Monday, June 08, 2020

Marriage is on a long-term decline

The marriage rate is on a long-term decline, and we see explanations such as this from Psychology Today:
Why Aren't Women Getting Married?

New research identifies an interesting quirk in the marriage market that might explain declining rates of marriage (Lichter, Price, & Swigert, 2019). Taking an economic approach, the authors argue that there's a fundamental mismatch between what available men in the United States have to offer and what available women in the United States are willing to accept. Maybe, they propose, women aren't getting married because the highly desirable men are taken.
And Quillette:
Many commentators have also pointed to the inability of many black women to partner with similarly educated black men. ...

The discussion concerning the white community is more muted. ...

Some commentators — like David Brooks and Christina Cross — claim the declining marriage rate reflects its diminished value. In an article entitled “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” David Brooks contends that prior to World War II the dominant family type was the extended family in which married couples were embedded within a larger set of family ties: parents, grandparents, and siblings. Once these extended relationships became attenuated in the postwar period, the stand-alone nuclear unit lost much of its value.

But Brooks never explains how abandoning the nuclear family would benefit unmarried mothers and their children. ...

There was also a 1.6 percentage-point decline in the marriage rate of white women despite a decline in the employment gap between married and unmarried white men. That suggests the growing educational gap between white unmarried men and women had a more powerful influence than employment.
All of this theorizing ignores a long list of anti-marriage causes.

From the 1960s to the present, we have had efforts to dismantle marriage by feminists, leftists, Jews, homosexuals, judges, etc. Brooks claims to be a conservative, but recites Jewish anti-marriage propaganda.

Examples: no-fault divorce, welfare disincentives, child support.

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