CMC Professor on the Economics of Coupledom

From The Intelligent Life, the quarterly magazine published by The Economist:

...how do couples divide these spoils? Economists once touchingly assumed that spouses wanted the same things and acted as one to achieve them. Households were "glued together" in Amartya Sen's phrase. Now economists think of marriage as a bargain in a second sense. Husbands and wives haggle over cash, chores, care and consideration. By one recent estimate, the split in Britain is 40:60 in favour of the man. But these deals are not set in stone. When the government started paying child benefit to wives not husbands, in the 1970s, Britain's unglued households began spending less on booze and home-cooked food and more on restaurants and takeaways, according to Jennifer Ward-Batts of Claremont McKenna College. They also spent £6 more a year on toys.

The idea of marriage as two parties "haggling" over essential household chores seems a bit like a radical application of R.H. Coase's theory of the firm. The logical extension of this view leads to outsourcing of chores around the house either to children or to companies that specialize.

Outsourcing will be costly however, requiring you to have more children or more disposable income to spend on laundry services or housecleaning. But often one party will be better at a task than another i.e. women will be better at cooking not because they are women but because their parents encouraged that behavior when they were children. In a way, the women have specialized and trade with their husbands.

Many of my libertarian friends make the argument that left-wing divorce laws that allow no fault divorce make marriages stronger, but the children produced in those single family homes tend to be less productive citizens and dependent on government.