For most people throughout history, marriage has been the primary means of attaining increased production. The reason is simple: the division of labor. It enables people to specialize. Specialization increases output per unit of resource input. That is how economists describe economic production.
I was able to achieve considerable output as a graduate student. I did not marry while I was in graduate school. I went through the Ph.D. program, and I published a lot of articles in The Freeman, which helped support me in my graduate program.
I got married in 1972. I started publishing Remnant Review in the spring of 1974. I began publishing through the Institute for Christian Economics in 1976. My wife Sharon's efforts were crucial in both of these operations. She helped me do the physical mailing of the newsletters. She kept track of the money, and she never lost any of it. For the first five years of Remnant Review, she handled the subscriptions, including running the mechanical dog tag stamping device that stamped the little metal tags that contained the addresses, and then she ran the foot-operated machine that stamped the addresses onto each of the envelopes. She did that until the mailing list went above 2000 people.
She handled the money that came in for the Institute for Christian Economics, and she took care of a lot of the paperwork. Only in 1980 did the ICE have enough income on regular basis to hire secretaries. At that point, she pulled out of the various requirements associated with the ICE.
If she had not been willing to learn how to do basic accounting -- pre-Quicken -- and if she had not learned how to manage a mailing list, I certainly would not have achieved what I have achieved so far. I would have written a lot of articles, but they would have been articles for other people's newsletters and magazines. I would probably be online today, but these would be much smaller operations.
She was there to help bootstrap my career from one of writing for other people's publications to one of writing for my own publications. She invested five years of time in doing this, and she also bore three children in that period. She ran the household, and she had to run two separate publishing operations. She taught herself how to do this, because she was under pressure to do it. She recognized that this is what I wanted to do, and she also understood that the newsletter would be a major source of income. In 1979, that is what it turned out to be. The newsletter went from about 2000 subscribers to 22,000. She had to turn loose at that point. She could no longer do it with home-based technology, such as the dog tag stamping machine that she used to stamp out the plates, which was left over from World War I.
She still does the basic accounting for my various projects. It is a lot easier now, because Quicken and QuickBooks make possible remarkable accounting operations with very simple equipment. She spends several hours a week on bank account-related tasks.
In the late 1970's, there was no way to run a newsletter on microcomputers, which barely existed in 1979. So, you had to go from ancient physical equipment, such as we used, to something like a mainframe computer, which was expensive. You had to get large enough to pay for the computer technology and accounting services, and to do that, you had to move from Xeroxed labels to physical plates that stamped out addresses. That took five years of hard work. We rolled the profits back into the business.
If my wife had not been willing to take on these tasks, along with the tasks associated with running a household, I would not have built the mailing lists I have. This report will be sent to 100,000 people. It is hard to build a list like mine, but the mailing can be done with a $65 piece of software and a cheap Amazon S3 account. I love the Web.
In the digital age, it is possible for a single man to achieve remarkable output. Matt Drudge is a good example. But most men need the division of labor. A good marriage is at the heart of a highly productive man. It requires a highly productive woman.
There would be no Duck Dynasty if Phil Robertson's wife had not backed him up. There also would have been no Duck Dynasty if she had not laid down the law to him about what he had to do for her to take him back. It took a marriage to build that dynasty. She stuck to her guns. They have made a great deal of money from the sale of what had been an obscure support device for men with shotguns. And that was just the beginning.
A bad marriage can undermine the man's productivity. That is why men should work hard to build a good marriage. It starts with the right woman. If she backs up a high-output husband, there will much higher output. She has to see that joint sacrifice now can lead to a big payoff later. She must be future-oriented, or as Edward Banfield called it, upper class.
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