The story we think we know is that the institution of marriage is crumbling and on the brink of oblivion. The real story is much more complicated.
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!
The simplest summary of their findings is: It's really, really complicated. The full answer for the delay and decline of marriage would touch on birth control technology (which extends courtships by reducing the cost of waiting to get married), liberal divorce laws (which creates "churn" in the labor market by increasing divorces and new marriages), and even washing/drying machines (which both eliminate the need for men to marry lower-earning women to do housework and also free up women to work and study).
One important lesson from Stevenson and Wolfers is that, as much as it feels like things are changing very rapidly, a longer view on marriage trends reveals a more boring picture. If you pull back the lens, not to the 1960s but to the 1860s, the marriage rate and the divorce rate stick stubbornly to
long-term trend lines.
Marriages-per-thousand people are declining,
but slowly, after spiking in the 1940s. Divorces-per-thousand people are rising, but slowly, after spiking in the 1970s. Even in the Great Recession, which theoretically scared couples from investing in matrimony, we've seen "the same rate of decline that existed during the preceding economic boom, the previous bust and both the boom and the bust before that," Wolfers wrote.
The median age
of marriage for men and women is rising slowly into the high-20s. But that's not so unique compared to men's historical averages. What is new -- really, really new -- is the rising marriage ages for women.
The education revolution for women -- one of the happiest trends of the 20th century -- carries important implications for the marriage market. First, if women are going to college, more of their 18-22 years will be taken up by history classes rather than husbands. Second, when these women start earning money, fewer need to marry for financial reasons, which means they can afford to put off marriage. Thanks to birth control, a little bit of biotechnology has helped their cause by reducing the costs of being sexually active and single.
THE TWO MARRIAGE TRENDS
The economics of marriage suggest it's like any other investment. Women are more likely to get hitched when they see big potential gains from a union. That explains why the apparently monolithic Decline of Marriage is in fact two polar opposite trends. The first points toward the revitalization of marriage. The second points to decline.
First, for highly-educated or rich women, marriage rates are actually rising. It was once the case that a college degree was the equivalent of punching your spinster card. In the late 1800s, half of all college-educated women never married. But in the last 40 years, marriage rates have increased for the top 10 percent of female earners more than any other group, Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney found in a new report from The Hamilton Project. A 2004 American Community Survey also found college-educated women were 10 percentage points more likely to be currently married than women with less education.
Second, there is a parallel trend that really does look like the crumbling of marriage. Among less-educated and poorer women, marriage is in outright decline. The bottom half of female earners saw their marriage rates decline by 25 percentage points, Greenstone and Looney find and show in the graph above.
There is evidence that social and economic sorting in America creates clusters of people who match up by education, salary, and politics. As a result, perhaps poor or under-educated women are more likely to be matched with poor or less-educated men who offer a worse return on the marriage investment.
"Marriage has become the fault line dividing America's classes,"
Charles Murray writes in his newly book on the state of white America, Coming Apart. In a Wall Street Journal
column based on the book, Murray compared those living in the country's
educated white-collar world ("Belmont") and less-educated blue-collar world ("Fishtown"). The divergence between Belmont and Fishtown begins at the alter,
he argued:
In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and
Fishtown were married--94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s,
those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the
great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s,
standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to
slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in
marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from
just 10.
The decline of marriage in Fishtown matters, Murray says,
because we have an abiding national interest in seeing children raised in two-parent households. Murray might be overstating the importance of living with married parents, as opposed to couples in cohabitation (which is way up in the last 20 years). But if he's right, the following statistic should scare the heck out of you: In 1970, only 6% of births
to undereducated "Fishtown" women were out of wedlock; by 2008, it had grown to a whopping 44%.
MEN AND MARRIAGE
If Pride and Prejudice were written today, it might begin, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune is practically an endangered species." In the last two years, this magazine has published two cover stories -- on the End of Men and the rise of the Single Lady -- that posited that "a marriage regime based on men's overwhelming economic dominance may be passing into extinction."
Marriage Extinction Watch is on high alert in the poorer segments of the country. In 2007, among women without a high-school diploma, just 43 percent were married. One reason was that the men they're mostly likely to marry are faring so poorly. The wages for all prime-age men have fallen by 40% in the last 40 years,
after you account for the fifth of these men who have dropped out of
the labor force. As the Hamilton Project reported last week, falling male earnings track closely to declining marriage rates. "At the bottom 25th percentile of earnings ... half of men are married, compared with 86 percent
in 1970," Greenstone and Looney write.
We cannot know why millions of couples who might have been tying the knot 40 years ago aren't doing so today. Cohabitation is a factor. Divorce is a factor. But so is economics.
It might help to think of the marriage marketplace as, well, a marketplace. Historically, men and women have gone to the market to marry for the same reason that employers go the market to hire. They are looking to hook up with a productive "partner." As women are likely to seek partners in their income class, poorer women are more likely to be surrounded by men with low and falling fortunes, and more have chosen to forgo a union that could become a financial drain.
'TIL DEATH: A SILVER LINING?
If twentysomethings are responsible for inspiring "end of marriage" talk, let's praise seniors for keeping the institution alive by staying alive. As the graph above shows, today's Americans aged 60 and higher are as likely to be married as any other generation before them at that age. In fact, those over 65 are now more
likely to be married as those in their 20s -- a moment that is unique in
history. Adults are living longer, having fewer children, divorcing at a
higher rate, and finding new partners, Stevenson and Wolfers write.
The graph above is a deceptively simple picture that says a lot about how the institution of marriage has changed in the last 130 years. First, it shows how unusually early twentysomethings married around 1960. This suggests that comparisons to that generation imply an exaggerated collapse. Second it shows that, at every age up to 60, today's Americans are less likely to be hitched than any generation before them. Third, it suggests that seniors are marrying close to their age. The shrinking gap between the ages of husbands and wives that helps to explain why couples are more likely to sort within their income group. Finally, it implies that even with rising divorces, the market for re-marriages is strong.
If somebody tells you nobody your age is getting married anymore, the optimistic rejoinder is: Just wait. Marriage isn't dead. It's just changed, and running a few years behind schedule.
A long, surprisingly standard speech ignored the tumultuous lived reality of American politics over the past year—and the likely reality in the year to come.
The strangest thing about watching President Donald Trump deliver a State of the Union address was how normal it seemed. Tuesday night, in his first State of the Union, the president offered a workmanlike speech that seemed worlds away from the tumultuous, gridlocked lived reality of American politics over the past year—and the likely reality in the year to come.
Looking back to his speech to a joint session of Congress last February, Trump recalled, “A new tide of optimism was already sweeping across our land. Each day since, we have gone forward with a clear vision and a righteous mission—to make America great again for all Americans.” He added, “Over the last year, we have made incredible progress and achieved extraordinary success.”
Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.
The clinic permitted Paul Manafort one 10-minute call each day. And each day, he would use it to ring his wife from Arizona, his voice often soaked in tears. “Apparently he sobs daily,” his daughter Andrea, then 29, texted a friend. During the spring of 2015, Manafort’s life had tipped into a deep trough. A few months earlier, he had intimated to his other daughter, Jessica, that suicide was a possibility. He would “be gone forever,” she texted Andrea.
His work, the source of the status he cherished, had taken a devastating turn. For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He’d been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed a highly personal relationship.
Those hoping the special counsel will prosecute the president are engaging in fantasy.
The latest revelations about President Trump have, once again, excited the interest of the public, leading to speculation that Special Counsel Robert Mueller may have amassed sufficient evidence to charge the president with obstruction of justice. Trump’s attempt to fire Mueller (which happened last June, but is only now being publicly reported) is, under this line of thinking, the final straw.
Color me deeply skeptical.
Mueller will not indict Trump for obstruction of justice or for any other crime. Period. Full stop. End of story. Speculations to the contrary are just fantasy.
He won’t do it for the good and sufficient reason that the Department of Justice has a long-standing legal opinion that sitting presidents may not be indicted. First issued in 1973 during the Nixon era, the policy was reaffirmed in 2000, during the Clinton era. These rules bind all Department of Justice employees, and Mueller, in the end, is a Department of Justice employee. More to the point, if we know anything about Mueller, we think we know that he follows the rules—all of them. Even the ones that restrict him in ways he would prefer they not. And if he were to choose not to follow the rules, that, in turn, would be a reasonable justification for firing him. So … the special counsel will not indict the president.
How Afghanistan’s neighbor cultivated American dependency while subverting American policy
Two months after the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Vice President–elect Joe Biden sat with Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, in the Arg Palace, an 83-acre compound in Kabul that had become a gilded cage for the mercurial and isolated leader. The discussion was already tense as Karzai urged Washington to help root out Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, implying that more pressure needed to be exerted on Pakistani leaders. Biden’s answer stunned Karzai into silence. Biden let Karzai know how Barack Obama’s incoming administration saw its priorities. “Mr. President,” Biden said, “Pakistan is fifty times more important than Afghanistan for the United States.”
It was an undiplomatic moment for sure, but also a frank expression of the devastating paradox at the heart of the longest war in American history. In 16 years, the United States has spent billions of dollars fighting a war that has killed thousands of soldiers and an untold number of civilians in a country that Washington considers insignificant to its strategic interests in the region. Meanwhile, the country it has viewed as a linchpin, Pakistan—a nuclear-armed cauldron of volatile politics and long America’s closest military ally in South Asia—has pursued a covert campaign in Afghanistan designed to ensure that the money and the lives have been spent in vain. The stakes in Pakistan have been considered too high to break ties with Islamabad or take other steps that would risk destabilizing the country. The stakes in Afghanistan have been deemed low enough that careening from one failed strategy to another has been acceptable.
The program uses state-of-the-art AI techniques, but simple tests show that it's a long way from real understanding.
One Sunday, at one of our weekly salsa sessions, my friend Frank brought along a Danish guest. I knew Frank spoke Danish well, since his mother was Danish, and he, as a child, had lived in Denmark. As for his friend, her English was fluent, as is standard for Scandinavians. However, to my surprise, during the evening’s chitchat it emerged that the two friends habitually exchanged emails using Google Translate. Frank would write a message in English, then run it through Google Translate to produce a new text in Danish; conversely, she would write a message in Danish, then let Google Translate anglicize it. How odd! Why would two intelligent people, each of whom spoke the other’s language well, do this? My own experiences with machine-translation software had always led me to be highly skeptical about it. But my skepticism was clearly not shared by these two. Indeed, many thoughtful people are quite enamored of translation programs, finding little to criticize in them. This baffles me.
He’s arguably the best quarterback of all time. That’s part of what makes him the absolute worst.
Perhaps the sight of Tom Brady’s chin dimple doesn’t blind you with seething rage. I guess you don’t have eyeballs.
Or maybe you’re not from Philadelphia. Eagles fans have recently been prevented from realizing a beloved postseason pastime—the city’s so-called “Crisco Cops” greased up downtown lamp posts to stop rowdy Philadelphians from scaling them. Perhaps now, they can instead relish another classic activity: the great tradition of loathing the New England Patriots, everyone who holds them dear, and everything they represent.
The Patriots. Ugh. Even their team name is a lie. First of all, a bald eagle—so sleek! so majestic! so fierce!—is infinitely cooler than some dude wearing a tricorn hat. And can someone tell Robert Kraft that giving muskets to a bunch of LARPers in the endzone isn’t actually patriotic? Last time I checked, the cradle of liberty wasn’t in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Ben Franklin may have believed the nation’s premiere bird was the turkey, but he still picked Philadelphia over Boston for a reason. (The reason: Philly’s better.)
The omissions in the State of the Union, and the fate of Victor Cha, all point in the same direction.
The more closely you read Donald Trump’s comments about North Korea in his State of the Union address, the more plausible it becomes that he is preparing for war.
First, there’s the sheer emphasis he placed on the subject. In his speech, Trump devoted a mere sentence to Russia and China. He devoted 23 words to Israel, 34 to Afghanistan, and 48 to Iran. Even the war against ISIS, which Trump cites as the main foreign-policy achievement of his first year in office, garnered only 302 words. North Korea received 475.
Second, there are the things Trump didn’t say. The Olympics begin in South Korea in 10 days, and the South Korean government hopes participation by athletes from the North will ease hostility on the Peninsula. But Trump didn’t mention the games. In fact, he didn’t mention diplomacy at all.
How the United States lost the faith of its citizens—and what it can do to win them back
For years, the residents of Oxford, Massachusetts, seethed with anger at the company that controlled the local water supply. The company, locals complained, charged inflated prices and provided terrible service. But unless the town’s residents wanted to get by without running water, they had to pay up, again and again.
The people of Oxford resolved to buy the company out. At a town meeting in the local high-school auditorium, an overwhelming majority of residents voted to raise the millions of dollars that would be required for the purchase. It took years, but in May 2014, the deal was nearly done: One last vote stood between the small town and its long-awaited goal.
Thousands of vulnerable migrants may soon be deported, which many Jews see as inconsistent with their faith.
TEL AVIV—Around 9:30 p.m. on a recent weekday night, four men sat waiting on the sidewalk outside Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority office. In a broken mix of Hebrew, English, and Arabic, they told me they were waiting for it to open so they could turn in their applications for refugee status—the next morning. According to local activists, the office only processes a handful of these forms each day, so asylum seekers arrive the night before to ensure their place in line.
These men are among the roughly 40,000 African migrants who have been stuck in limbo in Israel for years. Many crossed into Israel through the Sinai desert between 2006 and 2012, according to Israel’s African Refugee Development Center, fleeing the harsh political conditions in Eritrea or genocide and war in Sudan. The Israeli government has argued that these migrants are simply in Israel looking for work. Human-rights organizations, however, claim that most or all are here out of fear of persecution in their home countries. Of more than 13,000 people who had applied for asylum as of last summer, only 10 have been recognized as refugees, according to the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an Israeli human-rights organization.
The endowment of the country’s first college chair for the study of the subject draws attention to the complexity of nonbelief in America today.
Louis J. Appignani, an 84-year-old living in Florida, tells a compelling story about his conversion to atheism. Despite attending Catholic schools from a young age and through his teens, he didn’t really question belief in God growing up; people in his world, he said, sort of took faith for granted. Then he got to college and started reading the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who argued against traditional defenses of God’s existence and justified, as Appignani put it, “what I deep down believe.” Now, the proud atheist holds nothing back when it comes to his personal views on religion. The study of atheism, he said, “gave me strength to believe that faith is stupid … [that] mythology is not true.”