To a Nordic ear, the idea of promoting marriage, one of the most precious of human experiences, as a policy solution to poverty sounds like something from the distant past. Marriage today shouldn’t be used to force people into a pact of financial dependency as it was in the old days, back when every decent person—especially every decent woman—sacrificed his or her true desires and set aside any qualms about the union for the sake of familial legacy and property. This is exactly the sort of old-fashioned arrangement that modernity is supposed to have freed us from.
