{"id":274,"date":"2007-02-07T23:20:46","date_gmt":"2007-02-07T17:50:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/2007\/02\/07\/three-counter-intuitive-corollaries\/"},"modified":"2007-02-07T23:20:46","modified_gmt":"2007-02-07T17:50:46","slug":"three-counter-intuitive-corollaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2007\/02\/07\/three-counter-intuitive-corollaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Counter Intuitive Corollaries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/2007\/02\/06\/saving-face-and-saving-money\/\">last post on dowry<\/a> throws up three corollaries which run contrary to received wisdom. Here they are:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Women from communities which don&#8217;t have a tradition of dowry are <\/span><span style=\"font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;\">worse<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\"> off in the long run<\/span>. 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&#8217;t want dowry. But when the desire for social acceptance isn&#8217;t counterbalanced by the pain of dowry you&#8217;ll have more arranged marriages, at younger ages.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Consumerism is a good thing<\/span>. This is based on my point about all the stuff you can do with your money if your didn&#8217;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&#8217; families are consumerist, while all the brides&#8217; families are saintly enough to forgo all the consuming they could do if they kept the dowry for themselves.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Rising dowry demands are a good thing<\/span>, because the higher the demand, the greater the incentive to say &#8216;Balls to social acceptance and tradition&#8217;. 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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Next up, I&#8217;ll talk about why dowry is a bad thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The last post on dowry throws up three corollaries which run contrary to received wisdom. Here they are: Women from communities which don&#8217;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, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,59,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-and-economics","category-dowry","category-society"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-4q","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}