A Simple Key To Success: Get And Stay Married

Once big discoveries are made in a particular field, scientists fall to tackling smaller and smaller ones until they're dealing with relatively trivial issues. Being scientists, they still want to trumpet their findings and, needing to sell newspapers, reporters still want to make a big deal out of them. The reader, however, is probably not affected much by these progressively smaller discoveries and could tune out without much risk.

Marriage, as studied by sociologists, is one such field. It was discovered long, long ago that marriage gives you an advantage in life. For one thing, jokes about your wife are a lot funnier than ones about "my co-habitating, semi-committed partner." Without marriage, the prose is unruly and the punchline gets lost. Here's another example from one of my favorite writers, Megan McArdle.

However, that doesn’t necessarily tell us whether selection effects are at work. A society’s values about marriage aren’t the only thing that affect the stability of its unions; economic forces also undoubtedly play a role, for example, and those vary widely by country. A simple international comparison cannot tell us whether anything we discover is selection effect or causation.

This bit of obfuscating drivel is from an essay pondering the alleged chicken-and-egg problem of the superiority of marriage over shacking up. It's obvious one exists. That's the big discovery from long ago. Now sociologists are debating whether this is a cause or an effect. Studies are done, correlations are found and the press rushes about with each new one telling us whatever fits their preferred narrative. Today, it would be anything supporting homosexuals.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us, these discoveries have the same impact on our lives as French avant-garde art. None at all. It doesn't matter if the correlations point one way or another. Get and stay married. There, that's it. Now we can all go cook delicious food and watch the game with friends while the eggheads sit in the study alone, arguing about t-tests and cross-correlations.

For the love of Pete, how many times can we hit the woodwork in one game and not score? Newcastle should have won this one 4-2 at least.

Say, has anyone seen Megan? Dinner is almost ready. Could someone go see if she's still in the study?