Here's an article about the "shidduch" (matchmaking) crisis being experienced in some parts of the orthodox Jewish community. It's interesting (in particular to readers of this blog) for several reasons. As it's title suggests, it is about both a particular institutional feature of a marriage market and about the use of secular science by religious communities.
The general problem is the "marriage squeeze" in communities in which husbands tend to be older than wives, when birth cohorts are growing (so there are e.g. more younger women than, say, two-year-older men). The author argues that the practice of asking new students in yeshiva to promise not to date during their first semester adds congestion to the mix, when they all come on the marriage market at the same time.
(A glossary may help: shidduchim is matchmaking, a shidduch is a match, a shadchan is a matchmaker, chochma is wisdom, a yeshiva bochur is a student, bochurim is the plural,
From VIN News:
The Freezer Policy and Science By Rabbi Yair Hoffman
"There are several thousand more young women than young men currently in shidduchim. ... "We have girls who have not received a single shidduch call in months — if not ever.
...
"We cannot ignore the needs of half of Klal Yisroel. The time to act is now.
"The Midrash in Eichah Rabbah (2:13) teaches us: “Im yomar lecha adam: Chochma baGoyim — Taamin. If a person tells you that the nations of the world possess wisdom — believe it.
...
"We are instructed to take Chochma seriously. The empirical sciences, mathematics, economics, the study of how systems behave — these are chochma. And Chazal tell us: taamin. Believe it. Use it.
...
"Three of the world’s foremost experts in the science of matching markets and queue theory have produced findings that apply directly — with surgical precision — to the shidduch crisis and to the structural damage caused by the Freezer. The Torah tells us: taamin. Listen to what they have found.
"Winner of the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his foundational work on matching markets — Professor Roth devoted his career to studying the precise kind of system our shidduch world represents: a two-sided market where two groups must find each other, and where price alone cannot clear the market. He uses marriage itself as his primary model.
"In his landmark paper “Jumping the Gun: Imperfections and Institutions Related to the Timing of Market Transactions” (American Economic Review, 1994), Roth documented a phenomenon he calls “unraveling” — the destructive timing failures that occur in matching systems. He found that timing problems:
“…play an important and persistent role in a wide variety of settings” — explicitly including “marriage in a variety of cultures.”
"Roth further showed that when one side of a matching system is held back and then released in a synchronized wave — precisely what the Freezer does to bochurim — the result is “congestion”: a catastrophic overload in which a sudden surge of participants meets an accumulated backlog they cannot process equitably. In his research on the market for clinical psychologists, Roth documented that congestion left thousands of participants “stranded” without a match — assigned to no one — not because of a shortage of partners, but purely because of the structural timing failure.
...
"Professor John Little of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published in 1961 what is now called “Little’s Law” — the foundational theorem of all queue theory, cited in virtually every textbook on operations research, supply chain management, and systems analysis. It is one of the most proven and universally applied mathematical theorems in modern science.
"Little’s Law states with mathematical certainty:
“An arrival rate exceeding an exit rate would represent an unstable system, where the number of waiting customers in the store would gradually increase towards infinity.”
...
"In plain language: once a timing imbalance is introduced into a matching system, the backlog will grow
...
"In their jointly published research, Roth and Xing documented what happens when a large matching system attempts to process too many participants in too narrow a window of time:
“Congestion is an issue whenever a large number of offers have to be made [simultaneously]. The system… stranded [thousands of participants] on waiting lists… assigned to no one or to options for which they expressed no preference.”
...
This is the precise mechanism the Freezer creates. By holding back an entire cohort of bochurim and releasing them at once into a pool of girls that has been accumulating for months, the system is flooded. Bochurim cannot adequately evaluate the full pool. They gravitate toward the newest, youngest entrants. The girls who have been waiting longest — those who entered the system months or years earlier — are stranded. They are not passed over because of any failing of their own. They are stranded by a structural timing failure
...
"To fix a problem, we must understand it. The primary cause of the crisis is well-known: bochurim generally marry girls a number of years younger than themselves. Since the Jewish population grows every year, Baruch Hashem, this age gap means more girls enter shidduchim each year than boys — and many girls are inevitably left behind.
"But there is a second, compounding structural factor: the timing distortion caused by the BMG Freezer. Any bochur who arrives for the winter zman, beginning Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan, must wait three and a half months until the Fifteenth of Shvat before he may begin dating. He signs a written agreement to this effect. The stated purpose was noble: to allow bochurim to become acclimated to their new yeshivah and learn without interruption."
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previous posts about the shidduch crisis:
Friday, January 8, 2016 Baby booms and marriage squeezes
Tuesday, December 17, 2024 Marriage markets among religious Jews
and on matchmaking more generally:)
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 What has G-d been doing since the Creation? (Matchmaking, of course...))
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