[mlsu]

In America we spend that money on weddings. Lots of young people wipe their savings on getting married, at one of the most critical times in life (just before starting a family). It often prevents them having kids or buying a home for years.

[bobanrocky]

Ha, have you been to an indian wedding in India? Now that’s big big money. And the societal pressures to make it so are huge .. American weddings are so tame and sensible by comparison.

Far better to spend those $$ on weddings rather than funerals though !

[JumpCrisscross]

> have you been to an indian wedding in India? Now that’s big big money

Are Indian families spending multiples of annual incomes on weddings? They're lavishly done. But the cost of labour, land and e.g. fresh flowers is also ridiculously cheaper in India than in the West.

[decimalenough]

Per Wikipedia, the average cost of an Indian wedding is six times annual income.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Per Wikipedia, the average cost of an Indian wedding is six times annual income

Income disributions can produce that effect even if every couple spends less than a year's income on a wedding. This article says "out of 325 families that declined into poverty in western Kenya over a period of 25 years, 63 percent cited “heavy expenses related to funerals” as a major cause." I'm curious if we have similar statisitcs of financial burdens caused by wedding expenses.

[s1artibartfast]

big question is who pays

[squigz]

> Far better to spend those $$ on weddings rather than funerals though !

Is it though? Can you elaborate why you think that?

To me, they seem to serve basically the same purpose. They are both, at the end of the day, a way for family & friends to get together and bond over a person/people.

[bobanrocky]

In my experience (60 yrs, almost equally in India and the US) are that weddings are typically more suited as social occasions with fun, cheer, enjoyable music, food & drinks. Funerals also bring folks & families together, but its a sombre and more disciplined/rigid vibe. I know which one I prefer ..

[Aurornis]

You can always find disaster stories about couples who wipe out their savings and put themselves in a precarious financial situation for a wedding they can’t afford, but it’s actually super common.

Traditional weddings costs are paid in part or full by the parents. Many well off young people pay their own way. If neither is an option it’s also common to have a smaller or home-grown wedding.

If you know enough people we can all likely think of someone who overspent and regretted it, but I disagree that it’s the common cultural thing to do. It’s a topic where righteous people like to heap scorn on others for doing it, though.

[mlsu]

It's still very irrational no matter who pays. The article is looking at a society-wide wealth here isn't it?

I mean a party? Thousands and thousands of dollars for just one day?

I did the irrational thing, paid a lot for my wedding and it was really special. My family is much closer to her family because of it. From me and my wife's rational self-interested perspective, it makes no sense: we would be in a better position financially had we not splurged a little for the wedding. Our house could be bigger. We could have more optimally allocated our capital.

However, the family bonds being strong outweighs all of that. When we zoom out a little bit and look at our extended family and friend group, it all makes sense. These are the people who will help raise our kids, take care of us when we are down on our luck, etc. The 50 people who attended can, because of our big expensive wedding, put faces to each others' names. It was a fun party for us, but it actually served a very important purpose. This value will not be registered in the GDP number.

I'm poking fun at the article. That first of all, we (the enlightened, modern, etc) spend an absolute metric fuckton ton of money on irrational meaningless shit, due to social pressure. I would point the author of the article to homeopathic medicine, which is a 10b market; just ten of these equals the GDP of Ghana. Do a ctrl-f for colonialism or imperialism or extraction and... yeah, sure. They must be poor because they do quirky things at funerals.

[cortesoft]

I am so glad we had a big wedding. It was so much fun, and all my friends and family had a blast.

[AussieWog93]

It's so funny you say that. Was literally just chatting to my wife the other day about how mediocre weddings are. You spend $20-$50k basically LARPing as landed British gentry, and end up having less fun than the average 21st, Christmas or New Year's. So much more stress in planning too.

[cortesoft]

My wife and I are not party people. We would never host a part with 100 friends and family for any reason other than our wedding.

It felt really special to see all my friends and family out there in the audience supporting my wife and I sharing our vows to each other. I was grinning like an idiot the whole ceremony because I was just so happy.

I had always loved going to my cousin's weddings. No one in my family is religious anymore (my uncle was a priest but left the priesthood, I was raised atheist), but we all do take marriage pretty seriously. I have 10 cousins and 4 sets of aunts and uncles, and all of them are still married to their first spouse. It felt very special to join that club. I was the second to last cousin to get married (I am also the second to youngest).

All my cousins had amazing weddings, too. They were all big parties that we had a lot of fun at. I felt like it was my turn to host one, and it felt magical. We got married at the downtown library, which is a special place for us. We love taking our kids there and showing them where we were married.

Having spent that money hasn't really changed my life in any significant way. I don't think anything would be different if I had an extra $60k. For the price of a nice car, we got a magical night that we will never forget, wonderful memories, and a fantastic way to celebrate our commitment to each other. It was a once in a lifetime thing. Way more valuable to me than a nice car.

[Glyptodon]

I don't know. If you had 50 friends, reserved space at a decent restaurant, and got a DJ you could totally have a good time for what's been solidly under $10k even until recently in most of the country. Outfits + photographer + rings add, but there's obviously a lot of latitude to have a really fun time in that price bracket depending on what you like. And there are all kinds of alternatives. We have some friends who went to Italy with a wedding party of about 8 people (family and close friends) and had a great time. I don't think it was cheap, but it was probably below the low end of the $20k if some of the wedding party paid their own way and they had a really fun Italian vacation. We also have friends who just borrowed someone's house, got a pile of food delivered and had basically a game night wedding thing.

[cobbzilla]

I know the kinds of weddings you speak of, and it’s sad, and hard to disagree.

Even more sad that for $20-$50k you /could/ have a super unique, awesome and even low-stress wedding (ok that last part depending on parents/relatives may be impossible), yet so many are the same songs (you know them all), same venues (estate, banquet hall, rooftop, etc), same food.

[knicholes]

Are you otherwise well off? How do you define "big?"

[cortesoft]

We do pretty well, although it is expensive living in LA.

We had a little over 100 people, our wedding was at the downtown library, and we spent about $60k. It didn't really hurt our ability to buy a house a few years later, an extra $60k would not have changed our budget at all.

[gigatree]

The good thing is you can have a big wedding without going into debt (assuming you’re rich or don’t mind public parks)

[Thorrez]

Yes, we spend a lot on weddings, but not as much (adjusted for income) as they do on funerals. In Ghana they spend 2.3x-9x the yearly median income[1] on a funeral. The median income in the US is $45,140[2], so if we were to spend the same amount relative to income on weddings as they do on funerals, that would mean our weddings would be $103k-$406k.

[1] https://remotepeople.com/countries/ghana/average-salary/

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

[whalesalad]

My wife and I eloped at the city hall. Our wedding was $0.

[Glyptodon]

I think people often spend too much on weddings, but even expensive weddings (IMO) are still in the same cost bracket as a relatively boring and reliable car. If buying a reliable car sets you back years... I view it more so as a sign that income levels are too low and people are trying to counter signal "poor stigma." (That said, weddings are also the kind of thing where extracting time from your kinship group can drastically lower costs. Rent a pavilion in a camp ground, have a bunch of people bring grills and some speakers and you can basically keep things pretty cost contained.) And of course upper class weddings are a whole different thing.

[jareklupinski]

a couple can have a really big wedding for a really decent price if they plan everything themselves / with family

if they go through a planner, the 'coordination' eats most of the budget, almost entirely so if 'their people' get involved with setup / teardown

[blindriver]

Same thing with engagement rings, it's just a stupid fake tradition created by DeBoers in the 1950s that costs an inordinate amount of money for nothing.

I really hope that lab grown diamonds puts that entire industry out of business.

[hajile]

Lab corundum is where it's at. Almost as hard as diamond (Mohs 9), but much less prone to cracking than diamond. It's available in tons of colors (most famous are blue and red -- sapphires and rubies). Lab-grown is so much better than natural that the way they identify natural is by looking for imperfections that lab versions don't have.

Oh, and diamonds burn while aluminum oxide does not.

There's no need to go broke when you can buy a superior product for less money.

[Glyptodon]

I definitely think sapphire is the best gemstone for rings given the huge variety of colors and reasonable synthetic rough prices. My only gripe is that green shades that look nice are hard to find in synthetics.

[hn_throwaway_99]

This seems very different that what the article describes.

Sure, some young people may spend more than they can really afford on their wedding, but this still seems like a personal choice - tons of people have cheap weddings (or gasp, elope). I don't think may people are cutting back on eating (when they already suffer from malnutrition) to have a big wedding like how the article describes funerals in Zimbabwe.

Plus, I think the relatively few cases in the US where young people do feel intense family pressure to overspend on a "big wedding" show similar dynamics and downsides to the "kinship societies" that the article is really about.

[overfeed]

> to have a big wedding like how the article describes funerals in Zimbabwe.

I clicked through to the linked about Zimbabwe, and the article misrepresented the research (at best). The paper notes that when families have unexpected funeral expenses, they hold onto assets if they only have one in that asset class at the expense of temporary food insecurity, which would be like not selling your only car in the face of a shock medical bill and opting for cheaper groceries/ramen.

The paper notes that when Zimbabwean more than one item in an asset class, they are likely to sell one (or more). This reads a lot like generic loss-aversion and not specific to attitudes about death, which would require to be controlled against expense type (e.g. weddings, environmental disaster or unexpected loss of income).