Why has the number of people getting married collapsed over the past 60 or so years?
Advice to conservatives who want to convince liberals to talk up marriage:
The key persuasion (if you do actually want to persuade) strategy here is to clarify that you’re talking about hectoring *men* not women.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) September 22, 2023
This is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but worth responding to. There are two hypotheses here. Hypothesis #1 is that the decline of marriage has something to do with men, who have gotten worse and more feckless over the years. But that's not really so:
This is no great shakes—it averages to less than 1% growth per year—but neither does it suggest that men have become unreliable sluggards. It's true that fewer men are working these days than in 1950, but even so about 90% of all prime-age men participate in the labor force. That's nowhere near a big enough drop to explain the collapse of marriage.
But might the decline in marriage be the consequence of some non-financial failing among men? Sure, anything is possible. But all the evidence suggests that, overall, both men and women have gotten generally better over the years, not worse. The idea that modern men are uniquely unmarriageable is mostly just a historically blinkered view that plays down how crappy men have always been.
No, the answer is almost certainly Hypothesis #2: it has something to do with women. Does it ever:
Starting in the '50s for Black women—and then really taking off around 1963—incomes skyrocketed. This same thing happened among white women, but it started later and their incomes didn't increase as much. This is consistent with (a) women rejecting marriage when they started to make enough money to get along on their own, and (b) Black women rejecting marriage earlier and more strongly than white women.
Were social pressures also involved? Did marriage start to decline only when society started to accept single motherhood?
Probably. But it's worth noting that this started among Black women in the '50s, before the counterculture revolution of the '60s but after they started earning more money. So it may be that causality worked the other way: as women made more money they ditched men in greater numbers, and as that happened society slowly adapted.
In any case, I'd guess that the conventional wisdom is correct on this: marriage declined because women became self-supporting and could raise children on their own if they wanted to. And many of them wanted to.
POSTSCRIPT: By the way, did you know that Black women caught up to white women years ago and today earn as much as they do?
On average, Black men still earn 25% less than white men.
shorter version: Marriage is a LOT of work for women, and if you’re not getting an economic benefit, why are you there? yes yes “love,” but love and an empty sack is worth the sack.
I find this analysis confusing. Not because I think income levels have nothing to do with marriage, but because I find it odd to look at marriage as a function of men, individually, or women, individually. I also find this unconvincing in general as a primary reason for lower marriage rates.
Whether or not people get married is a function of something couples do.
This analysis of income and supposing that being able to raise kids on one's own is what's behind the lower rate of marriage is making a LOT of assumptions without checking those assumptions against data.
Changing social pressures and norms are far more likely to be the cause. There is less stigma against single parenthood than there used to be. People are having fewer kids, and fewer people are having kids - so there's less reason to get married. And if both individuals in a couple are working (as is more often the case these days), there is essentially zero fiscal incentive to get married. You only get a tax break for marriage if your household is carrying only 1 income, or in households with hugely disparate incomes such that married filing together would result in a lower tax bill.
you can also look at rates of felony arrests....
https://journalistsresource.org/economics/felony-triple-prison-conviction-black/
the "war on drugs" that went after minority communities because they voted for the wrong party has consequences...
I would suggest that there's a feedback cycle. As women joined the labor force in increasing numbers, Fewer women felt economic pressure to get married. As fewer women were pushed into marriage, the social pressure on their younger counterparts to get married fell off. As the social pressure to get married fell off, more women joined the labor force.
There's also the decline in religiosity and the demographic transition. One of the reasons for marriage is to provide a stable two parent environment in which to raise children. Fewer children means fewer reasons to get married. The decline in religiosity means that "living in sin" has largely stopped being strongly frowned on. From that angle, I might ask if there are less cohabiting couples. That is, if both married couples and common-law couples are counted, is it pairing up that has declined or just formal marriage? If it's just formal marriage that's declined, I would attribute the decline in formal marriage to social factors, mostly the decline in religiosity, rather than to economic factors, which can be expected to affect couple formation regardless of the legal status of those couples.
According to Pew Research, between 1995 and 2019, the percentage of adults who were married declined from 58% to 53% while number percentage living with an unmarried partner increased from 3% to 7%. So the amount of pairing hasn't changed much.
Shocking. Women don’t want to have to support men, and once they had enough income coming in from their own paychecks, they decided living with a man who would very likely make them do all the housework and possibly take emotional/physical abuse for decades too wasn’t worth it. They can get better companionship from friends and sexual intimacy from boyfriends without risk of pregnancy, so really, what’s the point anymore of having a husband? You can’t even say “to have someone to grow older with and take care of me later in life” because lots of husbands either die first or dump their wives when they get too old/sickly. (The older men in my family are notorious for this: several divorced their wives after they came down with major medical problems, the bastards.)
A major trend not mentioned in the graphs is that more women are marrying other women, not men. So they'll have companionship, sex, romance, someone who does their share of housework, and whether there will be children is more of a choice.
Basically a lot of men are complete assholes and women only stayed married to them because they needed to. Give women options and they won’t put up with them.
Now a sane person reacts to that by saying “men need to stop being assholes and become worthy partners”. Conservatives say “we need to go back to the old days where women had no choice but to marry us”
Hmm, well okay.
Bring on the AI waifubots and elite femboys. If a guy can dress as a cuter girl than most girls what need for women?
The maga mystique seems to be "total glass bowl." Nobody tells ME what to do! I want to carry my big old rifle everywhere I go! Grow a scuzzy unkempt beard! Turn on the Fox News, good and loud! Wave that Gadsden flag, or better yet, the starz'n'barz!
Anything less isn't "FREEDUMB!" Civilization is for snowflake kucks!
and yet... Tucker Carlson is married, as is Karl Rove.
I thought the CW was that if marriage is needed for sex, children, social esteem and steady relationships, lots of people will marry. Whereas when all those things can be had anyway and the only benefit to marriage is the opportunity to throw an expensive party, lots of people won't.
Admittedly, women who don't want a partner have it easier now they make more money. But marriage stats still say much less than stats on living together.
This is maybe only tangentially related, but does the NAEP separate their scores by gender? Is there any noticeable gap between the genders in education attainment and/or performance?
Racism is so weird!
Black women's income matches white women's income, so obviously structural racism is no longer being used against black women, but black men lag white men... Apparently racists are only racist against black men and not black women?!?
Minimum wage has gone up in many states even though it has been stagnant at the Federal level.
I haven't found the details for the data Kevin used, but income levels does not reflect the number of hours worked to get to that income. And other places point to significant pay gaps--see 25-54 age group:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/18/heres-how-much-men-and-women-earn-at-every-age.html
The angry guy full of grievances sees the race boogeyman everywhere. Lol, poor guy.
Black women are total powerhouses. They have supported the Democratic Party, doing the hard work for decades now. They also stand up for themselves, taking no guff and demanding respect.
If a black man emulated any of these behaviors, chances are he'd be shot dead on the spot.
So racism, yeah.
Kevin, the fact that women’s financial prospects have improved does seem extremely likely as a causal explanation for why marriage rates have declined.
Matt’s point, as I understand it, is not “something changed about men and that’s why marriage rates have gone down,” it’s “something needs to change about men if we want marriage rates to go back up.”
Now that women have more financial freedom, they no longer have to accept less-desirable husbands out of financial necessity. So if we want marriage rates to go back up, men need to step up our game and be desirable. We can’t just rely on a woman needing us for the money.
I doubt Matt would disagree with much of anything you’ve written. But your arguments are only tangential to his point.
1. Formal marriage may be getting rarer, but how many people are still actually living in long-term, committed relationships and just not making it official (for whatever reason)? Hardly anyone gets married any more in Scandinavia, for example, but most households with kids have the two parents living together. 2. As a number of people have pointed out, as women gained financial and social independence, it removed one of the main reasons they had felt obligated to get married in the first place. Now women have choices and men have to have something to offer a partner other than just being a breadwinner. A lot of young men have apparently not quite figured that out yet.
It should be axiomatic that anything Matt Yglesias writes should be ignored.
+100