't necessarily pretend to mirror it.
In particular, the assumption that there is no "third way" between wife and whore is problematic, if not outright offensive: "The third alternative, working in a regular job but not marrying, can be ruled out, since we assume that the only downside of marriage for a woman is the forgone opportunity for prostitution."
Be sure to let all your married friends know what they're missing.
Also, the emphasis on the utility of children is puzzling. In most Western democracies, fertility rates have plummeted as wealth has increased. Empirically, men not only buy fewer whores as they get richer, but they have fewer children.
Still, the economic analysis of marriage explains one age old phenomenon: gold digging.
"In particular, does our analysis justify the popular belief that more beautiful, charming and talented women tend to marry wealthier and more successful men?" wrote Becker. His answer: "A positive sorting of nonmarket traits with nonhuman wealth always, and with earnings power, usually, maximizes commodity output over all marriages."
In other words, yes, supermodels do prefer aging billionaires. And Gary Becker proved it mathematically decades before The Donald married Melania.
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Response to Forbes Magazine article advising men against marrying working ladies.
The Sunday Times
Guys, a word of advice
There’s a huge hoo-ha in America about an article published on the business website Forbes.com. It starts off like this: “Guys, a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.”
The writer, Michael Noer, cites at length a piece in Social Forces, a US research journal, that has apparently found marrying a working woman dramatically ups the risk of having a difficult marriage and that “professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. Even those with a ‘feminist’ outlook are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner”.
So that’s nice, especially the incredulous quote marks around the “feminist”. And working your butt off as a cashier at the supermarket doesn’t count, by the way: to qualify as a career woman you apparently need to have been to university, work more than 35 weeks a year outside the home and earn a minimum salary of 30,000 dollars(just under 16,000 pounds, a weirdly low figure, surely?).
Marrying these women is, according to the research Noer quotes, “asking for trouble”. If they abandon their job to raise children “they will be unhappy”. If they make more money than you “they will be unhappy” and “you will be unhappy” too. Husbands of career women are also more likely to fall ill, it appears, and to have dirty houses (again strange, as one of the joys of a double income is that you can afford to hire any number of cleaners).
You can imagine the outcry the article has caused. Women readers aren’t happy and the website has now posted a spirited riposte by one of its female correspondents alongside Noer’s original feature.
What is interesting about all of this is that I suspect Noer’s central point, that working women are trouble and that you’re better off with a docile little breeder or, indeed, a trophy wife, is more widely held by men than you or I might imagine. It’s not a viewpoint they like to trumpet in mixed company, obviously, but I’ve heard it expressed more times than I care to remember in private.
It stems in part from a sweet but inane desire for alpha malehood, me man, me provide, me gain big eyed gratitude for ace wage earning skills, and from chronic sexual insecurity. If your nice little wife is safely at home all day, instead of running around the boardroom with men who might, the horror, be somewhat more alpha than you, she’s more likely to admire your manly skills and talents when you come home at night, and not realise what she’s missing.
That’s the theory, anyway. The practice, I have observed over the years, is somewhat different. Men love nothing more than coming home to an ordered house, sleeping children, dinner in the oven and a cocktail waiting on the table, but they don’t necessarily go a whole hog on the conversation that goes with it: “Such a funny thing happened at playgroup”; “The queues in Sainsbury’s were awful today”; “I’ve found that if I purée the broccoli, they don’t really notice they’re eating it”. And so on. Then women are all surprised when men seem not to listen, or to be distracted, or suddenly find themselves “working late”.
Besides, as we all know, the domestic fantasy outlined above is usually only achievable with a vast amount of paid help, which means a double income. Without it the children are still running amok, the dinner’s burnt, the missus has dark circles under her eyes and she’s downed the cocktail in one herself to try to calm her nerves.
She doesn’t want to talk about broccoli either but her brain seems to atrophy more and more with the birth of each child. She wants to watch Newsnight but she’s too tired. How can she be tired, the husband wonders, when she’s at home all day? What does she do? She’s not the one who had to get up at 4am to catch a flight to Zurich. And now he’s feeling frisky but she’s already snoring. Despite what Noer and his “research” might claim, it’s hard to see this scenario as the best advert for marital bliss.
I don’t want to get drawn into the unproductive name calling that passes for debate on the question of working versus stay-at-home women. I’ve been both and I liked both. I prefer working because I can’t imagine not having my own money and because I like being able to pay other people to do the stuff that bores me.
The point, surely, is that women should have the freedom to do exactly what they wish to do with their lives, and that very freedom is only real if it originates from women themselves. If a woman doesn’t want a career at any point, fine. The problem arises when that option is put to her by a man; less an option, actually, than an instruction: “There’s no need for you to work, I can support us both. And isn’t it about time you got pregnant?”.
So I would say this: Girls, a word of advice. Marry handsome men or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blonds or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a man with a complex. Marry a man who is happy for you to be you, happy whether you do or don’t work. Marry a man who loves you as you are and who doesn’t think taking the rubbish out is beneath him. Marry a man who can put the children to bed when you’re running late and make dinner too without feeling he is the victim of an emasculating conspiracy. Never marry a man who is stupid enough to use feminist as a term of abuse. Don’t marry Michael Noer.
Nice to see Victoria Beckham cracking a smile for a change, even if she was allegedly tiddly after a night out. One of the mysteries of our age is why Posh, in her wisdom, thinks the “sultry” pout she usually adopts at all times is somehow cool or aesthetically pleasing rather than reminiscent of a teenage goth experimenting with surly facial expressions in the privacy of her bedroom.
Another Posh related mystery surfaced last week. In the advertisement for the Beckhams’ his and hers fragrances, Intimately Beckham, Victoria sports an enormous derriere. Well, enormous in the context of her emaciated frame, at any rate. The new bottom is rather like Barbie’s bosom: you have the feeling that if its owner were actually to try walking with it they’d fall over, helplessly beached until someone came and pulled them up.
What I want to know is: does the J.Lo style bottom owe its existence to the wonders of digital manipulation or does Posh really own a pair of prosthetic buttocks? There is no way the huge bottom is hers: even implants wouldn’t give the desired silhouette. As far as I am aware, the only places that sell fake bottoms are shops catering to pre-operative transsexuals. I knew Posh liked shopping, but this is ridiculous.
Comment: If you want a good wife and a good mother for your children, then stay away from working girls. They are bad news. Working women lay rotten eggs.
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Forbes Editor rips women who have a career.
Article by the executive news editor for Forbes Magazine.
"The Economics Of Prostitution"
Michael Noer - American business writer and editor.
Wife or whore?
The choice is that simple. At least according to economists Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn, it is.
The two well respected economists created a minor stir in academic circles a few years back when they published "A Theory of Prostitution" in the Journal of Political Economy. The paper was remarkable not only for being accepted by a major journal but also because it considered wives and whores as economic "goods" that can be substituted for each other. Men buy, women sell.
Economists have been equating money and marriage ever since Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker published his seminal paper "A Theory of Marriage" in two parts in 1973 and 1974, also, not coincidentally, in the Journal of Political Economy.
Becker used market analysis to tackle the questions of whom, when and why we marry. His conclusions? Mate selection is a market, and marriages occur only if they are profitable for both parties involved.
Becker allowed nonmonetary elements, like romantic love and companionship, to be entered into courtship's profit and loss statement. And children, in particular, were important. "Sexual gratification, cleaning, feeding and other services can be purchased, but not children: Both the man and the woman are required to produce their own children and perhaps to raise them," he wrote.
But back to whores: Edlund and Korn admit that spouses and streetwalkers aren't exactly alike. Wives, in truth, are superior to whores in the economist's sense of being a good whose consumption increases as income rises, like fine wine. This may explain why prostitution is less common in wealthier countries. But the implication remains that wives and whores are, if not exactly like Coke and Pepsi, something akin to champagne and beer. The same sort of thing.
As with Becker, a key differentiator in Edlund and Korn's model is reproductive sex. Wives can offer it, whores can not.
To be fair, Edlund and Korn were merely building an admittedly grossly simplified model of human behavior in an attempt to answer a nagging question: Why do hookers make so much money? Prostitution is, seemingly, a low skill but high pay profession with few upfront costs, micro miniskirts and stiletto heels aside.
Yet according to data assembled from a wide variety of times and places, ranging from mid 15th century France to Malaysia of the late 1990s, prostitutes make more money, in some cases, a lot more money, than do working girls who, well, work for a living. This held true even for places where prostitution is legal and relatively safe. In short, streetwalkers aren't necessarily being paid more for their increased risk of going to jail or the hospital.
Notwithstanding Jerry Hall's quip when she was married to Mick Jagger, about being "a maid in the living room and a whore in the bedroom," one normally cannot be both a wife and a whore. "Combine this with the fact that marriage can be an important source of income for women, and it follows that prostitution must pay better than other jobs to compensate for the opportunity cost of forgone, marriage market earnings," Edlund and Korn conclude.
Ouch.
Another zinger: "This begs the question of why married men go to prostitutes (rather than buying from their wives, who presumably will be low cost providers, considering that they can sell nonreproductive sex without compromising their marriage)." Guys, nothing says "Happy Valentine's Day" more than "low cost provider."
Of course, it's easy to pour cold water on some of the assumptions made in Edlund and Korn's mathematical model. But these so called "stylized facts" are supposed to predict human behavior; they don't necessarily pretend to mirror it.
In particular, the assumption that there is no "third way" between wife and whore is problematic, if not outright offensive: "The third alternative, working in a regular job but not marrying, can be ruled out, since we assume that the only downside of marriage for a woman is the forgone opportunity for prostitution."
Be sure to let all your married friends know what they're missing.
Also, the emphasis on the utility of children is puzzling. In most Western democracies, fertility rates have plummeted as wealth has increased. Empirically, men not only buy fewer whores as they get richer, but they have fewer children.
Still, the economic analysis of marriage explains one age old phenomenon: gold digging.
"In particular, does our analysis justify the popular belief that more beautiful, charming and talented women tend to marry wealthier and more successful men?" wrote Becker. His answer: "A positive sorting of nonmarket traits with nonhuman wealth always, and with earnings power, usually, maximizes commodity output over all marriages."
In other words, yes, supermodels do prefer aging billionaires. And Gary Becker proved it mathematically decades before The Donald married Melania.
--
Response to Forbes Magazine article advising men against marrying working ladies.
The Sunday Times
Guys, a word of advice
There’s a huge hoo-ha in America about an article published on the business website Forbes.com. It starts off like this: “Guys, a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.”
The writer, Michael Noer, cites at length a piece in Social Forces, a US research journal, that has apparently found marrying a working woman dramatically ups the risk of having a difficult marriage and that “professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. Even those with a ‘feminist’ outlook are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner”.
So that’s nice, especially the incredulous quote marks around the “feminist”. And working your butt off as a cashier at the supermarket doesn’t count, by the way: to qualify as a career woman you apparently need to have been to university, work more than 35 weeks a year outside the home and earn a minimum salary of 30,000 dollars(just under 16,000 pounds, a weirdly low figure, surely?).
Marrying these women is, according to the research Noer quotes, “asking for trouble”. If they abandon their job to raise children “they will be unhappy”. If they make more money than you “they will be unhappy” and “you will be unhappy” too. Husbands of career women are also more likely to fall ill, it appears, and to have dirty houses (again strange, as one of the joys of a double income is that you can afford to hire any number of cleaners).
You can imagine the outcry the article has caused. Women readers aren’t happy and the website has now posted a spirited riposte by one of its female correspondents alongside Noer’s original feature.
What is interesting about all of this is that I suspect Noer’s central point, that working women are trouble and that you’re better off with a docile little breeder or, indeed, a trophy wife, is more widely held by men than you or I might imagine. It’s not a viewpoint they like to trumpet in mixed company, obviously, but I’ve heard it expressed more times than I care to remember in private.
It stems in part from a sweet but inane desire for alpha malehood, me man, me provide, me gain big eyed gratitude for ace wage earning skills, and from chronic sexual insecurity. If your nice little wife is safely at home all day, instead of running around the boardroom with men who might, the horror, be somewhat more alpha than you, she’s more likely to admire your manly skills and talents when you come home at night, and not realise what she’s missing.
That’s the theory, anyway. The practice, I have observed over the years, is somewhat different. Men love nothing more than coming home to an ordered house, sleeping children, dinner in the oven and a cocktail waiting on the table, but they don’t necessarily go a whole hog on the conversation that goes with it: “Such a funny thing happened at playgroup”; “The queues in Sainsbury’s were awful today”; “I’ve found that if I purée the broccoli, they don’t really notice they’re eating it”. And so on. Then women are all surprised when men seem not to listen, or to be distracted, or suddenly find themselves “working late”.
Besides, as we all know, the domestic fantasy outlined above is usually only achievable with a vast amount of paid help, which means a double income. Without it the children are still running amok, the dinner’s burnt, the missus has dark circles under her eyes and she’s downed the cocktail in one herself to try to calm her nerves.
She doesn’t want to talk about broccoli either but her brain seems to atrophy more and more with the birth of each child. She wants to watch Newsnight but she’s too tired. How can she be tired, the husband wonders, when she’s at home all day? What does she do? She’s not the one who had to get up at 4am to catch a flight to Zurich. And now he’s feeling frisky but she’s already snoring. Despite what Noer and his “research” might claim, it’s hard to see this scenario as the best advert for marital bliss.
I don’t want to get drawn into the unproductive name calling that passes for debate on the question of working versus stay-at-home women. I’ve been both and I liked both. I prefer working because I can’t imagine not having my own money and because I like being able to pay other people to do the stuff that bores me.
The point, surely, is that women should have the freedom to do exactly what they wish to do with their lives, and that very freedom is only real if it originates from women themselves. If a woman doesn’t want a career at any point, fine. The problem arises when that option is put to her by a man; less an option, actually, than an instruction: “There’s no need for you to work, I can support us both. And isn’t it about time you got pregnant?”.
So I would say this: Girls, a word of advice. Marry handsome men or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blonds or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a man with a complex. Marry a man who is happy for you to be you, happy whether you do or don’t work. Marry a man who loves you as you are and who doesn’t think taking the rubbish out is beneath him. Marry a man who can put the children to bed when you’re running late and make dinner too without feeling he is the victim of an emasculating conspiracy. Never marry a man who is stupid enough to use feminist as a term of abuse. Don’t marry Michael Noer.
Nice to see Victoria Beckham cracking a smile for a change, even if she was allegedly tiddly after a night out. One of the mysteries of our age is why Posh, in her wisdom, thinks the “sultry” pout she usually adopts at all times is somehow cool or aesthetically pleasing rather than reminiscent of a teenage goth experimenting with surly facial expressions in the privacy of her bedroom.
Another Posh related mystery surfaced last week. In the advertisement for the Beckhams’ his and hers fragrances, Intimately Beckham, Victoria sports an enormous derriere. Well, enormous in the context of her emaciated frame, at any rate. The new bottom is rather like Barbie’s bosom: you have the feeling that if its owner were actually to try walking with it they’d fall over, helplessly beached until someone came and pulled them up.
What I want to know is: does the J.Lo style bottom owe its existence to the wonders of digital manipulation or does Posh really own a pair of prosthetic buttocks? There is no way the huge bottom is hers: even implants wouldn’t give the desired silhouette. As far as I am aware, the only places that sell fake bottoms are shops catering to pre-operative transsexuals. I knew Posh liked shopping, but this is ridiculous.
Comment: If you want a good wife and a good mother for your children, then stay away from working girls. They are bad news. Working women lay rotten eggs.
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