1. Over at ProfessorBainbridge there was a post on a topic related to my paper: what's special about Delaware's role as the site of incorporations.
(My paper dealt much with the question of whether a "Delaware" would emerge in Europe. Answer: We don't know yet.)
2. I was looking at Google's answers service, and came across this choice nugget:
Question Presented:
What fraction of Americans over 30 have never been married?
What fraction of American women over 30 have never been married?
What fraction of American men over 30 have never been married?
Answers:
10.9% of American men over 30 have never been married
7.8% of American women over 30 have never been married
or 9.3% of American men and women over 30 have never been married
So it would appear I'm in some rare company.
4 comments:
I don't know if i'd trust those never married numbers - what year are they from? How were they collected? We are starting to see a trend of 1st marriage not happening until age 28-32 or later because more people are going to college/grad school or are establishing careers before getting married.
Howdy Matt!
If you click on "choice nugget" it'll take you directly to the original.
The Google answers folks pull them out of the 2003 census data. Of course, the comparison isn't perfectly apt, because it posits a pool of "all men over the age of 30."
The real comparison I'd be interested in is "what fraction of all 31-year-old men have never married" ie of all of the people like me what fraction have managed to make it to my age without getting hitched.
I was reading an article on a guy doing longevity research (maybe in Time), and he was making the same point regarding late marriage and education. I personally suspect that such delay is probably "bad" (in the Adam normative universe, babies are always pro-social and generate positive externalities).
Well, delaying marriage doesn't mean not having kids - it just means having them later in life. Thus the rise in people using means of medical assistance to get pregnant in the past several years - and incidentally the rise in number of parents having multiples (twins, triplets, etc). So getting married and having kids later than is historically "normal" may actually result in having more children :)
So wait around long enough, and you can pick up a two or three-for-one special. Excellent.
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