Over at Slate Matthew Yglesias has had it with wedding presents:

• Wedding gifts come from a different era – a time of dowries and arranged marriages.
• These days couples generally live together before they get married, and so they already have a lot of the things that couples typically receive as wedding gifts.
• Couples are also older now, and have higher incomes, enabling them to purchase the items that are typically given in a wedding.
• Gifts in general are economically inefficient. Rather than trying to guess what somebody else wants the best gift is cash so that people can choose what they want to purchase.
• At least with birthday gifts though everybody gets one and so it evens out. Not everybody is getting married these days and since married couples already live longer and are happier, why should they have the added benefit presents?
• A good modern alternative is college graduation presents – people graduate with a lot of debt and could use some help getting their life started up.

Read more of Yglesias’s tirade against wedding gifts, his own wedding experience, and more over here.

Source: Slate