Bride Price

During my Sunday morning perusal of the NYTimes I came across this article about the marriage market in China which was especially intriguing to me. When I lived in Shanghai there was a marriage market in the city’s central park and perspective parents and match makers would meet to post and chat about their charges. I had heard of the increasingly desperate plight of the poorer urban and even poorer rural male, but this article points to a whole new market in which brides are hunted in plain sight. Scouts are deployed, databases are kept, and huge bonuses worth a year or two in salary are paid to those who find the right girl. This is no dating service however, the top clients pay 50,000 to 1.5 million USD for a match. As the love hunter put it, “Why shouldn't they pay more to find the perfect wife? This is the most important investment in their lives.”

Recently I have been reading a book, The Price of Everything, which chronicles how things get their price. As an aside, this was very funny because the book still had a sticker on it that said, “Bargain Bin 2 for 1.99” and I had bought the book through Amazon for about 3 dollars. The price of everything indeed.

One of the major issues in the book is the price of girls/marriage. The traditional dowry and all the social implications that go with it can clearly be explained by economics and pricing. More or less, people had to pay to get rid of their daughters. Historically and currently in China males have been preferred to females as they extended the family line and are caretakers for parents in their old age. Some have gone as far as to say that women were maids/slaves for their spouse’s family. Definitely not a desirable position. 

The desire for sons has not changed and in fact has gotten quite a bit more extreme since the introduction of ultrasounds and other devices detecting sex before birth. At its peak in 2004 the sex ratio was about 121 boys to every 100 girls at birth. This is way out of sync with nature and has produced (or not produced) what many have coined as “missing girls”. Estimates differ, but there are expected to be about 25 million unmarried men by the end of the decade. The sex ratio gap has narrowed in recent years and is now 118 to every 100, but that is  still the world’s widest chasm.

As this gap has continued and as China’s economy keeps on pace, more and more poorer men have to remain bachelors as young women are snatched up by those who can afford them. For women the choice is an obvious one. Love or not, men with greater financial power give them and their offspring a better chance of survival and continuing the line. Many factors have contributed to the changing valuation of women, but none so much as the imbalance in the market.

Most interesting of all is not the left over men at the age of 35 or 40 trying to find a match, but the women on the flip side of the coin. Those who have had successful careers, but failed to  marry and find it increasingly hard as men do not desire women whose education or wealth are larger than their own. This to me seems in-congruent with what prices would signal. Why would a man, especially one who may also be a “leftover” be averse to marrying a woman who is of higher financial and educational ranking than he? Yes, there may be some pride or social conditioning there, but prices should change that. However, that does not seem to be occurring as much as I would expect. In one instance the article noted a pensioner, “who was seeking a husband for his eldest daughter, a 36-year-old economics professor in Beijing.” It would seem that there is an over abundance of smart successful Chinese women just waiting for someone decent to agree to marry them. Any single economists out there wishing to benefit from this disequilibrium?