In NA at least, the issue isn’t that simple - because the choice of whether to be formally married or not is not on all fours with the choice of whether to have and keep a partner. A large number of people have long-term partners but are not married (and similarly, divorce is relatively common).
That’s why, to my mind, it has more to do with small-c “conservatism” in attitudes.
To my mind, the choice of getting formally married does not, in and of itself, always lead to financial advantages. As you point out, in many situations it is financially dis-advantageous (at least in the short to medium term).
Rather, I suspect that the underlying causation is that “getting formally married” tends to correlate with a bunch of small-c conservative traits, which taken together tend to be financially advantageous.
I rather suspect that, for the majority, the issue of whether the act of marriage will lead to financial advantages (or not) is a rather secondary consideration.
It’s not that simple in S Asia either, with cultures which are a universe away from N America (and each other) and a skyrocketing divorce rate, but educated people on average tend to be in situations where they can more easily find a desirable partner, and keep one over the years. That should not be surprising.
One thing that should also be mentioned is that middle class and also professional-types tend to take reletively harder financial hits after divorce/splitting up of long term relationship. That can also partially explain why people might continue.
By the way, I am defining marriage here both as formal marriage and unofficial long term stable relationships. Just so you know.
Uh, did you miss the enormous risk they took by moving to a new country? How “traditional and conservative” is it to pack up and move to an unknown country? Your relatives may have great personal values, but I’m guessing those personal values haven’t been as lucrative for the ones that made the safe choice to stay back at home on the farm. This is exactly the kind of risk I am talking about. And it’s easier to do that when single.
There are two ways to get rich- save more money or make more money.
If you are living on the edge, saving money isn’t going to help. Even if you somehow stash half your paycheck from McDonalds, it’s not going to add up to enough to change your life. Some people do manage to take the long hard path and make it work, but most of the time saving isn’t going to do much when you make $7.50 an hour.
So that leaves making more money. If you are working at McDonalds, there is probably something in the way of you making more money. Maybe you don’t have the skills and qualifications. Maybe you are in a crappy job market. Maybe your professional networks suck. But the point is that there probably isn’t an easy path just waiting for you to make more money.
So chances are if you are poor, some kind of major change has to happen if you are going to get rich. And it’s hard to make major life changes when you are married (at least, if you are married and poor).
The risk of emigrating to the U.S. frequently didn’t pay off. One estimate is that about a third of the immigrants moved back to their home country when they realized that they couldn’t make it in the U.S. Furthermore, the percentage of immigrants who did the traditional sort of slowly moving up the economic ladder was actually mostly restricted to a limited set of nationalities (and ethnic groups from those countries). Yes, some of the immigrants were told to move to the U.S. and forget about anyone they left behind. Once in the U.S., they had been told how to get to know other people who had emigrated from their countries (and, often, their specific ethnic group within that nationality) who could find them a place to live and help find them a good job. Other such immigrants could do no such thing. They were expected to keep sending money back to their relatives in the old country for the rest of their lives. Often no previous immigrant from their country could help them with jobs or places to live. Often some nationalities and ethnic groups faced racial and ethnic prejudice. It’s just not true that all immigrants had a clear path to moving up in the U.S.
They had no choice but to leave - it was that, or die (in effect). 
I would say that, on average, the “upside” of being small-c conservative is financially more advantageous than the “downside”, if you are very poor. Sure, they are less likely to take big career risks; but they are also less likely to end up making big lifestyle mistakes. They are less likely to end up “rich”, more likely to end up “middle class”.
Well, sure, if you define “marriage” as meaning “any stable long term relationship”, I would agree with you. But that still leaves the original question to be addressed.
Hmmm… nobody’s mentioned the obvious - it costs a fortune to get married properly. The amount some families spend on the (daughter’s) wedding is ludicrous, sometimes more than the family can afford. SO the poorer women, the ones who left home and have no parents to help pay for things, possibly consider putting off the wedding until they can afford their “special day”. Unless, of course, they latch onto a guy who can afford something close to their dream wedding, or at least something better than a trip to city hall in clean clothes. (Which still seems to some as the losers’ way.)
Rich people, too, are more likely to formalize the relationship to handle the legal/financial loose ends. There’s a lot of situations where living together qualifies as pretty much the same as married, but a lot (IIRC) where it may not. Home ownership and names on title, and the disposal of assets in break-up, custody - all these matter to people who can afford houses and afford lawyers for protracted arguments over custody of children, but less to those who cannot afford such things, nor the stability to contemplate needing them. In fact, not tying the knot makes breakups for the poor simpler and more flexible - and much cheaper.
Not sure the Appalachian example applies, I recall from many years ago (have times changed?) a woman could be kicked off welfare if there was a hint she was entertaining a man regularly in her place. This is the common inner city complaint that the welfare system actively encouraged the single mother problem, since a guy who spent too much time at his girlfriend’s house could be deemed her new means of support.
(Plus there’s the jail problem - in inner cities, stats says something like 1 in 4 men of not-in-college marriageable age (say, 18-24) would have spent time in jail, or 1 in 10 ARE in jail. This not only means there are fewer men to choose from, and they are less likely to find permanent employ - but the differential leads men to exploit their status. IIRC from a NY Times discussion of the issue, one woman who confronted her boyfriend about him seeing other women got the reply “I didn’t realize you expected this to be an exclusive relationship”. As men in China (and India) are finding out, it does not take a large differential to make the scarcity an issue.)
Finally, with money and careers comes planning. People who have decent incomes probably give far more thought to the timing of having children… sometimes too much though, and think themselves out of having children. For lower income groups, likely along with less education comes less planning and less carefulness. Fathers who are surprised by unplanned pregnancy are probably more likely to leave, especially if they have no assets or wages to be chased for.
This appears to be false. Cite.
I work in Silicon Valley with highly educated people, and none have ever expressed any interest in dumb women, and all the women here are married. Anecdotally my daughter who has a PhD is married, and the other women in her department were all married. Marriage rates are lower for the poor who are unlikely to have PhDs.
so I think you are back in the Mad Men marry your secretary world.
Really? When I was ordering a copy of my daughter’s marriage license, two people got married by the clerk at the window next to me, with one witness. They seemed pretty happy. Have any cites on wedding size being a marriage blocker?
Now this reason I buy.
What sector do you work in? What’s the gender ratio, in general? “All my female coworkers have been married” has a different significance if you work in engineering firms with two women and fifty men vs one of those primary schools where a man on premises is more likely to be a visiting father than an employee.
More School means the sexes are in closer contact longer
The higher the education, the more desirable a person becomes as an income earner.
(aka: Seeking the ‘Mrs. Degree’)
When US conservatives talk about the important of being married, do they mean stable monogamous long term relationships or only relationships formalized by a marriage contract/ceremony?
They tend to equate the two.
The “getting an Mrs. degree” was a joke going around when I was in college in the later 70’s, too. But partly, the logic applies here - in school, then college, people are in close contact with a peer group - same age, mostly not married and looking for relationships. Once out in the real world, you mileage may vary, but generally you are working with a larger mix of varied co-workers, fewer even near your age and most likely to be already in a relationship. Unless you have alternate social circles to find companionship, choices are much fewer and so it probably takes longer to find “Mr. Right”. A person who skips college to go straight into the work force probably has less opportunities to find a compatible mate, and particularly a more educated (i.e. higher income) one…
I think it was “Freakonomics” that suggested the current generations are the most stratified in the history of North America. With the advent of large subdivisions, suburbs have become more uniform, so the typical high school tends, like the neighbourhood friendships, to involve mostly people of the same socio-economic status.
The same applies with college - there is a greater mix of social status groups, but even then - your success in education tends (statistically) to follow your parents’ economic and educational level, so more rich and upper middle class people can afford to go to college and succeed in gaining entry. Once again, during prime relationship-forming years, people are mixing with a group of peers of similar educational achievement.
That doesn’t exactly contradict what I said.
That article addresses men wanting to marry a woman with less education than them.
What I was talking about was women not wanting to marry a man with less education than them.
And yes, one of my sources was the Atlantic article by Kate Bolick. While she did say women face “a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be ‘marriageable’ men — those who are better educated and earn more than they do.”, she was not saying the men were rejecting the women, but rather vice-versa.
Now, not every women feels this way, but surveys show most do.
We are definitely not going back to “Mad Men”: the Times article clearly states that only 20% of husbands marry a woman with less education than themselves.
However, the fact that 30% of wives marry a man less educated than themselves reflects less that they are more willing to do so and more that they have little choice.
The Times article you cited says 60% of BAs and BSs go to women. That means 40% go to men. If every one of those men marries a woman with an equal education, 20% of people with a BA or BS aren’t getting married, or will have to marry someone who never went to college.
My point is even supported by the Times article: the third paragraph from the end is about how a informal survey found that most of the women surveyed wanted a man who was slightly intellectually superior to them.
So, anecdotally, about your daughter with the PhD: what’s the highest degree held by her husband? Is he also a PhD, or is she one of the 30%?
One thing I found very interesting in that article happened right up front. It said “TODAY women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees and more than half of master’s and Ph.D.’s”. My understanding was that the gap actually grows.
Like if women receive 60% of Bachelor’s degrees, they’d receive more than 60% of MAs, and an even bigger percentage of PhDs.
And it starts with high school. More women graduate High School than men, more of them go on to college, and more of them graduate, creating an ever-expanding educational gender gap.
Far from proposing that we still live in the world of Mad Men. I am proposing that most people want a spouse who is their equal in intellect and education. But at every level of education, there are more women than men. This means men have no problem finding an equal partner, but women do. And while 30% of married women married someone with less education than themselves, many women choose to remain single rather than make that compromise.
And I suspect the gap noted in the Times article, that 30% of wives have a husband with less education but only 20 of husbands have a wife with less education (which they note is a reversal since he 1970s) is not due to preference but rather availability: Educated men have no problem finding a woman of equal education, so fewer of them are “marrying down” to use the article’s phrase. I don’t know what percentage of undergraduate and graduate degrees went to women in 1970, but at a guess I’d say less than half. So with a larger percentage of women receiving high levels of education, it is hardly surprising that a larger percentage of them are “marrying down”.
This is my guess. Lower-educated people get married less not because of lack of education directly, but because of all the other negative things that correlate with lack of education (being in jail, being a deadbeat without a job who no one wants to marry, having mental/emotional issues that make it difficult to carry on a long-term job, etc).
If you’re stable enough to make it through 4+ years of college and get a degree, it’s far more likely that you’ve got your life together and make for attractive marriage material.
Good points. There are a very large number of people that are afraid to get on an airplane due to their perceived risk of dying in a crash or hijacking. This is despite the fact that statistically, driving is more dangerous than flying. Perceptions get biased because of the prominence of plane crashes in the news and the fact that the news typically does not spend much time reporting on the dozens of people who drove off a cliff/into a wall/into a bus/whatever today and were killed.
It was my understanding that highly educated women had trouble finding partners because women prefer a male who has an equal or higher level of income and education than she does. There is a gender gap with women earning about 3 college degrees for every 2 by men. I don’t know how that will affect marriage rates.
What is the marriage rate among college educated black women, or women with professional degrees?
So, if they saw a stable, monogamous, long-term couple with children that hadn’t entered into a formal marriage contract, would it blow a fuse in their brain?