- The episode explores the reasons why people get married and the concept of the marriage market.
- The marriage rate in the US has declined over the years, but people are now marrying later in life, leading to more durable marriages.
- Marriage has been found to have benefits in terms of better life outcomes, health, wealth, and the well-being of children.
- Love is seen as a metaphysical reason to marry, but measuring it is challenging for economists.
- The marriage market is different from traditional markets, as it involves searching for a match rather than buying and selling goods.
- Cohabitation and long-term partnerships without marriage have become more common, particularly in Europe.
- Education and assortative matching play a role in marriage patterns, with highly educated individuals tending to marry others with similar education levels.
- It is difficult to determine whether preferences or circumstances drive assortative matching in marriage.

- Studies on dating apps and speed dating experiments show a preference for assortative matching.
- However, it is difficult to determine how much of these patterns come from preferences or the dating market itself.
- A study conducted by anthropologist Helen Fisher found that over 50% of Americans want a partner who shares their political views.
- The study also revealed that a significant percentage of people don't care about factors like ethnic background or religious beliefs in a partner.
- Assortative mating refers to the tendency to be drawn to people with similar characteristics.
- Economists are interested in understanding the socioeconomic effects of assortative mating and its impact on income inequality.
- Mark Gognier conducted a study on the exclusive marriage market during the London season, which was a well-defined marriage market with clear incentives.
- The Queen played a crucial role in coordinating the season, as depicted in the series "Bridgerton."

- The Queen played a central role in the marriage market for aristocrats, choosing who would be presented at court and invited to parties.
- In 1861, Queen Victoria experienced a series of deaths, causing a three-year interruption in the marriage market.
- During this interruption, the social activities and parties organized by the Queen were greatly reduced.
- Young girls who were part of the marriage market during this time had limited access to eligible bachelors and often ended up marrying outside the aristocracy.
- Marrying down was frowned upon, resulting in reduced social standing for families.
- The interruption led to more class diverse marriages and reduced sorting based on wealth.
- The interruption also had political and policy effects, such as the expansion of state education in the 1870s.
- The interruption diminished the power and leverage of the aristocracy, potentially benefiting the rest of society.
- After the interruption, the marriage market resumed with Queen Victoria's return to business.

- Shakespeare's plays, such as Romeo and Juliet, reflect the importance of social status in marriage during his time
- In Elizabethan times, men and women did not typically marry until they were around 25 years old
- Marriage markets were limited to the people in one's village or community
- The advent of technology, particularly dating apps, has drastically changed the marriage market by connecting people to a larger pool of potential partners
- Around 40% of singles now meet their first date online, compared to only 25% through friends
- Dating apps cater to specific demographics and interests, leading to segmentation in the industry
- Matching technology and institutions that determine who people meet can perpetuate inequality in marriages
- Assortative mating, or marrying someone similar to oneself, is often influenced by who one meets and interacts with.

- Assortative mating is often determined by who you meet, as people tend to be attracted to those who are similar to them.
- It is unclear whether people sort themselves into circumstances where they meet similar people, or if the circumstances themselves lead to assortative mating.
- Certain settings, like universities and jobs, may unintentionally lead to assortative mating.
- Dating apps can both facilitate encounters with a larger pool of people and restrict the set of people one meets to those who are similar.
- The concentration of intellect and abilities in marriages can have both positive and negative effects on society.
- The US has a high rate of pedestrian deaths, and the next episode will explore the reasons and potential solutions.

- The episode explores reasons for marriage and the concept of the marriage market.
- The decline in the US marriage rate has led to people marrying later in life, resulting in more durable marriages.
- Marriage has benefits for life outcomes, health, wealth, and children's well-being.
- Love is a reason for marriage, but it is challenging for economists to measure.
- The marriage market involves searching for a match rather than buying and selling goods.
- Cohabitation and long-term partnerships without marriage are more common, especially in Europe.
- Education and assortative matching influence marriage patterns.
- Preferences and circumstances drive assortative matching in marriage.
- Dating apps and speed dating experiments show a preference for assortative matching.
- Over 50% of Americans want a partner who shares their political views.
- Assortative mating refers to being drawn to people with similar characteristics.
- Economists study the socioeconomic effects of assortative mating.
- The London season was a well-defined marriage market with clear incentives.
- Queen Victoria played a central role in the marriage market for aristocrats.
- A three-year interruption in the marriage market led to more diverse marriages and reduced sorting based on wealth.
- The interruption had political and policy effects, benefiting society.
- Shakespeare's plays reflect the importance of social status in marriage during his time.
- Technology, like dating apps, has changed the marriage market by connecting people to a larger pool of potential partners.
- Dating apps can perpetuate inequality in marriages.
- Assortative mating is influenced by who one meets and interacts with.
- It is unclear whether people sort themselves into circumstances where they meet similar people or if circumstances lead to assortative mating.
- Certain settings, like universities and jobs, may unintentionally lead to assortative mating.
- Dating apps can both facilitate encounters with a larger pool of people and restrict the set of people one meets.
- The concentration of intellect and abilities in marriages can have positive and negative effects on society.
- The next episode will explore the reasons and potential solutions for the high rate of pedestrian deaths in the US.

Sure, you were “in love.” But economists — using evidence from "Bridgerton" to Tinder — point to what’s called “assortative mating.” And it has some unpleasant consequences for society.

Hey there, I'm Stephen Dubner and it is June.

You know what June is famous for, don't you?

That's right, weddings, especially this June with so much pent up wedding demand from COVID.

When 2 people decide to marry each other, do you ever stop to think why they made that decision?

We first published it last year, and now we have updated facts and figures as necessary.

Mark Gognier is from Spain, but a few years ago, he moved to Norway.

Did you meet her at a ball at the Queen's Palace?

I'm as far as possible from the aristocracy.

you're saying, for the record, you're not an aristocrat.

Although Gognier is not an aristocrat, he is the next best thing, at least in my book.

Among his research interests are economic history and marriage.

they think about marriage, they think about it in terms of preferences and in terms of love.

We economists, we tend to focus on other factors, namely the fact that the person you end up with is not only the person you choose, but it's also determined by the set of people that you have met.

So this idea is what encapsulates the idea of the marriage market.

That's the question we'll try to answer today through the lens of Bridgerton.

Oh, you cannot possibly be thinking of marrying him.

If I'm unable to secure another offer, there may be no alternative.

I think people truly misunderstand these dating services.

Not after today's episode, we won't misunderstand.

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

I am extremely optimistic about marriage.

I'm a biological anthropologist and I study love.

Fisher is a longtime academic and is currently a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute.

I am the chief science advisor to the dating site Match.com.

As for her optimism about marriage, if you look at the marriage data, that optimism may seem misplaced.

Before the Great Depression, there were more than 9 marriages each year per 1, 000 people.

It fell to around 8 during the Depression, but after World War II, it shot up to 16.

By the early 2000s, we were back to around 8 marriages per 1, 000 people.

And for the past few years, it's been hovering around 5 or 6 marriages per 1, 000 Americans.

But Helen Fisher says that within those numbers, there is some good news, at least what she thinks is good news.

What we're seeing now is we're marrying later and later.

In my day, I'm a baby boomer, people married in their very early 20s, about age 21 for women, 22, 23 for men.

Now they're marrying at age 28, 29 for women and age 30, 31 for men.

So there's this long period of what I call pre-commitment all through your 20s, during which singles are growing up.

And while this may lead to fewer marriages, it's also leading to better, more durable marriages.

I've looked at the divorce data through the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations since 1947 to 2011.

And as it turns out, the longer you court and the later you marry, the more likely you are to stay together.

And that's exactly what we're seeing in America today.

Divorce rate peaked in the 1980s with nearly 23 divorces per 1, 000 marriages each year.

As of 2019, there were around 15 divorces per thousand, and the rate has hit a 50-year low.

But it does raise a question, a big existential question.

Why exactly do people get married anyway?

There is good evidence that marriage leads to better life outcomes, health and wealth outcomes.

Also, the children of married people tend to do better than the children of unmarried people.

We should say it can be hard to pin down the causality on the benefits of marriage.

It may be that people who aren't doing as well on the health and wealth fronts simply have a harder time finding a mate.

Still, even when you control for demographic differences, it does look like marriage has real material benefits.

And as Helen Fisher will tell you, there is also a metaphysical reason to marry.

People pine for love, they live for love, they kill for love, and they die for love.

And when you think about, I mean, the myths, the legends, the poems, the stories, the novels, the sitcoms, the operas, the plays, the symphonies, the ballets, the therapists, the holidays.

So that's an anthropologist's perspective.

What sort of data set can you use to measure love?

That again is Marc Gognier, who studies marriage markets.

The word market implies buyers and sellers of goods and services?

There's several differences of course in the marriage market.

It's a market in the sense that there's single people looking to form a match as in a goods market I would be looking for a particular product that I like.

It captures the idea of 2 sides looking to form a match.

Typically, we don't have prices, although in some cultures there's dowries and there's bright prices.

Dowries are still common in rural India, for instance.

That, of course, is not how marriage works in the US and most other high-income places.

Marriage here is mostly an autonomous decision, and it involves a search.

You go on some bad dates, maybe a few good ones, you evaluate potential partners until you find the right 1.

In some cases you do nearly everything associated with marriage, including living together, before you actually marry.

In some places, you do all this and you never marry.

I totally consider myself as married, although I haven't done the formal thing.

It's not entirely clear that I will do it.

If I compare myself and my friends to the generation of my parents, you see that both ended up in long-term relationships, but the marriage rate is much lower nowadays.

The marriage rate in Europe since the 1960s has halved.

So although we still observe many long-term relationships, most of these long-term partnerships now take a different form.

Americans consider this type of long-term partnering, including having children together, as a European style.

the share of cohabiting non-married couples has more than doubled.

So That may help explain a bit of the U.S.

The economist Amalia Miller, in a recent series we ran on college, told us that attending a prestigious school has a big impact on women's incomes and other aspects of their lives, too.

What we find is that there's a significant decline in women's likelihood of being married in their late 30s if they attended a more elite school for college.

These women are less likely to marry, but when they do marry, they're marrying men who are more educated.

When 1 highly educated person pairs off with another highly educated person, that's an example of what is called assortative matching or assortative mating.

Broadly, this is the idea that most people end up marrying someone who's quite like them in some significant way.

But again, it's tricky to nail down the causality here to tell whether that is a true preference or just a function of circumstance.

In other words, do we pair off with people because of our similarities or because we tend to meet people who are similar to us?

We observe who marries whom, but it's hard to disentangle what reflects the choices and what reflects the marriage market aspect of who we met.

There is some evidence to help with the disentangling.

There are a couple of studies that have tried to identify preferences by looking at data from dating apps and from these speed dating experiments where you can, as a researcher, control who meets whom.

And these studies in general tend to show that in many dimensions there is a preference for assortative matching.

But Gognier points out these studies are looking at dating.

So for marriage or let's say long-term partnership, it's still difficult to understand how much of the patterns we observe come from preferences and how much from the market itself.

In other words, in a dating market, you might see more experimentation or more deviating from your core preferences, whereas marriage you only do it once or maybe, you know, twice or 3 times.

But you're saying that we might become more conservative in our choices when it comes to marriage than in dating, is that right?

Marriage and these long-term relationships, you gotta think more carefully.

Whereas in dating, there is definitely more experimentation.

The anthropologist Helen Fisher, in her work with the dating company Match.com, has spent the past 13 years trying to understand what Americans are looking for in a partner.

This is a national representative sample of singles based on the US census.

So every age from 18 to 71 plus, rural, suburban, urban, every part of the country, black, white, Asian, Latino, etc, etc.

of Americans do want a partner who shares their political views.

About 43% want a partner who is of the same ethnic background.

About 46% want somebody the same religious background.

What's interesting to me is the huge percentage of people that don't care.

Is it that they don't care or they say on a survey they don't care because they may want to appear to be the type of person who would say that they don't care when in fact they may care?

You never know Steven you know I do a lot of questionnaires and you can answer a questionnaire in 1 of 3 ways with who you really are, with who you want to be, or with who you want others to think you are.

But, because we have so many thousands of people, and there's a bell-shaped curve, we can be pretty confident of what we're doing.

When I say the phrase, assortative mating, you say what?

It's a basic academic term which basically means that we're drawn to certain kinds of people for certain Darwinian evolutionary reasons.

And does that necessarily mean that likes attract or can it also include opposites attract?

Yes, people who like to play tennis tend to be drawn to people who like to play tennis.

We do know that people tend to fall in love with somebody from the same ethnic and socioeconomic background, same degree of intelligence, good looks and education, same religious and social values, and same reproductive and economic goals.

But you know, you can walk into a room and everybody is from your background, level of education, et cetera, et cetera, and you don't fall in love with all of them.

If you are an economist and you're thinking about assortative mating, you may ask a different set of questions.

For instance, What kind of socioeconomic effects might we see from assortative mating?

If high-income people only marry other high-income people and low-income people do the same, what does that mean for social mobility and income inequality?

These are the kind of questions that Mark Gognier has been thinking about.

It seems that inequality is very persistent over very long periods of time.

So in order to understand this process and why this inequality has survived massive political changes, revolutions and so on, there has to be something that we economists were missing.

And part of it is this marriage decisions, how to pass down wealth, how to educate your children.

And marriage is a very important determinant of this long-term inequality.

And when you talk about the economists' interest in income inequality, is it that you are interested in understanding this high concentration of income at the top of the distribution, or are you more interested in disrupting it for the sake of society?

I'm interested in understanding it, and my prior is that it is very disruptive.

An extreme concentration of wealth and income, especially when it comes to being concentrated in the hands of very few individuals, can distort many of the important political processes in society.

When you have a bunch of people that are very rich and monopolise a lot of the wealth in the society, they also take over the institutions.

It's important to understand its causes and important to understand which of the determinants of inequality we can tackle and which we cannot tackle.

So Gognier decided to take an in-depth look at those people who, as he puts it, monopolize a lot of wealth in society.

He just published a paper called, Assortative Matching at the Top of the Distribution, Evidence from the World's Most Exclusive Marriage Market.

And what is the world's most exclusive marriage market?

So The world's most exclusive marriage market, and this won't come as a surprise for watchers of Bridgerton, was the London season.

That again is Mark Gognier, an economist at the University of Bergen in Norway who studies marriage markets.

Bridgerton, if you haven't seen it, is an historical romance series on Netflix, executive produced by Shonda Rhimes and based on a book series by Julia Quinn.

It's set in the 19th century and it follows what is called the London season.

That's when the English peerage, the dukes and earls, barons and lords, would come into the city from their countryside estates.

So every year for 6 months there was the Parliament season.

And in 19th century Britain, this meant that aristocrats from all over the country converts on London to attend the sessions in the House of Lords.

It's about 800 families or so, you write, is that right?

Exactly, 800 families, They rented the house in London and soon this developed into the social season.

Wait a minute, Marc, they had to rent a house?

No, the typical practice was to rent a house.

You needed a house large enough to organize big balls.

This only happened when you had marriageable daughters.

So let's say I have 3 daughters who are just approaching or maybe already in marriageable age.

The essence of the season was that by the 19th century, arranged marriages were no longer acceptable.

So parents could not directly choose who their children married.

Now, they came out to a solution to this problem, which was that while children were allowed to choose their partners, parents made sure they would only meet the quote, right sort of people.

Your preference for your daughter would be that she would marry within the higher aristocracy, within the peerage if possible, and to a higher titled person, and preferably someone who owned large amounts of land and high income derived from this land.

So here was a very well-defined marriage market with a finite set of players and clear incentives, a perfect scenario for an economist who studies marriage.

You might think it would be tricky to find records of whose daughters went to which parties

years ago, but the English aristocracy did a wonderful job of tracking their children's social engagements, And these records are preserved in the British National Archives.

I was there in this archive with this massive dusty book with a list of all the 19th century people invited to royal parties, which was a great fun.

Yes, many of these were royal parties because at the center of this social scene was 1 key figure.

It is only the Queen's eye that matters today.

So I have seen just enough of Bridgerton to know that the person who really coordinated the season was none other than the Queen herself, which I hadn't known.

And I might have thought that was an invention of Shonda Rhimes for the purposes of Bridgerton.

But as you write, that's really how it happened, yes?

So, the Queen played an essential role in the season.

First, as it is shown in the first episode of Bridgerton, there is this presentation at court, where young girls are introduced by a sponsor, usually their mother.

Miss Prudence Featherington, Miss Philippa Featherington and Miss Penelope Featherington.

In the series, it's a little bit dramatized, with some women fainting and so on.

But this was a very important event, and it constituted an announcement of who was on the marriage market.

And, you know, the courtship process would start from that point onwards.

So given that marriage was such an important thing for the aristocracy, the queen here had something to gain by playing this central role in the marriage market.

She could choose who would be presented at court, she would choose who would be invited to the parties.

So that was a way to make sure that these aristocrats would always be aligned with their interests.

In other words, these weren't quite arranged marriages, but they were, to use Gaunier's term, aligned marriages.

These aristocrats of marriageable age attended only the parties that included others in their social sphere.

But as Gognet discovered, there came a point when this closed system temporarily opened up.

and for Queen Victoria it was a very bad year.

The year started with the death of her mother and ended with the death of her husband.

Prince Albert, her husband, was a young man and was healthy, so the death was completely unexpected.

And by all accounts, we know that they were very fond of each other.

And for 3 consecutive years, She didn't take part in the season.

No young girl was announced to the marriage market.

what did they talk about "Assortative mating refers to being drawn to people with similar characteristics." in this episode ?

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Why Did You Marry That Person? (Ep. 511 Replay)