Are there any agruments on gay marriage that are exclusively based on theories of law and economics? What are these arguments?
Sure.
Legal:
A spouse cannot be compelled to testify against the other spouse.
Under most state lowas a spouse is generally entitled to a certian fraction of an estate.
Economic: Generally spouses can be covered by employer medical insurance. Spouses can often use personal/sick days to care for an ailing spouse. Or they may get grieving days. (These may also be partially legal as there may be some laws requiring some of these.)
Economic/legal: IRS rules have specific rules governing spouses. Th emost obvious of these is joint filing.
I suspect there are many more, but these are some everyone would probably be familiar with.
This may or may not have been the OP’s intentions, but I’m interested in the macro-economic perspective. How would legalizing gay marriages effect the economy, outside of the wedding industry?
I think Kel is looking for arguments for or against gay marriage, while those are legal and economic issues surrounding marriage, I’m not sure if they suggest a pro or con view.
One can say that there is a ‘moral’ argument against gay marriage, if you believe that homosexuality itself is a sin, for example. There is also the reverse moral angle, if you think it’s fundamentally wrong to deny one group the option of marriage when allowing others to marry.
If it can be shown that there is a distinct economic/legal societal benefit to having more married couples, then opening marriage to a large gay population is beneficial. I’m thinking about pooling of resources, for example. People living together use less resource than people living separately, one bedroom instead of two. Of course you don’t technically need marriage to accomplish this, but you might get more couples living together with marriage than without.
I guess I mainly looking for efficiency arguments. Whether from the persective of the state and gay couples, is allowing marriage is econmically efficient as opposed to not allowing gay marrige and what happens when you then factor in the rest of society.
This story cites a UCLA study indicating an approximate $25 million annual benefit to the state of California were the state to legalize SSM.
This press release cites a federal report indicating that legalizing SSM nationally would result in a $400 million annual increase in federal tax revenues throught the end of the decade, along with a $1 billion annual reduction in federal expenditures. The release contains direct links to the study so I won’t post those here.
Generally speaking, restricting the available choices of economic actors is welfare reducing. So restricting the choice of same-sex couples to marry would be efficiency reducing, absent some sort of market failure that is ostensibly being corrected.
One could argue that same-sex marriage creats a form of pollution: Disgust (sp?). People are so offended by the existence of it that it is a cost born external to the couple making the union, and therefore warrants some sort of intervention to make them bear the cost internally. That would be a hard case to make.
So, from an efficiency standpoint, all I can really think of is that people should be free to choose themselves, unless there is some reason to think that such choice will actually be harmful for societal well-being. (E.g., the Tragedy of the Commons where individual optimizing conditions actually make society worse off by an amount greater than their individual gains, or a prisoner’s dilemma where the best choice by individuals actually makes everybody worse off.) I see no reason to think that same-sex marriage qualifies as some sort of market failure, so efficiency conerns would push us toward allowing same-sex marriage.
I’m not sure if that’s what you’re looking for.
An easier case could be made for the “pollution” of homophobia, in the prevention of same-sex marriages. Once the marriages are legalized, the cost of the pollution is removed, benefitting the economy.
Also, the immediate benefits of the “marriage industry,” including caterers, florists, liquor stores, jewelers, formal-wear manufactures and retailers, musicians, chauffeurs, limo manufacturers, travel agents, airlines, hotels, etc.
And that’s not even figuring all the gifts.
Then there are the children that will be easier to adopt by same-sex couples, easing the financial burden of the state.
And, of course, the inevitable divorce attorneys.
The dislike of homosexuals per se really seems a tough case for an externality argument. To have an (negative) externality, one needs to impose a cost on another for an activity without bearing that cost or compensating the one burdened, and that cost is a sort-of by-product of the activity. If I’m dumping dioxin into a public stream as a by-product of producing a good, then that’s an externality; but if I’m dumping dioxin into a public stream for its own sake, then that’s not really an externality AFAIK.
SSM could produce pollution if people disguisted by it are, well, biologically disposed for it, I guess. Consider noise around an airport. Humans have ears and loud noises affect us adversely. The noise is reasonably a pollution because of this. As another example, an economist at Oxford, IIRC, has been looking into what makes people happy. It turns out that when others in one’s comparison group are more “successful” than oneself, one’s happiness and well-being are adversely impacted. His evidence suggests that this is an evolutionary hard-wired trait that is an inherent part of being human—just like sensitive ears and noses that can become offended. His argument then points to the conclusion that relative success creates a form of pollution, and that higher marginal tax rates on higher incomes is an appropriate method to make actors internalize this cost.
So for SSM, one would have to argue that being offended by SSM in the same sense that having too much noise, smoke, or dioxin in the environment are forms of pollution.
“This story cites a UCLA study indicating an approximate $25 million annual benefit to the state of California were the state to legalize SSM.”
That sort of thing, along with gains to the marriage industry, etc., really don’t qualify as efficiency gains. That $25M already belongs to someone else. The state gov’t. may see it as a boon, and the marriage industry may be salivating, but the money that goes into marriage & taxes is money taken from somebody else. That’s not an efficiency gain.
Putting it very crudely, an efficiency gain is when we redistribute stuff (often indirectly) and as a result people are better off. With this situation, suppose that I would prefer to spend $100 on a wedding gift for a gay friend than on a pair of pants. If the wedding is proscribed by law, I spend $100 on pants. I’m still getting $100 worth of pants. If the law is repealed, I can spend $100 on a wedding gift. The tailor loses $100, but the wedding-gift guy gains $100. That is a net zero gain. Where the positive gain lies is in the fact that I can engage in an activity that was worth more to me, as evidenced by the fact that I preferred purchasing the gift to purchasing the pants.
In terms of economics, that’s where the efficiency gains lie: In allowing people to make their own choices according to what they prefer.
I agree with js_africanus, but let’s step back and make explicit what is efficient about legal marriage.
The US favors freedom of contract to a large extent. Thus, if you have a mind to, you can agree to go to work for $5 an hour, use some of your earnings to buy a home and pledge that home to the bank to secure the cost of the home you can’t afford to pay in cash right now. If you meet someone you like a lot, you might invite them to move into the house with you. If you like them a whole lot, you might have a little baby. You might want to provide for your live-in and baby by deciding who will get ownership of the house, your cash, your stuff and any money in your bank accout if you die an untimely death. You might want to have your live-in make your medical decisions if you can’t.
The foregoing scenario is culturally pretty common in the US right now (note that this statement does not have any moral content whatsoever).
If you had to draw up legal contracts for each aspect of the example, it would be a huge transaction cost (and many people would not bother–leading to uncertainty and litigation down the road). There would have to be an employment contract, a house purchase contract, loan and mortgage documents, occupany/lease arrangement, parental rights claim, insurance contract, will and health care power of attorney.
Because the situation described is common, there are laws and legal shortcuts which eliminate or cut way down on transaction costs. You don’t HAVE to have an employment contract because labor laws provide certain minimum conditions that most parties think are fair. Your home purchase contract and mortgage documents are likely to be standard forms whose enforceability has already been tested in court–a short-cut. Property laws generally say what rights and liabilities you have vi-a-vis your neighbors or an invited guest who overstays a visit and wants to continue to live on your sofa.
If you marry your live-in, you automatically acquire a pakage of certain and known legal rights vis-a-vis each other and third parties–you don’t HAVE to have a will because the law says your spouse gets your goods if you die; if you own your bank accounts and house jointly–a legal short-cut–everyone acknowledges who will own the property in the event of death. If you live in a single household, how do you divide up the tax deduction for the mortgage interest you pay? If you are married, the IRS has a pre-determined way to handle it by joint return. If your live-in is at work, you have the power as parent listed on the baby’s birth certificate to have custody and give the baby medicine–you don’t have to legally adopt the baby. If you lose consciousness, the law says generally that your spouse can make your health care decisions–you don’t HAVE to draft a power of attorney.
Because gay people cannot currently marry, they cannot quickly and easily and cheaply acquire the assumed package of rights that culturally most “couple in single household” pairs would want if they thought about it. They can (as can unmarried heterosexual couples), with the help of lawyers, contractually duplicate many of these rights, but not quickly, easily or cheaply. This is an economic argument for gay marriage.
It is harder to come up with economic arguments against gay marriage–yes, there may be disruptions to tax revenues if more people are able to take advantage of married couple tax breaks (which may or may not exist anyway), but then one must assume that it is economically efficient to encourge married couples to stay married and to have children. You can make the economic argument that it is, but remember that there is notorious disagreement about whether population growth should be encouraged, and therefore about whether those tax code provisions are really efficient.
[The legal conclusions stated above are generalities and of course will vary state by state.]
This thread is better suited for Great Debates. I’ll move it for you.
Cajun Man
for the SDMB
I’d appreciate it if you moved it back. I gave a straightforward factual answer about an application of economic theory, and in addition what was a straightforward factual remark about what is and is not economic efficiency. The second remark can be referenced in Landsburg’s Armchair Economist for a more complete lay discussion of the issue in his chapter on cost-benefit analysis.
Humble Servant also gave a straightforward answer in terms of transaction cost as an element of SSM prohibition. Note that the argument was not made, but merely given in response to a request for factual information: What type of arguments exist under a certain discipline.
There is disagreement in many GQ threads, yet that doesn’t imply that they’re GD material.
I also think this would be better in GQ. My OP is about whether there are law and economic arguments in relation to gay mariage. I know gay marriage in a hot button topic but there isn’t really a debate here just a factual discussion of the arguments and how they apply.
Does anybody know if R. Posner ever addressed this issue?
The Congressional Budget Office recently released an interesting report on the potential effects on the federal budget of recognizing same-sex marriage. http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=5559&sequence=0
Their result is that legalizing same-sex marriage at the federal level would have very little effect on the federal budget. And that little effect would be positive (from a budgeting standpoint): the federal government would make money.
It turns out that the additional costs in Social Security benefits would be more than offset by the additional income tax revenues that same-sex marriage would bring. Because some married couples pay more filing as couples than they would filing as individuals (the famous “marriage penalty”). The type of couples that face that penalty are ones in which both partners work and have a fairly similar level of earnings. The gay baby boom notwithstanding, the majority of same-sex couples fall into that category.
Moreover, the federal government would pay less for some benefit programs (such as SSI and Medicaid) if a same-sex spouse’s assets and income could be counted in determining whether someone was eligible for those programs.