Is marriage too big to fail?

(pic from here)

Against the backdrop of the economic downturn, a very useful metaphor has emerged: zombie banks.

Unable to create value on their own, these banks are a financial suck.

Once they collapse, they depend on outside value – government money – to survive.

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After reading this article, I’m wondering if marriage is the zombie institution of the cultural marketplace:

Why do we still insist on marriage? Sure, it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?

While the article reads somewhat cathartic and effusive and personal, it does pose some compelling questions.

Is marriage an effective institution when it comes to investing the cultural assets of our lives? or does it set us up for failure?

I really dunno.

People haven’t seemed to give up on the institution writ large.

Yet the scenario sounds familiar: in spite of systemic failure, an institution manages to subsist on the edge of sustainability, with many external costs.

If marriage is a zombie institution within the cultural marketplace, what exactly are the forces keeping marriage solvent anyways? (Other than people making a lot of money off weddings of course…)

And does zombie marriage back us into the possibility that we are in the middle of a cultural downturn?

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It will be interesting to see if raising children becomes more decoupled from marriage and romantic relationships in general.

Came across this article in CNN which resonates.