Money and marriage: why we mustn’t leave the family in the hands of accountants

Lewis Lower argues that we need to change how we speak about marriage and family life and resist any temptation to see them in merely economic terms.

Last October, the Hong Kong government announced a variety of measures to increase the region’s birth rate. Delicate, slick-sounding suggestions and mathematical formulae applied to taxes, interest and rent stood alongside the rather more blunt proposal, closer to a plea: ‘a one-off cash bonus of $20,000 for each baby born’. 

The cynic in me imagines that all the other measures, the complex sounding stuff, were all smoke and mirrors, a way to bury the lede in the embarrassing predicament that the government, serious people thinking about serious issues, is having to address.

Hong Kong isn’t alone on this front. From Japan to Norway, governments seem increasingly desperate to form families. This has brought rejoicing from many on the right, who see it as a victory for traditional values, old-school conservatism, a “we told you so” moment. 

Indeed, Péter Szijjarto, Hungary’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, says that having kids ‘must not be an economic decision anymore’, seemingly marking a shift away from a cold calculative assessment to something more red-blooded, more conservative. Still, Szijjarto can’t help slipping in examples of his government’s policies’ effectiveness in areas such as immigration, tax benefits, subsidies, and other economic matters.

It is not his fault. Essentially, Szijjarto cannot make family no longer an economic decision, as he might wish, because he is a politician, Hungary is a country, and governments are governments. 

This bringing of the domestic into the sphere of public business is part of the growing tendency to transform social thinking into calculation, to quantify social phenomena.

Everything becomes economics.

Thus, Thomas Malthus, as a political economist, represents an early stage in this calculative process. He calculated, using mathematical terms, that agriculture progresses linearly whereas human reproduction does so exponentially. Reality is reduced to quantification.

In calculative conceptualisations like this, the various aspects of family life, with all their intense emotions – having children, raising them, parents ageing and grandparents dying – are reduced to birthrate, gender imbalance, retirement age, and life expectancy. 

One of the clearest examples of this tendency is seen in society’s handing-over of marriage to the State, moving from ecclesiastical or inter-family oversight to civil authority. The keeping of marriage is pried from institutions which keep its meaning, and given over to those concerned with it only as a matter of public record.

In some ways, this is actually quite a good thing. Marriage and family life do affect the State and it makes sense for the State to supervise them. And usually it has the mechanisms, means and infrastructure to do so. After all, stable families make stable societies.

The problem is, however, that a government cannot and should not have a role in forming meaning, in controlling the really important things of individuals. 

And when the family is reduced to statistics, a need is created for their interpretation and to give them meaning. Someone has to come along and decide what all those statistics are saying about marriage and family life, and as the famous saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Can statistics ever really tell us what marriage is and what it is for?

But this is only the beginning of the problem. The even greater trouble comes with the unavoidable spread of this logic, when we all start to share this mentality, when people prefer to fill the gap left by the government’s economic reduction with more economics of their own.

It is too complicated to face the emotional and relational challenges of life, so instead people start to believe the shorthands and placeholders, birthrates and death rates and median incomes and the rest of it, to be the things themselves. It becomes easier to see marriage in economic terms than in human ones.

Let’s not be naive. Marriage has always been an economic affair. Ancient kings used it as ways to make treaties or for economic and territorial gain. And marriages have been arranged since time immemorial at all levels of society with financial considerations to the fore. 

But they still realised, and the historic prohibition of divorce helped here, that ultimately it was a lifelong union of two people to have children. It was also in almost every culture a profoundly religious affair. It was a lot more than mere statistics.

But everything (re-)began when Malthusian ideas reared once more their ugly head, with concerns about excessive population and, with them, calls to control it. The invention and distribution of most current contraceptive methods grew up with the support of Family Planning movements, whose main concern was what they considered a ‘world population problem’. 

This scientific advancement brought technology into the very act of sexual intimacy. This was the technologisation of interpersonal relationships. 

I am not under the romantic illusion that ‘before’ people were essentially more moral. The view of sex as ‘a bit of fun’, as something that could be quantified and put in a regular economy and traded, i.e. prostitution, is ancient. 

Though touted as a responsible act, with a Malthusian concern to reduce population, contraception ended up removing all responsibility from sex. Removing the ‘danger’ of fertility, sex came under the ‘safe’ hands of science and of economics. 

Using contraception was also a political act, liberating women from the ‘burden’ of childbirth. The effect of such a change in intentions became the slogan of the sexual-liberation-feminist movement: “The personal is political.”. 

Thus, with the State’s straying into the traditionally private domestic sphere, sexual intimacy, which one could consider the model for all intimacy, lost its meaning and reverence. The burden of this responsibility was too great, with individuals defaulting to the economic reasoning that the State employed. Thus, every personal act became an economic one. 

I tie together ‘conservative’ current family-planning and the sexual revolution for a reason, even though outwardly they seem diametrically opposed. The logic for both is the same. It is the belief that you can control and manage something as intimate as sex and as personal as married life.

The society that comes up with contraceptives is the same one that comes up with cash rewards for births, and will probably be the same one that comes up with mass cloning (not to speak of discreet procedures already being practised in some less scrupulous labs today). ‘Conservative’ family model advocacy is unsustainable as long as it basically rests upon reproductive economics, since there are always more efficient ways of achieving that goal.

The funny thing is that the problem makes itself. A cold calculative view of politics shapes individuals with a similarly calculative view of children, who become no different than buying a stock. More and more people have a child because they ‘want’ one (one, not two or more), almost as a sentimental toy, rather than receiving new life as a gift and being ready to face the sacrifices it brings with it. Thus, despite people now being much more comfortable than their ancestors, they see children as simply unviable. 

They aren’t wrong either. As investments kids are nonsense. The solution can only be a radical rejection of calculation in the private life. 

The words we use, with all their subtle connotations, affect how we see reality. So it’s essential to choose our words carefully. If we use language borrowed from economics we will re-form marriage into an economic reality. But if we take the trouble to describe marriage in relational terms, in terms of commitment and openness to children, we might just have a chance to keep this precious reality what it was always meant to be: a partnership for life, open to life.

Just as technology revolutionised our view of sex by emptying it of its relationship with life – with babies – so too would a changed language change how family and children are seen, with every thought and every word spoken. This is an ambitious desire, and perhaps I am merely closing the door after the horse has bolted. Still, Only in such unEconomic terms do children and family really make sense.

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