Trendspotting: The Marriage Premium Keeps Growing

NewsWire: 11/8/21

• A growing share of U.S. adults are unpartnered, and the gap in well-being between partnered and unpartnered adults has widened over time. While social and economic outcomes have been improving rapidly for the partnered over the last several decades, they haven't improved much at all for the unpartnered. (Pew Research Center)
• NH: The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who are not living with a romantic partner has risen from 29% in 1990 to 38% today. These are the “unpartnered”--that is, people who are neither married nor living with a partner. This finding is highlighted in a major new research report by Pew that examines the growing "partnership divide" separating winners from losers in America.
• One interesting finding is that men are now more likely than women to be unpartnered, which was not the case in 1990. While this seems paradoxical (how could an unequal number of men and women be partnered?), it can be explained. No, it's not happening due to more female couples than male couples among non-heterosexuals. Rather, it's driven by the rising average age gap between heterosexual partners. Since women are more likely to be partnered with older men, men in the range Pew examines (25 to 54) have fewer corresponding women who are the same age. So why has the age gap risen? Mostly due to the rising share of marriages that are remarriages. When people remarry for a second or third time, the age gap tends to be bigger than in the first marriage.
• Let’s move on to Pew’s main finding: the dramatic total increase in the unpartnered population. Most of this has been driven by the steep decline in any sort of marriage, first or otherwise, among working-age adults. Thirty years ago, 67% of this group was married; today, 53% are. While the share of unmarried adults who are cohabiting has risen over this period (+5 percentage points), the rise has been far smaller than the drop in marriage (-14 percentage points).
• This shift has major social implications. Across a broad range of social and economic indicators, unpartnered Americans do not fare as well as partnered Americans. Unpartnered adults, on average, have lower earnings, lower educational attainment, and are more likely to be “financially vulnerable” (that is, making an income below $19,950, which Pew deems the minimum for being able to live independently). They are less likely to be employed and more likely to live with their parents.

• The fact that marriage is linked with all kinds of positive economic, social, and health outcomes is well-established--but what Pew shows is that the delta in well-being has grown larger over time. A comparison of outcomes in 1990 and 2019, which Pew breaks down by gender, make this clear.

• The most striking takeaway from these charts is that almost all of the economic improvement over the past 30 years has gone to partnered people. Unpartnered people are barely doing any better than they were three decades ago.
• Among women, the differences are especially dramatic. The share of partnered women holding a bachelor’s degree has nearly doubled (from 22% to 43%), and their median earnings have jumped over $13,000, while unpartnered women’s earnings have dropped by $300. Partnered women have also experienced a huge decline in financial vulnerability. Among men the shifts have been less dramatic, but among unpartnered men there are more cases of declining outcomes. Their employment and earnings have declined, and the share who are financially vulnerable remains the same. The only area where they’ve seen any gain is in educational attainment, and even this is minimal.
• Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, unpartnered men and women also differ in their living arrangements. In 2019, just under a third of unpartnered men (31%) lived in their parents’ home, compared to 24% of unpartnered women.

• Again, the strong correlation between marriage and a broad range of positive outcomes is a well-corroborated social science finding. The more interesting question for researchers is determining the direction of causation: Does marriage confer these benefits, or is it that people who are already disposed to do well in life are more likely to get married? The answer seems to be both: Happier and more successful people are likely to choose to get married and to look better as marriage prospects; and marriage tends to induce people to lead more stable and effective lives.
• Which of these causal effects better explains the widening outcomes gap between the partnered and unpartnered? There's plenty of evidence supporting the growing role of the self-selection effect: Increasingly, those getting married are people who are already positioned to do well in life. In 1990, it was still lower-income Americans who were more likely to get married. But since then, marriage has increasingly become a “capstone” reserved for people who have already achieved their financial and educational goals. (See “Marriage is Now the Capstone of Adult Life.”) Among Xers and (especially) Millennials, the high achievers are more likely to end up married than the low achievers. Among Boomers, it was the other way around. (Among the Silent, nearly everyone got married... high- and low-achiever alike.)
• But there may also be evidence of a growing “marriage effect.” In a highly individualistic society that generally lets people do what they want, it’s possible that marriage has more of a protective effect by providing people with structure and purpose in life that they may not get from any other source. This effect appears to be especially large for men, which may explain why men have been most hurt by the decline in marriage.
• How do we know that men benefit more from marriage? Consider the “widowhood effect”: After the death of a spouse, men are much more likely than women to experience rapid declines in their physical or mental health. After becoming widows, women's mortality rate doesn't change much; after becoming widowers, men's mortality rate jumps dramatically. Men tend to rely on their wives for emotional benefits that they struggle to replace. Women, on the other hand, tend to have stronger social support systems outside of marriage.

• In previous NewsWires, I’ve often pointed out that the decline in fertility is being driven less by a decline in people’s desire to have kids and more by the obstacles people feel prevent them from having kids. There’s a parallel here in America’s attitude towards marriage. It’s not that Americans don’t want to get married: In 2020, 81% of never-married American adults told Gallup that they want to marry someday, an even higher share than when this question was first asked in 2013.
• While Americans are certainly more accepting today of different kinds of marriage and living arrangements, they still want the essential stability and commitment that are inherent to a marriage. But for various reasons, that goal is moving further and further out of reach.

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