Chicago Booth Review Podcast The Data on Sex, Marriage, and Happiness

Sam Peltzman: When you're in a world where two out of three adults are unmarried, you're having to find pretty good reasons to get married and stay married. There's cohabitation, there's divorce, whatever it is. These are exceptionally hardy marriages in that kind of a world, and it shows up in the marital premium.

Hal Weitzman: Married people are happier than the unmarried on average. Those who are married and having regular sex are even happier. And over time, the difference between the happiness of the married and the unmarried is growing. So what do the statistics tell us about marriage, sex, and happiness? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way.

I'm Hal Weitzman, and today I'm talking with Chicago Booth's Sam Peltzman about his research into happiness and marriage. Is there a big difference between being married and just cohabiting and does having sex more frequently mean you're more likely to be happier? Sam Peltzman, welcome back to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Sam Peltzman: It's my pleasure.

Hal Weitzman: We have talked before on this podcast about happiness, so remind us how do you know when people are happy or not? What's your methodology?

Sam Peltzman: I don't have a methodology, nor do I pretend to be an expert on the topic of happiness. I'm just curious about how the numbers that we have are distributed in the population, and the numbers we have are the answer to survey questions. The most widely used-

Hal Weitzman: And remind us which survey it is.

Sam Peltzman: Well, the most widely used is the General Social Survey, and it has asked the same question for over 50 years now. And the question, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, is everything taken together? Are you happy, okay, or sad? All you have is the answers to that question one, two, or three. I've rescaled it, but basically that's the raw material that we're going to be talking about.

Hal Weitzman: So it's a simple question. And how often are people asked this? Is it once a year?

Sam Peltzman: Not exactly every year, but almost every year, every couple of years from 1972 to today. I have excluded the last few years because of the pandemic, which not only has disrupted society, it disrupted the survey business because you couldn't go out and ask people, you had to change the methodology.

Hal Weitzman: So your sample goes from '72 up to, is it 2018?

Sam Peltzman: Just the last one before the pandemic, which would be 2018.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Maybe that was the last time some people were happy.

Sam Peltzman: Well, we're going to find out.

Hal Weitzman: Right.

Sam Peltzman: There's actually some quite distressing preliminary evidence of what the pandemic did. But for the moment, yes, we're excluding everything from the pandemic on, and that means the last such survey was 2018. They couldn't do 2020, pushed it off for a year. Anyway, we don't want to focus on that.

Hal Weitzman: But that's a long span of time-

Sam Peltzman: A very long span of time.

Hal Weitzman: ... that gives you some great data about trends.

Sam Peltzman: Yes.

Hal Weitzman: So one of the big trends that I wanted to have you talk about is the marital premium. What's the marital premium?

Sam Peltzman: Well, that's the focus of this, my latest excursion into this terrain. Marriage is the most important dividing line between happy and I would say okay, marriage then followed by income, but marriage would be the most important dividing line. The overall population, the average happiness is positive in the sense that it's above okay. It's not giddy happy, but it's above okay. But if you just do a division married and unmarried, there's a huge gap. The married are considerably happier.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. When you say considerably, how much happier?

Sam Peltzman: Okay, so the way I do it is very simple, I take these answers and I subtract the sad from the happy, so that gives you kind of a net happy. I treat the okay as a zero. So I'm talking about happy minus sad, the extremes. Now, in 100 randomly chosen people, that's 20, there's 20 more happy than sad. If you make the division into married and unmarried, it's zero for the unmarried, just as many happy as sad. If you look at the married, it's plus 30. That difference is enormous in this context.

Hal Weitzman: So that's the premium?

Sam Peltzman: Yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's the difference between every 100 people, if they're married, what's their answer? If they're unmarried, what's their answer? It's that difference. And it's averaged the around 30 since the unmarried are zero and the married are 30 to average around 30 over 50 years.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Well, I want to get to the trend.

Sam Peltzman: Yes.

Hal Weitzman: But just to be clear, you're not saying that marriage actually causes... Well, you don't know.

Sam Peltzman: No, no. This is a statement about the odds of finding happy people in the population and the causality lines can and probably do run in both directions.

Hal Weitzman: In other words, happy people may be more likely to get married.

Sam Peltzman: Absolutely.

Hal Weitzman: Right.

Sam Peltzman: And we have had people in economics and other social sciences who have worried about that, and it's hard to really know, and it's a source of constant debate.

Hal Weitzman: As someone who's thinking, "Should I not get married?" They're not going to learn much from this.

Sam Peltzman: Yeah, this is not... But what they would learn is the odds of finding happy people go up if you look at married people as opposed to-

Hal Weitzman: Got it, so that's the marital premium. Now, you referred there to this, you've got this 46-year period. Is the marital premium stable?

Sam Peltzman: More or less, that's really the basic finding of all of this is it's not only enormous in terms of magnitude, it's pretty stable. That's gone up a little bit. If you push hard, you'd say it's a little higher now, it's 35, but it is pretty stable.

Hal Weitzman: But as you say, it's gone up a little bit in past 20 years.

Sam Peltzman: Yes.

Hal Weitzman: How do you explain that?

Sam Peltzman: The answer is I don't, but I have a big clue, which is the marriage rate has gone down. At the start of this period, in the early 1970s, 80% of adults, we're talking about people 25 and older. In that group, 80% were married in the early 70s, 80. It's 60 now. If you start chopping the population up into those groups where marriage has declined most substantially and those where it's declined less, the ones where it's declined most substantially are the ones where the marital premium has gone up. So what's happened is that the groups where the pressure is very strong not to get married, leave married people who are getting more out of the relationship than the unmarried people.

Hal Weitzman: Could that be because in the absence of social pressure or with less social pressure, people are marrying because they really genuinely want to?

Sam Peltzman: They would be more on the margin of the happiness aspect of it. If we're back to 80% as we were in the 1970s, everybody's getting married, you're going to have people who... Remember, we're talking about a 30, 35-point premium. That means that there's a lot of people who are married and unhappy, a lot of people who are married and unhappy, and so on and so forth. So this marital premium is not for every... 30 isn't something that applies to an individual marriage. It's an average across the whole population. So let's say you have people who are on the margin, "Should I or shouldn't I get married?" And the social pressure is not there. "Well, we get married." They're just as happy as if they had made the decision to be unmarried. Once the pressure builds up not to get married, that margin will have to shift. You've got to have a good reason to get married, and extra happiness is part of that reason, or you have to be extra happy to be out there and socially gregarious enough to find a mate in more difficult circumstances.

There's other evidence that's in the paper of that kind of thing. The racial differential, the decline in marriage is across the board, but it is particularly substantial for Blacks. You are now in a world where it's exceptional for Black adults to be married, two to one. The marital happiness premium for Blacks has gone up. It used to be less than whites, it's now a little bit more than whites. Again, put this in some context. We're not talking about huge differences. We're talking about small but perceptible differences.

Hal Weitzman: So if the average is 35, what is the average for Black people?

Sam Peltzman: It would be in the high 30s as opposed to around 35, and it would have been in the high 20s, so there's been an uptick in Black marital happiness. The gap in unmarried happiness is also closed, but this is an illustration of when you're in a world where two out of three adults are unmarried, you're having to find pretty good reasons to get married and stay married. We can get to how you get unmarried. There's cohabitation, there's divorce, whatever it is. These are exceptionally hardy marriages in that kind of a world, and it shows up in the marital premium. So that's one reason, but again, keep it in context. Every group of significant weight has a substantial marital premium.

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Sam, in the first half we talked about the marital premium. Let's try and understand what's going on with the marriage. What explains it? Is it about children? Is it about sex?

Sam Peltzman: I'm not going to be able to really explain what causes it, but how does it break down when you start looking at what goes on in a marriage? Well, people have sex and they have kids. So the one thing you want to look at is that, a dividing line. And the big answer is no, but it's complicated. There's always complication. So let's start with, you can pick it, sex or kids. I looked at both of them fairly intensively and we can talk about the complication in either.

Hal Weitzman: Sure. Well, let's start with sex. I would imagine that's what most people find more interesting.

Sam Peltzman: Okay, so there is no doubt, absolutely no doubt that sex is correlated with happiness. I was going to make a causal statement, but I will not. Again, in the same sense as the marital premium and marital happiness, if you divide the population, and we have a subsample in this survey of people who are sexually active or not. If you divide the population by whether they are or are not, how frequently they have it. By the way, I was blown away by the enormous diversity of the population that is sexually active. There are substantial numbers who do it once a year and substantial numbers who... Now, remember this is self-reported and it's subject to all sorts of biases, but there's a substantial number who say they do it every day.

Hal Weitzman: It feels like once a year-

Sam Peltzman: Yeah, I don't know.

Hal Weitzman: And is there a difference there? Those who are having more sex?

Sam Peltzman: But there's a difference, there's a very clear difference. If you go from once a year to once a month, to once a week, all those gradations are correlated with bumps upward in happiness. Very clear. However, you're talking about a difference between let's say once a year and once a day. You're talking about a difference of five points. It's measurable because another nice aspect about this survey is not only has it asked the same question for 50 years, but you now have accumulated large, large samples which allow you to detect pretty small changes. They are clearly there, but they do not explain the marital premium.

It's on the order of, if you take people who don't have sex at all, there's a substantial fraction of the population, largely older people, almost exclusively in fact older people, who are married and don't have sex. That could be for lots of reasons. Is there a marital premium in that group? Yes, yes, but it's 20 points. It's not 30. So that's 10 points in going from unmarried largely older people to very sexually active people who are young, let's say.

Hal Weitzman: So what's the comparison if you have a young person who's unmarried, who's sexually active versus an older person who's married and sexually inactive?

Sam Peltzman: Same thing, that's a good question. That's a good question. The unmarried sexually active are happier than the unmarried, inactive. Now, that group is across the board age-wise and there's a substantial celibate element. Not half or anything like that, but it's substantial. If you compare very active, unmarried to inactive, unmarried, there's a difference. But if you take this comparison-

Hal Weitzman: There's difference meaning that the person who's sexually active but unmarried is happier?

Sam Peltzman: The most extreme one that I could think of, let's take married, and old. Okay. It turns out age doesn't matter very much in this, but okay, take somebody most active and young, but unmarried. 20 point difference favoring the celibate married, so you have to put all this in perspective. It is clear sex and happiness are correlated, frequency is important, but it doesn't explain the marital. It explains one-third of it at most.

Hal Weitzman: But the bottom line there is you're still happier being married.

Sam Peltzman: You're still happier to be married.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. I want to move on to children quickly, the more boring part of it.

Sam Peltzman: Children, that's really complicated.

Hal Weitzman: So very quickly, I mean, in a nutshell, if you have more children, are you happier?

Sam Peltzman: It's not that clear. The fraction of people who get married and don't have children ever in their lives is very small, but it's not trivial. It's one in 10. I mean, one in 10 means we meet people like this on the street every day. They're actually happier than the married people with kids. That's a difficulty because 90% of the people who are getting married have kids at some point in their lives and you can't say that having children makes people unhappy, but it's a big puzzle for somebody who wants to say that having children is the source of marital happiness, that you have this non-trivial group out there who are just as happy as other married people. In fact, happier. At all ages, it goes to almost zero at around 45, but the very young and the very old for very different reasons, if you have children living in the house, you're not as happy as this group that doesn't have it.

Hal Weitzman: Fascinating. Okay, very quickly, I just wanted you to, in a sentence, talk about cohabitation. So people who are not married but living together, and also about gay marriage just to give us the headline.

Sam Peltzman: Gay marriage is going to be very complicated, but-

Hal Weitzman: If you can summarize it, that would be helpful.

Sam Peltzman: I'll try.

Hal Weitzman: Okay.

Sam Peltzman: I'll try. Which one do you want to deal with?

Hal Weitzman: Let's deal with cohabitation first.

Sam Peltzman: All right, that's very simple. Cohabitation is what you would call small, but growing. Just as marriage has been declining, cohabitation has been increasing, and it's obviously no coincidence. It's a substitute. So my first instinct is, well, cohabitation should be leading. If I can find those people and look at their happiness, why shouldn't they be as happy as married people? They're not, they're not even close. They are, I want to make this very clear, they are perceptibly happier than unmarried who are not cohabiting. But here are the numbers, 30 for the marital premium. Well, let's round off and forget about trends for a minute. 30 for the marital premium, 10 for cohabitors, zero for other unmarried. So one third, they get one third of the way toward the marital premium, but not the rest of the way.

Hal Weitzman: Okay, excellent.

Sam Peltzman: And there's no trends.

Hal Weitzman: No trends at all there. Okay, so what about gay marriage very quickly?

Sam Peltzman: Gay marriage is complicated because first of all, it hasn't been legal. Secondly, if you go back to before 2015, or even before 2000 when no state had legal gay marriage, 2004 is the first state that has legal gay marriage. There was some before it was legal, this is all self-reported, and people had commitments, ceremonies, and they regarded themselves as married. So the complication is most gays when asked, "Are you married or not?" Would have said no before then, but some would have said yes. That complicates things. But as nearly as we can tell, the situation is this, gay people as a whole are slightly less happy, but they're much less married.

Hal Weitzman: Less happy than heterosexuals?

Sam Peltzman: Than heterosexuals as a whole, but they're much less married.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, okay.

Sam Peltzman: The people who report that they're married have a marital premium that's the same, almost the same as heterosexual people. It's not quite, but that's because the people who say they're unmarried and are gay, a lot of them are living in a relationship that looks like marriage. And the one thing we know from recent data is that once marriage becomes legal, there's a real increase in married gays, and it's coming from these people who are all but married, they're not-

Hal Weitzman: I'm going to try and wrap up all your knowledge in one sentence, which is the happiest people are Black, married, and having sex regularly, and have no children, and don't have children. Is that right? On average.

Sam Peltzman: I wouldn't say... The marital premium.

Hal Weitzman: The marital premium. Yeah, okay. All right. But those who are enjoying the biggest marital premium are Black, married obviously, and have no children, right?

Sam Peltzman: Yeah. Well, that's true. Yes.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Well, there you go.

Sam Peltzman: And have a lot of sex.

Hal Weitzman: And have a lot of sex. So if any of our listeners hit those categories, good for you. Okay, Sam Peltzman, it's so fun to have you talking about your research here on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Sam Peltzman: You're very welcome.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis, and insights, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research.

This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.