I was reading about the so-called “Marriage Gap” whereby uneducated people, particularly women, forego marriage, and the opposite is true for educated people, especially women: they are more likely to be married.
But what explains this cost/benefit? What drives people to behave this way?
But this doesn’t make sense to me. A young couple can join their finances and have prudent planning and improve financially as a result of marriage, due to economies of scale, better credit rating, home ownership, tax benefits, social status, and lots of other things! Studies show that being married improves people’s economic status. Why would it be disadvantageous?
The two are not inconsistent. You are assuming that those that don’t wont to get married have enough financial stability to allow it to improve. Also that people on the margins have the skills to apply “prudent planning”. When your job is at minimum wage, and has no security, marrying someone else who flips burgers for a living doesn’t get you to the point where a lot of this can help - at least not enough to get you past the point where you feel secure enough in life to take on real responsibilities. Two minimum wage people married won’t be able to afford a house, and their job security probably isn’t gong to improve, so their credit rating won’t. The question isn’t whether, in general, being married improves a couple’s economic status, but whether being married improves the the status of those at the bottom or near bottom. Or even if it does, whether the improvement is enough to be meaningful. Being married, on the minimum wage, and needing to support an out-of-work partner is probably disastrous. But for a middle class couple, the opposite is likely true - it is possible to support the partner through a bad patch, and so the partnership is more resilient to problems, whereas for a poor couple it isn’t. If you don’t perceive that you have the financial wherewithal to carry your partner through a bad patch, you are less likely to want to take on the responsibility.
What you need are numbers, number that are much more specific than just overall averages across all socio-economic statuses. It is common that there are hidden and unexpected barriers in certain economic bands. Barriers that can work both ways.
Interesting. So it has to do with the risk of supporting a needy partner.
Because most of the time, relatively speaking, a couple who pool resources are surely better off than being single? Yes, two poor people are still on the margins, but still they’re better off because they can save and share resources. Regardless of where one starts, it’s a comparative advantage to the alternative. Unless some kind of cost is bigger than the added benefit… which as you mentioned is a needy partner. Is that the main cost that can overshadow added benefits?
Sharing is good. Saving, well that is another matter. There still has to be a surplus to actually be able to save.
It isn’t a cost - it is a risk. A perceived risk. People tend to be driven, in-part, by their perception of risk. It is well understood that people have a habit of perceiving some risks as being less or more than is real, and that the outcomes are lesser or worse than reality. We tend to be over averse to risks that have very bad outcomes.
Whereas you might be able to sit down with a spreadsheet and show that a couple can manage better than a pair of singles, both on minimum wage, you will find it hard to convince either that they are in the position to cope with carrying the other through a bad time. If the partner gets sick, loses their job for a while, one gets pregnant, you need to perceive that you are able to carry that. The load and responsibility is massive, and I doubt that when confronted with the perceived problems, it doesn’t weigh on some people’s minds that they simply are not up to it, in their current circumstances. People are different. What you describe is a trend, not an absolute. But there isn’t much doubt that security in life, and especially financial security (no matter how modest) is one of the bigger drivers in shaping people’s decisions. Ability to plan for a future beyond the next pay cheque makes a huge difference.
Another issue: If your partner is abusive or deadbeat (more likely at the low end of the income scale), then you’re better off being able to ditch him or her more easily. Marry the loser, though, and now you’re stuck with his or her abuse and leeching.
Remember,pooling resources is not the same as being married. A couple can get all the advantages of pooling resources without being married. Also, that there can be financial costs to marrying if each person has an income , because the joint income can cause them to lose benefits that one or the other would qualify for if they weren’t married. Probably the most well known examples are people who will lose SS benefits they remarry and people who will lose Medicaid coverage if they marry , but those aren’t the only ones.
Marriage makes a family more conservative. A single person can pack up and move to greener pastures, execute a career change, start a business, drop everything and go to school, etc. In a marriage, big changes get more complicated and less likely to happen.
In a richer family, that’s fine, because they are already on a path to advancement. But in a poor family, nothing is likely to get better unless something big changes.
Off the top of my head, my explanation for why educated people are more likely to be married is simple. People who are patient and motivated are more likely to get an education, and also more likely to get married (and stay married). People who are impatient and unmotivated are less likely to get married (or more likely to get divorced sooner), and also less likely to get an education. Generally speaking. But I admit I don’t have a cite to back this up. It’s just an explanation which makes sense to me.
I raise this issue because I’m an educated, affluent middle-aged professional male. At all the jobs/offices I’ve worked, there have never been any unmarried women, 100% were married. At the same time, we constantly hear in the media that “half of all Americans are single” and there’s been a staggering increase in the number of singles. This doesn’t jibe with what I see at the office.
My only conclusion is that these changes have predominantly affected low-income, uneducated women whom I don’t see day-to-day, whereas educated professionals are unaffected.
I guess it depends on the age of women. The ones I work with who are under 30 are all single. Over 30 and most are married.
Also it seems like many people meet their spouse in college since almost nobody is married in college years. (except Mormons where a lot are married in college)
And I read that if the partners have a different level of education that is a pretty good predictor of divorce. I can’t think of any guy I know who got a degree who married a woman without a degree.
For people on the edge of middle class status (or below), conservatism is generally a net positive. Sure it means in some contexts less useful risk-taking, but it also comes with many useful traits (if “useful” is defined by economic success) - less partying with drugs and booze, more on saving money, more stability, more emphasis on working for the benefit of ‘the family’ as a unit: in effect, less fun, more work.
This is how members of traditional and conservative social and ethnic groups tend to claw their way from abject poverty to middle-class-dom is a generation. My in-laws are an example of that - they came to this country with literally nothing, didn’t speak the language, but managed through obscenely hard work to carve their way to economic success - though with values and motives that are utterly alien to me (they had little concept of ‘fun’, saved obsessively, worked to they dropped, etc.)
Getting and staying married (to the ‘right partner’ - i.e., one who shares these values), an obsessive focus on education and work to the exclusion of other things, rejection of ‘fun’ (particularly in the form of boozing and drugging), intense devotion to the family unit over the needs of the self - all of these correlate together as traits that, in general, are more likely to make for ‘economic success’. They may not, of course, make for ‘personal happiness and fulfillment’.
The majority of women would prefer to marry a man with more education than them, or at least equal to them. But at all levels (High school, Undergraduate Degrees, Masters Degrees, Doctorates) more women graduate than men.
The more education a woman has, the fewer men have the same or better.
A man with a PhD looks like a good catch to almost all women, but a woman with a PhD is looking for a man who also has a PhD.
The articles I’ve seen about this say that increasing numbers of women are choosing not to marry because the pool of men with enough education to suit them is so small.
A related effect: highly educated men are electing not to get married because they are in demand. The whys get more complicated, but essentially it comes down to economics.
About that economics comment:
I didn’t mean money, I meant things like supply and demand.
Once the guy realizes how high the demand for him is, the "price"he’ll be “paid” when he gets married starts to look too small.
You, like others above, seem to equate “unmarried” with “single”.
That woman in Appalachia, for example, is already living with the father of her children. Now look at the financial costs and benefits to marrying him.
If he’s working, she can probably get more benefits like welfare if she isn’t married. If he isn’t working, he can get benefits too. They don’t have to lie to anybody: they are roommates and he is expected to pay half the bills. The both are given money to help cover the rent, but as 2 roommates they combined collect more than a married couple would.
And most of the financial benefits of getting married don’t apply to them. Save on taxes by filing jointly? Only matters it you make enough to actually pay taxes. Get in on group insurance through an employer? Neither of them has the kind of job that offers benefits. Better credit rating? That only means people might be a bit politer as they turn you down for the loan.
And the bottom end of the spectrum here is bigger than you might think. My mother lived with my stepfather for 19 years before they got married because there was no financial advantage to being married. When they finally did get married, it was because she finally got a job that offered insurance.
She wasn’t flipping burgers for a living, she was part-time faculty at a state university. When that changed to full time at the Coast Guard Academy, it finally made sense to get married.
So the range of people who can take a look at the numbers and realize that economically it makes no sense to get married extends well into the lower middle class. People with the resources to buy houses, people with jobs that require graduate degrees.
Educated people tend to have higher paying careers. better prospects, more comfortable lifestyles than lesser educated people. Those things tend to result in greater success in finding partners and keeping them.
Asking this question is like wondering why atheletes tend go be physically fit people.
