Love and marriage

Both horse and carriage seem to be disappearing.

Since its founding in 1990, Center of the American Experiment has been one of the most consistent and high-profile advocates for the often-controversial view that the decline of the marriage rate in the United States is an economic and social problem of the first order. Two new, high-profile books show that this debate finally caught up with us.  

In The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, economist Melissa Kearney charts the decline of marriage. 

Between 1970 and 2020, the share of 30- to 50-year-olds who were married fell from 87 to 60 percent for men and from 83 to 63 percent for women. This is not because more people are getting divorced — divorce rates are lower now than in 1979 — but because fewer adults are getting married.  

This has not been a uniform decline across the population. It varies by education. Kearney notes that:  

…during the eighties, the pace of decline in men getting married continued among high-school educated men, accelerated among men with less than a high school degree, and leveled off among college educated men; marriage became relatively more common among elites…The share of high-school educated men (including those who’ve completed some college) who are married is now on a par with the low rate of marriage among high school dropouts.  

Among women:  

…from the 1960s to the 1990s, women with college degrees were less likely to be married than women with high school degrees. By the mid-1990s, these women became the most likely to be married. While all demographic groups are less likely to marry, the women who are marrying least are those with less education. 

It also varies by ethnic group. Between 1980 and 2020, the share of men age 30 to 50 who were married fell from 81 to 65 percent for white men but from 60 to 41 percent for black men and from 84 to 55 percent for Hispanic men. For Asian men, the share declined from 81 to 75 percent.  

Kearney outlines the economic consequences of fewer parents and fewer incomes in each household. Single parents face twin deficits of the time and money they can devote to their children relative to what two parents can devote and these deficits negatively impact their children. Because of this, sociologist Brad Wilcox writes in Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization:  

When Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues looked at the factors driving economic mobility for poor children – i.e., their capacity to go from rags in childhood to riches in adulthood… They found that “the strongest and most robust predictor [of children’s economic mobility] is the fraction of children [in the community] with single parents”… Not income inequality. Not race. Not school quality. 

We have been looking in the wrong places for the causes of some of our most pressing social and economic problems.  

Both Wilcox and Kearney advance William Julius Wilson’s “marriageable men” hypothesis as a cause: the large-scale loss of manufacturing jobs, which often paid well for unskilled work, made men less attractive marriage prospects — as well as changes in cultural norms. The policy wonk must ask, “What is to be done?” Kearney doubts that these trends can be reversed and offers policies to ameliorate the consequences: “As a matter of federal policy and national spending,” she writes:  

I believe the U.S. should do more to provide for the material needs of children — through increased income support, safe housing, adequate health care, nutritious food, and high-quality early-childhood education.  

While this may do something for the deficit of money it does little for the deficit of time.  

Wilcox, while acknowledging that “government can only do so much here,” is more optimistic that policy can counter these trends. He suggests “defunding college” and “refunding vocational education”; boosting family incomes by expanding the child tax credit with a 20 percent supplement for married parents; eliminating marriage penalties in the tax and welfare systems; expanding school choice; and promoting “the success sequence” of graduating high school, getting a full-time job, and waiting until marriage to have children.  

The Center has long argued in favor of vocational education, elimination of marriage penalties in the tax system, and expanded school choice. We have not advocated for expanded child tax credits.  

In 1995, Mitch Pearlstein wrote, “in the matter of this nation’s human capital, no threat is greater than the disintegration (and non-formation) of far too many American families.” As these books argue, that remains the case.