Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Can the West Seduce the Arab World with Our Dating Culture?

For no apparent reason, today I was thinking about the assertion I've seen, on blogs and elsewhere (and yes, you may assume this means I'm too lazy to go find the links) that all we need to do is wave the prospect of actually marrying someone you choose yourself at the young people in the Arab/Muslim world, and they'll jump ship for our obviously superior system. This rests on an extremely flawed analysis which considers the decision to marry as largely separated from questions other than the romantic interest between the two people. This is based on the Western, especially the American, view of marriage, which is both itself far too simplistic, and simply inapplicable to a wide swath of the world's people in their current condition.

Don't get me wrong -- despite the fact that studies have repeatedly shown that people in arranged marriages are about as happy as people in marriages where they choose their own spouse, I'm a big fan of romantic marriage. But marriage as an institution takes place within a whole web of social and economic connections, and you can't just consider a society's rules about marriage in isolation. Arabs don't have arranged marriages just because they're mean, sexist bastards; there are reasons that they arrange things the way that they do.

Specifically, arranged marriages take place in societies where the extended family is both the basic social unit, and the basic economic unit, (and often the basic political unit) of the culture. A Saudi girl will, after her marriage, socialize exclusively with her family and (mostly) her husband's. Those families will provide her with the economic support for herself and her children. The dowry so often decried by feminists usually actually belongs to the woman, and is used to support her in the event of death or divorce. The arrangements that are usually derided here as primitive and cruel are in fact a complex system designed to ensure that women and children are supported. (I wouldn't want to live in the system. Perhaps many of those living in it wouldn't either, though I haven't talked to any and thus couldn't say. But you can't change one part of a system without examining the systemic effects of that change.)

In the case of those who assume that choosing your own spouse is an unalloyed good, they are failing to understand the complex system of obligations that accompanies marriage in a society where extended families form the primary economic and social support. The obligations that a marriage in America conveys upon the parents-in-law are not trivial, but they are nowhere near as binding as the obligations that not only parents, but also the entire extended family, takes on to the new spouse, and often their extended family, in traditional societies. Ever wonder why so many plays and novels prior to the twentieth century feature families having, er, violent reactions to their children's choice of spouse? Well, before the industrial revolution (and after it for some time, due to cultural lag), a poorly chosen spouse conferred all sorts of potential trouble on the family. Their debts could be settled upon the family in many places; their actions could dishonor the family. In earlier times, your family might be expected to provide money, or even go to war, to support theirs. Well into the twentieth century, you would expect to be saddled with your child and any of their children if the spouse turned out to be a rotter.

In that context, it doesn't make sense to let the children choose their own spouses. Would you want to be settled with legal and social liability for the actions of whoever your child thought was nifty at the tender age of, say, seventeen? This is why, well into the twentieth century, most parents expected to have a little say about who their daughters married.

The response of those who favor a transactional model of marriage is to get rid of these clearly inferior institutions. They extravagently impair individual liberty -- who needs it?

Well, in cultures that practice these kinds of extended family relations, the answer is usually "everyone". Extended families perform a lot of highly necessary functions, such as social insurance, emergency health and child care, employment agent, and a hundred others. In countries with low per-capita incomes, especially countries where government corruption is high, it is not possible for the government to provide all of these services at adequate levels for several reasons. Government services have enormously higher transaction costs than family-provided services, because of poor feedback mechanisms and misaligned incentives. Also, until people are pretty well off, they are unwilling or unable to pay taxes for the support of people with whom they lack genetic affinity.

Even in the West, however, the libertarian/left idea of marriage is excessively transactional. No matter how appealing the idea, it really isn't possible to separate any decision this major from its cultural and economic repercussions.

Take, for example, the indisputably private decision to bear children. Private and personal though it may be, it has large public effects. In Japan, where a large number of individuals are individually deciding not to have children, the aggregate effect is to create a demographic crisis, as fewer and fewer workers have to support more and more people out of the workforce. This is a vicious circle, because the higher the economic burden of caring for the pensioners, the more people are likely to curtail childbearing.

Now, many will argue that the problem is the social security system, but this is not true. While badly designed pension systems can indeed have undesireable effects on pensions, productivity, childbearing, working decisions, and so on, the problem of demographic crisis is substantially the same whether the system is public or private. Whether they are drawing their money from a government check or a dividend check, the essential issue is the same: a smaller number of workers trying to produce enough things for a larger number of non-workers. A private pension scheme would probably increase productivity, and thus the standard of living at which the extra non-workers could be supported, over what would be made available by a public system, but there's no particular reason to believe that with demographic decline like Japan's, realistic productivity improvements could even maintain current standard of living, much less improve them.

And why the demographic decline? I don't know that much about Japan, but I'm told that it's because, institutionally, Japanese marriage is inappropriate to their modern economy. Japanese men work and socialize almost exclusively with other men, leaving their wives home with the children and often, his mother, to take care of. Young women are looking at this and saying "no thanks!"; they're staying single and spending their disposable income on themselves. In an economic system in which women's labor is sufficiently productive for them to adequately support themselves outside of the home, and a legal system in which Japanese women cannot be forced to marry by their families (thanks, MacArthur!), Japanese marriages offer insufficient incentives to induce sufficient numbers of women to enter into them.

So decisions about childbearing and marriage are not made in isolation, nor changes to the structure of the associated institutions, although to Westerners they appear to be. They can have very large economic and political effects on everyone else: witness the ten-year recession in which Japan's demographic crisis seems to be the starring player (with able assistance by the banking crisis and status-quo ruling party).

Note that this is not necessarily an argument for some sort of government intervention. There's no particular reason to think that governments would make good decisions about people's marriage and childrearing. It is merely to point out that marriage and childrearing are not merely lifestyle choices. They fundamentally alter the character of the society in which everyone else lives. As such, they can have large negative externalities.

To return to the question of whether Arabs can, willy-nilly, abandon arranged marriage, the answer is, not without getting rich enough to abandon the extended family as the major socioeconomic unit. And they can't do that without altering the governments that so dramatically misalign incentives, and thus stifle growth, or seize the bulk of the nation's wealth for kleptocrats. The idea that we'll seduce them by dating forgets that for a young person in Syria, dating may be all very well, but if he marries without his parents permission, he'll have no job or home, no one to take care of him if he's sick, etc. Most of his friends are probably also relatives. It's much more complicated than I think most Westerners are assuming.

I think they're putting the cart before the horse. First get rid of the governments so they can get rich. The social stuff will take care of itself.

Posted by Jane Galt at December 15, 2002 04:43 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links