Tag Archives: Marriage

Another North Carolina Law On Marriage

Marriage

The republican dominated legislature here in Raleigh are submitting legislation that speaks to marriage.  However, unlike the vast majority of recent such bills, this one has nothing to do with gay marriage or civil unions.

It has to do with divorce:

Raleigh, N.C. — State lawmakers are considering making divorces harder to get in North Carolina.

Senate Bill 518, dubbed the Healthy Marriage Act, would double the one-year waiting period before a divorce could be granted and would require husband and wife to receive conflict resolution counseling, as well as counseling if they have children. Supporters said they believe the restrictions will help cut the state’s divorce rate.

Now, I don’t think that this action in any way excuses the liberty restricting legislation that has passed regarding gay marriage, but it is interesting to see republicans acting on oft cited criticisms of gay marriage opposition laws.  Namely, divorce of straight couples.

And, like laws restricting the rights of our gay friends, families and citizens, this law suffers the same faults.   Marriage, in the eyes of the state, should be a contractual matter.  And if two people want to enter into such an arrangement, they should be able to.  And, in similar logic, if they want to end said relationship, they ought to be able to do that as well.

Unless, of course, you buy into the liberal version of  the “collective” and reject the notion of “private” relationships.  In which case, if the community feels that marriages are better for society, well, then, perhaps divorce should just be outlawed completely.

The Impact Of Marriage: Poverty And Children

I have been making the point that one of the contributors to poverty, income disparity and perhaps income mobility is marriage.  I’ve been making the case that marriage tends to bring people out of poverty and failing to get married tends to make one more likely to experience poverty.

For example, I’ve demonstrated that the GINI, or disparity in income, falls as the marriage rate increases in a population:

  • 50% Marriage:  .3446
  • 60% Marriage:  .3353
  • 70% Marriage:  .3227
  • 80% Marriage:  .3015

As the marriage rate went up, the GINI went down.  In other words, as my population increased its marriage rate the inequality diminished.  In fact, by moving from a 50% marriage rate to an 80% rate, the GINI moved by 12%.

Let’s do it again.  10,000 new salaries, same constraints:

  • 50% Marriage:  .3471
  • 60% Marriage:  .3416
  • 70% Marriage:  .3248
  • 80% Marriage:  .3093

Again, a continuing trend toward equality.

As the population marries, the GINI falls.  And this is just a mathematical observation, it has nothing to do with the social benefits that occur due to marriage.

Further, data from the Urban Institute and American University shows that marriage impacts poverty in more concrete ways:

The gains from marriage extend to material hardship as well. About 30 percent of cohabiting couples and 33-35 percent of single parents stated that sometime in the past year they did not meet their essential expenses. These levels are twice the 15 percent rate experienced by married parents. Even among households with similar incomes, demographic and educational characteristics, married couples suffer fewer serious material 21 hardships. Moreover, despite their less promising marriage market, low-income and less educated mothers who are married experience significantly less material hardship than low income,
less-educated mothers not married.

Marriage retained an advantage in limiting hardship even among families with the same incomes relative to needs. The variables used for controlling for the effect of income to-needs ratios were the income-to-needs ratios in the current wave of SIPP (the prior four month period) as well as the mean level and the stability of income-to-needs ratios during the 28 months prior to the current wave. Not surprisingly, higher current welfare ratios, higher past welfare ratios, and lower instability of welfare ratios were all associated with less hardship. However, the inclusion of the income variables left intact virtually all of the differences by marital and family status.

Families that fit in the same income that are married fare better than families that are not married.

The other day I posted on poverty and how to avoid it.  One of the key barriers to middle class is not getting married:

 

The Immediate Prerequisites to Success Are:

  1. Receive a good education [graduate high school]
  2. Work full time
  3. Marry [And do it before having kids]

But do we have data?  Have we been able to demonstrate that marriage is a determining factor?

Yes.  There is data that backs up the idea that marriage, and just marriage, would reduce our poverty rate significantly:

Economists Isabel Sawhill of Brookings and Adam Thomas of Harvard have conducted a fascinating analysis of whether higher marriage rates would reduce poverty in the United States.4 Employing statistical modeling, they analyzed data from the Census Bureau to determine how poverty would be affected if poor people behaved differently. In particular, they modeled the effect on poverty rates of more work, more marriage, more education, and fewer children by poor adults. In the case of marriage, they simply matched unmarried people by age, education, and race until the marriage rate for the nation equaled the marriage rate in 1970. This exercise showed that if we could turn back the clock and achieve the marriage rate that prevailed in 1970, poverty would be reduced by well over 25 percent.

Impressive indeed.  Simply returning to 1970 rates of marriage, we would be able to realize a significant improvement in our poverty numbers.  And to put this in perspective, social welfare programs aren’t even close when it comes to effectiveness:

By way of comparison, doubling cash welfare would reduce poverty by less than one-third as much as increasing marriage rates.

We could double spending and reduce  poverty.  But it would only be one-third as effective as getting people to get married.

And as a way of comparison, look at the impact of poverty on kids and what reducing that impact by getting married would do:

Marriage, and the declining marriage rate, is a key to poverty in the United States.

Three Steps To Avoid Poverty

Income mobility.  Poverty.  How to create best results.

Topics that generate a lot of interest in the discussion of politics, government and the role of government.

I have discussed how marriage can impact the GINI coefficient measuring income disparity in populations and more recently had conversations regarding the impact of marriage on social mobility.  I feel that the more married we are, the more mobile we are:

I suspect that it [ social mobility] has to do with several things, but I feel that our declining marriage rate and the number of immigrants are leading reasons.

I came across an interesting piece of data from the Brookings Institute:

The Immediate Prerequisites to Success Are:

  1. Recieve a good education [graduate high school]
  2. Work full time
  3. Marry [And do it before having kids]

The results are staggering:

If an individual adheres to zero of those three social norms, he has a 76% chance of being poor.  Only a 7% chance of attaining the middle class.

On the other hand, if an individual adheres to all three of those social norms, an almost exact opposite picture is painted.  An individual stands a 74% chance of attaining middle class and only a 2% chance of being poor.

 

Income Inequality, The GINI and Marriage

I continue to question the GINI calculation comparison of nations in order to determine how well wealth is distributed within those nations.  For example, I have a specific problem with the fact that the United States has seen a significant rate of marriage decrease in its population over the last several decades.

As an example, I used a population of 4 and computed the GINI if they were all single:

24,000 – 30,000 – 50,000 – 75,000  The GINI came to .24162

If we marry 2 of those we might see:

24,000 – 50,000 – 105,000 This GINI is .301676

If we marry a different 2, we might see:

54,000 – 50,000 – 75,000 This GINI is .093110

Clearly the makeup of the population impacts the GINI coefficient.  In this analysis, I was called on small sample size.  Fair enough.  I did the data on a population of 10,000.

I took a random sampling of 10,000 salaries.  These salaries ranged from $0.00 to $250,000 and formed a near perfect bell curve with an average of $125,000.  Clearly this is not how wealth is distributed in real life, but I am simply making a point.

I then created 4 worlds.  Each world had a different marriage rate; 80-70-60-50%.  An acknowledge flaw in my data is that I do not randomize the single people each time.  That is, in the first world where 80% of the population is married, I take the first 2,000 and mark them single.  I then marry the 2001st individual to the 6,001st individual.  Then the 2002nd individual to the 6,002nd individual and so on.

My results:

  • 50% Marriage:  .3446
  • 60% Marriage:  .3353
  • 70% Marriage:  .3227
  • 80% Marriage:  .3015

As the marriage rate went up, the GINI went down.  In other words, as my population increased its marriage rate the inequality diminished.  In fact, by moving from a 50% marriage rate to an 80% rate, the GINI moved by 12%.

Let’s do it again.  10,000 new salaries, same constraints:

  • 50% Marriage:  .3471
  • 60% Marriage:  .3416
  • 70% Marriage:  .3248
  • 80% Marriage:  .3093

Again, a continuing trend toward equality.

Does my theory have legs in the real world?  I think it does:

Inequality is typically higher as the percentage of married people declines and as the correlation of of partner’s income increases.  Inequality also tends to be higher when low-income earners are disproportionately likely to remain unmarried.

In other words, the more people marry, the more equitable income is.  Especially when this trend is observed in low income individuals.

Further data suggests that poverty is addressed by marriage:

As expected, the results clearly show that married parents experience lower poverty rates and higher incomes not only than single mothers living without another adult, but also among those unmarried mothers with at least two potential earners. Poverty rates of cohabiting couple parents are double those of married parents; non-cohabiting single parents with at least a second adult had poverty rates three times as high as among married parents.  The apparent gains from marriage are particularly high among black households.

The gains from marriage extend to material hardship as well. About 30 percent of cohabiting couples and 33-35 percent of single parents stated that sometime in the past year they did not meet their essential expenses. These levels are twice the 15 percent rate experienced by married parents. Even among households with similar incomes, demographic and educational characteristics, married couples suffer fewer serious material 21 hardships. Moreover, despite their less promising marriage market, low-income and less educated mothers who are married experience significantly less material hardship than lowincome,
less-educated mothers not married.

In short, marriage matters.  And for whatever reason, the United States is becoming a less married nation.  If you wanna address poverty, inequality and hardship, focus on getting people, especially low-income people, married.  Failing that what you are doing is transferring wealth from one population to another in an attempt to “wish” you way out of reality.

 

Marriage In The United States Of America

Last month I made a claim that one of the reasons the GINI coefficient, a measure of the disparity in income, is not telling the whole picture in America is that it doesn’t reflect the true concept of households.  I made the case that:

For example, you could take 4 people with incomes described as:

  1. $24,000
  2. $30,000
  3. $50,000
  4. $75,000

The Gini coefficient for the above data is .24162

Now, marry two of those wage earners:

  1. $24,000
  2. $50,000
  3. $105,000

The Gini coefficient for THAT data is .301676.  Without ANY income changing at all, the Gini increases by 25%.  In other words, the same number of people are working the same number of jobs and earning the same number of dollars.  The only difference is the method by which they calculate the Gini.

Nickgb over at Poison Your Mind called shenanigans.

You are taking a nation-wide economic statistic, applying it to a population of four, then three, and drawing conclusions as to its usefulness?

Certainly my math was simple.  It consisted of a population of 4 individuals.  Clearly this was just a demonstration of what could or might occur in a larger group.

However, since then, we have learned that a record number of Americans are unmarried:

Barely half of all adults in the United States—a record low—are currently married, and the median age at first marriage has never been higher for brides (26.5 years) and grooms (28.7), according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data.

In 1960, 72% of all adults ages 18 and older were married; today just 51% are. If current trends continue, the share of adults who are currently married will drop to below half within a few years. Other adult living arrangements—including cohabitation, single-person households and single parenthood—have all grown more prevalent in recent decades.

Certainly there is nothing wrong with people deciding that they would rather enjoy life’s treasures as a single person rather than a married person, but it is also true that when measuring household income using the GINI coefficient, a drop in marriage rate of 33% will impact the results.