The Decline OF MARRIAGE
It used to be that an overwhelming majority of Americans married, and an overwhelming majority of American children were raised within two-parent families. Over the past six decades, this has changed.
Now roughly 40 percent of children are born outside wedlock, and about one-quarter live in single-parent homes. The share of married Americans has fallen significantly since 1960, with a further decline portended by the marriage rates of the younger generations.
But it hasn’t changed for everyone. The rich and well-educated still marry—not quite at 1950s rates, but something close. It’s the poor and working class and (increasingly) middle class who don’t.
The meaning of this class division has been the subject of many cycles of debate, and there’s a reassuring familiarity to the arguments raised by and in response to Melissa Kearney’s new book “The Two-Parent Privilege,” which rehearses the evidence that being raised by married parents is good for kids and that the decline of marriage among the working class is linked to economic struggles and stratification.
As usual, you have conservatives arguing for stronger cultural norms encouraging marriage before having kids and discouraging divorce thereafter.
As usual, you have centrists and some liberals shying away from anything that smacks too much of stigma or heteronormativity but arguing for some sort of milder encouragements for marriage in cultural messaging and economic policy.
As usual, you have other liberals and the left arguing against a traditional marital norm, casting it as conservative, confining and potentially cruel, and insisting that the inequalities linked to marriage fundamentally need to be remedied by money.
The strongest point made against the focus on marriage that Kearney advocates is the deep uncertainty about exactly what kind of lever, cultural or economic or political, would suffice to reverse such a broad, multigenerational social trend.
I’ll try to write something more about that question in the future. But I want to talk about some of the difficulties in the progressive case against a focus on marriage, using essays by Rebecca Traister and Matt Bruenig to tease out what this case requires you to believe.
From a left-wing perspective, the difficulty in dismissing the importance of marriage and married childbearing is precisely the fact that the upper and upper-middle classes still marry at high rates, defer childbearing until marriage and divorce less frequently than other social strata. Because when the well-off follow a particular practice so consistently, the normal left-wing assumption is that the choices must serve their class interests in some way.
Why do upper-class people so often send their kids to private schools, for instance, or hire private tutors, or pressure their offspring to attend elite colleges and universities, or seek to protect their family wealth
from the taxman? For the sake of the reproduction of privilege.
And Traister, in her argument against Kearney and other marriage advocates (me included), basically concedes that upper-class marriage does do something similarly privilege-enhancing for people entering it. In addition to being a “rewarding capstone life event,” a late-20s or early-30s celebration of professional-class success, wedlock also “allows the already economically stable to become even more stable by combining their resources.”
Which is the cold, economistic case for why more mothers and fathers should be married, no matter what resources they have to pool. But Traister then argues that this argument doesn’t really apply to people whose lives aren’t stable to begin with:
“For those who have money, marriage is likely to help them to have even more of it; for those who find a good match, there are many emotional and societal rewards of partnership. But you need stability first; you need the money, jobs, housing, and health care first. And these are the things that the American government, particularly the American right, does not want to offer its people.”
If marriage has the economic benefits that she concedes it may have—the pooling of resources, the everyday flexibility, the possibility of specialization and economies of scale—why wouldn’t it be at least somewhat beneficial for people who don’t have that much money yet? Financial hardship puts unusual stresses on relationships. But hardship also increases the marginal benefit of any kind of economic stabilization, making marriage more beneficial, in some ways, for working-class parents than for the rich.
There are some clever theories for why this might not always be the case. As I was writing this, a new paper appeared arguing that liberal divorce laws make marriage less valuable to poorer couples because the partners who specialize in child rearing or domestic labor have more to lose if their spouses leave them, whereas in the same scenario for rich couples, the spouses have more assets to equitably split up.
That kind of subtle argument notwithstanding, the basic point stands: If pairing off can even modestly reduce financial stress relative to single parenthood, it seems like a matter of economic self-interest for couples to at least try to make it work before having kids.
Alternatively, if the best and only way to get more working-class couples to choose marriage is to raise their incomes upfront, then you would expect marriage to gradually revive as Americans get richer. But marriage rates have steadily declined outside the upper class over a period of decades in which most Americans—not just the upper class but also the working class—have enjoyed rising incomes, for men and women both.
There has been stagnation and disappointment as well as growth, and there are good arguments about how the fixed costs of child rearing make the parental position worse than median income trends alone might suggest; we can certainly do better in supporting families than we do right now.
But the disappearance of marriage is not just an underclass phenomenon; it feels like a social crisis precisely because it’s spread well beyond the very poor. And there’s no way to torture the data to prove that most working-class and middle-class Americans are much poorer today than in the much-more-married past of 1965 or 1985.
So if marriage confers benefits on the upper-class couples who enter into it, if it is desired by many people and on paper economically beneficial, and yet it is declining rapidly even as living standards rise, then something besides material deprivation has to be involved.
What that something might be, from the marriage-skeptical perspective, can be seen by turning from Traister to Bruenig. His critique of Kearney’s book concedes the apparent material benefits of marriage, then argues that you can’t possibly tell whether those benefits would have actually accrued to nonmarried couples had they been married, because you don’t know if the nonmarried spouses and absent parents would have been any good at being spouses and parents:
“The assumption that the missing parents … are average parents who would contribute an average amount of earnings and an average amount of child care is obviously ridiculous. As with any group, the missing parents are a heterogenous bunch, but that population almost certainly skews toward below-average earnings and below-average domestic contribution, with many actually having a net-negative domestic contribution, whether because they are abusive, demanding or otherwise.”
This is obviously true for some share of the unmarried population and divorced population. Some subsets of kids are better off without a dysfunctional or dangerous parent; some sets of spouses are better off separated or divorced.
But what share? Bruenig’s point is that Kearney and other marriage apologists don’t know. But if we’re relying on the problem of “net-negative” potential spouses to explain why roughly half of all births to women without four-year college degrees now happen without married fathers, while the same figure for women with four-year degrees is about 10 percent, then we’re basically assuming that a really big slice of moderately educated Americans— men, mostly—are presently unmarriageable, unfit and dysfunctional, despite incomes that are higher than those of the almost universally married parents of the Eisenhower-era past.
This is a fairly bleak perspective.Sure, it allows, married child rearing seems to benefit the professional class, it seems to benefit many of our journalistic friends and colleagues and neighbors, it’s what we expect from those friends and neighbors’ kids when the time comes … but you can’t expect marriage to help women making $35,000 a year because the potential spouses in their socioeconomic bracket aren’t any good at being decent husbands and fathers.
So all we can offer to those parents is money, education and the hope that their kids will eventually go to a four-year college, apparently the only place where you can find someone whom it’s safe to marry before you start having kids.
Bleak stuff, but hardly incoherent if you take a certain kind of feminist analysis seriously. This analysis, which I think Traister would partly endorse, holds that more men were marriageable under pre-sexual-revolution conditions because women usually depended on them for income and were forced to stick with them, no matter what.
Then, when women’s incomes rose and nonmarital and divorced parenting became more socially acceptable, those same men’s faults were thrown into stark relief, even when they made enough money to be technically economically useful around the house.
But not all men; the men of the professional classes were successfully re-educated into a new set of egalitarian and emotionally sensitive norms, making them desirable partners even under conditions of female independence. So the impediment to expanding the present benefits of upper-class marriage to the rest of society is psychological, not just material.
More money helps, but you ultimately need less educated men to effectively become different kinds of people, to discard toxic masculinity and embrace enlightened manhood in some form. (Especially since now that women earn more college degrees, they’re often the ones who need to marry down the education ladder, and you can’t expect that to happen if blue-collar men are stuck on patriarchy.)
I have a pretty different view of how marriage declined, what a marital revival might look like after feminism, and what kind of responsibility the upper class bears to the rest of our society.
But the foregoing is the best way to make sense of the data we have while sticking firmly to progressive priors. As with other aspects of contemporary progressivism, no matter how much talk there is about economics, when you follow the logic, it’s clear a kind of therapy comes first.