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Marriage and economics...any connections?
Posted by wdfavour • 10/10/08 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: marriage, money
“Divorced households in the [United States] could have saved more than 38 million rooms, 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, and [2,400 billion liters] of water in 2005 alone if their resource-use efficiency had been comparable to married households.” - Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Is there really any connection between marriage, divorce, and economics? There's a lot of opinion listed on this issue at [url]wdfavour.successacademyonline.org/marriage-and-economics[url]
What do you think?
User Comments
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YES of course -
I think it is a pretty stupid comparison, frankly.
Why divorced households? What about widowed or never married? Aren't they essentially the same in terms of their resource usage? Or does a divorced man in some way use more electricity or water than a never-married man...or widowed...of the same age?
How would it be different if the single mother of two children had never been married to their father? What, exactly, does marriage bring to the equation that is missing in the exact same domestic structure where a marriage never occurred? You still have a woman and two kids living in one environment and a man living alone in another. What magic did the divorce decree confer?
The economics of marriage are mostly economies of scale. One does not require marriage, however, to reap the same benefit. Cohabiting couples (straight or gay), roommate arrangements, multiple generations of a family living together...all can reap the economies of scale found in a married household, with or without children in the mix.
I live in a married household, but we use a lot fewer resources when my husband is on a business trip and I have control of the household light switches, shower water usage, and the remotes!
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