Mom's Time

Dan Hamermesh always takes on the fun projects. 

A decade ago, he did a pile of work looking at returns to beauty. 

Now, he's looking at time-diary data. Here's the abstract from his latest at NBER. 

Using time-diary data from the U.S. and six wealthy European countries, I demonstrate that non-partnered mothers spend slightly less time performing childcare, but much less time in other household activities than partnered mothers. Unpartnered mothers’ total work time—paid work and household production—is slightly less than partnered women’s. In the U.S. but not elsewhere they watch more television and engage in fewer other leisure activities. These differences are independent of any differences in age, race/ethnicity, ages and numbers of children, and household incomes. Non-partnered mothers feel slightly more pressured for time and much less satisfied with their lives. Analyses using the NLSY79 show that mothers whose partners left the home in the past two years became more depressed than those whose marriages remained intact. Coupled with evidence that husbands spend substantial time in childcare and with their children, the results suggest that children of non-partnered mothers receive much less parental care—perhaps 40 percent less—than other children; and most of what they receive is from mothers who are less satisfied with their lives.

After adjustments for education, age, children's age and so on, married mothers spend about 40 minutes more per day in household production than do similar other mothers. But most of that time difference is in non-childcare activities; married mothers spend about 6% more time providing childcare. But their husbands spend a lot of time in childcare as well. Consequently:

Together with the slight amount of additional time in childcare by married women, this suggests that children of married mothers receive over 3 hours per day of care from their parents, compared to about 1-1/2 hours per day that children receive from their single mothers.

The biggest gaps are for children aged 3 to 12; 

Widows differ substantially from other groups of mothers without a spouse in the home:

One sub-group of non-married mothers uses time differently from the others—widows. They account for only four percent of non-married mothers ages 25-54 in the sample, but they show statistically significant differences in the time they spend on various activities compared to other non-married mothers. They exhibit much more home production time than others; indeed, they differ only minutely (five minutes less per day) in this dimension from married mothers. They make up for this extra time by working and sleeping less than the other non-married mothers. Overall, except in their leisure time widows behave more like women with a husband present than do divorcees, separated mothers or those whose spouse is absent.

And marital status has substantial effects on self-reported life satisfaction:

The estimates of the impact of marital status in regressions describing this indicator of life satisfaction are shown in the bottom panel of Table 7. For all four countries the same vectors of covariates that have been used throughout are included. If there is no spouse/partner in the household, the mother is significantly less satisfied with her life—by 16, 43, 23 and 16 percentage points in the U.S., France, U.K. and Italy respectively. There is a very large difference in this measure by partnership status in all four countries. (The effects of being non-partnered are even more significant statistically in ordered probits describing the entire range of responses to the questions about life satisfaction.22) While feeling only slightly more rushed for time than partnered mothers, non-partnered mothers are much less likely to be satisfied with their lives. This difference is essentially unrelated to how they allocate their time across different activities—the results hardly change if the mother’s time allocation is included in the estimating equations.

Note that while the Table 7 estimates adjust for the effects of education (among other covariates), income doesn't seem to be included.  

Hamermesh concludes:

The results suggest that children of non-partnered mothers not only receive less parental time than others. The attention that they do obtain is from mothers who feel more stressed for time and who are less satisfied with their lives, a concatenation of time and possible interest that may on average disadvantage their children even more. Overall, our findings imply the need for even more attention and concern to the difficulties facing children in single-parent households. With non-married mothers in the U.S. being disproportionately less-educated and more likely to be from minority groups than married mothers, this conclusion takes on special importance.

Hamermesh doesn't draw policy conclusions; I expect folks will form them based on their prior preferences. 

Some conservatives may take it as an argument for strengthening families, discouraging out-of-wedlock births, and encouraging marriage counselling over rapid divorce. 

Others might take it as argument for very substantial investments either at school or before school to try to make up for the hour-and-a-half difference in parental time per day. There will be a substantial cumulative difference by the time a child enters school. 

It may not be particularly controversial to suggest that the government's proposed Equity Index, which would replace school decile funding formulas, include marital status as one of the variables. I don't think it's currently in there.

Discriminating against the ugly

A few years ago, Robin Hanson asked why we care so much about income inequality but so little about other forms of inequality: the beautiful get more friends and potential sexual partners, for example. From an ev bio perspective, inequality in opportunity to produce successful children and grandchildren is what matters most. Income inequality will contribute to that, but so too would inequality in physical attractiveness. If we redistribute resources from rich old ugly men to young poor attractive bohemian men, we may increase rather than reduce inequality. But do read Hanson's post for some potential reasons why some inequalities matter more politically than others.

Hanson pointed to a Washington Post oped that satirically called for beauty-based redistribution.

Now, the New York Post is taking beauty-based redistribution seriously.

In another, more synergistic universe, the site might have been a useful tool for labor economist Daniel S. Hamermesh, whose book Beauty Pays takes a more high-minded approach to the vagaries of looks. Specifically, it attempts to explain why attractive people make more money than unattractive people. A lot more money, in fact: $230,000 over the course of a lifetime, which holds true even in professions where looks wouldn’t seem to matter. Hamermesh found that fetching professors, for example, earn 6 percent more than their average-looking peers, while unattractive quarterbacks earn 12 percent less than their hunkier counterparts. Men, in fact, suffer the greater repulsiveness penalty in general: Unattractive women earn 3 percent less than average-looking women, while unattractive men’s take-home is reduced a whopping 22 percent.

But wait—how can something as subjective as beauty hold any value in an economic context? Therein lies the cold truth at the heart of these findings: A common standard of beauty does exist. Based on an attractiveness scale of one to five, most people surveyed will come to near agreement on a test subject’s looks, a finding that holds true across all cultures. And while extreme beauty and extreme ugliness are rare, 10 to 15 percent or so of the population falls into the “below-average attractiveness” category, where they will endure their pronounced asymmetries as long as they live. Beauty is not only scarce, it turns out, but unobtainable to those born without it: Studies show that homeliness is approximately as easy to change as race, which is to say, it’s not.

Knowing the extent to which people are economically penalized (or rewarded) for their looks raises the question: Should the ill-favored be protected? And if so, how? Hamermesh, in the Über-cautious fashion of an economist, predicts that the most unsightly people will eventually receive the same kinds of legal protection extended to Americans with disabilities. 

I have a hard time believing that this could ever be implemented; Hamermesh, in the article, points to some of the obvious problems. I'd expect that there'd be any number of entrepreneurs helping folks uglify themselves before going in for their government attractiveness rating.

I'd noted a couple weeks ago discrimination against the ugly at the ballot box by uninformed voters. Niclas Berggren found similar results in Finnish data a while back as well:

We study the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns. Our investigation is based on visual assessments of 1929 Finnish political candidates from 10,011 respondents (of which 3708 were Finnish). As Finland has a proportional electoral system, we are able to compare the electoral success of non-incumbent candidates representing the same party. An increase in our measure of beauty by one standard deviation is associated with an increase of 20% in the number of votes for the average non-incumbent parliamentary candidate. The relationship is unaffected by including education and occupation as control variables and withstands several other robustness checks.

Presumably then voters who cannot constrain themselves against preferring more attractive political candidates would be the ones choosing policies to limit the advantage of beauty.

Where's Diana Moon Glampers when you need her....