I spent a few minutes (OK, hours) yesterday reading about how to make my blog more popular. It was a funny exercise since I am actively trying to avoid anybody finding out about this blog. The thought of my colleagues or my mother reading this mortifies me. Still, since I want to be a writer and a writer ostensibly has to promote herself, I did a little preliminary research.
Many blogs are not exclusively about navel-gazing, but offer useful advice or information. This is a calculated strategy in order to attract more eyeballs to said blog. In fact, a common approach is to blog about one's area of expertise. Given that I have, let's see, 20 years of education and counting, there must be something I know about. Right? ...Anything? Bueller?
It turns out that my lengthy education has done little more than give me mush for brains but here, for my lone reader's enjoyment (hi hubby!), is something I wish I knew about: the two-body problem.
What is the two-body problem? Well, in engineering/science it is something much more complicated that I am not qualified to talk about, but in social science it is about finding jobs in the same place for two people. Not too long ago married women generally did very little work outside of the household and most married men found jobs in the labor market in order to bring home some wages and support their family. If the husband needed to move somewhere else for a job, the wife and kids went with him, no problem. That all changed last century when more and more women began to work outside the home. Today, most households with married or co-habitating couples are dual income, with both partners working.
So how has this affected mobility patterns? Do people move less? More? Does it vary by income level? I don't know! But here is some stuff to mull over: Alan Benson at MIT has found that women tend to sort into jobs that are geographically dispersed, prior to marriage. In other words, before they get married, they choose careers that exist everywhere (think teachers, nurses, administrative assistants). Men, on the other hand, choose careers that are geographically clustered; they exist in only a few cities (think Wall Street and Silicon Valley). This results in heterosexual couples tending to move for the husband's job since the wife's job is more flexible. Another nasty side-effect is that the wife tends to take a hit in wages every time the couple moves, since she is the "trailing" spouse who is accommodating her partner's career rather than maximizing her own career prospects.
If both partners have geographically dispersed jobs, then the couple seems to move less often. If both partners have geographically clustered jobs it's unclear how things would play out. However, what is clear is that either way solving the two-body problem is easier if the couple lives in a big city. This is supported by Dora Costa's paper "Power Couples: Changes in the Locational Choice of the College Educated, 1940-1990." She finds that educated couples tend to live in large metropolitan areas and argues that the driving force behind this is the co-location problem. Bad news for small cities?
Maybe. But I can see at least one reason that it might go the other way around. If one spouse has a good job in a small city, they might anchor a highly educated partner there. If that partner would otherwise have gone to a bigger city, the co-location problem could be a boon for cities that would have trouble attracting educated workers otherwise. I know of some universities that have academic superstars in their departments who would have been poached had it not been for their spouse's job.
Here are the links to the papers I mentioned:
Power Couples: Changes in the Locational Choice of the College Educated, 1940-1990
Re-Thinking the Two-Body Problem: The Segregation of Women into Geographically Dispersed Occupations
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