economics & marriage

Blumner:
Saving marriage a matter of economics, not 'values'

Marriage has been in the news lately for its scarcity. More than half of all women in our country are now sans spouse. It's enough to make a wedding planner sob into her taffeta. This slow demise of marriage - down nearly 50 percent since 1970 - results from several trends. Americans are waiting longer to get hitched, are living together without benefit of marriage and, of course, are divorcing at a high rate. This is old news. Drill a bit deeper in the marriage statistics, and you'll unearth a much more remarkable fact: Better off couples are half as likely to divorce. Families with annual incomes over $50,000 have a 31 percent chance of divorce after 15 years, according to a study by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, whereas families with incomes below $25,000 have a 65 percent chance. Income predicts divorce with great accuracy. The numbers suggest that a key variable in family stability is less cultural or sociological - less about personal values - than about basic economics. It is hard to get along when you can't get by. There are plenty of stresses that buffet a marriage, but facing more bills than income has to be among the most insidious. Few things are as humiliating and oppressive as working full time yet knowing there is no way your paycheck will provide for your family. It is not a feeling that working Americans in the 21st
Advertisement
document.writeln(AAMB6);

century should be subject to, yet we increasingly are. The Bush administration has focused on marriage as an anti-poverty program, with the government directing hundreds of millions of dollars in tax money to help marriages flourish. I agree that healthy marriages should be encouraged. Married couples have higher incomes through their combined efforts, generally provide a better environment to raise children, and bring wider social stability. But just teaching people conflict resolution and relationship skills is not addressing the elephant in the room. You want healthy marriages? Then start reversing the growing income inequality and the you're-on-your-own economy that America has become. You want healthy marriages? Then start with healthy people and make sure that no American is without affordable health care and no employee has to lose a day's pay when sick. San Francisco is the first city in the country to require employers to provide paid sick leave, and you would think it was demanding gold-plated toilet seats at the loading dock bathroom. The travesty here isn't old liberal San Francisco bilking business owners. It is that any employer today can actually get away with not providing their staff accrued sick pay. Are they kidding? President Bush's idea to reduce the uninsured is a tax deduction for the purchase of private health insurance, a plan that would do virtually nothing for the lower income uninsured. The president should get real. Shoring up families means universal health care. You want healthy marriages? You want things to look more like the venerable 1950s when people seemed calmer and more secure about their lives? Then return to defined benefit pensions. Today only about 21 percent of workers in the private sector enjoy this peace of mind. Instead, we have shifted the risk of retirement onto workers' shoulders. If you don't invest wisely in your 401(k) or if you didn't put enough of your income aside or if you outlive your nest egg, well, thems the breaks. If Bush had his way, even Social Security would lose its entitlement status and become an investment program fraught with personal risk. You want healthy marriages? Then a $2-per-hour increase in the minimum wage won't cut it. We should figure out what constitutes a living wage and make that the floor. In England the minimum wage is $1,800 per month compared to our $824 for full-time work. The idea across the pond is that if an employer wants to monopolize the working time of an employee, then that employee should be paid enough for a reasonable existence. Marriages only have a chance when the people who are in them have a chance. The statistics couldn't be clearer: If the workplace provides men and women dignity and a semblance of economic security, that will translate into stability within the family. If the Bush administration really wants to gird the institution of marriage then it should forget about sermons and lectures on personal virtue (the government's marriage programs are largely operated by faith-based institutions). Red states, which tend to be more avidly religious, have higher divorce rates than blue states. Whereas in low-divorce blue states, workers tend to have higher incomes. It's not a matter of values, it's a matter of value for one's labor. Only by demanding that workers receive decent wages and benefits and only by becoming a more generous society will the decline of marriage substantially slow. Everything else is just a diversion.

--------------------------------

I chose this article because I think it's interesting that the author points out that the divorce rate is higher for lower-income families. I think the solutions she offers to getting more people married are interesting, so I'm going to go through and critique them, in an economic way of course:

You want healthy marriages? Then start reversing the growing income
inequality and the you're-on-your-own economy that America has become.

The growing income inequality I believe the author is referring to is the fact that there are rich people, and there are poor people. It's sad, of course, that some people are ridiculously rich while some people are ridiculously poor, but it's always been that way--and it always will be. In Wheelan's book (I don't have it with me right now, but I remember VERY CLEARLY) he goes through many different techniques on how we've tried to make the rich poorer and the poor richer--and the money never ends up with the poor. It never really works. It's just the way things are in our market system. There will always be unemployment.

Then start with healthy people and make sure that no American is without
affordable health care and no employee has to lose a day's pay when sick.

So, if I get this right, the author is saying that the reason there are so many low income people (resulting in a higher divorce rate among lower-income couples) is because companies don't pay for sick days. An externality for companies paying for sick days is this: say you are never sick. You're always at work on time. Then Lucy is never there. Lucy's always sick. Not only do you possibly have to do extra work to make up for Lucy (opportunity cost: the work you're supposed to be doing), but the company has to pay wages for someone who isn't present. The company is poorer. They may dock some of your pay. So, basically, people who show up every day may end up working harder for less money, and people who are sick end up working less for more money. Hmm.

You want healthy marriages? Then a $2-per-hour increase in the minimum wage
won't cut it. We should figure out what constitutes a living wage and make that
the floor. In England the minimum wage is $1,800 per month
compared to our $824 for full-time work. The idea across the pond is that if an
employer wants to monopolize the working time of an employee, then that employee should be paid enough for a reasonable existence.

Increasing the minimum wage that dramatically (the author is suggesting we more than DOUBLE the minimum wage per month) means everyone has more money. So far, so good. But then the company who makes gum has to pay their employees more, so to compensate, they raise the price of their gum from $1 to $2. Goods cost more. It works basically like inflation. I don't like it.

If the Bush administration really wants to gird the institution of marriage
then it should forget about sermons and lectures on personal virtue (the
government's marriage programs are largely operated by faith-based
institutions).

I agree that the Bush administration probably shouldn't focus so much on faith to save the country's marriages, but instead, they should probably work on tax cuts for those in marriages--especially for lower-income families. They could set up a law saying that couples with a combined income of less than $25,000 gets a certain percentage of tax cuts.

The END!