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So in other words, if we want stable marriages, we should not financially devastate men in divorce and give their wives cash and prizes and accolades for breaking up their families and pushing fathers out of their kids' lives. Got it. Most of us knew this already but it's nice to have a study to confirm it.
Here are first-take conclusions I draw from the article:

> The only discernible effect on female winners is that wealth increases their short-run (but not long-run) divorce risk.

Women still divorce their sucky husbands. It just takes longer. This could result in fewer kids, or it could result in kids whose homes are broken during later childhood or adolescence.

Reading the actual paper, this is, in fact, the conclusion the authors come to: "In contrast, the only exception to the pattern of null results for female winners is that lottery wealth almost doubles their short-run probability of divorce. One interpretation of the absence of a discernible long-run increase in divorce risk among these women is that wealth accelerates the dissolution of marriages that were already underway."

> We also report results which suggest that when married men win the lottery, the windfall has a tendency to stabilize their existing marriages

Winning a lottery helps men feel secure enough that they aren't as sucky to their spouse.

> lottery wins cause the largest increase in marriage rates and the biggest reduction in divorce rates among unmarried men with low incomes.

So if you want stable marriages that have children the best thing to do is make people wealthier, especially those of lower income. Make men wealthier and they'll get married more and have more children. Make women wealthier and the men they stick with will be ones they like sticking with. I can't see this latter leading to fewer children, on average. I'd expect it would lead to more.

Where'd you get your idea from?

> One interpretation of the absence of a discernible long-run increase in divorce risk among these women is that wealth accelerates the dissolution of marriages that were already underway.

If you're pulling in divorces from the future, shouldn't the long term rate go down? Sounds like the total divorce rate goes up.

> sucky husbands

That's odd framing.

> sucky husbands

It's become the standard in some companies to bitch about men and presume they're suckers and abusers is any situation that involves both sexes. Let's keep in mind that it's not science saying this, but woke ideology.

> the best thing to do is make people wealthier

Far-fetched. Winning a lottery makes you much wealthier relative to other people, it puts you in maybe 10-20% richest people of your country. You can't fit everyone in those 20%.

Look at something like Uzbekistan. Country is miserably poor compared to Sweden and they still reproduce like they win lotteries all the time.

“Men still divorce their sucky wives” is a phrase you’d be comfortable with? I’m not.
Afaik financial worries are a big reason why some women stay with abusive partners. This is gendered - many sub groups expect men to be breadwinner and women to be primary caregiver. So women are more likely to have no income for period of time or have child duties that interfere with work.

Contrary what OP wrote, typical result is that women becomes poorer after divorce and men had more money. (And no, alimony are nit given out like candies).

It is not only reason, but practically not having money and risking poverty or homelessness means you need to plan divorce very carefully.

I don't understand why people, on, supposedly, intellectual resource like HN, are offended when people state that women attracted to success(which can be measured in a multiple things, but right now, in the most places it's money). Keep dialogue constructive, things are like they are.
Alternative interpretation: Many women tolerate abusive relationships because they do not have the means to financially support themselves and their kids. Winning the lottery is a way out.
Probably a factor.

Another is that some men are uncomfortable with a wealthier partner. I know a few like this who say it plainly, but it showed up recently in "Crazy Rich Asians" with the tech CEO husband.

This seems like an oddly woman-hostile take that's only very tangentially related to the study.
It’s not intended to be woman-hostile at all. It’s opposed to a specific system of incentives that encourages immoral and socially destructive behavior. It just happens to be that the system of incentives is itself designed to operate unequally and so it affects the participants in families differently.

If a similar system of incentives were created that strongly benefitted fathers in ways that fathers would respond to, we would probably see similar dysfunctional behavior from fathers.

> like an oddly woman-hostile take

Noone cared about alimony until women started having to pay and now there's suddenly a movement to remove it.

You could say woman-hostile. You could also say victim mentality.

He who is being left usually has walked away first.

I think that you are simply lying about the financial devastation divorce has on men and women. Obviously the material split differs between countries, but I literally no country I actually looked at what you wrote was actually true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Whittaker_(lottery_winner...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-12-13/lottery-w...

This man had his entire life destroyed after winning the lottery.

Apart from divorce, other men sued him for ruining their marriages by making them look like losers and actually won!

What's interesting to me is that all this happened after he already had a $17M net worth (20 years ago, so worth almost double that now with inflation, and in a low-cost-of-living area), per the Wikipedia article. That's far more money than I'll ever see. How does more money materially change the life of someone like that? It sounds like his troubles were the effect of publicity after winning the lottery, not wealth.
According to him, no one really knew he had that much money.

I find that highly dubious because in my experience bank clerks talk a lot and there is effectively no banking secrecy.

> other men sued him for ruining their marriages by making them look like losers and actually won

Wait, what?!

I'm having trouble finding a primary source, but you can find people claiming that.

I would not be surprised because, trial by jury.

Whittaker sounds to have had a lot of issues that had nothing to do with lottery.

To me it sounds like one of those cases that likely got widely distorted in media. I have seen it multiple times where when you dig into the case, it turned out to be something else entirely.

Isn't there a Jane Austen quote that goes something like:

Everyone knows a bachelor with an inheritance is in need of a wife.

"A woman loyalty is tested when a man has nothing. A man loyalty is tested when he has everything."
Or to paraphrase Chris Rock:-

In a good neighbourhood the women dont have jobs.

In a bad neighbourhood it's the men that don't have jobs.

Interesting. Who said it?
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

Opening line of Pride and Prejudice.

I mean, in a society where all financial security of a woman is from man and she has no real way of getting independent income, this sort of thinking actually makes sense.
Not just wealth...lottery winners.
If you want to estimate causal effects you need a randomly assigned treatment. When studying the effects of wealth a lottery gives you exactly that.

The critique would be that the findings don’t necessarily generalize outside of the lottery participating population, but why wouldn’t they?

> The critique would be that the findings don’t necessarily generalize outside of the lottery participating population, but why wouldn’t they?

Because normally when people earn their wealth, they build up a whole set of experiences and social networks that assist them in managing their wealth. Contrarily, winning the lottery has often been reported as "the worst thing that can happen to you", and lottery winners are frequently broke in a few years: https://www.ngpf.org/blog/question-of-the-day/question-of-th...

> If you want to estimate causal effects you need a randomly assigned treatment. When studying the effects of wealth a lottery gives you exactly that.

It gives you exactly the opposite of that. How many financially prudent individuals do you know who buy lottery tickets? It is not a representative sample.

> but why wouldn’t they?

Well, could be that the lottery participating population has less than average satisfaction of their current life situation. Seems reasonable.

Lottery partecipants are more likely to be mathematically illiterate.
The mindset matters imo. Someone who worked their a$$ off to accumulate wealth has a totally different perspective to life compared to someone who won lottery.
Please note this study is on men who got a wealth shock. But population wise high income households have less children for some reason.
It's the case across entire countries: The richer a country or region the less children there are.

For the countries and peoples moaning about low birthrates, the simplest solution is to go back to being destitute. The poorer a country or region the more children there are.

Not to say that's a realistic solution, of course. But the cause-and-effect seem fairly clear that more monies equate to less kids.

You can look at fertility rates across rich countries, and what you'll notice is a rapid secular decline starts literally the exact same year that the birth control pill becomes legal.

Go ahead and google fertility rates for any developed country that comes to mind and compare it to when birth control became legal. For the US, UK, Australia, South Korea, etc its the EXACT year.

Wealth doesn't seem to explain it exactly: the main reason people who want kids don't have they in developed countries is a lack of mean (wealth). Wealth itself doesn't seem to be it (all else equal, having more means doesn't seem like the obvious cause).

I wonder what percent of children born for all of human history were simply unplanned. The data seems to suggest something like 50%+ of them. As family planning becomes more accessible, we're finding that people just keep postponing having them and a big part of the reason they had them before was simply "oops".

No surprise in hindsight. There's not a single animal on earth besides us very recently that do any kind of family planning. They just have sex and offspring happen. Why should Homo Sapiens be any different.

> The richer a country or region the less children there are.

Used to be true but now has changed. The richer have more children. See a recent survey on the new economics of the family by Mathias doepke of northwestern.

> But the cause-and-effect seem fairly clear that more monies equate to less kids.

I disagree. I would guess the cause is women gaining agency to dictate how many children they birth, from a combination of being able to control when they have sex, birth control, and access to abortion.

It just so happens that women generally do not have these things in poorer societies.

>> For the countries and peoples moaning about low birthrates, the simplest solution is to go back to being destitute

I don't think that this is true anymore. We have crossed the Rubicon, birth rates will only increase if people can maintain a good standard of living with less stress and more available time.

This study covers men and women who got wealth shocks through three different programs, two of which are fairly conventional lotteries and the last of which is a “save to win” program where your odds of winning are a function of your bank account balance (to encourage savings).
The obvious explanation to me is that having children costs money, and having children is a big disadvantage for many effective money-making enterprises.
Url changed from https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/04/th..., which points to this.