In today’s second “On the Square” article, a researcher at the Institute for American Values analyzes the effects upon the marriages of the less-educated of certain elite ideas that the affluent can afford more easily than the poor. “Less-educated women are punting marriage,” writes David Lapp in The Poor’s Good Marriages ,
because they have no reason to get married—and they have no reason to get married because they lack the adequate time and resources to enjoy the hedonic marriage. In the hedonic model, the only people who get married are the people who can afford to consume lavishly. Marriage is imagined as another luxury that only the wealthiest can enjoy. Marriage is of little use to the less educated.
This, he shows, is a very bad and destructive idea.
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