Indian Marriages

SecondTier has convinced me to pay attention to Mankiw's blog. I noticed this link about Indian marriages.


I love economics and the free-markets, I think. I may need to switch majors. I think it's beautiful how market forecasts and macroeconomic phenomenon have a role in marriage in India. Perhaps we should bring this style of thinking to the US as a means of increasing free-market awareness. Libertarian views cannot thrive if people do not see how the free market works [to their benefit.] The marriage market is one free-market that people can readily relate to.

How awful it must be to have a daughter marry an unemployed alcoholic biker with a half-completed degree from ITT Tech in auto-repair (with a concentration in American vehicles.) If my future, theoretical daughter came to me with such a slob, I'd make use of my second amendment rights immediately. Other people probably agree with me. So why not emphasize free-markets, forecasting, and proper marriage-partner selection early on? This could benefit the US both socially and politically.

From a statistician's point of view, I think marital bliss is achieved through a non-deterministic process similar to how wealth is obtained from proper stock portfolio selection. I bet there are several factors in the marriage factor model. If Y is your outcome (or "pricing") then, as an example:

Y = B0 + B1 * X1 + B2 * X2 + B3 * X3 + epsilon.

The B#'s are the betas that show your exposure to the various factors, like X1 and X2. As an example, X1 could be education, X2 could be something like the number of tattoos, and X3 could be the number of motorcycles a partner owns. Someone purchases a "partner" based on the assumption that that partner's "factor" exposure is more likely to lead to "better pricing" and a better future. Higher Y values would then correlate to higher earnings, or happiness or what have you. The higher a beta corresponding to a factor, the more a certain kind of risk you take when trying to achieve marital bliss. Based on Mankiw's link, we conclude that Indian woman are minimizing betas with respect to IT-education/employment risk.

Based on personal experience and my simple theoretical model above, I'm lead to believe a woman in India might make a value judgment that her Y might be maximized based on increased exposure to factor X1 (education). That is, B1 (beta one) will have a greater magnitude for an Indian woman (or her family) and she may believe exposure to education factors are more likely to lead to marital bliss.

In the US, I suspect the process of partner selection is much more haphazard and results in people getting married without knowledge of their exposure to various risk-factors. As an example, given my theoretical model above with education, tattoos, and motorcyles, I think the odds of selection of partners with substantial exposure to X2 and X3 is much higher in the US. I hypothesize that the long run outcome of this kind of "marriage-portfolio" (i.e. women marry bikers with tattoos) selection is a nation of dummies, a la "Idiocracy."

Who knows? Perhaps Pareto's 80/20 rule is a result of a small subset of people with a secret marriage-partner selection strategy. Perhaps exposure to education about proper portfolio selection and awareness of the "marriage market" in the US could improve the lives of millions of Americans. Maybe this is our ticket to idiot-minimization within the US populace.

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