That’s the title of a short paper (what we call an “extended abstract” on the day before the Population Association conference deadline) I just posted.
This revises and updates a post I wrote five years ago. It makes the same argument but uses a new data setup. The argument is that the marriages achieved by a (hypothetically successful) marriage promotion policy would be less economically beneficial than the average already-existing marriage. This seems painfully obvious, but it undermines a large fraction of the elite discourse promotion marriage, which has a habit of rhetorically jumping from the average differences between married and unmarried people to the need to get more poor people married. Underlying this basic insight is the mind-boggling suggestion that people who aren’t married might be at least partly aware of the costs and benefits of marriage given their actually-existing options, and are already acting accordingly.
(In addition to my recent posts, in the last couple weeks, Matt Bruenig made some headway on this, first here in response to Melissa Kearney, and then here in response to Ross Douthat. I’m also happy to report that, in response to my endless hollering at passersby, someone respectable finally invited me to review Kearney’s book, so that should eventually happen as well.)
So here is a little data exercise. I’m open to expanding on this, so suggests are (as always) welcome. The posted paper has links to the data and code, as well as some history and literature review. This is a shorter, less technical explanation.
The gist of it is to compare two groups of women and their coresidential partners: those who have married for the first time in the previous year versus those who are cohabiting and have never been married – the latter of whom could, in principle, have chosen marriage last year instead. After describing how women in cohabiting couples have partners with more meager resources than those who were just married, I show that the economic benefits of marriage are likely to be greater for women who are most likely to marry. In other words, those added to the population of married couples under the influence of pro-marriage policy would be expected to reduce the average observed benefits of marriage. I do this separately for Black and White women — not so much to explain the inequality between them but because their dynamics are very different.
Caveats: I am keenly aware that using crude, point-in-time economic indicators to assess potential marriage returns is a very blinkered approach. Life, especially around questions of inequality, is so much more more than these variables. That’s why this is just an illustration of an obvious point, not an attempt to truly quantify the potential benefits of marrying. I also take a huge, simplifying shortcut here, which I can only justify by saying I assume it leads to understating everything I’m concluding. That is: I take the sample of cohabiting partners as the available pool of partners. I compare people who just got married to people who are cohabiting, and treat the latter as the people who have decided not to marry given their available partner. Left out, obviously, are all the people who made (or had made for them) the prior decision — not to cohabit with a partner in the first place. Also, this is all from the women’s perspective, datawise, but in a world where couples are constrained to one man and one woman (a condition I reproduce here), the parallel analysis is suggested here in relief.
First, let’s take all the men these women are living with, and give them an economic prospects score. This is a crude measure that gives one point each for: four levels of education, four levels of income, three levels of weeks worked in employment the previous year, three levels of hours usually worked in employment the previous year. One point is removed for men with any disability. So man can score from 1 to 12. A man with a score of 1 has less than a high school degree, less than $20,000 wage or salary income, did not work any weeks or hours in the previous year, and has at least one disability. A man who scores 12 has a BA or higher, wage or salary income over $80,000, worked at least 35 hours per week for 50 weeks, and has no disabilities.
Using the American Community Survey, which tells us which women are cohabiting with a male partner, and which women got married in the previous year, we can compare the men they’re involved with. (Relationships that don’t involve living together are invisible in the data.)
Once you see that women who got married have partners with higher scores than women who are cohabiting, you have absorbed the main point. Here that is, in one figure. The distribution of partner scores (including both cohabiting women and those who just married) is on the left. Nine is the most common score, and Black women’s men have lower scores on average. On the right you see that women with higher-scoring partners are a lot more likely to have gotten married in the last year. Thirty percent of women paired with 12’s married, compared with 7 percent of those living with 1’s. (Worth noting as something to analyze more is that Black women are less likely to have gotten married at all levels of men’s score on this curve, except the very top and bottom.)
Then I go through some regression models, and use the pattern among married women to create a predicted probability of marrying for the cohabiting women. In reality, of course, their probability of marrying in the previous year is zero, but some were closer to it than others, based on the other data we have about them and their partners. Once you line up these cohabiting women up from least to most likely to marry, you can see that those who were closest to getting married are paired with higher-scoring husbands. This is the last figure:
This means that the hardest to reach couples, the ones who “need” marriage promotion as a policy the most, are the ones who will economically benefit the least from marriage.
In her New York Times Op-Ed, Kearney used this argument against depending on the welfare state to raise living standards for single mothers:
What are the odds that the government will start providing one-parent families with, say, benefits equal to the median earnings of an adult with a high school degree, which comes to around $44,000 a year? I would put the odds at zero. As long as that’s the case, income gaps between one- and two-parent homes will be substantial.
The specifics are very wrong (because that husband is going to consumer much of his own earnings, too), but the impulse is what’s really wrong: The average marriage-promoted husband is not the average man. If he were he would probably already be married — most men are, including 70% of men with incomes in the $40k-60k range. Even more, those who are not married, although they may be happy and carefree independent souls, may have other issues or problems that aren’t captured by their income level (absolutely no offense intended, and the same could be said of women). Again, the people involved probably know all this, including the things these crude datasets can’t see.
Addendum
Finally, back to the most recent Bruenig post. He writes:
Another common and pithy way of expressing Douthat’s point here is that upper class people should “preach what they practice,” with proponents of that phrase seemingly thinking that it means that upper class people should tell lower class people to marry. But what upper class people practice is not “marriage.” It’s “marriage to upper class people.”
Then he shares the text from Kearney’s NY Times wedding announcement, revealing the very elite status of herself and her husband. (Fair game! People put those things in the paper because they want us to talk about them.) It reminded me to update something from my book. If these policy experts think the way to reduce poverty is to convince people to get married, why aren’t they trying to convince rich people to marry poor people? That would really be practicing what they preach. To put that in perspective, I gathered the 1.2 million never-married mothers living below the (supplemental) poverty line. Then I took the never-married men and worked my way down from the richest till I got to 1.2 million, which is $175,000 per year income. I’m showing the two groups by race/ethnicity, to help reinforce the integrationist aspect of this plan as well.
If you think this is outrageous or offensive, from either the men’s or women’s point of view, try to explain why in a way that isn’t either very racist or doesn’t also apply to existing marriage promotion programs.
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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License
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