The Poor’s Good Marriages

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:01:00 -0400

In a recent opinion column in The New York Times , Wharton School economist Justin Wolfers noted an important fact in marriage trends”then delivered an analysis more instructive on how to exacerbate the problem than how to solve it. The important fact is that while recent news reports of declining marriage rates among young people 25 to 34 have focused on the recession as an explanation, marriage rates over the past thirty years have been declining, through boom and bust alike, especially among less-educated Americans. Combine that with the fact that less-educated Americans are now more likely to divorce than better-educated Americans, and you have a yawning marriage gap between the college-educated and the non-college-educated.

What contributed to this shift? Wolfers suggests we now have a new marriage model, the “hedonic” model. In contrast to earlier marriages based on “the economic benefits of playing specialized roles,” the new model is based on “shared passions””or as Wolfers put it in an accompanying Freakonomics blog, on “consumption complementarities.”

This model privileges better-educated Americans, he suggests, because the success of marriage today depends on couples who share the same tastes “in books, hobbies, travel and so on.” Women with less education, he explains, “likely have the least to gain from modern hedonic marriage” because they have the least capacity for consumption.

Should the decline of marriage among the less-educated concern us? In a 2008 essay for the libertarian Cato Institute, co-authored with his significant other, economist Betsey Stevenson, Wolfers downplays the importance of marriage for less-educated women. “The decline in marriage among less-educated women would be an important concern if we were still in the world where women needed a husband for financial security,” they argue. But today,

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The Poor’s Good Marriages