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Tyrrell_McAllister's avatar

Then the question would seem to be whether failure-to-get-married is seen as a bad thing, in the sense that hedging against it would signal risk aversion.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

The "bride price" tradition probably fulfilled a similar goal. The money is paid to the parents, so the value to the wife herself is much lower than the original sum, but value isn't destroyed in the long term because of the expected payback from the couple's own daughters a couple of decades later. A gender-symmetrical version of that tradition (to avoid the icky trading-women-like-cattle connotations discussed by earlier posters, as well as to make it more compatible with homosexual couples) would serve the purpose of the betting system you described.

Unlikely to happen though, because the chicken/egg problem is even bigger than the weirdness problem in the betting system - it's only viable if it’s an established tradition, but wouldn’t become established until it’s viable. The most plausible way I can think is if a culture that still has a bride price tradition (China?) moves to a gender-symmetrical version then gains enough soft power that its marriage culture is adopted abroad, but at the moment it looks like that’s going in the opposite direction.

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