True Love Is The Most Important Thing In The World: A Coasian/Evolutionary Approach

My wife and I took the 6 train down to City Hall five years ago today. It’s been good so far. Half a decade later, we’ve survived three kids, two cross-country moves, some death, and other sundry issues. But we had basically the right idea when we got married. Here’s what I posted on Facebook the day of:

Marriage is really important, and I think we should make it legal again.

Technically you can fill out some paperwork and get married — Pamela and I just did. And of course you can have a wedding.* What you can’t reliably do in most states is make a legally binding, socially binding commitment to join yourself at the hip to another person — to be a family unit, not two atomized individuals who happen to share a lot of stuff.

As game theorists love to point out, the right to be sued is a valuable one. Without it, you can’t make credible promises. Similarly, the right to get married such that you can’t get unmarried without Herculean effort is a valuable one. The existence of no-fault divorce weakens that. You just can’t write a marriage contract that’s as permanent as used to be standard, and shorter-term contracts raise time preference and thus reduce investment in the future.

And investing in the future is a pretty big deal! In a way, marriage is a legal recognition of a biological fact: once two people have three or more kids, their largest genetic investment is in the kids they share, not in…