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Gary Becker won a Nobel Prize for treating marriage like a business decision. Most people found that offensive. He turned out to be more right than even he probably imagined.
Becker’s core idea was simple. People marry when the expected gains from marriage exceed the expected gains from staying single. Marriage is not just about love. It is about household production, risk sharing, specialization, and economies of scale. Two people pooling resources can generate more total welfare than two people operating alone. That surplus is what economists call the marriage premium.
For decades, this framework explained marriage patterns remarkably well. Men specialized in market labor. Women specialized in domestic labor. Both gained from trade. The arrangement was not romantic in its logic, but it was stable. It worked the way a well run firm works. Each partner brought something the other could not easily replicate alone.
Then the world changed. And it changed in ways that make Becker’s framework not obsolete, but far more interesting.
The Collapse of Complementarity
The traditional marriage premium depended on complementarity. You married someone who did what you could not, or would not, do yourself. Men earned income. Women managed households and raised children. This was not some natural law. It was an economic equilibrium shaped by labor markets, social norms, and limited technology.
Consider what has happened since. Women now earn more bachelor’s degrees than men. The gender wage gap, while still real, has narrowed considerably. Domestic technology has reduced the time cost of household production. You do not need a spouse to eat well when meal delivery apps exist. You do not need a partner to maintain a clean home when you can hire a cleaning service with three taps on your phone.
The gains from specialization have eroded. And when the gains from trade decline, the incentive to trade declines with them.
This is not a moral crisis. It is a shift in relative prices. Becker would have understood it immediately. When the cost of staying single falls, fewer people will choose to marry. That is not a prediction. It is an observation. Marriage rates in the United States have dropped nearly 60 percent since 1970. These are not random cultural fluctuations. They are rational responses to changing economic conditions.
Enter the Digital Marketplace
Here is where things get genuinely strange. The internet has not just changed how we work or shop. It has created entirely new markets for things that used to be bundled inside marriage.
Companionship, sexual gratification, emotional validation, financial support. These were historically packaged together in the institution of marriage. You got them as a bundle, or you mostly did without. The bundle was the product. Marriage was the platform.
Now each component can be purchased separately.
OnlyFans is the most visible example, but it is hardly the only one. The platform reportedly has over 370 million registered users and four million creators. What it sells, at its core, is not pornography. It sells parasocial intimacy. The illusion of connection. The feeling of being seen by someone attractive who appears to care about your existence.
This is not a trivial product. Loneliness is one of the most potent forces in human psychology. The Surgeon General of the United States has called it an epidemic with health effects comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. When someone is lonely, they will pay for relief. OnlyFans creators understand this better than most therapists.
But here is the Beckerian insight that matters. If you can purchase simulated intimacy, simulated companionship, and real sexual content for $10 to $50 a month, the reservation price for marriage goes up. Why commit to the complexity, compromise, and legal entanglement of a real partnership when you can get some of the psychological returns at a fraction of the cost and none of the risk?
This is exactly the logic Becker laid out in 1973. When substitute goods become cheaper and more accessible, demand for the original good falls. Marriage is losing market share to its own unbundled components.
The Luxury Good Thesis
But marriage is not disappearing. It is concentrating. And this is the part that should make you uncomfortable.
Among college educated Americans, marriage rates remain high. These couples marry later, but they marry. They pool dual incomes. They invest in their children’s education with a ferocity that borders on competitive sport. They leverage the marriage premium the way it was always meant to be leveraged, as an engine of household production and intergenerational wealth transfer.
Among those without college degrees, marriage has collapsed. The decline is not gradual. It is structural. In 1960, there was virtually no class gap in marriage rates. By 2020, the gap was a canyon. Working class Americans are not choosing singlehood out of some liberated philosophical conviction. They are responding to a brutal economic reality in which the gains from marriage have genuinely diminished for them.
When a man without a college degree faces stagnant wages, unstable employment, and limited upward mobility, he does not bring much to the Beckerian bargaining table. When a woman in the same economic bracket can earn income independently, access social safety net programs, and manage a household with modern technology, the marginal benefit of adding a partner shrinks. Especially when that partner may bring debts, addictions, or instability into the equation.
Marriage has become a luxury good. Not because weddings are expensive, though they certainly are. But because the conditions required to make marriage economically rational, stable income, human capital, future orientation, impulse control, are themselves increasingly concentrated among the affluent.
This is a deeply counter intuitive outcome. Marriage, the institution that historically provided economic security to those who had the least, now primarily benefits those who already have the most. The people who need the marriage premium most are the least likely to access it.
The Paradox of Choice in Mating Markets
There is another force at work that Becker did not fully anticipate, though his framework accommodates it beautifully. The digitization of mating markets has created a paradox that the psychologist Barry Schwartz would recognize immediately.
Dating apps have made potential partners abundant. Hinge, Tinder, Bumble. The average user can swipe through hundreds of profiles in an evening. In theory, this should improve matching efficiency. More options should mean better matches.
In practice, it has done something closer to the opposite. The abundance of options has increased search costs, not reduced them. When you can always swipe again, commitment carries an opportunity cost that feels enormous. Every relationship you enter is a relationship that prevents you from exploring the next profile. Economists call this the option value of waiting. In dating markets saturated with alternatives, that option value has become punishingly high.
This connects to a phenomenon in behavioral economics that has nothing to do with romance on its surface. It is the jam study problem. When researchers offered consumers 24 varieties of jam, fewer people bought any jam at all compared to when only 6 varieties were available. Too many options can paralyze decision making entirely. Dating apps have turned partnership into a jam aisle that stretches to the horizon.
The irony is thick. Technology designed to help people find partners may be one of the reasons fewer people are forming lasting ones.
The Supply Side Revolution
Now consider the other side of the market. OnlyFans and similar platforms have not just changed consumption patterns. They have changed production incentives.
A conventionally attractive person with a smartphone and some business sense can now earn six figures without leaving their apartment. The top one percent of OnlyFans creators reportedly earn over $49,000 per year. Some earn millions. This is not exploitative in the way critics often frame it. For many creators, it is the most rational economic decision available to them.
But it has second order effects on marriage markets that are worth examining. When attractive individuals can monetize their desirability directly, the opportunity cost of settling into a monogamous relationship increases. Why give exclusive access to one person for free when thousands will pay for simulated access?
This creates what you might call a Becker problem on both sides of the market. Consumers of digital intimacy face lower incentives to invest in real relationships. Producers of digital intimacy face higher opportunity costs from committing to one. The market clears at fewer marriages.
There is something almost elegant about the economics here, even if the human consequences are messy.
What Children Have to Do With All of This
Becker was always clear that children are one of the most powerful drivers of the marriage premium. Children are what economists call a marriage specific investment. You can raise a child alone, but the production function is far more efficient with two committed parents. Children benefit from stability, from complementary parenting styles, from the simple arithmetic of having two adults available to manage the relentless logistics of modern childhood.
The data on this point is uncomfortably clear. Children raised in stable two parent households outperform their peers on virtually every measurable outcome. Income, education, health, incarceration rates, psychological wellbeing. The effect sizes are not small.
This creates a brutal feedback loop. Affluent, educated couples marry and invest intensively in their children. Those children grow up with advantages that make them more likely to form stable marriages themselves. Meanwhile, children born into unstable households face compounding disadvantages. The marriage premium does not just benefit the couple. It echoes through generations.
Becker would call this a human capital externality. The rest of us might just call it unfair.
The Uncomfortable Forecast
So where does this leave us? If Becker’s framework is correct, and the evidence increasingly suggests it is, the future looks something like this.
Marriage will continue to thrive among the educated and affluent. It will function as an investment vehicle, a child rearing partnership, and a tax optimization strategy wrapped in a socially approved emotional bond. These marriages will be later, more deliberate, and more economically productive than marriages of previous generations.
For everyone else, marriage will increasingly be replaced by a patchwork of market substitutes. Digital intimacy platforms for companionship. Gig economy flexibility for income. Social media for validation. Government programs for safety nets. Each substitute will be inferior to the bundled product on most dimensions, but each will be more accessible and less risky.
The middle will hollow out, as it has in so many other markets. Think of retail. You have Whole Foods and you have Dollar General. The middle tier department store is dying. Marriage is following the same pattern. You will have high investment partnerships among the elite and isolated individuals purchasing intimacy, companionship, and security piecemeal from digital platforms.
This is not a moral judgment. It is a market outcome. And like most market outcomes, it will be celebrated by those who benefit from it and endured by those who do not.
What Becker Might Have Said
Gary Becker died in 2014. He did not live to see OnlyFans reach its current scale, or dating apps become the primary way young people meet, or the marriage rate hit historic lows. But his framework anticipated all of it.
He understood that marriage is not sacred in the economic sense. It is a contract. And contracts only hold when both parties expect to gain more from signing than from walking away. When the outside options improve, fewer people sign. When the gains from trade diminish, the trade stops.
What Becker might not have anticipated is how efficiently technology would unbundle the marriage product. He knew substitutes mattered. He could not have known that an app on a phone would become the most potent substitute in human history.
The marriage premium is real. The research is overwhelming on this point. Married people earn more, save more, live longer, and report higher wellbeing. But a premium only matters if you can access it. And access increasingly requires exactly the resources that the premium is supposed to help build.
That is the circle that defines our moment. Marriage makes you better off. But you increasingly need to already be well off to make marriage work. The institution that once democratized prosperity is becoming a gated community.
Becker showed us that love is not enough to explain marriage. Economics matters. What he perhaps did not foresee is that economics would not just explain marriage. It would price most people out of it.
