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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).