Be Careful What You Wish For

Most unwisely, Megan McArdle has decided to justify her decision to marry to the world at large. McArdle has found a happy medium in wedding blogging. She has evidently decided to skip an examination of the wedding industry, which would take work and numbers and stuff, and merely satisfy herself by talking about talking about economics. And herself.

McArdle starts by stating she believes in marriage. She expects it to make her happier and more fulfilled, despite the tax hit she might suffer. She can't think of a reason to stay single except for the sake of "contrariness"--being different for its own sake. Not that she needs to marry, she hastens to add. She has nothing to prove to anybody, being above the moral and legal laws conservative followers are required to inflict on each other.

And yet, she will marry anyway. If she has so little drive to marry, why the drive to marry? What reason does she give?

It would be much harder to do many of the things we want and intend to do, for
and with each other, without that useless little piece of paper.

Like what? You can rent houses, hold jobs, and almost everything else if you're cohabiting. It's true that you would not have legal rights regarding your partner if some tragedy were to occur. If your boyfriend were hospitalized you wouldn't have any rights regarding his care. But McArdle calls the rights that piece of heterosexual paper endows "useless." Why won't she mention the obvious reason, the one given by so many homosexual couples who want to be able to care for sick partners? Why won't she discuss health care--god knows she's been yapping about it endlessly; surely it's on her mind?

Suderman just received an 11-month Koch fellowship at McArdle's former employer, Reason. Based on a quick look at other Reason intern jobs, it appears that interns are paid a stipend only--no benefits. No health insurance. If Suderman wants to be covered, in case he is shot while bar-hopping or hit while riding a bike, he has to marry someone with heath insurance or buy ruinously expensive policies on his own.

Decisions to marry are based on love, but decisions on when to marry are often based on more practical reasons. If McArdle doesn't care one way or the other, something tipped the scales and there's a very good chance that health insurance was a factor, as it is for every uninsured person in the US.

Wedding Belle

Hear the mellow wedding bells, Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!


Megan McArdle can't resist talking about herself, especially if she can make herself look elite in the process. Therefore it was utterly predictable that she would be utterly incapable of not blogging about her wedding to up-and-coming astroturfer P. Suderman. She probably has a faint inkling that it will not reflect well on her professionalism, but her desire to stroke her ego is far too strong.

I know I said I wasn't going to blog about wedding planning. It turns out that this was a lie. The economics of the thing are just fascinating.

First rule: there are no awesome bargains, particularly in DC. If you want to save money on the catering, you have to rent a venue . . . and the venues price accordingly. No one in DC has a back yard which serves as reasonable competition for a wedding, and hello, price inflation!

(Why are you getting married in that pricey hellhole, I hear you cry. My hometown is Manhattan. Peter's hometown is on Florida's Emerald Coast. These are not noticeable price improvements, particularly when you factor in travel to, like, meet vendors and taste the food. Now, if one of us had been born in Topeka, we could have a slammin' hometown wedding on a thin budget, but there you are.)

Remember when Megan whined that she couldn't find Louis Vuitton luggage on sale? Heh, that was funny. So close to being elite, yet unable to fit in because she is too poor to be one of them. And petulant because a market that depends on its image of exclusivity and fine, expensive quality won't knock down their prices just for her benefit. She sees no relation at all to what she preaches as a libertarian and what she actually experiences in real life--the marketplace at work, trying to get as much money out of the customer as it can.

Second rule: transparency is not at a premium in the industry. They strenuously try to hide their prices from you until you they can get you into the shop and strenuously imply that a wedding without 4,000 calla lilies won't make you feel really married.

Since Peter and I are a) journalists and b) in agreement with each other and our families that we are not going to spend any sum that might reasonably function as the downpayment on a house, I don't want to waste time talking to vendors who cannot deliver on our budget. So especially in the case of caterers, if you don't have a menu--with prices--on your website, you don't get a call from us.

Doesn't it occur to McArdle that the catering companies left off prices because they don't want her business, or the business of anyone looking to get out of there cheap? McArdle knows that a high-end caterer will cost a great deal of money for good reason, and expecting a high-end caterer to advertise to a lower-end market is illogical and bad business.

I am wondering whether this is leading to greater transparency--and thus price competition--in the industry.

Obviously not. The prices aren't there, are they? So not putting prices on menus is not leading to greater transparency. Was she drunk on tiny samples of wine when she wrote this?

I suspect that it's probably just segmenting the market. High end caterers who don't want to listen to Peter and I whine that we really can't afford to pay one squillion dollars a head even if it is hand-picked Argentinian moss in the garnish, will continue to rely on word of mouth and the society pages. The ones who cater to a more, er, thrifty audience, will put up packages and prices . . . and probably see their margins competed downward.

It's "Peter and me," sweetie. It's something most English majors manage to master during school. "I" when the subject, "me" when the object.* Just leave out the "Peter" and you'll see. "Caterers don't want to listen to me whine." Not "Caterers don't want to listen to I whine." Having heard McArdle's nasal drawl on bloggingheads, I'm quite sure she's correct on that point, at least. And let's just ignore "competed downward" altogether.

Which is rough. Most brides feel that the caterer must be raking it in . . . $100 a head for a few itty-bitty hors d'oeuvres and a piece of steak? But my mother was a caterer for a while, and once you've factored in things like staff, insurance, inventory, spoilage, downtime, and so forth, those margins start to look pitifully thin.

So by not advertising [prices], caterers will be forced into transparency except they won't because they are doing what they must. That was a fascinating excuse to blog about your wedding economic discussion.

All that said, the one thing I actually have bought so far, the wedding dress, turned out to be a joy. I read all the horror stories about bridal salons, and the way they thwart competition and exploit you at every turn for "extras" like fittings, alterations, and ironing the dress. Labels (illegally) scissored out of dresses and photos forbidden so you can't comparison shop. Industry mags that tell them how to manipulate you into a sale. No one allowed to look at the dresses, which have to be pulled by a "consultant" to insure that you don't spy one cheaper than your budget that you might like.

Then while I was at my family reuinion in western New York, I stopped in at this shop, which is run by my first cousin once removed. It's friendly rather than fancy. The racks are open, the dresses are reasonably priced, and all the alterations are included. I tried on half the dresses in the store, and bought the one that Janice picked out--which was one of the mid-priced dresses. I slept on the purchase with no hassle.

I have no idea whether this experience is typical, but I'm not quite as suspicious of wedding vendors as I was a few weeks ago. I suspect this may cost me somewhere down the road . . .

McArdle wonders if everyone who goes to bridal shops where their cousin works have pleasant experiences and don't feel like they're being ripped off. By their cousin. This pleasant experience has made her less distrustful of vendors, although she just wrote a post complaining about her distrust of wedding vendors. But this rumination did allow her to advertise her cousin's shop in the "pages" of The Atlantic, which has high traffic. I just hope she received a good discount on her wedding dress in return for the endorsement. I'd be ashamed of a libertarian who gave away something for free.

*The blog I linked to has a very good explanation why people do this: "Somehow "I" appeals more to the common man and sounds superior to the mundane "me".

The Princess Bride

On this happy occasion, let's take a look back at an earlier post on marriage from Megan McArdle. Unfortunately, I seem to be blocked from accessing McArdle's Jane Galt archives, no doubt due to some kind of clerical error. Fortunately, there are other ways to access material on the internet. In "A really, really, really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the other," McArdle warns that big decisions can have unintended consequences, while stating over and over and over that she doesn't care either way whether or not gays can marry.

Unlike most libertarians, I don't have an opinion on gay marriage, and I'm not going to have an opinion no matter how much you bait me. However, I had an interesting discussion last night with another libertarian about it, which devolved into an argument about a certain kind of liberal/libertarian argument about gay marriage that I find really unconvincing.

Social conservatives of a more moderate stripe are essentially saying that marriage is an ancient institution, which has been carefully selected for throughout human history. It is a bedrock of our society; if it is destroyed, we will all be much worse off. (See what happened to the inner cities between 1960 and 1990 if you do not believe this.) For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman; this seems to be an important feature of the institution. We should not go mucking around and changing this extremely important institution, because if we make a bad change, the institution will fall apart.

A very common response to this is essentially to mock this as ridiculous. "Why on earth would it make any difference to me whether gay people are getting married? Why would that change my behavior as a heterosexual"

To which social conservatives reply that institutions have a number of complex ways in which they fulfill their roles, and one of the very important ways in which the institution of marriage perpetuates itself is by creating a romantic vision of oneself in marriage that is intrinsically tied into expressing one's masculinity or femininity in relation to a person of the opposite sex; stepping into an explicitly gendered role. This may not be true of every single marriage, and indeed undoubtedly it is untrue in some cases. But it is true of the culture-wide institution. By changing the explicitly gendered nature of marriage we might be accidentally cutting away something that turns out to be a crucial underpinning.

To which, again, the other side replies "That's ridiculous! I would never change my willingness to get married based on whether or not gay people were getting married!"

Having said she has no opinion, McArdle immediately begins discussing opinions. She presents these views as belonging to others so she can't be criticized or rejected by anybody. From her safe "neutral" perch she can criticize both sides while belonging to neither. Yet McArdle does, of course, have an opinion, and has the urge to present it to the world, indeed, an obligation to tell others what to think, as a highly educated person and one of the elite.

Now, economists hear this sort of argument all the time. "That's ridiculous! I would never start working fewer hours because my taxes went up!" This ignores the fact that you may not be the marginal case. The marginal case may be some consultant who just can't justify sacrificing valuable leisure for a new project when he's only making 60 cents on the dollar. The result will nonetheless be the same: less economic activity. Similarly, you--highly educated, firmly socialised, upper middle class you--may not be the marginal marriage candidate; it may be some high school dropout in Tuscaloosa. That doesn't mean that the institution of marriage won't be weakened in America just the same.

And now we're deeply in the weeds, where a layperson would have a hard time following or countering McArdle's opinions. It's not that McArdle's feelings towards marriage will suffer, it's the economy. No, McArdle isn't a bigot here and neither are you, dear reader. It's Others, lowlifes in Tuscaloosa who will harm marriage through their bigotry. Not McArdle. But just in case you accidently thought McArdle had an opinion lurking under the verbiage, she rushes to disabuse you of that notion.

This should not be taken as an endorsement of the idea that gay marriage will weaken the current institution. I can tell a plausible story where it does; I can tell a plausible story where it doesn't. I have no idea which one is true. That is why I have no opinion on gay marriage, and am not planning to develop one. Marriage is a big institution; too big for me to feel I have a successful handle on it.

Eh, maybe it will, maybe it won't, who knows? But remember, McArdle has no opinion on the subject either way. Marriage won't be harmed by gays marrying, unless, you know, it will.

However, I am bothered by this specific argument, which I have heard over and over from the people I know who favor gay marriage laws. I mean, literally over and over; when they get into arguments, they just repeat it, again and again. "I will get married even if marriage is expanded to include gay people; I cannot imagine anyone up and deciding not to get married because gay people are getting married; therefore, the whole idea is ridiculous and bigoted."

They may well be right. Nonetheless, libertarians should know better. The limits of your imagination are not the limits of reality. Every government programme that libertarians have argued against has been defended at its inception with exactly this argument.

So just in case you thought opposition to gay marriage was silly and bigoted, remember that it might not be, because someone, somewhere might make a negative economic decision, and hurt the free markets.

So what does this mean? That we shouldn't enact gay marriage because of some sort of social Precautionary Principle [sic]

No. I have no such grand advice.

My only request is that people try to be a leeetle more humble about their ability to imagine the subtle results of big policy changes. The argument that gay marriage will not change the institution of marriage because you can't imagine it changing your personal reaction is pretty arrogant. It imagines, first of all, that your behavior is a guide for the behavior of everyone else in society, when in fact, as you may have noticed, all sorts of different people react to all sorts of different things in all sorts of different ways, which is why we have to have elections and stuff. And second, the unwavering belief that the only reason that marriage, always and everywhere, is a male-female institution (I exclude rare ritual behaviors), is just some sort of bizarre historical coincidence, and that you know better, needs examining. If you think you know why marriage is male-female, and why that's either outdated because of all the ways in which reproduction has lately changed, or was a bad reason to start with, then you are in a good place to advocate reform. If you think that marriage is just that way because our ancestors were all a bunch of repressed bastards with dark Freudian complexes that made them homophobic bigots, I'm a little leery of letting you muck around with it.

Be humble little thinkers, who do not have McArdle's education and deep thoughts. Listen to your betters, which is why we have elections and stuff. Our ancestors knew what they were doing and did it for a good reason. (After all, it's not like the marriage contract started out as a bill of sale for the exchange of property.) Listen to your Authorities. They know what they are doing.

Is this post going to convince anyone? I doubt it; everyone but me seems to already know all the answers, so why listen to such a hedging, doubting bore? I myself am trying to draw a very fine line between being humble about making big changes to big social institutions, and telling people (which I am not trying to do) that they can't make those changes because other people have been wrong in the past. In the end, our judgement is all we have; everyone will have to rely on their judgement of whether gay marriage is, on net, a good or a bad idea. All I'm asking for is for people to think more deeply than a quick consultation of their imaginations to make that decision. I realise that this probably falls on the side of supporting the anti-gay-marriage forces, and I'm sorry, but I can't help that. This humility is what I want from liberals when approaching market changes; now I'm asking it from my side too, in approaching social ones. I think the approach is consistent, if not exactly popular.

Learn from my humility, little people. Deny civil rights to our fellow human beings. They might be miffed at that, but I'm sorry, I just can't help that.

McArdle is afraid of rejection from socially liberal people if she states what she really feels--gays shouldn't marry. If gay marriage hurts McArdle's marriage in any way, shape or form, she cannot allow it. Marriage is for her, happily born heterosexual and therefore good enough to marry. Not for gays, who are not good enough. McArdle has spoken. Be humble and accept her wisdom.

You go and have a very special day, Princess, and rest happy knowing that some people aren't allowed to marry at all, making your Happy Day even more exclusive and therefore better than before. It's the Libertarian Way, after all.

The Happy Couple

What a surprise. After making posts on proposals, rings and babies, Megan McArdle announces she is getting married. She might as well have a head of glass, since everything that passes through it is laid bare for the public to see.

It's why she's such a good example of how conservatives base political decisions on personal issues. It's not ideology or Libertarianism or an elite education or even God. It's Mom and Dad, and growing up listening to complaints about dishonest unions and those nasty people who are holding back their betters.

McArdle and Suderman will have a child they can't afford and spend every penny they can borrow to give him or her an elite education. They will live on the fringes of an elite society, both part of it and outside it, hanging on through sheer will and cunning. They will be very happy, except when they are not.

UDATE: The blogging about wedding purchases has begun. And there's a tiara.

No, there really is.