After reading Michael Noer's charming Forbes article on why marrying smart women will lead to a life of grim, sexless, childless misery in the company of a shrew who hates you (he declined, however, to note that you'd be richer), I'm somehow unsurprised that Noer's last Forbes piece ran with the charming title "Wife or whore? The choice is that simple," and included such gems as:
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.
It's unclear to me if, under that analysis, husbands are reluctant pimps, cops, johns, or what. In any case, dude's a charmer.
Back to the original article, Noer selectively and uncritically marshals a certain number of studies to prove that marrying career women ("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 a year.") For a point-by-point takedown, see Jill. I just want to note the lies, damn lies, and selective care with statistics.
The studies Noer relies on all show correlation between marrying career women and having a host of bad shit happen to you, but not causation. For instance, Noer notes a study that showed men marrying career women are more likely to fall ill. The likeliest explanation is that the men who are attracted to career women are type A personalities on career tracks with heavy stress loads, but Noer chalks it up to the absence of a doting female. Elsewhere, he notes that you're less likely to have children: That the male may be involved in that decision (i.e, the sort of guys who marry "career women" are less likely to want kids) never enters. But before you think the guy plays fast and loose with correlation and causation, watch what happens when he's forced to mention the data showing the health, happiness, and wealth benefits of marriage:
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.
Sure glad he cleared that up.
