What Are The Odds That Your Marriage Will Last?

What are the odds that you'll still be married in five years? In twenty? A nifty little tool lets you enter the six most important factors that predict marital longevity and find out the odds you'll still be married at any anniversary you choose.

Those key variables are:

• The woman's age at time of marriage
• The couple's combined years of education after high school
• The number of children from this marriage
• How religious the couple is
• The number of divorces among the couple's parents
• The number of previous marriages for the couple

It does occasionally return odd results, such as odds greater than 100% -- does that mean you should get married all over again? -- but it's fun to play with the numbers and see how important things like age at marriage are (a lot!).

We found the site using this list of prediction tools. Others include

• "Predict How Long You'll Live"
• Predict Your Liklihood of Illness or Disability
• Predict Risk of Cancer, Diabetes, Heart Disease, Osteoperosis and Stroke
• Predict Heart Disease Risk
• Predict How Much You'll Have to Retire

The page is an adjunct to the new book Super Crunchers, in which Yale law-and-economics professor Ian Ayres says that we are entering an age with both an incredible amount of data and the tools to analyze it, and that seat-of-the-pants judgement will play a far lesser role in future decisionmaking. If you'd like to get the gist of the book while in your car or on a run, there's a podcast interview with Ayres at EconTalk.