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The effects of wealth on (Swedish) marriage and fertility
- dang 4y agoUrl changed from https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/04/the-effects-of-wealth-on-swedish-marriage-and-fertility.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/04/th..., which points to this.
- djkivi 4y agoNot just wealth...lottery winners.
- efxhoy 4y agoIf you want to estimate causal effects you need a randomly assigned treatment. When studying the effects of wealth a lottery gives you exactly that. The critique would be that the findings don’t necessarily generalize outside of the lottery participating population, but why wouldn’t they?
- behnamoh 4y agoThe mindset matters imo. Someone who worked their a$$ off to accumulate wealth has a totally different perspective to life compared to someone who won lottery.
- mekkkkkk 4y ago> but why wouldn’t they? Well, could be that the lottery participating population has less than average satisfaction of their current life situation. Seems reasonable.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago> The critique would be that the findings don’t necessarily generalize outside of the lottery participating population, but why wouldn’t they? Because normally when people earn their wealth, they build up a whole set of experiences and social networks that assist them in managing their wealth. Contrarily, winning the lottery has often been reported as "the worst thing that can happen to you", and lottery winners are frequently broke in a few years: https://www.ngpf.org/blog/question-of-the-day/question-of-the-day-what-percent-of-lottery-winners-eventually-go-bankrupt/ https://www.ngpf.org/blog/question-of-the-day/question-of-th...
- vintermann 4y agoIf so, lottery winners are still useful for disentangling the effect that presumably comes from the wealth itself. Yes it's not entirely random who wins (not all play the lottery, not all play it equally much), but it's a lot more random than other ways to wealth.
- frostburg 4y agoLottery partecipants are more likely to be mathematically illiterate.
- huitzitziltzin 4y agoNot in one of the three main cases considered here. This is the Swedish “save to win” system - the number of lottery tickets depends on your bank account balance. (The other two cases for which they have data are more conventional lotteries.)
- lapsis_beeftech 4y agoI had one of those accounts and it was very much a lottery and not something a financially literate person would open.
- noughtme 4y ago> If you want to estimate causal effects you need a randomly assigned treatment. When studying the effects of wealth a lottery gives you exactly that. It gives you exactly the opposite of that. How many financially prudent individuals do you know who buy lottery tickets? It is not a representative sample.
- huitzitziltzin 4y agoNot a good criticism of this paper in particular. Read the details of the “save to win” program in the Data section. Save to win was not a conventional lottery program. (Two more conventional lottery programs are also included for which your criticism is more accurate.)
- noughtme 4y agoUnless I misunderstand, all three lottery programs studied are voluntary. Kombi subscription lottery, Triss scratch and win, and Prize Linked Savings Account (PLSA) are all voluntary, and therefore not representative of the general population.
- readthenotes1 4y agoIsn't there a Jane Austen quote that goes something like: Everyone knows a bachelor with an inheritance is in need of a wife.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Opening line of Pride and Prejudice.
- quadcore 4y ago"A woman loyalty is tested when a man has nothing. A man loyalty is tested when he has everything."
- lazyeye 4y agoOr to paraphrase Chris Rock:- In a good neighbourhood the women dont have jobs. In a bad neighbourhood it's the men that don't have jobs.
- debacle 4y agoThat's a great way to paraphrase this. A little chauvinistic, but he got slapped I'll cut him a break.
- belter 4y agoTo still paraphrase Chris Rock: Beyonce could still marry Jay-Z, even if she was working at McDonald's...Now Jay-Z by the contrary....
- toyg 4y agoBut, but, have you seen She's out of my league?!? Just kidding, of course - that movie works precisely because it upends well-accepted norms so thoroughly. Likely wouldn't work the other way around.
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- 77pt77 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Whittaker_(lottery_winner)#Legal_and_personal_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Whittaker_(lottery_winner... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-12-13/lottery-winner-jack-whittakers-losing-ticket https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-12-13/lottery-w... This man had his entire life destroyed after winning the lottery. Apart from divorce, other men sued him for ruining their marriages by making them look like losers and actually won!
- kif 4y ago> other men sued him for ruining their marriages by making them look like losers and actually won Wait, what?!
- 77pt77 4y agoI'm having trouble finding a primary source, but you can find people claiming that. I would not be surprised because, trial by jury.
- robopsychology 4y agoThere aren’t juries in Sweden from what I understand
- mekkkkkk 4y agoThis was in the US though.
- kif 4y agoCouldn't find a primary source either, but that would be one of the first cases where the phrase "suffering from success" applies unironically.
- warner25 4y agoWhat's interesting to me is that all this happened after he already had a $17M net worth (20 years ago, so worth almost double that now with inflation, and in a low-cost-of-living area), per the Wikipedia article. That's far more money than I'll ever see. How does more money materially change the life of someone like that? It sounds like his troubles were the effect of publicity after winning the lottery, not wealth.
- rysertio 4y agoPlease note this study is on men who got a wealth shock. But population wise high income households have less children for some reason.
- Dalewyn 4y agoIt's the case across entire countries: The richer a country or region the less children there are. For the countries and peoples moaning about low birthrates, the simplest solution is to go back to being destitute. The poorer a country or region the more children there are. Not to say that's a realistic solution, of course. But the cause-and-effect seem fairly clear that more monies equate to less kids.
- eldritch_4ier 4y agoYou can look at fertility rates across rich countries, and what you'll notice is a rapid secular decline starts literally the exact same year that the birth control pill becomes legal. Go ahead and google fertility rates for any developed country that comes to mind and compare it to when birth control became legal. For the US, UK, Australia, South Korea, etc its the EXACT year. Wealth doesn't seem to explain it exactly: the main reason people who want kids don't have they in developed countries is a lack of mean (wealth). Wealth itself doesn't seem to be it (all else equal, having more means doesn't seem like the obvious cause). I wonder what percent of children born for all of human history were simply unplanned. The data seems to suggest something like 50%+ of them. As family planning becomes more accessible, we're finding that people just keep postponing having them and a big part of the reason they had them before was simply "oops". No surprise in hindsight. There's not a single animal on earth besides us very recently that do any kind of family planning. They just have sex and offspring happen. Why should Homo Sapiens be any different.
- klipt 4y agoEvolution took the lazy shortcut of making us want sex, not children, and for millions of years that hack worked. Now that birth control exists, there will be much stronger selection for actually wanting children. People who only want sex will be removed from the gene pool.
- epicureanideal 4y agoSo in other words, if we want stable marriages, we should not financially devastate men in divorce and give their wives cash and prizes and accolades for breaking up their families and pushing fathers out of their kids' lives. Got it. Most of us knew this already but it's nice to have a study to confirm it.
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- geewee 4y agoThis seems like an oddly woman-hostile take that's only very tangentially related to the study.
- leobg 4y agoYou could say woman-hostile. You could also say victim mentality. He who is being left usually has walked away first.
- leobg 4y agoDown-vote and move on. That’s exactly what you’re blaming women for, isn’t it?
- epicureanideal 4y agoIt’s not intended to be woman-hostile at all. It’s opposed to a specific system of incentives that encourages immoral and socially destructive behavior. It just happens to be that the system of incentives is itself designed to operate unequally and so it affects the participants in families differently. If a similar system of incentives were created that strongly benefitted fathers in ways that fathers would respond to, we would probably see similar dysfunctional behavior from fathers.
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoIt seems women-hostile because: 1) It doesn't seem to follow from the paper. Which states that the wealthier partner tends to retain most of the married wealth. > While the richer spouse redistributes some assets to the poorer spouse in the typical settlement, the amount of redistribution is smaller than the amount required to ensure an equal split of the assets. This empirical finding suggests that the <lottery winning> spouses in our samples may anticipate retaining a larger share of the prize money in the event of divorce 2) If the only thing keeping a marriage together is the lack of wealth necessary for one party (the woman) to adequately survive after the divorce, then this is not a stable marriage. You seem to have come into this with an already formed opinion. Which is fine, but the opinion seems to be about circumstances not addressed by this study.