I think of marriages as commitment devices (CDs). CDs are measures humans take to ensure that they will maximize utility in the long-run by inviting immediate costs when deviating from intended behaviour. If we assume that marriage in fact is a CD then private contracts on time are the right way forward: minimizing costs, maximizing utility and giving agency to rational actors.
First, what is a commitment device? My greatly appreciated RHUL professor Dan Hamermesh gave a fantastic example:
(1) Hamermesh wants to eat healthy but gets tempted by sweets in the late evening.
(2) To ensure his long-term goal of healthy nutrition he needs to get rid of his short-term pleasure of late night snacks.
(3) He needs to introduce short-terms costs (commitment device) to outweigh the short-term benefits, in order to a achieve long-term health.
In Numbers:
(1) Hamermesh’s long-term utility of health is 100, but it is discounted heavily since it is so far from grasping. He discounts it with a factor of 10. Thus, if he does something for his health he gets 10 Utility. But eating snacks at the middle of the night he gets 11 utility thus he forgoes his health for the extra 1 utility.
(2) He needs to introduce a commitment device in order to offset the excess utility he gets from eating snacks.
(3) He brushes his teeth straight after dinner at 7pm. This means that if he eats snacks, he would have to brush his teeth again giving him 1.1 disutility thus offsetting his 1 extra utility he gets from eating snacks rather than staying healthy.
Hamermesh introduces immediate costs to ensure long-term utility maximization. Brushing his teeth at 7pm is a good example of a commitment device.
Moving on to Marriages:
(1) couples (mostly wanting kids) have a long-term (till death do us part) benefit by functioning as a team and not deviating from the household and labor division as consumers and producers or cheating. This long-run utility is heavily discounted while short-term pleasure like cheating is maximizing utility right now.
(2) measures must be introduced to punish short term deviations by short term costs.
(3) Such costs come heavy with legal divorce proceedings. Thus, marriage seems like a good commitment device.
If we accept that marriage is a commitment device, then there are two major problems with the standard marriage we see in the west:
(1) Marriage is forever. Thus, we discount long-run joint utility (Family Utility) to “forever” hence with a theoretically infinite factor. This means that we barely account for the long-run utility of the family.
(2) marriage is one-system-fits-all commitment device, which is a horrible idea. We see the same punishments for the same deviations, for very different couples, enforced by the law. Shouldn’t couples decide what constitutes a deviation of the long-run utility? They should also decide what its appropriate punishment is. In the end only they know how to offset short-term utility by immediate costs via punishments.
Thus, we come to the conclusion that private marriage contracts on time are the best solution to ensure stable utility maximization in the long-run. These contracts introduce their own immediate punishments on deviations and ensure that the long run isn’t so long. I would suggest a standard 5-year private contract that can be renewed at the end of the contract with amendments.
This theory originates from Gary Becker if you want further reading.
"dick explosive" and "beating about the bush"... I feel there is a pun somewhere...
The only real CD is a tech gadget around your cock, that explodes the moment it tracks intimate proximity to a female with whom you do not have a contract (aka cheating). Let's face it - everything else is just beating about the bush.