Category Archives: Daily Comment

Love in the Time of Corona (II): Distance and Devotion

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During the COVID lockdown, online dating has increased and exchanges have become more meaningful. Location matters less.

Jessie has a beautiful personality and sparkling eyes. While single and open to dating already before the lockdown, her social life often fell victim to a grueling work schedule and frequent travel. She was also taking care of extended family living across the country. There was a constant silent underlying disappointment emanating from these constraints, which were as real as they were hard to avoid. Dating was a bittersweet experience for Jessie, who felt that it was easy to meet people but hard to find meaningful relationships.

Along came Corona and the lockdown. One day, travel was out; the next, the commute was off. And Jessie’s employer extended to every employee the flexibility of daily working hours that was soon becoming a bare necessity for working parents.

When I chatted to her last, Jessie confided that dating under Corona had developed into an interesting direction. It was frustrating not being able to meet anyone in person. But you ended up having more and better conversations with the people you already knew. Dating has not stopped. While face to face meetings disappear, online and phone interactions take over.

The figures back this up. On the 4th of April, the OKCupid blog blog recorded “All over the world, matches on OkCupid have increased 10% — and conversations have increased over 20%! — as singles turn to online dating for connection. – In response to the new question “How do you plan on dating during this time of coronavirus?” a whopping 94% of respondents said they’ll continue to date, albeit virtually.”

And the conversations intensify. Jessie found that as there are fewer distractions, you actually focus on your date. You listen. You get to know each other much better than you would have if meeting face-to-face all the time.

OKCupid agrees. “Virtual dating is ushering in a new era of “slow dating” that’s been welcomed by singles. (..). – With virtual dating, the focus lands on the quality of conversations and time spent together, making it easier to figure out whether the person you’re talking to is compatible with whatever you’re looking for. – In just the past two weeks, there’s been a 5% increase in OkCupid users looking for long-term relationships and a 20% decrease in users looking for hookups.”

This lets many (especially female) singles breathe a sigh of relief. I literally see shoulders untense for many of my single friends. The last pressure point that Jessie saw fall was geography. If there was never strictly a need to be in the same city as your date, there definitely isn’t now.

She is not alone. “Women have also been more likely to expand their preferred location to “anywhere” so they can connect across borders. And those who do, have 5% more conversations than those who don’t.

What if ironically, confinement’s limitations lead to a wider global reach in dating?

 

Love In The Time of Corona (I)

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From the beginning of this most unusual way of life that we have all adopted, the “lockdown”, I have wondered what it does to people’s love lives. Those who already live with a partner or a family move in closer and spend more time with each other. Those who date or wish to date, can no longer do that in its most traditional form of meeting and going out. Everybody is constrained in the things they can do outside the house. – So I let my thoughts wander but eventually got distracted by a work life that happens to be just as full when working from home.

And then my friend Laure whatsapped me out of my complaisance and urged me to explore the effects of the Corona-lockdown. It turns out she started worrying about some friends and family for whom too much togetherness might be detrimental.

So let’s start with this; although it is usually the successful result of good dating rather than its beginning: togetherness. What does it do to us, and (as economists like to ask) what works?

Hygge and Fiesta

We all have personal preferences when it comes to closeness – and these preferences differ depending on who we are close to: strangers, acquaintances or family. So far so logical. But here comes a funny twist: people in colder countries prefer larger distances with strangers, and closer distances with family, compared to the global average. And the opposite holds for people in warm countries: it is ok to be a bit closer to a stranger, but family doesn’t need to cuddle close all the time. It is not exactly clear why the architects of Hygge also hug more, but it may have to do with literally having to warm each other up. Or with being used to staying inside more throughout the year.

Another variation is that older people prefer larger distances, to strangers as well as to family, than younger people. – All this to be taken with a grain of salt – the research quoted drew on a large but not representative global sample.

The most important lesson from this is to acknowledge that our personal preferences may differ, and that they may also significantly differ from the degree of closeness enforced by the lockdown. You may want to use the full space of your house to generate huggy Hygge or friendly Fiesta, depending on what you need.

But what happens really when all of us, with our manifold tolerances for togetherness, are confined?

Lockdown babies or divorce boom

I cannot wait to see the research papers that will come out assessing the effect of the current lockdown period. Different timing and severity of rules across states and countries may produce a nice natural experiment. For the time being, we can learn from earlier research on hurricane and holiday periods. Carefully trying to conclude from these, the story seems to be that extended togetherness acts like a catalyst: it strengthens strong relationships, and it may well be the last straw for the more fragile ones. There is evidence that low-severity storm warnings entail a peak in fertility, while at the same time divorces tend to rise after the classical vacation times of winter and summer.

There must be something we can do to manage the extremes of the new situation. Has anyone been here before and can advise?

More about space

Select people have had to endure confined living for extended periods well before Corona. This concerns for example astronauts. While their situation is more extreme than our lockdown, it is also chosen and entered into only after long and careful planning. – I happen to be married to a rocket scientist. Not only a rocket scientist, but a sort of ‘space psychologist’. I kid you not – his postgrad research was a multi-disciplinary affair across the faculties of aerospace engineering and psychology: prevention of “human error” in aerospace. So after a few weeks of lockdown, he started sharing some wisdom from the experience of people living in the international space station ISS (a good example is here).

Several experiences that hit us now unprepared, and are uncomfortable, are very familiar to astronauts. First, a feeling of relative help- and powerlessness. You cannot ‘exit’ the situation, and you have to go through it in due course until you arrive. Second, you are so isolated that it is easy to forget what day and time it is. There is no natural rhythm, no commute marking the border between work and life, and it is easy to lose that boundary. Astronauts know this and make an extra effort to restore the balance, to choose the boundary and impose a routine.

When it comes to managing relationships, the key is maximum self-awareness. It is important to know one’s own needs very well and to meet them. Only when our self-care is sufficient do we have the bandwidth of understanding that allows accommodating and nurturing others. Stress will reduce the bandwidth and will be more risky when people don’t know themselves or their needs well. In the conversation linked above, astronaut Sandy Magnus explained that her stress buster was exercise, and that astronauts on the ISS are supposed to work out 2 hours per day.

(2 hours a day! Check that. I really need to up my elvis.)

Astronauts learn and accept elaborate routines. Duties and burdens are clearly agreed, equitable and sustainable. This ensures security and prevents conflict.

Sharing space and time

Most households do not have the elaborate upfront agreements of a space station; rather, roles are more or less loosely negotiated based on bargaining power and availability of outside help, among other things. Over the recent decades, marriages have become more (if not completely) equitable in the time use between spouses, with women working more outside and less inside the home. The arrival of Corona risks upsetting that ‘balance.’ Traditionally female housework that had moved to the market economy such as child- and eldercare, cleaning, sometimes cooking – is moving back into the homes; and some goods are no longer purchased but produced at home.  There is a significant risk that women are silently expected to bear the brunt of these developments; with household arrangements pivoting back to the 1950s. And sadly this seems to be happening.

However, it should not have to be the case. If the protocols of the domestic space station have been set up equitably to begin with, with spouses having fairly similar time use, the new old chores may be shared equally.  I see many men promote their newly discovered domestic virtues, if mostly cooking and baking, on social media. And in my own house, the man has been lead parent ever since a child arrived. Thankfully, our kids’ school is being exemplary keeping up a relatively normal school day remotely.

The kids are allright

Our house has not switched back to the 1950s but right away to the 1800s. We play Little House on the Prairie, with the kids folding laundry and learning how to broom. Our eldest, Tiger Girl, asked to learn chores, and documented her ‘cleaning apprenticeship’ in a power point presentation as a school homework. She has indeed shown exceptional dedication, sweeping bathrooms, watching younger siblings, chopping and cooking – only to present me with a bill at the end of the month. As her pricing was modest and she does not have an allowance, I dutifully signed.

Overall, the education project has been more challenging but also more successful. In some ways, the limits of the lockdown do lock in consequences, and the children have been learning and listening faster and become more helpful, hopeful and hard working.

This relative domestic bliss may certify us as members of the Hygge culture. Upon reflection, I have to admit we may get quite used to it.

 

(Part II of ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ will look at how the lives of dating singles changed with the lockdown. Stay tuned.)

Valentin, Valentine, Valentino – Love Around the Globe

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It is Valentine’s Day 2020 and I have long pondered what blog to write you on the occasion. When I prepared my TEDx last year, I realized that I use largely Western evidence to write for a Western audience. This also applies to my TED video, to be released soon. I have to recognize that some of this evidence does not apply to the wider globe. The degree of women’s agency varies across countries, as does access to information and the presence or shape of democracy and the rule of law. For example. Not to mention social norms and traditions.

With that in mind, I have written this blog as a little tour through the dating columns of the world. You will find that love is everywhere, while its form, and the priorities around it vary.

Have fun!

America

Modern Love in the New York Times is a wonderful series. This one proposes American husbands can be trained like dolphins and other wild animals. American wives too. (I shall try these tricks on a German husband soon.)

China

China has a popular TV dating game show, Fei Cheng Wu Rao, “If you are not serious, don’t bother me.” It involves quite a bit of conversation on stage, and interaction between groups of two genders to narrow down a choice. Rather than seeking lofty romance or high ideals, contestants do not shy away from materialistic pursuits. Famous quotes include “I would rather cry in a BMW than laugh on a bicycle.” It went so far that Government intervened and ordered a psychologist chaperone to accompany the talk show host.

Egypt

One of my favorite dating columnists of all times is Nehad Abolkomsan. She has a popular TV show ‘Nehad’s Stories’ which gives advice to young women, often in matters of love and courtship. Her advice is quite evidence based and matter of fact. When you learn that Nehad’s day job is that of a lawyer and chairwoman of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, you understand why her program focuses on empowering women, seeking to give them a voice, agency and confidence. Including and especially when negotiating the dating and marriage markets. Here you can watch an episode, which is beautifully put in scene and focuses on how women should select their groom. She encourages looking for qualities suggesting that he would be supportive of a woman’s ambition and slow to anger. She also promotes a longer than average engagement period, based on statistics that put Egyptian marriages concluded after a short engagement at high risk of divorce. Quoting a survey into the preferences of Egyptian women, she finds that 80% of young women care about the ethical values of the potential groom, followed by a distant 19% valuing family and lineage and 13% love and romance. The episode ends with an interview of a young woman from Upper Egypt who has defied odds and traditions to realize personal and professional success.

Germany

The weekly Die Zeit has a series on dating with the title ‘It’s Complicated.’ It loves lives up to the stereotype that in the country of poets and philosophers, every puddle needs to have depth. The articles raise questions, reflect and explore with open endings, rather than advise or present complete personal stories. Popular topics include the pitfalls of online dating, aging and age differences, gender and social expectations and their reversal, as well as honesty and trust and their challenges, up to safety risks such as stalking. The common thread seems to be the question ‘What If?’ ranging from the light hearted ‘What if your date blows on his coffee?’ to several serious columns asking implicitly ‘What if s/he is the wrongest of them all?’

Nigeria

Efua Oyofo runs the blog ‘Dating While Nigerian’, which has now become a facebook page. I find it interesting that Efua is a labor and jobs professional, given that search and matching are relevant for both labor and marriage markets, and that several economic models apply to both. Her blog is quite forward, and an Economist article featuring it suggests that Nigerian dating breaks a few Western rules.

I hope you enjoyed this brief tour and found some inspiration for your own Valentine’s Day!

PS If your country has a popular dating column, please send me a link.

Is there an Oscar Curse?

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What do Sandra Bullock, Julia Roberts, Charlize Theron, Gwyneth Paltrow, Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, Helen Hunt, Kate Winslet and Reese Witherspoon have in common?

They all received at least one Oscar. And they all divorced or separated subsequently.

These anecdotes fuel the superstition that female Oscar wins and nominations lead to divorce. However, if you look at a broader sample, it may look like male Oscar winners and nominees increase their divorce risk while women don’t. – In truth, the jury is still out, because establishing a causal effect is tricky here: Oscars are not random, and then who exactly is the comparison group formed by non-nominee screen actors? It must be large indeed.

There is a true root in the superstition

The suspicion behind the anecdotes has a true core unfortunately. Professional success can cause women much pain. Good evidence, from otherwise quite equal Sweden of all places, and cited here, shows that some promotions nearly double the divorce rate of women, but not men.

For example, winning a local or parliamentary election, or becoming CEO can call the curse. In the US, a wife earning more than the husband is associated with a higher divorce probability.

This is not the case however, when couples agreed or expected from the beginning that earnings would be equal or in favor of the wife. It is the change, within the same couple, from a traditional gender norm to its opposite, that spells fragility.

Women know and try to preempt the ‘curse’

Women change their behavior in anticipation of what might happen. Within marriage, if the woman starts doing well in her job and at some point, reaches her man’s salary level or even exceeds it, she adopts traditional attributes. She tries to compensate the violation of the (gender) norm by putting in more housework, and sometimes, withdrawing from wage work altogether. The literature says, the woman is ‘doing gender’. Before marriage, women significantly downplay their ambitions in terms of career and salary when they believe to be watched by men.

A remedy has been found…

But this does not happen everywhere. The above has been documented with US and West German data for example. But it does not show up in East German data. No matter what angle you look from, and what factors you control for: the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall mark the boundary for the male breadwinner norm. Eastern German couples have no problem with women working and earning more than their husbands. And the more women earn, the less housework they put in. Which is kind of logical. And marriages are similarly stable independent of who the breadwinner is.

In other words: the male breadwinner norm, and with it, the ‘Oscar Curse’, are entirely cultural. They can be undone by institutions that actively promote another norm.

The Economics of Thankfulness

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This recent Thanksgiving, I wanted to write you a blog, but I couldn’t because I was busy bringing in a harvest of things to be thankful for. This is a true story. In the order of chronology, first, I got to speak at the Global Gender Summit about a topic I really love, employment-based childcare. Second, on Black Friday I delivered a TED talk about the content of this very blog: Loveonomics. (Videos to be published in spring.) And finally, on Saturday after Thanksgiving, I received the Alumni of the Year award of the Global Alliance in Management Education (the European business school ‘Ivy League’ hosting LSE, HEC, ESADE, Stockholm, Cologne and my alma mater St Gallen.). Senior alumni to boot. (God only knows what is senior about me, other than my memory sometimes.) All this on top of the really important essentials like life, health, family and friends.

Bottom line, feeling thoroughly #thankful.

And that got me to browse the literature on the topic. Why is it good to be thankful, and what if anything, can it do for your relationships? Here are 5 aspects of thankfulness that may resonate with you.

  1. Many experiments show that thankfulness can enhance wellbeing. Feeling thankful has been shown to be associated with, and also to cause, a stronger sense of wellbeing. The extent varies with the circumstances, of course, and in a few particular cases, the link does not work. But on the whole – worth trying.
  2. Gratitude seems to become better with practice. In some of the studies mentioned above, the wellbeing effects were the stronger, the more grateful the subjects already felt at the beginning of the experiments.
  3. When people are prompted to feel thankful, they connect with their sense of justice. A behavioral field study and experiment series primed people for different feelings, such as compassion and gratitude. It then let them choose a charity to donate to and those who were feeling thankful chose to donate to causes linked to justice, such as the ACLU. – This is particularly interesting because for the scholastics, gratitude has always been a sub-virtue of the cardinal virtue of justice. The reason is that gratitude makes us give to others what is due to them.
  4. Gratitude makes us more generous and cooperative, if need be at the expense of individual gains. An economic lab experiment showed that individuals induced to be grateful made larger monetary contributions benefiting the community. And this, regardless of whether they knew the beneficiaries.
  5. In family relationships, thankfulness is win-win and an element of a virtuous circle. To the extent that a relationship is a micro social order and a space of joint responsibility, gratitude gives credit to both giver and taker and does not diminish own pride. It encourages repeating the exchange that caused the gratitude.

In this sense, wishing you happy holidays and lots of gratitude from and to you!

 

 

 

 

 

Love in a cold climate

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5 ways to kindle the warmth in the freezing season

“Highs around 44…”, a polished news speaker voice from the clock radio wakes me up. You have got to be kidding me. Highs! Around 44! I pull the blanket over my head and snuggle up closer to The Husband. As far as I am concerned, I am happy to stay right here until the voice returns with “Highs around 60.” At least.

Unfortunately, that is not an option, and I have to embrace this day like everyone else, a day whose sun hasn’t even risen yet. It’s cold outside and most of life is confined to indoors, for parents and kids alike. Interesting life forms join us, such as Influenza, and one or another loved one may fall ill. I can think of circumstances that I literally warm up to more. Economists, scientists, have they come up with something useful to turn the ice into ice cream so to speak, as a couple, as a family?

I wouldn’t be writing this, if they hadn’t, so you can keep reading and see if you agree. My allies in spirit Bruno Frey, Sally Bloomfield, Jeffrey Dew and the holder of a bottomless treasure trove on just this topic, Sheldon Cohen, have some robustly tested advice to share.

  1. Good friendships can repel the simple common cold. Good social integration is associated with a reduced risk of this type of infections. Also, social support provides a buffer from the pathogenic influences of stress. – And if not…
  2. Bless you, if you have a family. Marriage and family are a mini-insurance against life’s adverse events. Such as the cold season. You may all get sick at the same time, but it is not likely. So if one is terribly sick, the other can take over. – Not that this is always fun, but…
  3. Exercising generosity improves marital satisfaction. Small acts of kindness, regular displays of affection and respect, and a willingness to forgive failings, are all positively associated with marital satisfaction. Even if it is not at all times exciting to care for the sick and/or shoulder their burdens, the small effort pays off in terms of happiness. The emphasis is on ‘small’ and ‘regular’. Big sacrifices can tilt the balance too far.
  4. It’s fine to kiss. Just don’t shake hands. Professor Sally Bloomfield, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says: “People avoid kissing each other when they have a cold, but in fact they are more likely to pass on an infection by shaking someone’s hand.” Air- or cheek kisses are safest.
  5. Remember the obvious, which for sheer obviousness does not appear in empirical research: light the fireplace, bake waffles with the kids, make hot chocolate or apple cider and wear thick crazy patterned socks.

That should do for a couple of weeks. Enjoy until the clock changes….which will be a whole new challenge.

Why don’t people marry anmore? 3 myths and 3 facts.

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Since the 1970s, marriage rates in the US have decreased 30 to 50 percent among younger adults, depending on demographic group. I have wanted to write about the economics of this for a while, and fascinated by this paper, had a whole narrative spun out in my head about the decline in some kinds of jobs for men, the exit of these men from the labor- and then the marriage markets and the consequences, including, possibly, extremism. But a Freakonomics podcast woke me up from dreamily walking into

Myth No. 1: Poverty is the reason for the decline in marriage. We do see in the cross-section of US data that poorer people marry less and cohabit more. We also see a combination of stylized facts that suggest that a decline in manufacturing jobs reduces the number of marriageable men via unemployment, addiction, mortality and homelessness. But the effect is not big enough and insufficient to explain the full decline in marriage. And the reverse is definitely not true: economic booms do not increase the marriage rate. They increase fertility, i.e. number of kids, but not marriage.

Myth No. 2: Looking at marriage alone is a nonstarter; cohabitation and marriage are the same thing. No they aren’t, definitely not in the world described by US data, and not for the group that matters most: kids. Kids of unmarried parents have worse outcomes in many different dimensions, education, health, wellbeing. The US situation is particularly stark internationally both in the achievement gap and the (large) share of single parent families. – This is not necessarily a helpful insight given that often single parenthood has not been chosen. But we will need to live with the fact that it’s better for a kid if her parents are married.

Myth No. 3: Declining marriage is no problem. With available modern contraception, out of marriage births are under control. Sadly, they are not. 40% of all children are now born outside of marriage, and of these, 60% were unplanned. Contraception can and does fail. More importantly, many people drift into relationships and into childbearing without much time or pause to reflect and plan for consequences. The sober chat before things heat up is rare, across the income spectrum and especially at the bottom end. But it shouldn’t be. Isabel Sawhill, the Grande Dame of researching declining marriage and its consequences, shows how the wider choices available today in terms of family formation require ‘planning’ rather than ‘drifting’ to arrive at a good outcome.

Judging from the above, marriage is an institution worth upholding and spreading. To that aim, getting richer is desirable, but does not help us increase the marriage rate back to where it was. What else, then, matters?

Fact No. 1: Gender ratios matter. When men need to compete for women, the marriage rate increases. For more details, see here.

Fact No. 2: Shotgun marriage has declined, due to abortion and contraception on demand. This is possibly the largest driver of the decline in marriage. – Tough news, I know. But it comes from Janet Yellen and her husband, both quite above the suspicion of conservative bias. – Don’t get me wrong, I am no fan of shotgun marriages. They still exist, and out of the ten or so cases I know, only a small minority ended in sustained long-term couple-hood. But all the cases created a nurturing environment for children to grow up in.
Turning back the clock on the social options available to us is possible only selectively. (The Amish don’t have the problem of a falling marriage rate. Neither has Ave Maria Town.) What else can be done? William Saletan in Slate makes a vocal case for holding unmarried fathers accountable as if they were married and it seems an option worth considering.

Fact No. 3: Marriage has decreased at the top end of female earnings: men still struggle to accept women as breadwinners.
No one less than today’s Nobel Laureate, Richard Thaler, delivers this fact in a very arresting NYT piece. He quotes research showing that ‘the trend in the percentage of women making more than men explains almost one-fourth of the marriage rate’s decline in the 40 years ended in 2010.’

One fourth. That is about as big a contribution to the fall in marriage rates as are declining job opportunities for men. Food for thought.

Power Couples

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Town and Country

I am sitting on an old style white chalked brick veranda with a sweeping view of expansive forests and rolling hills. The woodlands cover about five times the area of the settlements in their midst. I grew up here, so although I cannot see the detail of the boscage from where I sit, I know it to harbor fir, spruce, white oak, maple, beeches and birches. On a warm humid day with wind you can smell the spruce. And with the hindsight of economic studies, I recognize the region to host a wood cluster, from forestry along the value chain of industrial and fine carpentry and about any wood product a house may need. Some of the unpretentious medium sized manufacturers are world market leaders for a random product, like a kind of wood siding, or window caulking. Social networks in the small towns are dense, it is easy to know everyone living in the region, at least a little.

When I left this peaceful place for the first time to live in a big city, one of the things that struck me was the anonymity that reigns once you hit the million person mark. Every day you meet people and families that your parents or other kin did not know before. You have to actively build up a stock of knowledge about them, and several people may not have ‘a reputation’ of some sort because the turnover of interactions is so fast and fluid.
At the same time, the amount of opportunities and choice are wonderful. In the city I moved to, you had a bus for every destination you wanted to get to, a course for any subject you wanted to learn. Out of the 6m inhabitants, you had a pool of at least 1m you could interact with and recruit friends from. It was easy to match preferences, from classical music over poetry to spiritual brand. Sports, music and any other hobby could be practiced at near olympic standards. (And the city we are talking about is Bogota, not Boston. In the 1990s. Just for the record.)

The variety of jobs people did was diverse too. In addition to teachers and doctors, I met salesmen, bankers, engineers, painters, entrepreneurs in retail, textile manufacturing, forwarding and furniture design, employees and managers of multinationals. I could make out a couple of clusters touching the city: the beverage industry, furniture and jewelry design, pharma and cosmetics. Professional activities mingled and overlapped and moving from one to another was a more obvious and more frequent choice than in my original forestial dwelling.

Love in the City

Which surroundings are best for your dating? It depends. As people couple up, they think about compatibility. This includes natural affinity, values and preferences, but it also includes very practical matters. Such as, will both partners work, and where will they work. The industrially more diverse metropolitan environment is likely to hold more options for either half of the couple. If both partners want to work, they will be more able to do that in the city rather than in the country. They are also more likely to find a better job match in the city. I.e. the more demanding and peculiar they are about what they want to do, the more they will benefit from the better odds in the city of actually finding it. In principle.

Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn mined valuable data from the US and corroborated this story in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (Nov 2000). Between 1940 and 1990, the college educated drifted increasingly to cities, and the biggest driver of this drift was the emergence of Dual Earner couples. By far. Husband AND wife started to work, and career minded people increasingly mated with career minded people. (As for why this suddenly happened, see my previous post Opposites Distract.)
This does not mean there are no power couples in the countryside, but if you look closely you will realize they are far fewer. And mostly covering the essential services: medicine, teaching, pharmacy, religion. Unless both partners happen to specialize in the particular local industry.

The emergence of dual earners is a sign of greater equality in couples. But the process of their concentration in cities helps create spaces of two speeds. By attracting qualified people more easily, cities will thrive more. While the countryside suffers brain drain. Over time, town and country may drift apart in productivity and wealth.

Digital Desegregation

However, let’s not forget that this is 2016. The spatial segregation I describe above applies to jobs that are geographically bound, that need a specific place of work and personal presence. This requirement is fading in many industries. Digital jobs like programmer and web designer can be done from any place with an internet connection, and so can many back- and sometimes front office jobs in finance, medicine and retail. Presence jobs in fields as diverse as diplomacy, engineering and science have phases that can be covered effectively and (more) efficiently through telework.

And this is why I can sit on this white veranda and enjoy the clean air and the view of the forests in the evening sun. My blog will soon be posted to the internet, visible in town and country alike. And my man is sitting next door and writing his own.

(Second) Spring, Fertility and Happiness

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Despite the ever changing weather, I hear birds chirping outside. Beams of sunlight come and go, as do bees that are kept at the local elementary. The daffodils have not given in to the rain and the mosquitoes have not arrived yet. Perfect spring. New green life is piercing through frosty soil, and a somehow larger family of Easter bunnies gathers on our lawn. A good moment to think about how human families form and grow and pursue happiness. I have witnessed this lifecycle building best in my immediate friends, such as Beth (not her real name).

Beth has been married for over ten years now. She confided to me that her wellbeing had changed markedly since she first partnered with Jack. Getting married and moving in together nudged up her happiness. Trying for a child and getting pregnant brought an even deeper contentment and feeling of security, also for Jack. The actual birth of the first baby was life changing and laborious. But at the same time deeply rewarding and instilling pride. Beth and Jack felt like family. Both of them older than 36, they also saw a long held wish materialize, and at a time where their biological clock could have decided otherwise. In spite of the hard work that followed and would eat up part of their leisure for good, they were happy.

Mikko Myrskylä und Rachel Margolis mined the extensive data from British and German household panels and found that the birth of a child normally increases the parents’ happiness. This is strongest for the first child and a bit milder for the second (and non-positive for the third). The effect is temporarily very strong. As they write, “happiness is, on average, 0.3-0.5 units higher (on 0-10 scale) when a child is born compared to the baseline 4-5 years earlier. This magnitude is comparable to the effect of divorce (-0.49) or going to from employed to unemployed (-0.47).”

Happiness gets a boost around the birth of a child, with 2-3 years anticipation before the birth and lasting 1-2 years thereafter. The happiness increasing period before birth may reflect partnering, marriage and getting pregnant; and the post birth decline possibly a realization of the permanent loss of spare time.

And, wait for it. You better have your kids at a mature age. Older parents, above 35, as well as the highly educated have a stronger happiness surge, and even when happiness drops around 2 years after the birth, it still stays above the long term average. So for these groups, parenthood increases their happiness sustainably. Younger parents (below 25) can see their happiness decline long term. This may reflect that younger parents typically have fewer resources available, and also that they still have a – now unfulfilled – need to enjoy life and leisure on their own. Older parents likely have had their partying years and can let them go.

Looking at all this it is understandable that more and more people decide to have their children later, and to limit their number. Parenthood in the second springtime of life lets the new happiness last.

Memento mori

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“Memento mori – remember you are mortal.” This is really not big news, all our lives will end. But we are most of the time too good at ignoring it.

See, I have to write about death and mortality today because I am seeing too much of it. The Brussels and Ivory Coast hate attacks, people surprised by a diagnosis of terminal illness, young top-of-the-crop talents taking their own lives, car accidents, and again, diverse health struggles lost, heroically. Always untimely. Sorry for not coming up with a more uplifting topic, but bear with me. Because first, it is Good Friday and death is for a while the theme, and second, because by the end of this blog, I will try to extract some beauty from the setting. Somewhere.

Likely, none of us knows for when God has ordered the taxi, or who the driver is. And we repress thoughts about it successfully. We live as if we live forever. We love as if our relationship will last forever and beyond. It is easy to value today as if we had lots more of them coming, and value it barely more highly than tomorrow. Economists call this intertemporal preferences, or discount rate. For example, with a low rate we don’t discount the future strongly because we are convinced we have lots left. Or we are good at waiting. There are advantages to a low personal discount rate, such as willingness to save, invest, delay gratification, to work hard today for a better tomorrow. Most education aims at instilling these values in children.

But they may not be entirely realistic. In the long run, we are all dead, as Keynes wisely observed. We live moving towards death.
Some people get the news about God’s taxi, its driver and the approximate departure years in advance. It is still shocking news. It changes one’s outlook completely, and often quite painfully. Arguably the more painfully, the less prepared one is. There is a sudden realization of the strength of the will to live. An anger with fate or a higher power, sometimes turning one’s faith bitter. And the fear that the driver may be really unpleasant. And of the radical good-byes. (Radical, but not terminal, I believe.)
Even when the taxi is announced at a point in life that one could consider rich in years, and fulfilled, more often than not it pulls the emotional rug from under people.

My lesson from observing this is to get prepared. To live life, love, friendships, faith and work knowing the road will once end. To cherish every day, to worry a little less, to breathe more deeply, to savor food more, to spend more time with your kids, to give more and hoard less, to hold on to good memories and let go of grudges, to care for one’s time wisely and abstain from things, people and situations that drag.
To take liberties and forget others’ approval. To indulge all those who don’t know this. Simply, to put things into perspective. Many annoyances lose their weight in front of the fact that our stay on earth has an expiry date.

It is still fine to work hard and invest in tomorrow. But it is wiser to plant Lutheran apple trees and take joy in the planting rather than doing it only for the harvest. The apples may well be our offspring’s to enjoy without us, which is also worth it.