Women's liberation: What's in it for men?

Just to stay on a similar subject to the post I posted last week, I came across today a very interesting NBER paper by Matthias Doepke and Michèle Tertilt on "Women's liberation: What's in it for men?". Basically they argue that it was actually men who voted in favour for women's rights. So, if that was the case, why did men do that!?!

Here's an excerpt from their innovative paper:

"...from a man’s perspective, there is a tradeoff between the rights of his own wife versus the rights of other men’s wives. Improvements in married women’s legal rights increase women’s bargaining power relative to their husbands within the household. Since husbands have nothing to gain from an increase in their wives’ bargaining power at their own expense, men ideally want their own wives to have no rights. But men might stand to gain from other women having rights.

We focus on two channels that give men a stake in the rights of other men’s wives. First, men are altruistic towards their own children, half of which are daughters. Men prefer their daughters to have a strong bargaining position vis-`a-vis their sons-in-law...

Second, in our model an improved bargaining position for wives translates, among other things, into increased investments in children’s human capital. A father prefers his children to find high-quality mates, and therefore stands to gain from increasing the power of his children’s future mothers-in-law.

We argue that this tradeoff between the rights of a man’s own wife versus those of other men’s wives has shifted over time, because of a changing role of human capital. When the return to education increases, finding well-educated spouses for one’s children becomes a more important concern. Similarly, a rising return to education also increases fathers’ concern about the rights of their daughters, because the daughter’s marital bargaining power matters for the grandchildren’s education. According to our theory, the ultimate cause of the expansion of women’s was technological change that increased the demand for human capital. This change elevated the importance of children’s education, it increased men’s incentives to expand women’s bargaining power, and it ultimately induced men to voluntarily extend rights to
women rights."

Clever sausages!!!

Daughter, Father, and Voting Behaviour

Are our behaviours the reflection mirror of our parents'? Does the causality only run one way (i.e. from parents to children)? Or can there be a reversed causality that runs from us to our parents?

There are now two interesting studies on how having daughters can significantly affect parents' voting behaviours (one by Ebonya Washington - recently published in the American Economic Review) and the other was by me and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick.

More generally, our papers found that having more daughters make you more leftwing in your political stance.

Why is that?

The gist is this. First, men earn more than women, on average. In other words, there's pay discrimination by gender in the world. On the other hand, women by nature would prefer more public goods (i.e. streetlights after dark, better healthcare system, etc.) than men do.

Imagine there are only two political parties in the world.

• One is a rightwing party ("Because I'm conservative, I'll give you less of public goods but in return I'll also ask for less taxes from you").
• The other is a leftwing party ("Because I'm liberal, pay me lots of taxes and in return I'll provide you with lots of public goods").

In a stylized world, men would prefer the rightwing party than the leftwing party ("I'm a man - I earn a lot and don't really want to pay taxes as I don't really need public goods") than women.

However, by having daughter the man is likely to take his daughter's best interests into account ("I don't want my daughters to grow up in an unfair world!") and as a result shift his political stance from right to left.

I doubt that this case will apply generally in countries where popularism rather than right versus left dominates (like in Thailand, for example)...

Would you be happier if you were richer?

Would you be happier if you were richer?

Now, if somebody had asked you that question most of you probably wouldn't even need more than a second to respond with an answer 'Well, Duh! Of course I'll be happier if I am richer!'

Fair enough. How about would you be miserable if you were disabled?

Again, what a stupid question.

We have it fixed in our brains that winning lottery = happiness and becoming disabled = unhappiness even without having to experience it before. We use our pre-feelings as a rule of thumb for how we should be feeling if we win a lottery or becoming disabled. We also use it to try and second guess other peoples' experiences as well. When prompted to answer how happy do we think lottery winners and paraplegic are with their lives, we'll first imagine ourselves winning the lottery or becoming disabled and then give our answers accordingly.

But research on lottery winners and paraplegics have shown that their levels of happiness are in fact not that much different from the control groups. In other words, lottery winners are not much happier than those who did not win the lottery, whilst the disabled are not much unhappier compared to those who are not disabled.

What explains the gap between what is predicted (paraplegic should be miserable!) and what is actually measured then?

Well, as explained by Daniel Kahneman and David Schkade (1998), lottery winners and paraplegic have many experiences that are not directly related to their special status. Once the situation they find themselves is no longer novel, people in these circumstances usually think of other things, such as the food they eat or the gossip they hear. However, a judge who tries to imagine the life of a lottery winner or a paraplegic will naturally focus attention on the special circumstances of these cases and, as a result, tend to exaggerate the importance of such events. They called this mismatch in the allocation of attention the focusing illusion.

Focusing illusion is very common, mind you. We normally imagine that we'll be much happier if we were richer because the allocation of our attention is on using the money rather than actually earning it. This leads to us slaving ourselves away today for richer tomorrow. But when we get there, we usually find what we thought we were looking for slightly - if not largely - disappointing...

Reference

Schkade, D.A., and Kahneman, D. (1998). Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgements of life satisfaction. Psychological Science, 9(5), 340-346.