Three Counter Intuitive Corollaries

The last post on dowry throws up three corollaries which run contrary to received wisdom. Here they are:

  1. Women from communities which don’t have a tradition of dowry are worse off in the long run. In castes and subcastes with a dowry tradition, the girl and her parents have a financial incentive to delay marriage, or to elope with someone who doesn’t want dowry. But when the desire for social acceptance isn’t counterbalanced by the pain of dowry you’ll have more arranged marriages, at younger ages.
  2. Consumerism is a good thing. This is based on my point about all the stuff you can do with your money if your didn’t give it up as dowry. The next time you meet someone who moans about how dowry demands are increasing because of liberalisation and consumerism running rampant, ask them why it is that only the grooms’ families are consumerist, while all the brides’ families are saintly enough to forgo all the consuming they could do if they kept the dowry for themselves.
  3. Rising dowry demands are a good thing, because the higher the demand, the greater the incentive to say ‘Balls to social acceptance and tradition’. Crude oil at $75 a barrel may have hurt like hell, but it changed consumer behaviour. Hybrids became more popular and SUVs became less popular. Incentives matter.

Next up, I’ll talk about why dowry is a bad thing.

0 Responses to Three Counter Intuitive Corollaries

  1. Venu says:

    I think there are also the effects of urbanisation and anonymisation. The usual upsides of dowry – prestige among like-minded people – will be less strong once it becomes tough to broadcast the size of the dowry you gave/received. Such a broadcast is easy in smaller and well-knit places, but tougher in cities, because the relevant audience is much more dispersed.

  2. Zero says:

    This is a rocking series!

  3. Ashish says:

    Dude! Are you serious? You count few benefits of dowry and say that dowry is good in long run. What about all the negatives? Isn’t good or bad decided on net outcome? Your point 1 & 3 are based on same premise ignoring all that bad which comes with rising dowry and practice of dowry. If you meant to continue to talk why dowry is bad in next post, should you reserve judgement till end of series whether it is good or bad, or are we supposed to take each post on its own merit?

  4. Padma says:

    It was really good to see a blog with something worth while to discuss..

    Women from communities which don’t have a tradition of dowry are worse off in the long run. –

    Don’t u think u r contradicting of what u r telling in the first line and the rest of the paragraph? honestly speaking in din’t understand what u wanted to day.. r u telling dowry is good or dowry is bad:-?.. confused.. :O?

  5. Ritwik says:

    1. Wrong inference due to flawed assumptions. A girl’s decision to elope with a man is quite independent of the dowry demand or the ‘financial incentive’ as you put it. In any case, the lack of social acceptance that usually results due to elopement puts further social and economic pressure on the girl’s family if they have other unmarried daughters. So basically, elopement doesn’t result from dowry demands, and even if it did, it doesn’t ease the economic pressure on the girl’s family. Secondly, no family has a financial incentive to delay marriage. An excessive dowry demand may put off one particular wedding, however, as a girl’s age rises, so does the ‘bargaining power’ of the other prospective grooms with the argument of ‘your daughter is not getting any younger’ and dowry demands are only likely to rise. In any case, you base your corollary on the assumption that it is necessarily better for a girl to marry late, which is also flawed. You neglect the fact that most of these girls whose families will cough up dowry have never been allowed to dream big or be very ambitious, and getting married off to a resonable guy is very often the limit of their thoughts. An older, unmarried girl is very likely to be the subject of taunts and insults at her own home, while the same girl when married will atleast have some sense of responsibility and fulfilment, even if it is determined by traditional gender roles (as a lot of these girls themselves believe very strongly in these gender roles).

    2. Didn’t really get what you’re trying to say here. If you’re saying that dowry demands boost consumption and consumption boosts the economy, well then a lack of dowry demands will leave more dispoasble money with the bride’s family and boost consumption anyway. Or do you mean something else?

    3. Agree. Especially likely to happen in the families which are modern enough to let their girls work (probably as media/software professionals) but not modern enough to straightaway renounce the tradition of dowry.

  6. Venu, you’re right about increasing anonymity. About urbanisation, I disagree. Urbanisation won’t really help if the urban population is homogeneous.

    Padma, I haven’t yet started talking about why and when dowry is good or bad.

    In the first point, I assumed dowry to be part of a ‘traditional marriage package’- which would also contain early marriage and marriage only within the same community. I see this package as a bad thing because it reduces choice for the bride. If this package becomes so expensive because of rising dowry demands that families decide to reject it, that’s a good thing for the bride.

    My mistake was to ignore the fact that families could still reject dowry while staying with early marriage/ endogamous marriage. Or for that matter that even a late/ intercommunity marriage could have dowry demands.

    Ritwik, the decision to elope is independent of dowry demands. What I should have said is the decision to find a husband by herself, or find a husband from another community. If marriage within the community will lead to dowry demands, parents have an incentive to allow the girl to find a boy by herself.

    I didn’t mean what you thought I meant in point 2. That would be the broken window fallacy. What I meant was that increasing consumerism means that parents would rather spend the money on themselves than pay it as dowry.

    As to point 3, you’ve come close to what I’m getting at. It’s the families who are liberal enough to consider choice- but whose communities are not liberal enough to provide the choice- who will consider these incentives.

  7. Ashish, I’m not saying that dowry is good. I’m saying that rising dowry demands are excellent at weakening dowry as a concept.

    And yes, please do stick around for the whole series.

  8. Rashmi says:

    Mr. Khanna,

    I could not agree more. especially with…

    “Women from communities which don’t have a tradition of dowry are worse off in the long run”.
    Naturally, when they bring no dowry,What good are they anyway ?( in a purely economic sense). Their functioning as wives, mothers and daugheters has no computable NPA or any other economic value. they don’t add to the GDP in anyway do they ?

    “In castes and subcastes with a dowry tradition, the girl and her parents have a financial incentive to delay marriage”… that’s so true.
    parents also have incentives to
    – not educate their daughters,( save money for the dowry instead)
    – kill them at birth / before birth ( what’s more Mr. Khanna, it may even lead to a market correction later on when grooms outnumber brides wonderful isn’t it ? how market mechanisisms can control everything ) But then again the million or so girl babies who were never born have no economic value, so why should anyone be perturbed about it ?

    – burn brides who bring less than market dowry ( increasing usage of a product is a time tested marketing tool and in this case highly effective)

    “Consumerism is a good thing” Could not agree more , everyone knows happy marriages are based on having a plasma TV and the latest fridge..

    now i have to rush.. need to extract some money out of my parents Am eagerly awaiting your next article in the series…

    regards
    Rashmi V

  9. Harsha says:

    Shouldn’t one also look at inheritance rights under the Hindu civil law as means of examining the dowry issue. If we had a fair and equitable division of property amongst all children – male and female – would we have the issues that we do with dowry currently. The economic argument could be that the current inhertiance laws create the market for a dwry system.

  10. Padma says:

    Good to c your reply..

    Atleast per my understanding dowry was never part of marraige. I guess it all must have started like fathers willfully give something to the daughter who cannot support on finanicial stands and to get initial respect may be. But later on it has become like a compulsion/. They started judging the value of groom and bride on how much dowry they get or bring respectively..
    It is painful in nowadays where the women is equally skilled and earning like men are still treated inferior and in marriages money has become more important than values and attitute. In fact i would say the daughter in laws are not adjusting or rather does not want to adjust because of such instances thereby increasing the nuclear families and more old age homes.

    Rashmi

    Well said yaar. As a gal i can understand ur pain.

  11. […] Mistake number two was to loosely throw around the word elope as a catch-all. What I should have said was ‘the parents have an incentive to allow the girl to find someone for herself who won’t demand dowry’. Eloping is an extreme manifestation of that. […]

  12. ramki830 says:

    Bit disagreeing on your “findings” – Here’s my 2 Cent:

    1. “Rising Dowry” is itself very incorrect and inaccurate fact. Are there any concrete statistic by some independent body that has evaluated how much has dowry giving/accepting gone in say last 15 years? My understanding is that Dowry giving/taking/asking has become unacceptable atleast among the educated folks. What is happening however is that thanks to 24*7 Media and surfeit of news coverage, the increasingly fewer dowry taking/giving incidents get greater news coverage.

    Otherwise, Dowry as a concept looks to be on the decline, espically with greater urbanisation.(albeit slowly). In anycase, dowry is also a reflection of flawed inheritance laws/policies and with modern inheritance laws that emphasise on equal property share for all children(irrespective of gender) , dowry should get phased out.

    2. Linking Dowry practice with arranged marriage may not be correct . Arranged Marriage as a practice is a natural consequence of extreme social diversity of India and the consequent difficulty of people to find the right kind of partners. It is commonsense that birds of same feather like to flock together. So dowry or not, arranged marriage as a practice is going to stick on , for atleast another generation .

    3. The only aspect of consumption that is probably influenced by dowry is consumption of gold. Now this takes us to another topic altogether.

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