Classical Music Forum banner

The Oblivion of Marriage and the Coming Demographic Crisis

5K views 44 replies 14 participants last post by  Polyphemus 
#1 · (Edited)
Polednice has inspired me to speak against tyranny, and problems in general.

In the US we are facing one of the largest social/demographic shifts in history; the oblivion of marriage (in the lower socioeconomic classes).

National Marriage Week USA kicks off today, and for many people, a national booster movement for marriage could not come any sooner. The recession did a number on American matrimony, as you've surely heard. The collapse in marriage rates is cited as one of the most important symptoms -- or is it a cause? -- of economic malaise for the middle class. But the statistics aren't always what they seem, and the reasons behind marriage's so-called decline aren't all negative.

At first blush, the institution of marriage is crumbling. In 1960, 72% of all adults over 18 were married. By 2010, the number fell to 51%. You can fault the increase in divorces that peaked in the 1970s. Or you could just blame the twentysomethings. The share of married adults 18-29 plunged from from 59% in 1960 to 20% in 2010. Twenty percent!
Slope Rectangle Font Plot Parallel


http://www.theatlantic.com/business...death-and-life-of-marriage-in-america/252640/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/opinion/kristof-the-decline-of-white-workers.html?_r=1&hp

That's the backdrop for the uproar over Charles Murray's latest book, "Coming Apart." Murray critically examines family breakdown among working-class whites and the decline in what he sees as traditional values of diligence.

Liberals have mostly denounced the book, and I, too, disagree with important parts of it. But he's right to highlight social dimensions of the crisis among low-skilled white workers.

My touchstone is my beloved hometown of Yamhill, Ore., population about 925 on a good day. We Americans think of our rural American heartland as a lovely pastoral backdrop, but these days some marginally employed white families in places like Yamhill seem to be replicating the pathologies that have devastated many African-American families over the last generation or two.

One scourge has been drug abuse. In rural America, it's not heroin but methamphetamine; it has shattered lives in Yamhill and left many with criminal records that make it harder to find good jobs. With parents in jail, kids are raised on the fly.

Then there's the eclipse of traditional family patterns. Among white American women with only a high school education, 44 percent of births are out of wedlock, up from 6 percent in 1970, according to Murray.
Most of the blame in the mainstream media attributes the cause to
1. Income inequality
2. The recession

But the economic bloggers I read refute this pretty conclusively.

All of a sudden it is pulled out of the closest as a weapon against Charles Murray, such as by Paul Krugman (and here and here), Rortybomb, David Frum, and others. Bryan Caplan brings some sanity to the debate:

I'm baffled by people who blame declining marriage rates on poverty. Why? Because being single is more expensive than being married. Picture two singles living separately. If they marry, they sharply cut their total housing costs. They cut the total cost of furniture, appliances, fuel, and health insurance. Even groceries get cheaper: think CostCo.

These savings are especially blatant when your income is low. Even the official poverty line acknowledges them. The Poverty Threshold for a household with one adult is $11,139; the Poverty Threshold for a household with two adults is $14,218. When two individuals at the poverty line maintain separate households, they're effectively spending 2*$11,139-$14,218=$8,060 a year to stay single.

But wait, there's more. Marriage doesn't just cut expenses. It raises couples' income. In the NLSY, married men earn about 40% more than comparable single men; married women earn about 10% less than comparable single women. From a couples' point of view, that's a big net bonus. And much of this bonus seems to be causal.

More plausibly it is the rise in female income (among other factors, including the rise of birth control, read more here) which is behind the decline in marriage, but that doesn't fit with traditional mood affiliation, which finds the rise in female income to be good (which it is), and the decline in marriage to be - neither good nor bad per se but not exactly worth celebrating. If you can blame capitalism and wage stagnation for the decline of the family among lower earners, so much the better for ideology but as a sociological proposition that is a very weak hypothesis (do you see convincing links to real sociological evidence, showing this to be the dominant factor? No) and as Caplan shows it doesn't fit with the economics either.
http://marginalrevolution.com/margi...arginal+Revolution)&utm_content=Google+Reader

All of this is, to me, symptomatic of a larger social crisis brewing.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/

In his book, Is Marriage for White People?, Ralph Richard Banks, a law professor at Stanford, argues that the black experience of the past half century is a harbinger for society at large. "When you're writing about black people, white people may assume it's unconnected to them," he told me when I got him on the phone. It might seem easy to dismiss Banks's theory that what holds for blacks may hold for nonblacks, if only because no other group has endured such a long history of racism, and racism begets singular ills. But the reality is that what's happened to the black family is already beginning to happen to the white family. In 1950, 64 percent of African American women were married-roughly the same percentage as white women. By 1965, African American marriage rates had declined precipitously, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan was famously declaring black families a "tangle of pathology." Black marriage rates have fallen drastically in the years since-but then, so have white marriage rates. In 1965, when Moynihan wrote with such concern about the African American family, fewer than 25 percent of black children were born out of wedlock; in 2011, considerably more than 25 percent of white children are.

This erosion of traditional marriage and family structure has played out most dramatically among low-income groups, both black and white. According to the sociologist William Julius Wilson, inner-city black men struggled badly in the 1970s, as manufacturing plants shut down or moved to distant suburbs. These men naturally resented their downward mobility, and had trouble making the switch to service jobs requiring a very different style of self-presentation. The joblessness and economic insecurity that resulted created a host of problems, and made many men altogether unmarriable. Today, as manufacturing jobs disappear nationwide (American manufacturing shed about a third of its jobs during the first decade of this century), the same phenomenon may be under way, but on a much larger scale.

Just as the decline of marriage in the black underclass augured the decline of marriage in the white underclass, the decline of marriage in the black middle class has prefigured the decline of marriage in the white middle class. In the 1990s, the author Terry McMillan climbed the best-seller list (and box-office charts) with novels like Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which provided incisive glimpses of life and frustrated romance among middle-class black women, where the prospect of marrying a black man often seemed more or less hopeless. (As she writes in Waiting to Exhale: "[Successful black men have] taken these stupid statistics about us to heart and are having the time of their lives. They do not hold themselves accountable to anybody for anything, and they're getting away with murder … They lie to us without a conscience, they **** as many of us at a time as they want to.") Today, with the precipitous economic and social decline of men of all races, it's easy to see why women of any race would feel frustrated by their romantic prospects. (Is it any wonder marriage rates have fallen?) Increasingly, this extends to the upper-middle class, too: early last year, a study by the Pew Research Center reported that professionally successful, college-educated women were confronted with a shrinking pool of like-minded marriage prospects.

"If you're a successful black man in New York City, one of the most appealing and sought-after men around, your options are plentiful," Banks told me. "Why marry if you don't have to?" (Or, as he quotes one black man in his book, "If you have four quality women you're dating and they're in a rotation, who's going to rush into a marriage?") Banks's book caused a small stir by suggesting that black women should expand their choices by marrying outside their race-a choice that the women of Terry McMillan's novels would have found at best unfortunate and at worst an abhorrent betrayal. As it happens, the father of Chantal's child is white, and Denean has dated across the color line. But in any event, the decline in the economic prospects of white men means that marrying outside their race can expand African American women's choices only so far. Increasingly, the new dating gap-where women are forced to choose between deadbeats and players-trumps all else, in all socioeconomic brackets.
This WSJ OP-ED voices some of the same complaints.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146321725889448.html

Now, before you say that this is all sensationalist tripe. A paper from UPenn on female happiness shows that it is, in fact, in decline, and has declined sharply in the past 40 years.

http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/papers/Female_Happiness.pdf

The lives of women in the United States have improved over the past
35 years by many objective measures, yet we show that measures of
subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined
both absolutely and relative to men. This decline in relative wellbeing is found across various datasets, measures of subjective wellbeing, demographic groups, and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness
in which women in the 1970s reported higher subjective well-being
than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap
is emerging-one with higher subjective well-being for men

By many measures, the progress of women over recent decades has been extraordinary. The gender wage gap has partly closed. Educational attainment has
risen and is now surpassing that of men. Women have gained an unprecedented level
of control over fertility. Technological change, in the form of new domestic appliances, has freed women from domestic drudgery. In short, women's freedoms within
both the family and market sphere have expanded. Francine D. Blau's (1998) assessment of objective measures of female well-being since 1970 finds that women made
enormous gains. Labor force outcomes have improved absolutely, as women's real
wages have risen for all but the least-educated women, and relatively, as women's
wages relative to those of men have increased for women of all races and education
levels. Concurrently, female labor force participation has risen to record levels both
absolutely and relative to that of men (Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn 2007). IGiven these shifts of rights and bargaining power from men to women over the past 35 years, holding all else equal, we might expect to see a concurrent shift in happiness toward women and away from men. Yet, in this paper, we document that
measures of women's subjective well-being have fallen both absolutely and relatively
to that of men. While the expansion in women's opportunities has been extensively
studied, the concurrent decline in subjective well-being has largely gone unnoted.
One exception to this is David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald (2004), who
study trends in happiness in the United States and Britain noting that, while women
report being happier than men over the period that they examine, the trend in white
women's happiness in the United States is negative over the period. We will show, in
this paper, that women's happiness has fallen both absolutely and relative to men's
in a pervasive way among groups, such that women no longer report being happier
than men, and, in many instances, now report happiness that is below that of men.
Moreover, we show that this shift has occurred through much of the industrialized
world
n turn,
better market outcomes for women have likely improved their bargaining position in
the home by raising their opportunities outside of marriage.
How are things in old Europe?

I will share my theories on the cause of this later. I want to hear what you guys have to say first.
 
See less See more
1
#19 · (Edited)
Well, I guess the confusion lies in the fact that people don't usually clarify whether they're referring to an organized religion type of personal God, or just the simple concept of the world having a creator who may or may not care about what we do with our genitals.

By the way, the second part of my post, the part you didn't quote, was very important. My post looks much more serious without it. ;)
Yes, I admit that I quoted you out of context. And it's never been all that clear to me, either, why the Creator of a universe with roughly fifty billion galaxies, each with roughly fifty billion stars, is so fixedly obsessed with the affairs of the bedroom.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Praeludium
#21 ·
Yes, I admit that I quoted you out of context. And it's never been all that clear to me, either, why the Creator of a universe with roughly fifty billion galaxies, each with roughly fifty billion stars, is so fixedly obsessed with the affairs of the bedroom.
My analysis is that He didn't, and He isn't.
 
#3 ·
Not a crisis at all and I dont think it can be looked at as an economic symptom either. Its entirely to do with progression of social standards and change in religious demographics.

In the Netherlands it is very common for couples to live together and have kids without getting married. I cant find the exact statistics anywhere unfortunately.
 
  • Like
Reactions: PetrB
#4 ·
The simplistic idea that marriage is an indicator of family solidarity must go challenged as well. As emiellucifuge points out, many co-habitants have successful families, and many married couples raise severely dysfunctional ones. There's no direct connection between marriage and good family values. If anything, marriage can destroy healthy family life by forcing two people together who come to hate each other.
 
#5 ·
The practice of 'living together' without a marriage/civil union contract creates very little social tension in much of the US, including rural areas. Pooling resources while doing so is risky though. The marriage contract serves a civil purpose.
 
#6 ·
The major loss is to the world of comedy. The absurdity of trying the spend one's entire adult life under the same roof with one woman was a great comedic material source.
 
  • Like
Reactions: PetrB
#10 ·
I think I come out on the conservative side of this. There is a social problem in the US, and probably in other western nations. We've lost our moral values - not entirely of course, but essentially the quest for status via consumption has trumped about everything else. We are not as patriotic as we used to be, not as loyal, not as diligent, not as pious; the argument that living together without marriage is good enough is a good example. Maybe it is, but that says something about our culture.

Of course there is a good side: we are not as naive either, and authority has lost a lot of its prestige (legitimacy) for good reasons - stupid wars, racial/ethnic/religious bigotry, creationism, hypocrisy.

People want to be moral, but we no longer have mores that we can believe in. What we need is a revival of legitimate moral authority. Leadership. People were drawn to Obama because he promised that. As always, it will have to be religiously moderate and inclusive, demanding, but more demanding of the rich than of the poor (at least in appearance, but these days it will be fairly hard to deceive anyone for long), and inspiring. America's spiritual leader of the past 30 years has been Oprah. That's better than nothing, but it's not enough.
 
#13 ·
I think I come out on the conservative side of this. There is a social problem in the US, and probably in other western nations. We've lost our moral values - not entirely of course, but essentially the quest for status via consumption has trumped about everything else. We are not as patriotic as we used to be, not as loyal, not as diligent, not as pious; the argument that living together without marriage is good enough is a good example. Maybe it is, but that says something about our culture.
Is that you, DrMike?! America's problem is too much piety.
 
#18 ·
In practice "god" or "the gods" are a projection of someone's values onto the cosmos and its mysteries. The question is, whose values? "God" has lost respect because the people whose values he reflected have lost respect. In Europe, that is the old aristocracies and elite bourgeois leaders. In the South, that is the old Segregationists, my grandfather's and great-grandfather's generation. In the north and west of the US it is the old "Establishment." Now the values we would project are status-via-consumption, tolerance, and leisure. New religious traditions are appearing in part to do so for us.

I don't know; just guessing.
 
#27 ·
It's a weird time right now. There are so many laws and regulations in a time when the rule of law is being undermined and disregarded by those in government and business. How does this correlate to the rejection of the marriage contract by individuals, or doesn't it? Is there a general evasion of commitment and responsibility in society at large, or is it a personal liberty issue?
 
#30 ·
I think you and I have similar notions about what's going on in government and business. It's probably a stretch to tie the marriage contract situation to that, but for the rest of it, I dunno what the eff is going on.
 
#31 ·
The dissolution of marriage probably has a lot more to due with the financial independence of women today. They have that option that their mothers and grandmothers didn't have.
 
  • Like
Reactions: science
#32 ·
The option to make a living on their own? I think they had that anyway. That a woman can now raise a child without the father being around? That's been possible, though not easy, for a long time. There must be something else.
 
#34 ·
Perhaps soppiness has a place in this discussion - the fact that, over the years, marriage has strangely become associated with love. Rather than being arranged by parents; rather than being necessary for financial support; rather than being important to have as early as possible in order to fulfil your role of starting a family (or as a quick measure if you've accidentally started a family already), marriages are more often viewed as consolidations of a relationship with The One. Given that, both men and women are now more patient, and more willing to hold out, dating lots of people over a number of years before settling down, reasonably certain that they've found the person they actually want to spend their lives with.
 
#35 ·
I didn't mean for the mention of decency to be taken so specifically - I was just reaching for a way to summarize the distinction between the mainline evangelical churches and the fundamentalist ones. Something about class, basically, I guess. Then, when it was challenged, in my mind, the discussion shifted to a different topic.

I can't see how anyone could deny that a great deal of moral progress was made between about 1700 and 1970. What Couchie seems to regard with outrage about the values of, say, the 1950s was actually a big improvement over the 1690s. That's not to say (as I've evidently been taken to mean) that there was ever any kind of golden age of decency or of any other virtue.

Also, I don't think we can deny that some kind of fragmentation has taken place in America over the past 50 or so years. I think it's best to locate it in the "ruling class" rather than in society as a whole, which was always fragmented. But the "ruling class" used to be almost homogeneously WASP, mainline Protestant, Ivy League, and so on: there were more shared values and more trust than now.

I'm enormously distracted and annoyed right now so I can't think it all out or word it very carefully....
 
#36 ·
Also, I don't think we can deny that some kind of fragmentation has taken place in America over the past 50 or so years. I think it's best to locate it in the "ruling class" rather than in society as a whole, which was always fragmented. But the "ruling class" used to be almost homogeneously WASP, mainline Protestant, Ivy League, and so on: there were more shared values and more trust than now.
Then fragmentation is a good thing, right?

I didn't take your argument in quite the same way as couchie. I thought you were basically saying that, although we've never achieved perfect decency, at least we used to strive for it. Now, you argue, decency does not feature among people's priorities.

It's an interesting point (if that's the point you're making), but I would prefer an anarchy of indecency coupled with individual freedom rather than a mass striving for the wrong kind of decency which oppresses.

If you want a mass sense of decency and complete individual freedom without oppression, you may have to wait for another sentient species to evolve because this one is too broken to get there.
 
#38 ·
I'm not sure we're all talking about the same thing...

In my mind, over the past 40 or so years of American history, the diversity at the top has increased very much - the traditional Northeastern WASP elite have lost a huge amount of power to Southern and Western conservatives, and of course African-Americans and other minorities have gained influence as well. And women.

Is it good news?

Well, in some ways, certainly. Hopefully we can pull off this diversity project.

But perhaps it came at the expense of some things that I'll call "decency" (inertia is a deity) and "trust." I think - of course I don't actually know, but this is my impression - that in the era from about 1932 to about 1968 most of the super-elite leaders of the USA shared a common identity and culture. There were a few Jews, Catholics, women, and so on in power, but they were the minority and the Establishment WAS(mainline)P males were not threatened by them. There were some really bad apples as well - which reminds me to ask whether anyone has seen the J. Edgar Hoover movie. That's the case in any ruling class of course, and abundantly so among the current rulers. Still, the common culture and identity were there, and they may have permitted a level of trust and encouraged a level of decency that we can no longer maintain.

Perhaps race and religion, though they are just modern categories, get near the heart of something deep in human psychology regarding who we will feel we can trust. If so, then a racially and religiously homogenous society (or at least a homogenous ruling class) will have more trust and demand more decency from itself than a diverse one can.

It's not a pretty thought, but humans are not pretty beasts.

And if all of this is true, it doesn't mean that we should abandon diversity or promote homogeneity, since a pro-diversity education has at the very least a significant effect on things. And we may be forging a new identity and culture; or if we're not, we might be able to in the future. I'd actually guess that we will: some new tradition along the lines of Unitarian Universalism or Religious Naturalism or Secular Humanism will emerge to command the loyalty of our ruling class: something cosmopolitan and intellectual, not excessively supernatural, but probably with more impressive music and liturgy than we associate with those traditions, probably a little less hostile to traditional religion than those groups are, and probably a little more ethically demanding. It might even deny it's a religion, as the secular "religion" of the USA has long done. And when that happens, it could foster the kind of trust (and thus decency) that we need. So even if my suspicion about ethnic/religious diversity and trust is correct, our inner angels don't need to surrender to our inner apes.

Anyway, I have another excuse for the poor thought and writing that this post may contain: it's 5 am, and I've been up all night listening to Enescu. Do be careful with that guy. His music is a bit too interesting.
 
#40 ·
When my wife and I were young, we expected to never get married. We knew (strongly felt) we would always be together, but marriage seemed ridiculous with so many people marrying and divorcing for what we believed were poor reasons. The whole institution seemed vulgar. We did eventually get married mostly for legal reasons (for us and our future children).

My daughter (age 19) now believes she will never marry and won't have children. She saw so much misery both on the part of children and parents that she abhors the institution. She'd be happy to adopt, but feels bringing more children into today's world risks adding to the overall unhappiness. Obviously she's still quite young and hasn't met someone that she truly loves. Things may change like they did for my wife and I.

I'm still not certain how I feel about marriage. Overall I believe it can be a good institution, but there should be less pressure and expectation for marriage.
 
#41 ·
the oblivion of marriage (in the lower socioeconomic classes). [/I

Marriage was not the preserve of the "lower economic classes" before.The timeframe of the report only covers 1960 onwards and to espouse something as a declining "tradition" over a relatively short a period 50 years seems somewhat shortsighted.

Certainly in England there was a lot of common law this and that among the poor which did not always feature a wedding. Most commoners didn't have surnames in England until 1830 odd. Marriage was the preserve of the propertied classes because there was something of value of marriage and bloodlines was how the system worked. Marriage was an unsentimental business transaction to keep a particular social order - morality didn't really enter into it as the number of mistresses and famous prostitutes which now adorn gallery walls the world over attest to. It's a funny old world isn't it?

As for now - marriage is something people aspire to in Britain. In the sixties it was quite common for folk to marry in their teens, now it is more common for folk to marry in their late twenties/thirties. This is mostly economic factors - property prices are still high in the UK and most people have a few partners before deciding to settle down. Social factors also come into play as women are not dependent upon men for money so they do not have to hitch their wagon to the first man that comes along.

Although I must admit, I don't know what the paper you quote from is trying to prove. When it says; trends in happiness in the United States and Britain noting that, while women report being happier than men over the period that they examine, the trend in white women's happiness in the United States is negative over the period. the conclusion rather ignores the trends in Britian - perhaps because it doesn't support the conclusion?
 
#43 ·
This post is a great perspective on the question, and really makes it seem that marriage has been getting better, not worse. The statement "I can't see how anyone could deny that a great deal of moral progress was made between about 1700 and 1970" is so clearly filled with prejudice, and a desire to return to a 70s or 50s-esque U.S. moral system. Yes, morals did progress between 1700 and 1970, but so they have kept progressing between 1970 and 2012, they don't seem to be stopping, and that's a wonderful thing.
 
#42 · (Edited)
I can't see how anyone could deny that a great deal of moral progress was made between about 1700 and 1970.

1914-18 We sent out young men abroad to blow other young men to bits with new ways of killing each other.

1939-45 We did the same - perhaps for justifiable reasons, but the rise of facism and the atrocities it permitted can hardly be regarded as decency.

1945 The world now has bombs powerful enough to wipe out whole cities. These weapons still exit and have been made even more terrible over the decades. Is this a siggn of progress?

Then we have more trouble in the Balkans - which the rest of the world didn't fully commit to - so perhaps we have learnt something - but still thousands died.

Rawanda happened.

Now we have Syria descending into bloody chaos, Afganistan teetering on the brink and the jury is still out on Egypt and Libya.

The only moral progress seems to have been that since 1945 the populations of Europe and America are more reluctant to go to war, however that doesn't seem to stop leaders from starting them and then it seems very difficult to stop them from escelating - Vietnam got bigger, Afganistan lead to Iraq and peacekeeping never seems to just keep the peace.

Everyone talks about "going back to when things were decent" but that is a chimera, a myth. The only certainty in the past is that it is finished and whilst we can maybe see the choices that were made, we cannot see the confusion which resulted in those choices being made and the ones that were not made that lead to our present future.

The present is uncomfortable because we have to make choices - tea or coffee - yesterday was great because I had a nice cup of tea, but that doe snot make the present choices any easier. I could have tea, like I did yesterday, but that does not guarantee the same cup of tea as yesterday - the circumstances are different.
 
#45 ·
The insane divorce laws and the inability to make pre-nup agreements stick greatly add to the unwillingness to enter into the state of wedded bliss. God or religion does not enter into the equation. Religions in this era are corporations in disguise. If a relationship lasts a lifetime then you are witness to two lucky people. As an institution marriage is unfit for purpose.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top