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I had breakfast
with President Goodluck Jonathan on the 1st of October: No, not my
contrived one hour with the president a couple of months ago, and no;
it was not a private breakfast. It was in the company of many other
Nigerians invited to the occasion by the President and Commander in
Chief to mark Nigeria’s 50th Independence Anniversary.

Afterwards, we
moved to the venue of the president’s Independence Day speech,
broadcast live to the nation. After the speech, he interacted with us
before leaving for the Eagle Square. President Jonathan came across as
essentially decent, but I am dismayed by his cooks. Not Aso Villa’s
chefs but the political cooks stoking up the bonfire of his
presidential ambition.

President Jonathan,
like other people in power has many friends. And that, precisely is my
concern. It is not the number of friends, but their ulterior motives
and pedigrees that worry me. The president I sat with spoke to the
whole nation, but in the aftermath of the bomb blasts was saying “I am
from the Niger Delta…I know my people….” Is that to say that the
rest of us are not his people?

Nigeria is a
complex country. Managing the country requires composure, maturity and
tremendous self-restraint. My apprehension is that the many cooks in
the president’s kitchen (cabal once again?) have little appreciation of
the nuances needed to knead Nigeria. While it may be said that the late
President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua assembled a highly provincial team from
Katsina State lacking a national outlook, President Jonathan on the
other hand has an outwardly national team without a nationalist
mind-set.

A look at some of the president’s major supporters may be worthwhile.

Vice President
Namadi Sambo was hardly a brilliant choice. That the Jonathan campaign
team had to deny reports insinuating that Sambo would not be the
president’s running mate speaks volumes. It is debatable if Sambo can
deliver Kaduna State to the ticket because he was forcefully imposed as
governor in 2007. Not much has changed.

Just when you think
things cannot get any worse…. This column gave Turai Yar’Adua
scorching criticism for what was perceived as undue influence in
matters of state. We now have a new benchmark. Mrs. Patience Jonathan
is not the wife of a local government chairman. So what business does
she have engaging in populist and ill-advised activity like sharing out
bags of rice to people? It is an indication of how bad things are in
Nigeria that three people reportedly lost their lives at the
scene…for a bag of rice.

Jonathan’s option
of director general of his presidential campaign team is another
curious decision. Senator Dalhatu Sarki Tafida, the septuagenarian High
Commissioner to the United Kingdom played a very prominent role in
former president Obasanjo’s life presidency bid. He was so unpopular at
the time that he dared not visit Zaria, his hometown without an escort
of mobile policemen.

Tafida was forced
out of the Senate and compensated with an ambassadorial posting. In
free and fair elections, it is inconceivable that he will win his ward.
Deep down in his heart, Tafida probably does not believe that President
Jonathan would win. It is difficult to see how this man will energise
and engage the critical base for the campaign team.

The speed with
which Mohammed Abba Aji transferred support from the Yar’Adua to the
Jonathan camp should have made the president suspicious. As Yar’Adua’s
link with the National Assembly, Aji botched communication between the
Presidency and the National Assembly. We still do not know if there
ever was a letter from Yar’Adua to the Senate. Unfortunately, this man
not only kept his job, but also has become an integral part of
Jonathan’s team. What is his strategic and political value? With his
fortunes tied to Jonathan remaining in office, can this man be trusted
to give logical, selfless counsel?

In the final
analysis, it is clear that the many cooks in the president’s kitchen
are folks who can only concoct political poison. Olusegun Obasanjo;
Jerry Gana; Ibrahim Mantu; Jonathan Zwingina; Samaila Sambawa; Edwin
Clark; Hassan Adamu; Shehu Malami; Solomon Lar; Barnabas Gemade;
Bamanga Tukur; Tony Anenih – from a progressive viewpoint, the list is
odious.

Most of these cooks are bitter old men who have nothing to
contribute to the Nigeria of our dreams. Others are failed politicians
and businessmen seeking to feather their nests. They have nothing to
lose. Their only hope for relevance is continuing to muddle the
political environment in Nigeria and thriving in the resulting chaos.
Too many cooks….

If you are a
business owner in Nigeria and wondering why your profits are worse than
Nigerian stocks, do not go to any jazzman as they do in Nollywood
movies. You must also look beyond Facebook and Twitter, which are
gradually becoming the biggest anti-productivity drugs in the business
environment. Among the latest company to ban its workers from the use
of social networking sites, especially Facebook, is the luxury
automaker, Porsche because it poses a security threat to the company.
Whereas Facebook as a company has minted the freshest and youngest
among Forbes’ list of billionaires in the history of the United States,
the social network site has also cost countries like the United Kingdom
an estimated £14 billion in lost work time, because in that country
where things can be monitored and measured, 6% of its workforce spends
roughly one hour a day facebooking.

Well in my
wonderful country, we cannot really ascertain, even if we tried, the
amount of money employers of labour or Nigeria as a country are losing
because of Facebook in the workplace, reason being that we are trying
to count the number of hours we lose to our lawmakers who are
constantly arguing about how to loot the national coffers by
arbitrarily inflating their salaries and perks.

We have no problem
with social networking when compared to political networking especially
at this time when elections are around the corner. Britain would not
dare to publish its figures if they realised that what they lose to
social networking in the work place is moi-moi money compared to what
we Nigerians lose everyday to one bank MD networking with politicians.

This is not to say
we have no serious issues with Facebooking in Nigeria, just that ours
come in different colours. Facebook has allowed some of our leaders to
make us feel as if we are having a conversation with each other,
whereas you are probably instant messaging your cousin who is sitting
in a well furnished cyber café in Kubua or Yayan Karimu.

So when next you go
to your favourite politicians Facebook page and give him the thumbs up,
just remember you are hailing someone else, because I doubt if any of
the current presidential aspirants with Facebook pages who are busy
networking politically have time for virtual social networking.

Do not get me wrong
because there is much to be gained from Facebook for those that know
how to use it wisely and commercially, but for those that just want to
hang out there like Mami Market, it can be the most disastrous
adventure. Facebook is the biggest tatafo that was ever created. It’s
intended and unintended features can inflict untold pain and hardship
on users, so when next you see your friend’s profile message that reads
“Goodluck is Married to Patience”, just know that he is Facebooking
from the dog house and kindly give him the thumbs up, he will
appreciate you and laugh at your silly jokes when next you post them.

But this is not
where I am going this week; Facebook just sidetracked me, which is one
of its side effects. What I wanted to say earlier is that I think
Africa Magic, the DSTV channels that show Nollywood movies might be the
biggest bleeder of Nigeria businesses. Most homes and small businesses
in Nigeria have their TVs permanently on one version of Africa Magic or
the other.

Haven’t you been to
a hospital, while malaria is racking your bones, the nurse will be busy
chewing gum and waiting for Ramsey Noah to take off his shirt? Or have
you not had one of those experiences where you order rice, but the
waitress brings you an omelette because he or she was engrossed with
the pranksters, Aki and Pawpaw?

My latest
experience on the adverse effect of Africa Magic could be having on
Nigerian businesses was in my barber’s shop. There is a small notice by
his mirror that says a haircut with NEPA costs N200 but with his
I-better-Pass-My-Neighbour generator the price goes up to N300. On this
particular day, there was NEPA but he had his TV on Africa Magic.
Between running the clipper on my hair for two seconds and watching
Genevieve “romance” RMD for three minutes, NEPA took light, leaving me
with a temporary Mohawk, like one of those Benin chiefs during Igue
Festival. I sat livid while he was trying to start his small generator
that was leaking oil all over the environment.

All said and done I gave him N200 and told him I would not pay N300
because he had enough time to cut my hair before NEPA did what they do
best. We stood there looking at each other; he couldn’t believe his
eyes because I usually pay him more than N300 whenever I cut my hair,
but that day I just realised he did not know the difference between
production time and Africa Magic time. And Nigeria has more Africa
Magic addicts than Facebook addicts. When we compute what business lose
to AfricanMagic one day, the moment wont be magical..

It didn’t take
long, sitting with an enthralled audience and watching the saga of the
cloistered jerk who betrayed those around him and ended up unfathomably
rich and influential, to understand why it has been hailed as a
masterpiece.

They had me at the
mesmerizing first scene, when the repulsive nerd is mocked by a comely,
slender young lady he’s trying to woo. Bitter about women, he returns
to his dark lair in a crimson fury of revenge.

It unfolds with
mythic sweep, telling the most compelling story of all, the one I cover
every day in politics: What happens when the powerless become powerful
and the powerful become powerless?

This is a drama
about quarrels over riches, social hierarchy, envy, theft and the
consequence of deceit – a world upended where the vassals suddenly
become lords and the lords suddenly lose their magic.

The beauty who
rejects the gnome at the start is furious when he turns around and
betrays her, humiliating her before the world. And the giant brothers
looming over the action justifiably feel they’ve provided the keys to
the castle and want their reward. One is more trusting than the other,
but both go berserk, feeling they’ve been swindled after entering into
a legitimate business compact.

The anti-social
nerd, surrounded by his army of slaving minions, has been holed up
making something so revolutionary and magical that it turns him into a
force that could conquer the world.

The towering
brothers battle to get what they claim is their fair share of the
glittering wealth that flows from the obsessive gnome’s genius designs.

The gnome, remarkably, invents a way to hurl yourself through space and meet up with somebody at the other end.

All of these mythic
twists and turns in “Das Rheingold” at the Metropolitan Opera in New
York were a revelation to me. I’d never seen the Ring cycle. I didn’t
even know what it was about. I loved everything about Peter Gelb’s $16
million production: the shape-shifting, high-tech stage, the mermaid
sopranos dangling from wires, the magnetic Welsh bass-baritone Bryn
Terfel, who plays Wotan, the weak ruler of the gods who tries to renege
after bartering his gorgeous sister-in-law for construction of a
gorgeous castle. (The moral of the story:

Never mess with your contractor, the contractor always wins.)

But as I watched
the opera, my mind kept flashing to the “The Social Network,” another
dazzling drama about quarrels over riches, social hierarchy, envy,
theft and the consequences of deceit. A Sony executive called “The
Social Network,” the David Fincher-Aaron Sorkin movie about Facebook’s
Mark Zuckerberg and his circle of ex-friends and partners, “the first
really modern movie.” Yet the strikingly similar themes in Wagner’s
feudal “Das Rheingold” – the Ring cycle is based on the medieval German
epic poem “Das Nibelungenlied,” which some experts say helped inspire
J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” – underscore how little human
drama changes through the ages.

We are always
fighting about social status, identity, money, power, turf, control,
lust and love. We are always trying to get even, get more and climb
higher. And we are always trying to cross the bridge to Valhalla.

W.P. Ker defined
the heroic epic as “the defense of a narrow place, against odds.” And
that can just as well sum up the modern epic of the anti-hero Mark
Zuckerberg.

In “Das Rheingold,”
the dwarf Alberich is mocked and rejected by the Rhinemaidens. “Fury
and longing/ fierce and forceful/ surge through my spirit,” Alberich
sings.

Thwarted in lust,
stewing in rage, the gnome turns to greed and vengeance. He steals the
Rhinemaidens’ gold, returns to his sulfurous, subterranean cavern and
forges a gold ring that “would give unbounded power and wealth.”

He uses the ring to
enslave the other dwarves, “the Nibelungs’ nocturnal race,” and forge
and weld more gold trinkets, as well as a magic helmet that can make
him invisible and teleport him through space.

“No one can see me/
though he search for me/ yet I am everywhere/ hidden from sight,”
Alberich says, in a perfect description of the elusive Zuckerberg and
Internet users in general.

Then, in a mantra
that could belong to Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg, Alberich warns the
gods: “Beware! / For when once you men/ serve my might/ the dwarf will
take his pleasure/ with your pretty women/ who scorn his wooing, /
though love does not smile upon him.”

The 1854 Wagner
libretto has ornate language like “the soft zephyrs’ breeze.” The 2010
Sorkin screenplay has snappy, syncopated language about Python Web
servers and Pix firewall emulators.

But the passions
that drive humans stay remarkably constant, whether it’s a magic ring
being forged or a magic code being written.

© 2010 New York Times News Service

While they have all tried in their own ways to be worthy ambassadors of Nigeria, particular mention must be made of our special athletes, who despite the constraints placed in their way by the lapses within the Nigerian sports establishment, have risen to the occasion to command the respect of the international audience.

While we applaud our athletes, we cannot fail to mention the pall cast over our performance at the Games by the drugs scandal where two of our athletes, Damola Osayomi and Samuel Okon tested positive for the same banned stimulant, Methylhexamine. One of the consequences of those incidents apart from the obvious blight on our integrity was Nigeria’s loss of the gold medal won by Osayomi in the women’s 100 metres event.

Had that medal not been withdrawn our total haul of gold medals would have stood at 12, a situation that would have made our participation this year our best ever performance at the Commonwealth Games.

As it is, we are left to rue what might have been. Still, there’s much to be said for the fact that given the efforts of the NSC to educate our athletes on the dangers of doping, we find ourselves falling short at the international arena. While the athletes may not have deliberately set out to use performance enhancing drugs, the point must be made that had there been better co-ordination of activities within the Nigerian camp in Delhi, the affected athletes would not have turned to the drug without the knowledge of team officials.

That said, we must salute the performance of Team Nigeria and advise that as we revel in our success, we must not lose sight of the fact that the next games in Glasgow, Scotland is only four years away. Like Ibrahim Bio, our Minister of Sports has said, the time to start preparing is now.

Beyond that, we must seize the moment and recognise that the London 2012 Olympic Games is less than two years away. With careful planning we can sustain the Delhi momentum and ensure that unlike our participation at the last two editions, we strike gold in London.

The Commonwealth Games ended yesterday in Delhi after two weeks of intense competition. For the Nigerian contingent, it has been a wonderful outing.

With 11 gold medals already in the kitty, the last of them coming yesterday courtesy of Kate Oputa’s victory over Australia’s Catherine Morrow in the finals of the Women’s Single Wheelchair Table Tennis event, Nigeria has surpassed its gold haul at the 2002 Manchester Games and 2006 Melbourne Games combined.

For many Nigerians, the performance in India has come as a surprise given the general lack of preparedness of our athletes in the months leading up to the games. Before the Nigerian contingent departed for India, there had been reports in the media of how lack of funds had made it difficult for the National Sports Commission (NSC), to send athletes abroad on tours to complement whatever training had been given to them by their coaches.

The biggest casualty in this regard was our boxing team, which was completely outclassed in Delhi. The team, which had been scheduled to tour Germany to perfect strategies for the games, had to settle for a camp somewhere in Benin City.

Expectedly, officials of the NSC are engaged in chest thumping and backslapping. They are gleefully claiming responsibility for our good fortune in India. The truth of the matter however, is that what has happened in Delhi is the result of our athletes’ determination to succeed. That the athletes excelled despite the obvious drawbacks is testimony to their will to excel.

They have proved by their accomplishments in Delhi that with the right mixture of self-belief and patriotic spirit success can be achieved even in the face of the most difficult of odds.

Oluwadamilola
Olusola has lived up to the calling of the national youth service. The
25-year-old corps member in Ogun State on her own steam renovated the
children’s ward at the State Hospital, Abeokuta, as part of her
community development contribution.

Olusola is not a
doctor or an architect but a lawyer who graduated from the University
of Lagos. On a visit to the State Hospital the sad conditions prompted
her to do something about it.

“I just wanted to
do something to influence the community, so I embarked on this project
to renovate the children’s ward at least to make the ward conducive for
the sick children.”

Olusola spent her
service year that ran from November 2009 giving the children’s ward in
a makeover. New paint, mattresses, bedding, mosquito nets ceiling fans
and electrical fixtures and notice board were some of the standard
features she brought in as well as other touches to make the ambiance
more pleasant for the young patients.

Ms Olusola’s
story of how she raised the money for this project is a lesson in
enterprise and resourcefulness, no contract padding no obstacles to
“settle”. She made her appeals on the basis of charity but also
displayed a most democratic approach to raising the necessary funds
went to those who should have had more than passing interest in the
subject she had set her heart on. Both church and state were happy to
contribute to this laudable cause.

“I generated the
funds from corporate bodies and individuals like the state Commissioner
for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, Permanent Secretary,
Ministry of Justice, Permanent Secretary of Local Government and
Chieftaincy Affairs, Permanent Secretary Ministry of Environment,
Permanent Secretary Bureau of Cabinet and the Redeemed Christian Church
of God, Soul Winners Chapel, Lagos state and the Attorney General of
Ogun State also donated generously.”

The project took
ten weeks from idea to completion, which also included getting approval
for the National Youth Service Commission. The launching was a happy
occasion featuring Oyin Sodipo permanent secretary, in the Ministry of
health, representing the state commissioner who expressed her pleasure
with what she called an example of individuals complementing the
efforts of government and indicated that more of such activity would be
greatly welcomed.

When Olusola who
works at the Ogun State ministry of Justice was asked if she would like
to build a children’s home on day she gave this answer:

“I am a lawyer,
it is not likely that I will build a children’s home but what I hope to
do, is to continue with this ward renovation yearly and if possible
moving from here to other state hospitals. I believe that by doing
things like this, other people might see it, and do something of such
in the future to help others in need.”

What a complete
package in this example of young Nigerian enterprise: initiate,
independently finance complete and maintain with a plan for progressive
future expansion. What a contrast to the government: “Government cannot
do everything on its own,” the permanent secretary, Oyin Sodipo. Truth
is that the government can certainly do far more than it does to
provide the basics of a health care delivery system.

But with people like Oluwadamilola Olusola there is hope for Nigeria.

When he died last
Monday, aged 87, a former minister of education and one of Nigeria’s
key players in that sector in the last 50 years, Babatunde Aliyu
Fafunwa left behind his life-long companion, his wife, Doris and
children and grandchildren who have done him proud as a father.

However, the man
who devoted his entire career to educating generations of Nigerians
also left behind a nation still grappling with defining its destiny and
an even more troubled education sector. It is perhaps not surprising
that one of the last public actions of this driven and doughty man was
to rise in defence of one of his signal contributions to Nigerian
education: the 6-3-3-4 system introduced by the federal government in
1983 when he was the minister of education.

Fafunwa and other
scholars had for long argued that the former British 6-5-4 system was
inadequate for the nation’s needs. They contended that the British
based system was parochial, elitist, regurgitate and unresponsive to
the need and aspirations of the Nigerian society and fought for what
they said was a more suitable one, which was later adopted by the
federal military government.

Yet, participants
at a recent education workshop, including President Goodluck Jonathan,
blamed the rot in the nation’s education system on the change from the
British system to the more American one, which was supposed to provide
room for individual development. As it happens, the federal government
has itself changed the 6-3-3-4 system to the 9-3-4 system.

It is a trite
argument that education, along with most other sectors of the Nigerian
society, is in very parlous state. Employers of labour routinely bemoan
what they tag the ‘unemployability’ of Nigerian graduates while fresh
graduates themselves deal with diminished and vanishing employment
opportunities – and don’t even get them started on the conditions under
which they receive their training!

Surely the blame
goes beyond an operating system taking into consideration the now age
old Nigerian propensity to rush things through and hope for the best?

Take the 6-3-3-4
system: one of the recommendations of its promoters was that an
adequate number of teachers and the requisite infrastructure be
provided before the system was launched.

This never happened and it ensured that the expected outcomes were not achieved.

The new system,
anchored on a well-promoted university basic education programme, has
itself not fared any better. It has been struggling with under funding
and lack of teachers to bring the project to reality. It would not be a
surprise if this is also jettisoned by another administration a couple
of years down the road. This business of chopping and changing while
ignoring the basics is as unsustainable as it is pathetic.

No nation can
truly achieve its potential with an uneducated – or poorly educated
citizenry and Nigeria cannot be an exception. If any government
official – or parent – needs any reminder of the low quality education
that children are receiving across the nation’s schools, they only need
to check the result of graduating secondary school students over the
past couple of years.

The failure rate
has been consistent in its abysmal level. Our education system is
failing our children – and you cannot hang this on one man.

The death of Mr.
Fafunwa also poses another dilemma for national planners. He was a
member of a generation that was well trained in local and international
institutions and was still devoted to working in their country to build
a better future. It is a moot point whether they truly were able to
achieve this.

Many of the
fresher graduates expected to lead in future are badly prepared – and
probably see little to recommend them to a life of public service, and
that is they have not already fastened their hopes on making a living
abroad.

Our present leaders need to realise, to use a much-abused phrase,
the urgency of now. There is a need to ensure that the labour of our
heroes past – thinkers, doers and leaders – is not in vain. Hard work
and dedication to duty must therefore replace fickle chicanery.

The first time I
heard of Alkaki was from one of the owners of Abule Café. The café is
part of The Life House on Sinari Daranijo Street in Victoria Island,
Lagos. Abule simply means village, and the owners have a strong
suggestion of an organic approach to their sparse but interesting menu.

I have to admit to
liking the way their minds work. It is refreshing to have a place where
you can go for a snack of a bowl of gari, iced water and groundnuts in
the afternoon comfortably sipped in air conditioning while surfing the
Internet…or their own charming version of Buck’s Fizz, a combination
of champagne and zobo; or their delicious Chapman’s made from freshly
squeezed watermelon and other fruit juices, Angostura bitters and
additional well guarded secret ingredients. Theirs is the very first
Chapman’s that I have drunk with an unsuspecting and tranquil mind.

One of my favourite
Abule Café stories is that of fresh palmwine available there from the
beginning of the week. A nursing mother who wants to bring on the
breast milk can go in at the start of the week and drink this palmwine
and at the weekend when it is fully and irredeemably fermented, those
wishing to mainline alcohol can go in and get unrepentantly drunk.

Abule Café’s Alkaki
comes from a friend of the house who makes them somewhere in the North
and sends them down to Lagos. It is apparent that they are carefully
and lovingly made. They are made up of twists of fried wheat dough
soaked in honey. In texture and taste they remind me of what I consider
the best honey wheat bread available in Nigeria sold by High Quality
Bakery in Calabar. The Alkaki, like the honey wheat is grainy, dense,
sweet (sweeter) crumbly and honey infused. A piece of the pastry broken
off reveals hidden silken tracks of honey. It is best served fresh, or
warmed in the oven, with a cup of coffee or Lipton tea.

Also Alkaki has
pedigree. It was originally the preserve of Northern aristocrats who
had it for tea or as a desert. I like to imagine Fulani ladies draped
in limited edition Hollandaise Ankara sitting under alcoves ordering
one such as myself about with trays of Alkaki, cold Lassis,

Fura and hot
fragrant teas, talking about the year’s yield of tea on plantations in
Taraba State in soft cultured voices. Alkaki has strong strains of
Arabic cuisine where desserts and puddings are prepared with wheat
flour, yoghurt and always always always, drenched in honey.

I asked Ugoma
Ebilah, who owns Abule with her husband, to request the summary of the
recipe for Alkaki from their Northern friend and was by and by snubbed.
I didn’t take it to heart. In a country of over 150 million people, no
Nigerian recipe can be successfully enshrouded. I finally stumbled on a
version in my old tattered Maggi family menu cookbook made from 2 cups
of crushed wheat, 2 teaspoons of yoghurt, 1 bottle of groundnut oil, 2
cups of honey and 2 tablespoons of lime juice. The methodology is also
simple enough.

Instead of crushed
wheat, I bought a N50 peak-milk-tin measurement of whole wheat sold out
of a huge Dangote bag. I ground a few handfuls of the wheat to coarse
flour in my blender’s dry mill, sieved it and added to the sieved
flour, yoghurt and about three spoons of groundnut oil, enough to
loosely hold the dough together. I must admit to substituting the lime
juice for water and also that something about the ground wheat
suggested and even demanded the addition of a handful of coriander
seeds. The dough must be left for a few hours or overnight to ferment.
The remaining oil is heated, the dough fried in it till the Alkaki is
the colour of golden honey. The Alkaki is removed from the heat and
submerged in a jar of honey. From experimenting, I found that they must
be submerged for a period of time to get an impressive infusion.

My Alkaki certainly does not have the well-dressed look of Café
Abule’s. Their friend has so perfected the art of making them, of
twisting the dough together to look like small pretty twisted brioches,
and has probably done this for years that I certainly cannot begin to
compete. But the taste of mine was commensurate if not better for being
freshly made, with a grainier bite from the coarseness of the flour and
coriander seeds, also fragrant from the coriander, honey sweet and
certainly worth the roundabout research and snobbery.

The recession has taken a toll on the institution of marriage, we keep hearing.

Last month, for
instance, when it was reported that the proportion of Americans aged 25
to 34 who are married fell below the proportion who have never married,
it was quickly attributed to the economic downturn. Young adults,
according to this narrative, have less money to spend on a wedding and
are less eager to enter into a lifetime commitment during times of
uncertainty.

Again last week,
when a report from the Pew Research Centre noted that, for the first
time, college-educated 30-year-olds were more likely to have been
married than were people the same age without a college degree, the
news was interpreted as another side effect of the recent recession.
After all, the downturn has been especially hard on young men with no
college degree.

But if you look at
marriage in the United States over the past century, this
interpretation doesn’t stand up. Marriage and divorce rates have
remained remarkably immune to the ups and downs of the business cycle.
Unfortunately, the marriage statistics are easy to misread.

It’s misleading to
count the wedding rings among people in their 20s and early 30s,
because the median age at first marriage in the United States has risen
to 28 for men (from 23 in 1970) and 26 for women (from 21 in 1970). The
fact that these folks aren’t married now doesn’t mean they won’t marry
– many of them just aren’t there yet.

Look instead at
40-year-olds, and you see that 81 percent have married at least once.
Yes, this number used to be higher – it peaked at 93 percent in 1980 –
but, clearly, marriage remains a part of most people’s lives. These
statistics are not a perfect barometer either, however, because they
reflect weddings that were celebrated years earlier.

To most accurately
track marriage rates, you need to focus on the number of wedding
certificates issued. In 2009, the latest year for which we have data,
there were about 2.1 million marriages in the United States. That does
represent a slight decline since the recession began. But it’s the same
rate of decline that existed during the preceding economic boom, the
previous bust and both the boom and the bust before that.

Indeed, the recent
modest decline in marriage continues a 30-year trend. And even as the
number of marriages falls, divorce is also becoming less prevalent. So
a greater proportion of today’s marriages will likely persist 30 years
into the future.

This is not to say
that marriage looks the same today as it always did – over the past
several decades, there has been a tremendous shift in married life.

It used to be that
a typical marriage involved specialised roles for the husband and wife.
Usually he was in the marketplace, and she was in the home, and this
arrangement led to maximum productivity.

But today, when
families have easy access to prepared foods, inexpensive off-the-rack
clothing and labor-saving technology from the washing machine to the
robot vacuum cleaner, there’s much less benefit from either spouse
specialising in homemaking. Women, now better educated and with greater
control over their fertility, are in the marketplace, too, and married
couples have more money, more leisure time and longer lives to spend
together. Modern marriages are based not on the economic benefits of
playing specialised roles but on shared passions.

This new model of
“hedonic marriage” has had an effect on who marries, and when – as
research I have conducted with my better half, the economist Betsey
Stevenson, has documented. In the old days, opposites attracted; an
aspiring executive groom would pair up with a less-educated bride. And
they would wed before the stork visited and before the couple made the
costly investment of putting the husband through business school.

But today, that
same young executive would more likely be half of a power couple,
married to a college-educated woman who shares his taste in books,
hobbies, travel and so on. Indeed, marriage rates for college-educated
women rose sharply through the 1950s and ‘60s, and have remained
remarkably stable since. These women tend to marry after they have
finished college and started their careers.

The decline in
marriage, it turns out, is concentrated entirely among women with less
education – those who likely have the least to gain from modern hedonic
marriage.

This is not to say
that the economic downturn has had no effect at all on domestic life.
Census data show that the number of unwed couples living together rose
sharply last year. With rents high and jobs hard to come by, it’s no
surprise that people are doubling up.

Still, given that
the marriage rate remains on trend, the rise in cohabitation isn’t
coming at the expense of marriage. Instead, many young couples who
might otherwise merely be dating are moving in together. Some of them,
no doubt, will eventually marry. Truly, the recession has not torn
young couples apart; it has pushed them closer together.

© 2010 The New York Times