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Since around 1965, we have been living in the era of the self-expressive marriage. Americans now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth. Fueled by the countercultural currents of the 1960s, they have come to view marriage less as an essential institution and more as an elective means of achieving personal fulfillment. …

As a psychologist, I could not help noticing that this history of marriage echoes the classic “hierarchy of needs” outlined in the 1940s by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. According to Maslow, human needs fit into a five-level hierarchy: The lowest need is that of physiological well-being — including the need to eat and drink — followed by the need for safety, then for belonging and love, then for esteem and finally for self-actualization. …

My colleagues and I contend that an analogous process has occurred in our expectations about marriage.

From a New York Times op-ed on marriage by Eli J. Finkel, a psychologist at Northwestern University.

I guess what this means is that, much like development policy, the institution of marriage has stopped working because the average married American expects way too much for his or her partner. Or: much like there is such a thing as development bloat, there is also such a thing as marriage bloat?

Our own marriage is far from perfect, but when we read Finkel’s op-ed on Sunday morning, my wife and I both admitted that we hadn’t married each other for “self-expression,” for which we can each turn to our own individual interests, hobbies, and friends. In fact, when we find self-expression in each other, it really comes more as a positive externality than anything else. Given that, it might be that managing one’s expectations that one’s partner will always and forever be all that and a bag of chips the best prescription for a long and healthy marriage.

A recent letter to the editor of the New York Times, in response to an article titled “How Single Motherhood Hurts Kids“:

As the product of a single-mother family, I take issue with the broad generalizations in your article. To those single mothers who work diligently to provide good homes for their children, the headline itself is an affront. The assumption is that single motherhood hurts children and this is how that happens.

In fact, this article is really about single, low-income, multipartner mothers, many of whom are teenagers. That is only a segment of the broad range of mothers who are single.

Setting aside the claim that single motherhood hurts kids, which I am in no way qualified to assess, I wanted to make an important point for consumers of social science results with this post. My point consists of two related sub-points, viz.

1. The vast majority of findings in the quantitative social sciences are true on average.
2. By definition, there is a whole distribution around that average, which means that the effect might be negative for some, zero for others, and positive for still others.

In other words, if I tell you that having a college degree increases your annual income by $30,000 on average, it is likely that the along the distribution of the average treatment effect of going to college on annual income, there are some people for whom the effect is negative — they went to college, but they ended up with a worse job than they would’ve had otherwise gotten had they accumulated four years of experience instead — and there are some people for whom the effect is more on the order of $100,000 per year.

Does the author of the letter to the editor quoted above make the mistake of assuming that average effects are uniformly distributed? Not really, because he recognizes that if you condition on certain things (high-income, adult single-mothers who have few partners), the result is likely to disappear.

And it’s not just the general, non-quantitative lay readers of the New York Times who make the mistake of assuming a uniform distribution of treatment effects. Every once in a while, I will get a comment in a referee report that goes something like “You find that an increase in food prices increases the number of food riots, but there are cases where food gets so expensive that people eat too little and, as a consequence, they are too weak to riot” (this is a fictitious example, by the way). To which your response should be: “Well, yeah.”

The whole point of running regressions, in most cases, is to know what happens on average. To be sure, there is a certain movement toward characterizing heterogeneous treatment effects in applied microeconomics, but doing so is difficult, because causally identifying average effects is difficult enough as is, and causally identifying heterogeneous effects is even more difficult.

[M]y own experience is that preparing for an economics exam has more to do with preparing for a musical performance than with preparing for an exam in the humanities. You cannot expect to play a piece of music perfectly the first time you sight-read your way through it. Rather, you will have to do a number of very rough sight-readings of it before you can identify weaknesses in your playing. When you have identified those weaknesses, you will isolate those measures that are the most difficult and work on them until you can play them seamlessly at the right tempo. Once that’s done, you will play the whole piece so as to make sure you can integrate those difficult measures into the easier material to make the whole piece of music flow evenly.

It’s that time of the semester once again, when students are preparing for their first wave of midterm exams. In my own APEC3001 — Consumers, Producers, and Markets course, my students have their first of two midterm next week, on Thursday.

As such, I just sent them the handout I had written a while back about how to do well in econ your econ courses. I thought I would share it again with the world at large; you can find here (link opens a .pdf document).