A better name for the book would have been "the Economic Incentives surrounding Marriage and its Alternatives." Very little is discussed that's dirty and even less involving money, though income does very much figure in the calculations.
The book is a cheerful and sometimes raunchy compendium of ten years of "Freakonomics" style research that has been going on in (mostly second-rate) academic institutions across North America around the incentive structures that surround marriage, its surrogates and its alternatives. It is more of a survey, it's not a book per se.
Your tour guide is a cheerful, open-minded, passionate, yet objective, compassionate, but sometimes desperate-sounding female professor of Economics who offers a class in the Economics of Sex and Love and runs a blog on the subject to boot.
As a reader I was often left wondering if the book is a cry for help or even a 250 page therapy session for the author who has yet to find her soulmate, but that's probably very unfair and may reflect my prejudices rather than reality. The topics are dealt with as thoroughly as possible and are dissected with the accuracy that ultimately only a dispassionate observer could bring to bear. For all I know, the author is successful enough in her field (and now as an author) that "by revealed preference" as she likes to say, she has a very high "reservation price" (her term again) for giving up her freedom.
That said, I only took away one thing from this book: humans respond to incentives.
The topic could really have been anything, but the author has concentrated on marriage. And if you've read Superfreakonomics (the sequel to Freakonomics) the authors actually start the book by saying their only goal is to provide examples of this fact from many different fields of endeavour. In the case of this book, it's all about marriage and sex (and not too much about love, to be frank)
Can't get myself to award the book more than three stars, and that's for three reasons:
1. There is no beginning, middle and end. You really could stick it in your CD player and go for the random button. It would make very little difference.
2. The macroeconomic assumptions of the book, and the the assumption that income inequality will carry on widening in particular, are taken as given. No explanation is offered. I happen to share them; regardless, even I felt at times like arguments were made on speculative macroeconomic foundations.
3. The lame attempt at a ten page conclusion / peek ahead is quite possibly the weakest chapter of the book and left me with a bad taste in my mouth (pun not intended, for those who've read it). Better to have skipped it altogether
That said, this is a good book. It taught me stuff I did not know and it made me think. And once I realised I did not need to keep track of what had gone before, I read it in ten minute increments. So it's a good book to read in the tube, provided you are not embarrassed to read it in public.
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