The 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.
> 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-th...
If 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.
Not 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.)
> 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.
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.)
Unless 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.
I mean, in a society where all financial security of a woman is from man and she has no real way of getting independent income, this sort of thinking actually makes sense.
What'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.
Whittaker sounds to have had a lot of issues that had nothing to do with lottery.
To me it sounds like one of those cases that likely got widely distorted in media. I have seen it multiple times where when you dig into the case, it turned out to be something else entirely.
It'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.
You 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.
Evolution 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.
I wouldn't call it lazy but parsimonious. At least among mammals, newborns seem to have vastly different requirements from the parents depending on the species. Optimizing for sex rather than nurturing just covers more cases.
It is difficult to afford raising more than two children on your own as a married couple. You have to enlist outside help. If you don't have a family to fall back on you have to purchase help. At some point one of the married couple needs to stop working instead of paying for childcare as the cost of childcare will exceed the income of one of the partners. Both partners want to maintain careers in the western world which applies further strain to the arrangement. I would have ten children if I had affordable childcare and additional help around the house. It is clear to me.
Not the same person you're responding to, but I'd have tons of children too if the economics weren't a factor at all. There's just something incredibly fulfilling about raising a child. It's similar to the feeling you get when helping somebody else out in need, except you also get to experience all the magical parts of the world all around you with them as they experience them for the first time. A lot of other things feel trivial by comparison once you've experienced that.
I do know families with many children. After some amount, you don't have time needed to fulfill all kids needs even if you are stay at home. At some point, educational and emotional needs of older kids go sideways since they are needed for work. And the stay at home partner seems super ultra tired all of the time.
Statistically, they have more behavioral problems including in educated not poor Christian families.
Utah with a 55% Mormon population has a TFR of 1.92. While it's higher than the US average of 1.66, I don't think the assumption that they generally have a lot of kids holds.
This exactly. There is something incredibly fulfilling with working with someone through the new world someone has never experienced. It has helped me let go of so many things I thought mattered. Once you see the life cycle for what it is the mental model of life is easier to digest.
Giving birth is easy for some, extremely annoying for others, and downright lethal for others. You truly never know if you are a chosen one until you try. There is no obvious phenotype.
You have missed the causality. Birth control has a huge wealth benefit where starting a family can be delayed until careers are more established. The number of children can be limited as well. Kids are expensive!
Also, in rich countries, people have much higher standards for raising kids.
In 2023 I know a lot of bougie American parents who cannot fathom making siblings share a room. 40 years ago, bunk beds were normal. 100 years ago, all the kids would probably be in one room, possibly with their parents, grandparents, etc and that type of living is still endemic in poorer nations. But how many people can afford an American house with another additional room?
No surprise there. Public school experience varies from traumatic to just a gigantic waste of time during the best development years. Once you go through that you don't want your children to have the same experience.
It was as fine for me as it was for other successful people I know.
I do not see how our experience justifies tens of thousands of dollars per year. Other than a general commitment to providing "the best" to their kids.
A wealth benefit for who? Maybe in terms of aggregate societal wealth, but in terms of relative wealth things have gotten worse (you can't buy a home and raise a family on a single income anymore for instance).
Before: everyone had one wage earner per household. Prices for goods meets this reality.
After: everyone has 2 wage earners per households. Prices for goods meets this reality.
Nothing has changed except now you need 2 people earning to live just as well as before. More aggregate output means "more GDP", but who cares when your life is relatively worse in many ways.
> Before: everyone had one wage earner per household. Prices for goods meets this reality.
This was only relatively well-to-do couples. Industrial economies were really good at expanding the middle class, but they never got rid of the lower classes in which both spouses had to work (and, of course, unmarried adults had to work regardless of sex). Labor force participation rate for women increased from a low of about 32% in 1948 (the earliest this chart goes) to a high of about 60% from about the mid-1990s to 2009. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
According to table 2 (page 4) of this BLS document (https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2001/05/art3full.pdf ), a four-person family in 1947 could have a "modest but adequate" lifestyle on a budget of $2904. The median income for a family then was about $3000, while the median income for an individual not in a family was about $1000 (https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1949/demo/p60-00... ). The federal minimum wage of $0.40/hour in 1947 would gross about $800/year for 40 hours a week. So the income necessary for a modest but adequate lifestyle for a family was about 3.75x the minimum wage at our current labor standard hours. Today, with a minimum wage of $7.25/hour, that 3.75x would be $27/hour, or about $54,000/year.
I'd speculate that even today a person with a typical engineer's salary, like then, could support a family at at least "modest but adequate" standards on a single income. But a typical laborer's salary would be stretching it, whether back then or today. Heck, the Turpin parents managed to do it with 13 kids, though they abused the hell out of those kids.
> The richer a country or region the less children there are.
Used to be true but now has changed. The richer have more children. See a recent survey on the new economics of the family by Mathias doepke of northwestern.
As I mentioned in a previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35407438 this is likely due to the additional help they can enlist at marginal additional cost by virtue of being rich
>> For the countries and peoples moaning about low birthrates, the simplest solution is to go back to being destitute
I don't think that this is true anymore. We have crossed the Rubicon, birth rates will only increase if people can maintain a good standard of living with less stress and more available time.
> But the cause-and-effect seem fairly clear that more monies equate to less kids.
I disagree. I would guess the cause is women gaining agency to dictate how many children they birth, from a combination of being able to control when they have sex, birth control, and access to abortion.
It just so happens that women generally do not have these things in poorer societies.
I wrote more than just birth control. Women in poorer countries might not have the economic opportunity to have the freedom to choose to have fewer or no kid, i.e. their society coerces them via lack of other options.
Also, in poorer countries, one’s physical securities may be more strongly related to the size of one’s family.
> Estimates suggest that more than 160 million women and adolescents who wanted to avoid pregnancy were not using contraceptives in 2019, despite significant progress in the use of modern contraceptives globally over the previous 50 years.
> Major disparities in contraceptive use still exist between regions – with more than half the women with unmet need for contraception living in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Wrong guess. It's not about money but culture. The arabs still re-produce by high numbers whether they have monies or not. This has come down in the recent years as they got more westernized.
Are Arab women known to have agency to have careers and complete control of their lives?
Some women in some subcultures may choose to have more kids than others, but by and large, giving birth and raising a baby is not a walk in the park, so I cannot see many women jumping up and down to have more than 2 or 3 kids.
Arab women are not an example of one where wome are making own decisions about children or have economic opportunities. It is example of culture where decision power about sex belongs to men. Woman may be on board or not, she may even have dominant temper, but practically all final power belongs to husband.
It is incredibly naïve to assume that women generally have no agency except in the West. In "the West" and related developing countries there is a huge amount of hedonist, anti-child propaganda, and the false belief that bearing children can be deferred to after 35 safely. Careers matter more to women there too, and they will increasingly risk child birthing over having a career.
Women do have agency in poorer countries. They don't have money (protection costs money) and education and fairly often don't have ability to day no to husband. Informing women about methods of protection and giving then even small economic opportunities means they use their agency to have less children.
Because, in fact, life of existing children matter to poor too and new child often means that older gets less food or have to stop education.
> generally do not have these things in poorer societies.
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Generally means that there are exceptions, with those Indian states being one of them. Good for India to have made significant progress on women’s rights.
This study covers men and women who got wealth shocks through three different programs, two of which are fairly conventional lotteries and the last of which is a “save to win” program where your odds of winning are a function of your bank account balance (to encourage savings).
The obvious explanation to me is that having children costs money, and having children is a big disadvantage for many effective money-making enterprises.
Young children stop you doing a lot of thing. I don't want to spend a decade changing nappies, cleaning up vomit, and waking up at 2am. Pregnancy is also annoying and potentially dangerous for the mother. I can't speak to others motivations, but those are the reasons I don't have more than 2 kids.
So 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.
It’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.
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.
This is silly. If your marriage is falling apart, you can’t wait for “the incentive system” to be changed. By whom, anyway? Also, many women will not leave the father of their children just for financial incentives. If there is the case, you gotta ask yourself what your marriage was based on in the first place. I agree that social pressure does play a role. For instance, I just saw a New York Times article that said “My husband doesn’t want sex anymore, do I divorce him?“. I agree with you that that is a disgusting framework of entitlement and replacability. But: If such cultural messages have more influence in your wife’s behavior than you, you gotta ask yourself… If you choose to believe what you just said, you’re gonna be a divorced Joe Rogan subscribing expat in Thailand pretty soon.
Intimacy, like love, isn’t something you get. It’s something you do. Getting the mental model wrong about this is a guarantee for disappointment. And for silly drama triangle thinking in terms of victim, perpetrator and savior (which does make for good clickbait).
Here are first-take conclusions I draw from the article:
> The only discernible effect on female winners is that wealth increases their short-run (but not long-run) divorce risk.
Women still divorce their sucky husbands. It just takes longer. This could result in fewer kids, or it could result in kids whose homes are broken during later childhood or adolescence.
Reading the actual paper, this is, in fact, the conclusion the authors come to: "In contrast, the only exception to the pattern of null results for female winners is that lottery wealth almost doubles their short-run probability of divorce. One interpretation of the absence of a discernible long-run increase in divorce risk among these women is that wealth accelerates the dissolution of marriages that were already underway."
> We also report results which suggest that when married men win the lottery, the windfall has a tendency to stabilize their existing marriages
Winning a lottery helps men feel secure enough that they aren't as sucky to their spouse.
> lottery wins cause the largest increase in marriage rates and the biggest reduction in divorce rates among unmarried men with low incomes.
So if you want stable marriages that have children the best thing to do is make people wealthier, especially those of lower income. Make men wealthier and they'll get married more and have more children. Make women wealthier and the men they stick with will be ones they like sticking with. I can't see this latter leading to fewer children, on average. I'd expect it would lead to more.
Afaik financial worries are a big reason why some women stay with abusive partners. This is gendered - many sub groups expect men to be breadwinner and women to be primary caregiver. So women are more likely to have no income for period of time or have child duties that interfere with work.
Contrary what OP wrote, typical result is that women becomes poorer after divorce and men had more money. (And no, alimony are nit given out like candies).
It is not only reason, but practically not having money and risking poverty or homelessness means you need to plan divorce very carefully.
It's become the standard in some companies to bitch about men and presume they're suckers and abusers is any situation that involves both sexes. Let's keep in mind that it's not science saying this, but woke ideology.
> the best thing to do is make people wealthier
Far-fetched. Winning a lottery makes you much wealthier relative to other people, it puts you in maybe 10-20% richest people of your country. You can't fit everyone in those 20%.
Look at something like Uzbekistan. Country is miserably poor compared to Sweden and they still reproduce like they win lotteries all the time.
There's also a bunch of womens groups where all men are the enemy.
One would hope these are fringe groups, but as an example my wife is on a few that bridge into breastfeeding groups, where the women actively malign their husbands who provide their living, and do most household chores, but are still considered inept.
Even in the seemingly equal marriage, it would seem the battle for equality rages on.
Lets call it for what it really is - battle for power and "freedom" to dominante others (those being husbands, wifes, coworkers - other humans in general). There seems to exists this general urge in some to search by all means necessary to make others an extension of their minds and not free and equal human beings.
Just my 2 cents of intuition acquired by observing some members of my closest family :(
"Sucky" relative to whatever it is the woman (who divorces him) wants.
> Winning a lottery makes you much wealthier relative to other people, it puts you in maybe 10-20% richest people of your country. You can't fit everyone in those 20%.
The average lottery winnings this paper is looking at is equal to ~$140,000 USD. According to wikipedia, Credit Suisse says the median net worth of individuals in Sweden is $95k USD. And the paper says the wealth effect on Swedish males is greatest among unmarried men with low incomes.
This is a one-off gain. It is not the continuous gain of a high-paying job. So this lottery win can provide immediate stability and opportunity, but it cannot, in itself, provide longevity of income gains.
You are making the claim that gains relative to population are most important. While I can see this as being important in supply-limited countries, I am not sure that Sweden is such a country.
> Country is miserably poor compared to Sweden and they still reproduce like they win lotteries all the time.
Which is why you control for experimental factors. If you want to see what factors boost marriage rates, marriage stability, and reproduction in Uzbekistan, you want to study Uzbekistan. This study was about Sweden.
> One interpretation of the absence of a discernible long-run increase in divorce risk among these women is that wealth accelerates the dissolution of marriages that were already underway.
If you're pulling in divorces from the future, shouldn't the long term rate go down? Sounds like the total divorce rate goes up.
The long-term rate appears to be level. This rate is not divorces per year, but divorces per person (or married couple). A level long-term rate with an increased short-term rate means, as said in the paper, that divorces-already-in-planning are just sped up.
If it's true that divorces are being brought forward this means that couples who remain together after the e.g. 1 year mark are stronger, thus you'd expect the long term rate to go down.
I don't understand why that would be the case. With a long-term rate staying stable, either a couple is going to break up, or they're not. Pushing forward the breakups would not alter the long-term rate, just as pushing backward the breakups (as long as they're still within the window observed by the study) doesn't lower the long-term rate.
If it was the men who were, on average, disproportionately divorcing their wives the framing could be reversed. As divorce has costs, the act of divorcing someone indicates that they are worse as a spouse than the alternative.
I had remembered reading that women tend to be less happy in marriages than men, but this appears to be wrong. Still:
> happiness increases when low-quality marriages dissolve—again, that’s true for both men and women.
Divorce can be initiated by either party and the wording in the abstract ("divorce-risk") suggests they're looking at whether divorce happens, regardless of who initiated it. (I can't access the main paper, to verify what they're actually measuring)
Alternative interpretation: Many women tolerate abusive relationships because they do not have the means to financially support themselves and their kids. Winning the lottery is a way out.
Another is that some men are uncomfortable with a wealthier partner. I know a few like this who say it plainly, but it showed up recently in "Crazy Rich Asians" with the tech CEO husband.
I think research actually show this is the other way around - very little women are ok with marrying less wealthy me, while for men it is common (e.g. male doctor might marry a female nurse but it will rarely happen the other way around).
I don't understand why people, on, supposedly, intellectual resource like HN, are offended when people state that women attracted to success(which can be measured in a multiple things, but right now, in the most places it's money). Keep dialogue constructive, things are like they are.
I think that you are simply lying about the financial devastation divorce has on men and women. Obviously the material split differs between countries, but I literally no country I actually looked at what you wrote was actually true.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadThe critique would be that the findings don’t necessarily generalize outside of the lottery participating population, 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.
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-th...
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.
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.)
Everyone knows a bachelor with an inheritance is in need of a wife.
Opening line of Pride and Prejudice.
In a good neighbourhood the women dont have jobs.
In a bad neighbourhood it's the men that don't have jobs.
Just kidding, of course - that movie works precisely because it upends well-accepted norms so thoroughly. Likely wouldn't work the other way around.
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!
Wait, what?!
I would not be surprised because, trial by jury.
I find that highly dubious because in my experience bank clerks talk a lot and there is effectively no banking secrecy.
To me it sounds like one of those cases that likely got widely distorted in media. I have seen it multiple times where when you dig into the case, it turned out to be something else entirely.
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.
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.
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.
Why would you have ten children? what is the need, or the benefit, or the reason.
Statistically, they have more behavioral problems including in educated not poor Christian families.
In 2023 I know a lot of bougie American parents who cannot fathom making siblings share a room. 40 years ago, bunk beds were normal. 100 years ago, all the kids would probably be in one room, possibly with their parents, grandparents, etc and that type of living is still endemic in poorer nations. But how many people can afford an American house with another additional room?
I do not see how our experience justifies tens of thousands of dollars per year. Other than a general commitment to providing "the best" to their kids.
Before: everyone had one wage earner per household. Prices for goods meets this reality.
After: everyone has 2 wage earners per households. Prices for goods meets this reality.
Nothing has changed except now you need 2 people earning to live just as well as before. More aggregate output means "more GDP", but who cares when your life is relatively worse in many ways.
> Before: everyone had one wage earner per household. Prices for goods meets this reality.
This was only relatively well-to-do couples. Industrial economies were really good at expanding the middle class, but they never got rid of the lower classes in which both spouses had to work (and, of course, unmarried adults had to work regardless of sex). Labor force participation rate for women increased from a low of about 32% in 1948 (the earliest this chart goes) to a high of about 60% from about the mid-1990s to 2009. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
According to table 2 (page 4) of this BLS document (https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2001/05/art3full.pdf ), a four-person family in 1947 could have a "modest but adequate" lifestyle on a budget of $2904. The median income for a family then was about $3000, while the median income for an individual not in a family was about $1000 (https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1949/demo/p60-00... ). The federal minimum wage of $0.40/hour in 1947 would gross about $800/year for 40 hours a week. So the income necessary for a modest but adequate lifestyle for a family was about 3.75x the minimum wage at our current labor standard hours. Today, with a minimum wage of $7.25/hour, that 3.75x would be $27/hour, or about $54,000/year.
I'd speculate that even today a person with a typical engineer's salary, like then, could support a family at at least "modest but adequate" standards on a single income. But a typical laborer's salary would be stretching it, whether back then or today. Heck, the Turpin parents managed to do it with 13 kids, though they abused the hell out of those kids.
The original family planning, infanticide, or abandonment of eggs for egg laying species, is practiced by a variety of animals.
Used to be true but now has changed. The richer have more children. See a recent survey on the new economics of the family by Mathias doepke of northwestern.
I don't think that this is true anymore. We have crossed the Rubicon, birth rates will only increase if people can maintain a good standard of living with less stress and more available time.
I disagree. I would guess the cause is women gaining agency to dictate how many children they birth, from a combination of being able to control when they have sex, birth control, and access to abortion.
It just so happens that women generally do not have these things in poorer societies.
It's not just that. There's a level of wealth where people just choose to delay having kids
Also, in poorer countries, one’s physical securities may be more strongly related to the size of one’s family.
> Estimates suggest that more than 160 million women and adolescents who wanted to avoid pregnancy were not using contraceptives in 2019, despite significant progress in the use of modern contraceptives globally over the previous 50 years.
> Major disparities in contraceptive use still exist between regions – with more than half the women with unmet need for contraception living in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Some women in some subcultures may choose to have more kids than others, but by and large, giving birth and raising a baby is not a walk in the park, so I cannot see many women jumping up and down to have more than 2 or 3 kids.
Because, in fact, life of existing children matter to poor too and new child often means that older gets less food or have to stop education.
Generally means that there are exceptions, with those Indian states being one of them. Good for India to have made significant progress on women’s rights.
He who is being left usually has walked away first.
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.
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.
Intimacy matters to people.
Noone cared about alimony until women started having to pay and now there's suddenly a movement to remove it.
> The only discernible effect on female winners is that wealth increases their short-run (but not long-run) divorce risk.
Women still divorce their sucky husbands. It just takes longer. This could result in fewer kids, or it could result in kids whose homes are broken during later childhood or adolescence.
Reading the actual paper, this is, in fact, the conclusion the authors come to: "In contrast, the only exception to the pattern of null results for female winners is that lottery wealth almost doubles their short-run probability of divorce. One interpretation of the absence of a discernible long-run increase in divorce risk among these women is that wealth accelerates the dissolution of marriages that were already underway."
> We also report results which suggest that when married men win the lottery, the windfall has a tendency to stabilize their existing marriages
Winning a lottery helps men feel secure enough that they aren't as sucky to their spouse.
> lottery wins cause the largest increase in marriage rates and the biggest reduction in divorce rates among unmarried men with low incomes.
So if you want stable marriages that have children the best thing to do is make people wealthier, especially those of lower income. Make men wealthier and they'll get married more and have more children. Make women wealthier and the men they stick with will be ones they like sticking with. I can't see this latter leading to fewer children, on average. I'd expect it would lead to more.
Where'd you get your idea from?
Contrary what OP wrote, typical result is that women becomes poorer after divorce and men had more money. (And no, alimony are nit given out like candies).
It is not only reason, but practically not having money and risking poverty or homelessness means you need to plan divorce very carefully.
It's become the standard in some companies to bitch about men and presume they're suckers and abusers is any situation that involves both sexes. Let's keep in mind that it's not science saying this, but woke ideology.
> the best thing to do is make people wealthier
Far-fetched. Winning a lottery makes you much wealthier relative to other people, it puts you in maybe 10-20% richest people of your country. You can't fit everyone in those 20%.
Look at something like Uzbekistan. Country is miserably poor compared to Sweden and they still reproduce like they win lotteries all the time.
One would hope these are fringe groups, but as an example my wife is on a few that bridge into breastfeeding groups, where the women actively malign their husbands who provide their living, and do most household chores, but are still considered inept.
Even in the seemingly equal marriage, it would seem the battle for equality rages on.
Lets call it for what it really is - battle for power and "freedom" to dominante others (those being husbands, wifes, coworkers - other humans in general). There seems to exists this general urge in some to search by all means necessary to make others an extension of their minds and not free and equal human beings.
Just my 2 cents of intuition acquired by observing some members of my closest family :(
> Winning a lottery makes you much wealthier relative to other people, it puts you in maybe 10-20% richest people of your country. You can't fit everyone in those 20%.
The average lottery winnings this paper is looking at is equal to ~$140,000 USD. According to wikipedia, Credit Suisse says the median net worth of individuals in Sweden is $95k USD. And the paper says the wealth effect on Swedish males is greatest among unmarried men with low incomes.
This is a one-off gain. It is not the continuous gain of a high-paying job. So this lottery win can provide immediate stability and opportunity, but it cannot, in itself, provide longevity of income gains.
You are making the claim that gains relative to population are most important. While I can see this as being important in supply-limited countries, I am not sure that Sweden is such a country.
> Country is miserably poor compared to Sweden and they still reproduce like they win lotteries all the time.
Which is why you control for experimental factors. If you want to see what factors boost marriage rates, marriage stability, and reproduction in Uzbekistan, you want to study Uzbekistan. This study was about Sweden.
If you're pulling in divorces from the future, shouldn't the long term rate go down? Sounds like the total divorce rate goes up.
> sucky husbands
That's odd framing.
> > the absence of a discernible long-run increase in divorce risk among these women
> > > the absence of a discernible long-run increase in divorce risk among these women
> If you're pulling in divorces from the future, shouldn't the long term rate go down?
If it was the men who were, on average, disproportionately divorcing their wives the framing could be reversed. As divorce has costs, the act of divorcing someone indicates that they are worse as a spouse than the alternative.
I had remembered reading that women tend to be less happy in marriages than men, but this appears to be wrong. Still:
> happiness increases when low-quality marriages dissolve—again, that’s true for both men and women.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/is_marriage_re...
However, that is besides the point? I find your question in very poor taste and not conducive to discussing the article.
Another is that some men are uncomfortable with a wealthier partner. I know a few like this who say it plainly, but it showed up recently in "Crazy Rich Asians" with the tech CEO husband.