Drawing on The National Marriage Project’s 2010 Report, “When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America,” I’ve mused a little about divorce and the larger relations between changed social mores and increased inequalities in America, suggesting that the sexual revolution has allowed the bourgeois to live like bohemians at the expense of fraying the delicate and more vulnerable social fabric of working class and poor Americans.
More evidence: the economic benefits of marriage. The report points out that partners who are married make more, save more, and invest more. For example, married men make between 10 and 20 percent more than single men with similar educational levels and job histories.
So, to return to the much lamented fact of income inequality in America and the growing gap between those who succeed and those who struggle—it turns out the marriage, or more precisely the decline of marriage, is a big factor.
Here’s how the Report puts it: “After more than doubling between 1947 and 1977, the growth of median family income has slowed in recent years. A big reason is that married couples, who fare better economically than their single counterparts, have been a rapidly decreasing proportion of total families. In the same 20-year period, and in large part because of changes in family structure, family income inequality has increased significantly.”
Again, I’m perplexed. Why don’t progressives call for an end to no-fault divorce, or at least hector the popular media to put an end to the Sex-in-the-City glorification of the sexual revolution? If they care about the poor and the almost poor, then the data suggest that high on the to-do agenda should be strengthening the culture of marriage for everyone.
January 14th, 2011 | 11:49 am
Reno wants to strengthen the culture of marriage by ending no-fault divorce and by hectoring the media about the TV shows it offers.
The report actually supports the progressive idea of addressing the economy first so that people have an incentive to stay married. The report shows that marriage thrived when inequality was narrowing during the Great Compression, 1947-1977. The era was dominated by liberal economic policies and strong unions.
Both Democratic and Republican presidents supported these policies, which is why Eisenhower was seen as a traitor by the conservative movement that eventually led to Goldwater and Reagan. Inequality began to grow again when Democratic and Republican presidents alike—Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton—started deregulating like crazy and cutting the legs out from under unions.
Progressives are in fact working for the economic changes that will lead to stronger marriages and families. The fact that many progressives don’t concern themselves with marriage is a sad irony when their economic policies will do much good.
In the meantime, the media push shows like “Sex and the City” because they sell. They are good business. It’s the profit motive that drives cultural degradation.
January 14th, 2011 | 11:53 am
Staying married requires a wide-range of skills that can also lead to success in other areas of life. For example, people who stay married are: 1) able to make long-term commitments; 2) able to negotiate and solve conflicts; 3) able to defer gratification; 4) able to consider the needs and wants of others. I could go on and on.
These sames characteristics are also necessary to succeed financially in today’s world. Accordingly, I not sure whether the status of being married causes better financial outcomes or whether staying married and succeeding financially are the outcomes of the types of character traits described above.
I am, by the way, a big fan of marriage so don’t take my comments as being negative towards marriage.
January 14th, 2011 | 11:59 am
“Why don’t progressives call for an end to no-fault divorce, or at least hector the popular media to put an end to the Sex-in-the-City glorification of the sexual revolution?”
I guess because sex matters more than the poor?
January 14th, 2011 | 12:17 pm
@Michael — it’s reasonable to argue that Reno is confusing cause and effect. Either poverty leads to divorce or divorce leads to poverty. However, I think ‘deregulating like crazy’ and ‘cutting the legs out from under unions’ are slogans rather than data.
Additionally, many of the ‘rising inequality statistics’ insofar as they deal with household income are an artifact of divorce. Consider a universe of two families, each making $100,000 dollars a year. The median, top and bottom quartile for the household income is $100K. One of the families gets divorced. Lets say the split in income is 70-30. In our new three household universe, the top quartile now makes almost 50% more than the median, and more than 3 times as much as the bottom quartile…and yet the only thing that changed was a household splitting up.
January 14th, 2011 | 12:23 pm
Michael, Are you old enough to remember 1979-80? There was a reason (actually many) Ronald Reagan was elected that year: a decade of stagflation, peaking drug abuse, epidemics of unwanted pregnancy and venereal disease, precipitous decline in the quality of education, explosion of the crime rates, explosion of divorce rates, multi-generational dependency on government dole, the national humiliation of the hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan all caused or contributed to by liberal policies, judicial decisions, and/or attitudes.
And your notion that “progressive” policies strengthen families is absurd approaching insane. Abortion on demand, no-fault divorce, welfare momism, self-esteem movements in schools, softness on crime strenghthen families? In what universe?
January 14th, 2011 | 12:24 pm
Born in ’81, in my lifetime conservatives have always harped on the institution of marriage as being sacred. But if it is so sacred, why shouldn’t it be reserved for the best and the brightest? Why can’t it be society’s reward for having kept your nose (and credit score) clean?
I see nothing unconservative with entitling the elite to be the gatekeepers of matrimony. They’ve paid more than their share in taxes for the privilege.
It is not just 19th century Nietzsche, but 21st century uber-Americans who recognize how the spirit of nobility resides in seeking the privilege of the fewest. (“Genealogy of Morals, Essay I, Sec. 16.)
January 14th, 2011 | 12:55 pm
[...] Reno writing at First Things / First Thoughts: “Why don’t progressives call for an end to no-fault divorce, or at least hector the [...]
January 14th, 2011 | 12:59 pm
There’s a correlation/causation error in the original post as well as in Michael’s comment.
In the original: married people don’t make more money BECAUSE they’re married. (After all, employers can’t legally ask about your marital status, and they’d be setting themselves up for a lawsuit if they paid a similarly situated single person less than a married person for solely the reason of marital status.) It is because, as someone else pointed out, the personality traits that lead to successful marriage also contribute to a good employment record. Despite similar educations, some people still have bad personal habits, which lead them to a lesser employment record. (Setting aside, of course, that some people eschew marriage for the purpose of ministry or public service, which tend not to pay as well as private sector.)
Michael, the “progressive” culture of the ’50s and ’60s also coincided with a time when marriage was esteemed. The supposedly “un-progressive” years that followed came immediate on the heels of the sexual revolution, the drug culture, and the beginning of no-fault divorce, all darlings of the surely “progressive” movement.
It’s possible to draw a straight line between those “progressive” ideas and the problems with marriage today. It’s less easy to draw that line between economic policies with today’s problems.
January 14th, 2011 | 2:38 pm
Jim,
Are you denying that beginning with Carter, the federal government started deregulating all kinds of businesses? That’s a fact, not a slogan. It includes Clinton putting the final nail in the coffin of the Glass-Steagall act, which helped create the Great Recession we’re currently experiencing.
Are you denying that union membership has gone down and that the ease of joining unions has also been restricted? These again are facts, not slogans.
You’re entitled to applaud both deregulation and the constriction of unions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.
Divorce does lead to downward mobility, especially for women, but every study I’ve seen shows a general clobbering of the middle class. The gains enjoyed by the upper quintile of American families over the last thirty years have not been shared by the bottom 80%.
Fred,
Yes, I remember. Reagan was the first vote I cast. If you reread my post, you’ll see that I praised progressives for their economic policies and not for their social policies. I also stated that more important still than progressive social policies you describe is the way that business is driven by profits to degrade the culture. Sex sells. A fuller answer would say that industrialism brought people into cities, the anonymity of cities bred sexual license and the breakdown of cultural mores, and business leapt into action, creating mass culture and consumer culture, which sells more degradation. This pretty much describes American culture since the 1920s.
Buzz,
I encourage you to read the study. As I explained to Fred, I’m talking about progressive economic policy, not social policy.
January 14th, 2011 | 3:01 pm
Michael
But again you’re mistaking correlation with causation. Yes, all those things happened as you said. Whether they are good or bad is a separate discussion.
But the problems with marriage are more easily traced to other things that happened during that time, as I stated: the sexual revolution, the drug culture, and no-fault divorce.
Yes, some economic changes have made it harder for some to marry, particularly with the loss of entry-level manufacturing jobs during the ’60s through present. But those effect pale, I think, when contrasted with the cultural/social changes.
And just as an aside, I think a lot of the problems our economy faces today have been exacerbated by trade unionism. Detroit is in the sorry shape it is today because inept management agreed to larcenous union contracts. (GM is in the business of providing health care to tens of thousands of UAW employees and retirees and makes cars as a sideline.) The parlous shape of the federal and many state budgets is due almost entirely to public employee unions. (Nearly 75 cents of every dollar California spends goes towards salary or retirement benefits for state employees.)
January 14th, 2011 | 3:25 pm
I agree with the Buzz–but let’s pin the blame with precision: blame JFK for the sexual revolution, Dr. Leary for the drug culture, the Mafia for the proliferation of trade unions, and Reagan for no-fault divorce.
January 14th, 2011 | 5:05 pm
Sean, thanks for your comment, which I think is accurate.
From the original article: “If they care about the poor and the almost poor, then the data suggest that high on the to-do agenda should be strengthening the culture of marriage for everyone.”
But preserving the Sexual Revolution (and its sacrament, abortion) is what is most important to our cultural elites as a whole.
January 14th, 2011 | 7:24 pm
This is not really news.
Researching poverty a decade ago, I learned that the single biggest factor determining who will be a have-not is a broken family tree.
And we know why, too: because resources are linked to socioeconomic units, and family is the most important socioeconomic unit.
Resources flow down family lines. Marriage is essential for full, unconditional membership in a family: a child born out of wedlock is suspect – and I’m sorry to say, but in at least some cases, adopted kids can be too, if the family values ancestry. You can make laws setting a bare minimum for what a family or a person owes a family member, son, or daughter, but you cannot force a family to offer up more than the minimum – and as these laws are misused and even abused, it becomes harder even to enforce the laws anyway.
Liberals favor policies that will destroy the family and replace it by the state as the primary source of resource sharing. The government will be our daddy, will provide for us economically – and will have a corresponding right to control our thoughts/beliefs and our actions.
This appears to be why liberals are not concerned about restoring the family. Their rhetoric suggests that having to rely on a family is inherently oppressive (unlike being dependent on a government, presumably).
January 14th, 2011 | 7:35 pm
I want to see the larger study that examines entire family trees, especially in relation to relevant values (for instance, traits related to cohesion, such as loyalty and sense of duty), and more information on how different families balance individual rights against required contributions.
It seems to me that people who come from families that value what you might call “marriage related virtues” are more likely to stay married.
Their children are more likely to stay married, also.
Their children would also be more likely to prosper: having an intact and cohesive family tree would provide such children with more notample resources (not just financial resources, either, but information, opportunity, and social network type resources)
You don’t have to be an expert in game theory to recognize that, across generations, families capable of teaching their kids how to behave like team players (and how to play the game) have a huge advantage over families that cannot locate and adequately enforce boundaries re: the balance of rights:responsibilities.
January 14th, 2011 | 7:59 pm
And broadly speaking, you cannot be serious about wiping out poverty if you are seriously in favor of revising the traditional definition and protection of conjugal marriage.
January 15th, 2011 | 8:01 am
This data is outrightly misinterpreted by Dr. Reno.
It is an alarming notation that marriage is increasingly a luxury item possessed by the wealthy. The middle class and the poor have been left behind.
Ross Douthat’s column in early December resonates here. This culture war is a war of the elites: the right wing elite (who really are battling for economic licentiousness and a pornography of material excess) and the left wing elite who battle for sexual free
January 15th, 2011 | 8:02 am
…dom. (last word cut off…sorry)
January 15th, 2011 | 11:33 am
“It is an alarming notation that marriage is increasingly a luxury item possessed by the wealthy. The middle class and the poor have been left behind.”
But there is no real economic reason for that. A marriage license in my county costs $45. I suppose there’s a similar relatively small fee for the marriage ceremony itself. And the issue can’t be the “expense” of forming a household, since a high proportion of non-married couples have in fact formed a household. And once you’ve formed the marriage, getting divorced costs both parties a lot more than staying married, particularly if kids are involved.
So I can’t believe that the reasons for the increase in non-marriage or divorce are primarily economic.
January 15th, 2011 | 6:23 pm
The National Marriage Project’s 2010 report buries one key data (to page 62 of the report) and that is the ever declining *new* marriage rate:
FIGURE 1
Number of Marriages per 1,000
Unmarried Women Age 15 and
Older, by Year, United States:
1969 80.0
1972 77.9
1975 66.9
1980 61.4
1985 56.2
1990 54.5
1995 50.8
2000 46.5
2004 39.9
2009 36.0
The fact that couples with higher education are able to tough it out longer misses the point. The general trend is that the US population is abandoning marriage en masse.
Possible reasons? I think of two major ones:
1) Women’s Economic Indpendence: Women are no longer required to “marry or starve” like in centuries past. So there is less settling going on.
2) Men’s Aversion to Sexist Divorce Laws: Did you know that even though alimony laws were rewritten to sound gender-neutral, in practice 96% of alimony judgements are still handed down on men, and only 4% on women? Apparently many young men have been paying attention. These men don’t want to become meat for the Family Court Saussage Factory.
January 16th, 2011 | 12:48 am
Tom,
Not to mention child custody. If you can’t prove the mother is a cannibal, she gets the child. Fortunately for me (and in my opinion my child) my ex voluntarily gave me custody of my son. But I wanted children to raise them, not to visit them. That could well be a deterrent to marriage for some men.
Michael,
I see your point, but I disagree. The redistributionist economics of liberalism is directly responsible for the multigenerational welfare dependency I mentioned earlier. The power of unions drove many companies to bankruptcy and deprived their employees of the opportunity to support a family. In addition, the constant wage demands of the unions helped fuel the inflation of the 1970s, which made the poor even poorer. I think liberal economic policy was almost as disastrous as the liberal social policy you rightly condemn.
January 16th, 2011 | 1:19 am
Michael,
This thread is pretty stale, so you may never see this response, but I feel compelled to make it. Liberal economic policy was every bit as disastrous as liberal social policy in the 1970s. Redistributionist policies were directly responsible for the multigenerational welfare dependency I mentioned earlier. The power of (greedy and lazy) unions was a major contributor to the stagflation I also mentioned. Keynesian stimulus policies also contributed. Besides, where have you ever seen liberal economic policies separated from liberal social policies? I do agree that “sex sells”; therefore, free markets can degrade our culture. But that is a problem with the public, not the producers. Before the 1960s, you didn’t see the quasi-pornographic commercials, television shows, and movies that predominate today. But that was because any company, TV station, or movie company that tried it would have been buried by boycotts and public scandal. Thanks to “progressive” policies and attitudes, however, today any such efforts, if they ever got started, would be immediately and vociferously condemned as “censorship” by the progressives, and that argument would be accepted by the public because of its conditioning by 40+ years of liberal policies and attitudes. In other words, it’s liberal social policies, not conservative economic policies that are responsible for the degradation you so rightly point out.
January 18th, 2011 | 7:20 am
I wonder if in the calculations of the “marriage-is-good-for-people-economy” kinds, they take into account that marriage has all sort of tax benefits, thanks to goverment artificial intervention in favor for the figure (and thus, discrimination against singles)?
For an example of what I am saying, look this article. No surprise then than marriage is a more economic alternative, but not for its own merits…
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