Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Is Capitalism Destroying the Family?

Apparently one of the ideas going around on the left is that if conservatives really cared about marriage, children getting to live in an intact family with both parents and other related issues, they would turn around and support progressive economics: unions, higher minimum wage, etc. Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig had a piece in The New Republic earlier this week titled "Poor People Don't Need Better Social Norms. They Need Better Social Policies." Today Jeff Spross takes to the virtual pages of The Week with a similar piece entitled "The conservative obsession with moral values doesn't explain the plight of the working poor".

Spross argues:
Research on both sides of the aisle has confirmed a quiet crisis in American life: over the last few decades, the social fabric of the poor and working class has come apart at the seams. For Americans in roughly the bottom third of the economy, marriage has collapsed and divorce has ballooned. Participation in work or in community groups is erratic at best. Children are largely raised in unstable, single-parent homes, where the support necessary for learning and healthy emotional development is very hard to come by. Loneliness and isolation are common.

A vocal cadre of conservatives have cohered around a theory of what happened: the post-1960s turn away from traditional moral values. But like any theory, it must fit the available data and it must be internally consistent. This one fails on both counts.

Instead, Occam's Razor suggests that economic changes — specifically the collapse of broad prosperity and the rise of inequality and the hourglass economy — is the lead culprit.
The evidence is indeed pretty dramatic. There's been a society-wide decrease in marriage and increase in single parenthood, but that change has been most dramatic among the poor. Spross includes a chart from Charles Murray's Coming Apart which shows how, although marriage rates were always lower among the poor, the gap has become much more dramatic since the '70s.



Spross points to the decline in unionization, etc. as the culprit, and argues that this is a far simpler explanation than blaming the shift on changes in cultural values.

That inflection point just after 1970, when the lower class begins its decline, is significant. Unions began devolving in the late 50s and really went into a slide in the late 60s. Median incomes stagnated compared to rising productivity right around 1970. And around 1980, right when the lower class really broke off from the upper class, was when the Federal Reserve induced a massive recession to fight inflation. Unemployment and involuntary part-time employment have been unusually high ever since, and it's taken the job market far longer to recover after each recession.

There follows more hand-waving about how things are tough for those at the lower end of the economy. And they are. But here's the problem. They always have been. The effect that we're looking to explain is a massive decrease in marriage rates and increase in out-of-wedlock childbearing. If we're going to explain that as driven by a bad economy, we'd expect to see the incomes of those people getting worse, right? But they haven't. Here's a handy Congressional Budget Office chart showing the change in inflation-adjusted after-tax income from 1979 to 2010 for households by quintile.


It's certainly true that the bottom 20% haven't grown as much as the top 20% or even the middle 20%, but all quintiles have in fact seen real income growth. If we're trying to explain a societal environment in which marriage has fallen apart badly for the poorer section of society, and fallen apart somewhat for the affluent, and your explanation is that this is because people aren't as well off as they were in the '50s and '60s, it seems pretty clear that you'd need to see incomes going down for the poorest section of society in order to make your argument work. We've seen unionization go down. We've seen the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage go down. But real after tax incomes for the poorest Americans are up.

I was trying to think of other ways that this hypothesis could be tested. One which occurred to me is trying to break the population down by race. The out-of-wedlock birth rate for African American families is significantly higher than for White families (72% versus 29%) however, the increase has not been as dramatic over the last 50 years in that it was higher in 1960 as well. Here's a graph I found on a Heritage report.


Since 1960 the out-of-wedlock birth rate for African Americans has increased by about 3.5x while the rate for Whites has increased by 10x. If you look at median incomes by race via the Census, you'll see that inflation adjusted median income for African American men has gone up by 82% from 1960 to 2001, while for white men it's only gone up by 35% (for women those numbers are 272% and 135% respectively.) This does have a certain inverse relation to what we see on out-of-wedlock births, in that white out of wedlock births have increased more, but again we have the problem that incomes have in fact gone up, while marriage and the family have clearly gone down.

Now, one theory which Spross does not air, but which one occasionally hears either from liberals who think the decline in marriage is a good sign or from those conservatives who think that women in the workplace are a bad thing, is that it's the fact that women have better incomes now in relation to men which makes women need men less and thus less inclined to marry. I don't know whether I buy that theory or not, but since I had the data from the Census I figured it could be interesting to run a graph, and here's the result. I've charted the ratio of women's income to men's income by race:


Black women have incomes close to those of Black men than do White women in relation to White men. There's also kind of a dip in the 50s and 60s where White women's incomes dipped in relation to White men's. This doesn't mean that White women's median incomes went down, it's just that White men's median incomes went up so much faster during the 50s and 60s than women's did. Black women did not suffer a similar dip. (I originally had a comment here saying this was doubtless because racial discrimination kept Black male incomes from experiencing the 50s and 60s boom which White male incomes did -- but actually it turns out that Black men saw their incomes rise at the same rate as White men from 1950 to 1965, it's just that their starting income in 1950 was much lower.) White women saw their income ratio inflect upwards and start to rise fast in 1979, so that would kind of fit Spross's story, in which everything goes bad in 1980, but I'm not sure he would want to reframe and blame women's liberation.

So we're not finding any clear stories here. A little later Spross tries to make some international comparisons. He says:
Other western countries do far more to reduce deprivation in absolute and relative terms, while coincidentally enjoying far greater family stability.

On family stability he links to this report. It's pretty damning. The US shows up low on the list, while right at the top with 94% percent of children living with two parents is that well known northern European social democracy... Jordan. Then Israel -- at least they have a good economy and welfare state. Then Egypt, not exactly known either for its booming economy or its generous welfare state. Are we doing so badly on family values because our economy and social programs are worse than Egypt? Then Italy, Poland, Malaysia... The Philippines ranks well above social democracy poster child Sweden. And yes, the US ranks below Ethiopia and above the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Oh, you say, but I'm not accounting for cultural factors. It's cultural factors which have Egypt ranking way above the US.

Cultural factors. Well, if it's cultural factors that have 89% of kids in Egypt living with both parents while only 69% of kids in America do, couldn't it just possibly be cultural factors which have changed in the US between 1950 and 2015? No epicycles are required. Occam's razor is appeased.

30 comments:

August said...

1950-2015
Women entering the workplace en masse.

Jenny said...

Cultural factors. Yes.

I might argue that women entered the workplace en masse for two reasons.

First as a repercussion of the sexual revolution. When sex became "free" and getting married "because you had to" fell out of favor, someone had to pay for those children. If Daddy isn't going to, Mommy has to.

Second I think there was a concerted effort by our betters to paint working mothers as the model of responsibility and nonworking mothers as lazy. I think many women took jobs because they felt like they weren't pulling their own weight at home, not necessarily because they wanted to be fulfilled at work.

That's culture, pure and simple.

Jenny said...

As an aside, I am not sure how those income tables work, but if the median income of a married white male who lives with his spouse is 46785 and the median income of a married white female who lives with her spouse is 25475, does that mean the median income of a married white household is 72260?

If so, that's mildly depressing.

Darwin said...

Jenny,

Well, pretty much. I did a quick check on median family incomes and it looks like around $72k is the pretty much the number.

texasknight said...

The hormonal birth control pill has caused it all.

dwb said...

Lots of policy changes happened in the 60s. Why is it we never consider what I think is the most obvious one: War on drugs.

If you are poor its much more "normal" now to think you are destined to land in jail. If that is the case, why get married?

Boonton said...

Very interesting post. I think you may be right about cultural factors but the story might be more complicated.

Individuals marry for love but in a society as a whole economic forces IMO play a huge role. For most of human history there are huge economic forces pushing women towards marriage, namely survival and protection.

I think the 1900's saw that equation begin to change. Developed economies rely less and less on brute force so the returns on the advantages males have (say raw strength) get less and less. Some traits that women are said to have an advantage in (say patience in dealing with annoying but not physically threatening people) see a bigger return. For TV fans here think of The Office's Pam versus her first boyfriend. Pam is able to swallow her pride, avoid losing her cool, and navigate an office full of bizaar and stressful people. Her first boyfriend works in the warehouse, drinks and will throw down punches when he gets jealous or angry. Pam ends up lead salesperson and first BF ends up arrested and fired.

Modern economies at best can be said to favor women equally to men or at worst (for those who like equality) actually favor women over men for most high paying positions. In a marriage, if one person is the breadwinner what does the other person bring to the picture? In previous ages the man might have 'won the bread' but he needed a woman to have the children. But women don't need men to have children...well they do but only for an hour or so (or perhaps minutes, I hear someone in the audience snicker).

The 1900's saw the beginning of this change but the World Wars put it on pause. The post war boom saw a temporary opening up of advantage for male workers as the US rapidly expanded its capital and Europe rapidly rebuilt. But a pause is still a pause. The 'golden era' of the 50's and early 60's was artificial. You killed ten million people in a World War, it wasn't golden for the 'average person' if in the average you include those people who should have been alive in 1950 but weren't.

So if it isn't culture, then why does Europe have a high degree of married parents? Err, well how many Egyptian women in Egypt are able to safely make a living on their own? How many jobs are there for regular Egyptians that are not highly physical?

But I think the Egyptian economy drives a lot of the Egyptian culture and the fact is the Egyptian economy is not a viable template for conservatives who think the US can be turned back to the 50's.

The hormonal birth control pill has caused it all.

Perhaps but IMO not really. I believe the Roman Empire had a hormonal birth control (the plant Silphium was believed to either cause abortions or act as a birth control but we can never be sure since the plant was picked to extinction so we cannot study it today). Yet that never produced anything like our society.

Darwin said...

Boonton,

I'd certainly agree it's complicated -- saying "cultural factors" in part seems to be a big plug indicating that.

And actually, I should be clear: the sense in which I'd say blaming the economy for the decline in marriage and rise in out-of-wedlock childbearing is, I would argue, only misguided when "the economy" is used in the sense of "because of declining unions and a low minimum wage" which is the kind of stuff that Spross gestures at in his piece.

I would agree that the fact that women are now more capable of earning a good living for themselves is probably an enabler of cultural change.

Obviously, different cultures deal with this different ways, because there's a complex interaction between social and religious norms, economic opportunity, personal desires, and family structures. But I don't mean to reject the interaction of the economy and the culture -- just the very simplistic: there's no moral or cultural issue to talk about here, if we threw money at the poor that would solve the "marriage gap" analysis that Spross and Bruenig seem to be peddling.

Developed economies rely less and less on brute force so the returns on the advantages males have (say raw strength) get less and less. Some traits that women are said to have an advantage in (say patience in dealing with annoying but not physically threatening people) see a bigger return. For TV fans here think of The Office's Pam versus her first boyfriend. Pam is able to swallow her pride, avoid losing her cool, and navigate an office full of bizaar and stressful people. Her first boyfriend works in the warehouse, drinks and will throw down punches when he gets jealous or angry. Pam ends up lead salesperson and first BF ends up arrested and fired.

This seems like an interesting point to think more on at some point. On the one hand traditionally hard labor ways of earning a living aren't needed as much, and lower skilled men have been hit hard as a result. On the other hand, you've got a lot of complaints that men still occupy a lot of the tops slots in business. After a draining week of having to deal with a lot of top brass at work -- and seeing how the women on my team hated it a lot more than I did -- I wonder if there's a sense in which for a small cut of men the high pressure, aggressive kind of business world is a better fit, which leaves them occupying a lot of top slots, while women are as well as or better suited for the broad middle. Kind of a male hourglass economy overlayed on a female football or pyramid shaped economy. I'm being strictly anecdotal, though. I'd have to go read up on it.

Jenny said...

Boonton,

"Modern economies at best can be said to favor women equally to men or at worst (for those who like equality) actually favor women over men for most high paying positions. In a marriage, if one person is the breadwinner what does the other person bring to the picture? In previous ages the man might have 'won the bread' but he needed a woman to have the children. But women don't need men to have children...well they do but only for an hour or so (or perhaps minutes, I hear someone in the audience snicker)."

While I agree with the gist of your overall comment, this paragraph is a bit incongruent. If we confine "high paying positions" to high school dropouts or some other such demographic, then I yes I agree that women are more likely to have a higher paying job than men. But for the overall population, there is no evidence for this claim. Women are still the exception rather than the rule for the highest paid positions.

Also the idea that mothers do not need the fathers of their children after the initial sperm deposit is the general feminist line, but it has no basis in reality. First working while pregnant and postpartum and with young children is no picnic. Secondly there is a reason 25% of adult women are on psychiatric drugs and it is my opinion that it is largely due to the cultural zeitgeist of "having it all." So while it is possible to strike out and raise children by yourself, it isn't what most would choose to do without the cultural tide pushing them in that direction. So what does a father bring to the table in these modern times? Protection, the same as it always was except now the protection is from utter exhaustion instead of death.

bearing said...

I just wanted to second dwb's comment that the war on drugs, and the consequent incarceration of many men who are thereby made unavailable to their families, and the consequent aggravation of the normalization of absent fathers, is a factor that might well be included here. Don't suppose you might take a look at the figures for male incarceration over these years as well?

Boonton said...

While I agree with the gist of your overall comment, this paragraph is a bit incongruent. If we confine "high paying positions" to high school dropouts or some other such demographic, then I yes I agree that women are more likely to have a higher paying job than men. But for the overall population, there is no evidence for this claim. Women are still the exception rather than the rule for the highest paid positions.

True but let's treat marriage as a pure economic bargain for purposes of this argument. The highest paid positions are by definition a minority, a tiny minority. So they can't drive the out-of-wedlock average. Whether the 1% is 100% faithful or 100% unfaithful to marriage, they can never be more than 1% of the overall population.

But at the top what makes the most sense, marriage or not? Well let me cite the example of the Clintons as a classic 'power couple' with children (or child). I would say more often than not at the top of the income scale, marriage is an economic advantage in raising children. Hence you see less out-of-wedlock births and while divorce may be common, the impression I get is that single parenthood is not. And it isn't. For all the talk about 'elites' the fact is today's elites look almost 1950ish in their family structure. Obamas, Clinton's, Bush's, even Palin's all seem to be made up of long term married parents. Decades ago Dan Quayle made a big deal about Murphey Brown but for the most part the Murphey Browns are rather traditional when it comes to marriage and kids (BTW, technically so was Murphey Brown. Her kid was with her estranged, erractic husband so from a Catholic POV she was a married woman)

Does this still work for a woman at the bottom or even lower middle of the income brackets? Not at all clear to me. A women can support a child without a man. There is no reason to marry a man unless he brings something to the table and is likely to bring something to the table into the future. Often, though, men come at a cost, they want their own children. So a single mother must seek out not just a peer but a peer plus since a new husband who will also want her to have another child will impose a cost and burden on her. It isn't sufficient, then, that he is just equal to her paycheck, he has to be equal plus. Marrying up then makes sense for women but marrying laterally doesn't and is no longer necessary in today's economy. Since 50%+ of women cannot marry up by definition it makes sense to downgrade marriage.

Also the idea that mothers do not need the fathers of their children after the initial sperm deposit is the general feminist line, but it has no basis in reality. First working while pregnant and postpartum and with young children is no picnic.

True but there's no biological requirement that help come from the father. A man biologically requires a mother to have a child.

Secondly there is a reason 25% of adult women are on psychiatric drugs and it is my opinion that it is largely due to the cultural zeitgeist of "having it all

I think a more relevant factor is that most women will want and will have children in their lifetimes. And they will do so whether or not men are on the ball.

We.Met.In.Barcelona said...

Poor women have always worked so people throwing marriage declines to the cultural revolution re: women entering the labor force - that is driven by changes in the middle and upper classes.

Jenny said...

Boonton,

"Often, though, men come at a cost, they want their own children. So a single mother must seek out not just a peer but a peer plus since a new husband who will also want her to have another child will impose a cost and burden on her."

In arguing your economic angle, you gloss right over the cultural impetus. The question is why are there so many single mothers not why aren't single mothers getting married.

I agree that after a child exists the economic calculus of getting married is more complicated, but before the child, it is pretty straightforward. Two incomes are more than one income. The economic forecast is very clear in that if you are married before having children, the likelihood of living in poverty is greatly reduced. The economic state of single mothers is generally poverty.

"I think a more relevant factor is that most women will want and will have children in their lifetimes. And they will do so whether or not men are on the ball."

This statement seems to assume that single women are using men for their sperm deposits in order to gain the children they actually want. While there might be some cases of this behaviour, I think a more truthful statement is that women who have sex will eventually have children in their lifetimes, whether or not men are on the ball.

If you allow me some conjecture, I will argue that most women who become pregnant out of wedlock are not looking to just go ahead and have children because they cannot find suitable husbands. Most likely they are engaged in the culturally supported delusion of "It won't happen to me." The culture tells us that if we have "safe" sex, it doesn't matter if we are married or not because nothing bad will happen. But in reality, "protection" fails quite frequently. The culture pretends it doesn't. We promote the act that creates children as the utmost pasttime in life and then are shocked when all these children keep showing up.

I don't think the economics of the situation play into the decision to have sex out of wedlock much at all before the fact of the child. I will grant that our modern economy, given the fact that women can survive on their own, does not provide negative feedback in regards to having sex out of wedlock. A single woman does not have the negative example of women and children dying in the gutter to dissuade her from having sex. I am not prepared to say that the fact we lack such examples is a negative.

I think, at best, economic consideration is a neutral factor when compared to the vast support the culture gives to non-marital sex.

And, of course, as I have granted before, once the child exists, these factors become much more complex.

Boonton said...

I agree that after a child exists the economic calculus of getting married is more complicated, but before the child, it is pretty straightforward. Two incomes are more than one income. The economic forecast is very clear in that if you are married before having children, the likelihood of living in poverty is greatly reduced. The economic state of single mothers is generally poverty.

I think the truth here is more subtle. I'm reminded of the debate over the Clinton healthcare reform back in the 90's. There was someone being interviewed on EWTN who said they were from some family orientated think-thank that had found 'facts' like being married meant you were more likely to be covered. Well causation is important. Two 19 yr olds working at a fast food place are unlikely to have health coverage. If they get married, they are still unlikely to have health coverage.

My question for you is why if marriage reduces poverty, then why aren't more people getting married? Is it your contention that single moms like poverty? I don't think so. Is it your contention that people in the bottom of the income scale don't know who to better their economic lot? Well one thing I've found is many people at the bottom of the income scale often are quite aware of possible ways to improve their situation. For example, many understand the disability system and how to qualify for it very well, even though it is actually very complicated. If marriage was as clear a ticket out of poverty as you think, then it seems very unlikely that people would avoid marriage.

I think part of the issue is while in theory two incomes are better than one, it isn't always clear that a woman who gets married is going to get two incomes. Bluntly a woman who marries may end up with a deadbeat which means she doesn't get two incomes, she doesn't get the help she would have otherwise gotten (since family would expect her husband to be doing the job) and she closes herself off to the possibility of finding and marrying a better man (since most 'better men' are not going to be very open to dating a married woman).

Likewise younger marriages tend to have higher failure rates, and it is harder to find serious economic improvement via marriage if you are younger than a bit older. So a hypothetical 18 yr old woman might confront the following economic options:

A: Wait until mid to late 20's to marry (or older). At that point you will interrupt your job development to have children which will cause an income hit. Presumably, though, by marrying wisely you can offset that hit by having a dependable, reliable income from the male side of the marriage.

B: Have a child or two in your late teens or very early 20's. At this point your parents are likely both young enough to help with the early childhood years AND at the peak of their income earning years. The impact to your income from career disruption is minimal. Unlike previous eras, respectable marriage later on is still open to you but you will not be under pressure to compromise on men due to a ticking biological clock.

This statement seems to assume that single women are using men for their sperm deposits in order to gain the children they actually want. While there might be some cases of this behaviour, I think a more truthful statement is that women who have sex will eventually have children in their lifetimes, whether or not men are on the ball.

Perhaps but teen pregnancy rates are low and getting lower. You can't quite argue that women are just having fun having sex and then get caught unaware that pregnancy and childbirth might follow. Women are more aware of this than men. Perhaps many single women will say pregnancies are unplanned but it isn't that plausible to argue that at some level they were not at least open to pregnancy.

Darwin said...

B: Have a child or two in your late teens or very early 20's. At this point your parents are likely both young enough to help with the early childhood years AND at the peak of their income earning years. The impact to your income from career disruption is minimal. Unlike previous eras, respectable marriage later on is still open to you but you will not be under pressure to compromise on men due to a ticking biological clock.

I actually find the B narrative deeply implausible. And the idea that its somehow less disruptive to a career (does it even make sense to talk about "career" at the economic level we're talking about here?) by having "a child or two" in one's late teens or early twenties doesn't strike me as passing the reality test.

My question for you is why if marriage reduces poverty, then why aren't more people getting married? Is it your contention that single moms like poverty? I don't think so. Is it your contention that people in the bottom of the income scale don't know who to better their economic lot? Well one thing I've found is many people at the bottom of the income scale often are quite aware of possible ways to improve their situation. For example, many understand the disability system and how to qualify for it very well, even though it is actually very complicated. If marriage was as clear a ticket out of poverty as you think, then it seems very unlikely that people would avoid marriage.

I think it's doubtless more complicated than this.

At the most basic level, marriage makes you better off even without two incomes. My wife doesn't bring in a paycheck, but the household gets a massive amount of value from the work she does educating the kids, caring for them, taking care of the house. The amount of money we'd have to spend to have someone else do that work if she was off at an office would be considerable. So even with poor employment prospects, a guy would have to be pretty astoundingly loutish for him to be a net drain on a household.

However, there are sometimes built in negative incentives (like government benefits that are lost if you have a spouse, but which you can keep if you're single) and then there's the interplay of short and long term thinking.

In a culture in which many of the morals which held 50+ years ago have been shed, there are people who make the trade of "this person isn't desirable enough to marry, but they're desirable enough to sleep with for now". Or "this person doesn't want to marry me, but maybe if we sleep together for a while they will."

If in the process people get pregnant, having a child often seems like a potential blessing which people don't want to pass up. Poor women abort unexpected pregnancies at a much lower rate than more affluent women. Liberals seem to assume this is just because they can't afford abortions, but some decent sociological research suggests its more a combination of being a parent (even if possibly a single one) looks like a good thing, and there's less of a sense that you're losing out on some awesome future by becoming a parent at the wrong time.

Jenny said...

All pregnancy rates are getting lower and lower except for the over 40 set. I'm not sure that you can draw the conclusion from dropping pregnancy rates that the women who do get unexpectedly pregnant are doing it on purpose.

Boonton said...

Jenny,

I'm not sure I'm following you assertion. You seem to be saying that the unwed pregnancy rate is going up because women are more likely to have sex outside of marriage and most women who have sex will eventually have children.

Yet you then say pregnancy rates are getting lower for all women except the over 40 ones. But if pregnancy rates are going down then clearly you cannot attribute the rise of unwed mothers to free wheeling women enjoying free sex until they are caught by a surprise pregnancy.

Boonton said...

Darwin,

I actually find the B narrative deeply implausible. And the idea that its somehow less disruptive to a career (does it even make sense to talk about "career" at the economic level we're talking about here?) by having "a child or two" in one's late teens or early twenties doesn't strike me as passing the reality test.

Actually yes, clerical, administrative support, even customer support careers still exist. Careers for those who don't get 4 year college degrees still exist (and so do careers besides more physical, male dominated ones like plumber, carpenter, mechanic). For many of these careers, long stretches of continuous experience provide the most reliable means towards higher pay. So yes in that case doing your children at 18 so by 25 or so they are old enough that you can concentrate on work is more economically viable than waiting until you are, say, 27 or so and taking a break for 5 years or so.

At the most basic level, marriage makes you better off even without two incomes. My wife doesn't bring in a paycheck, but the household gets a massive amount of value from the work she does educating the kids, caring for them, taking care of the house.

You're describing an advantage to *YOU* in being married. Your wife, of course, also greatly benefits but she benefits because she is married to someone who provides an above standard household for her.

What if her parents provided an above standard household but most of the available men to her could at best provide a substandard one? Strictly speaking being married even to a bit of a lout would be better than doing it all on her own (your two incomes are better than one argument), but 3 incomes beat two and provide relief from the prospect of getting older and older and feeling pressure to settle for a substandard male just to have children.

However, there are sometimes built in negative incentives (like government benefits that are lost if you have a spouse, but which you can keep if you're single) and then there's the interplay of short and long term thinking.

Most of which are vastly overstated.

In a culture in which many of the morals which held 50+ years ago have been shed, there are people who make the trade of "this person isn't desirable enough to marry, but they're desirable enough to sleep with for now". Or "this person doesn't want to marry me, but maybe if we sleep together for a while they will."

My thinking here is that the culture is being driven by economics much more than is driving economics. For example:

If in the process people get pregnant, having a child often seems like a potential blessing which people don't want to pass up. Poor women abort unexpected pregnancies at a much lower rate than more affluent women.

This assertion would seem to support my contention that unmarried pregnancies are happening because women choose to them AND economic incentives rather than 'cultural change' are a driving factor behind this choice. If it was simply about a cultural change towards 'more sex' then why would the abortion rate be falling?

Affluent vs less affluent have direct cost impacts. An affluent couple 'pays' a lot for a kid in the form of taking extended time off of work etc. So this would imply that we'd expect to see affluent couples to have fewer children but invest a lot more in them when they do. In other words, the Clinton model.

Less affluent also means less costs, esp. if you do it when you're younger and use parents or inlaws to offset costs for housing, food and so on (which many might be doing already even without kids in the mix)

Jenny said...

"Yet you then say pregnancy rates are getting lower for all women except the over 40 ones. But if pregnancy rates are going down then clearly you cannot attribute the rise of unwed mothers to free wheeling women enjoying free sex until they are caught by a surprise pregnancy."

Why not? If the portion of women having sex outside of marriage is increasing, they have the most at stake to avoid pregnancy, your notions of parental support notwithstanding. It is to their benefit to consistently and conscientiously use contraception. If most sex is nonmarital sex, I would expect most sex to be sterile by intention and design.

And yet contraception fails. And once the child exists, it is a whole new ballgame.

Darwin said...

Actually yes, clerical, administrative support, even customer support careers still exist. Careers for those who don't get 4 year college degrees still exist (and so do careers besides more physical, male dominated ones like plumber, carpenter, mechanic). For many of these careers, long stretches of continuous experience provide the most reliable means towards higher pay. So yes in that case doing your children at 18 so by 25 or so they are old enough that you can concentrate on work is more economically viable than waiting until you are, say, 27 or so and taking a break for 5 years or so.

Well, the jobs exist. I'm not clear that the amount of career progressions one makes over time is very large, such that taking a few months off would slow you down a whole lot, of even leaving to take a few years off and then coming back if that was economically in the cards. (I'm not sure it's common or viable for a single mom to take five years off to raise her kids, especially if her own parents are not necessarily married or still married.)

For instance, I used to work in a telephone call center in West Virginia. It employed a lot of women, many of whom were single or divorced moms. People came and went pretty commonly. Yeah, if you stuck around for years and your conversion rates were good, you could get a raise from $8/hr to up to as much as $10, but that was fairly rare. Most people made the basic. And since turnover was constant we actually had evening when we used the phone bank to call former employees and ask them to come back to work for the call center again.

Also, the data on unwed pregnancy shows the increase in rate pretty across the board in term of age:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db18.htm

60% of unwed births are to women age 20-29 and 17% to those 30+. From 1980 to 2006 the unwed pregnancy rate was up by the following percents per age group:

18-19: 59%
20-24: 95%
25-29: 120%
20-34: 161%
35-39: 170%

Darwin said...

This assertion would seem to support my contention that unmarried pregnancies are happening because women choose to them AND economic incentives rather than 'cultural change' are a driving factor behind this choice. If it was simply about a cultural change towards 'more sex' then why would the abortion rate be falling?

I wouldn't say it's a cultural trend towards "more sex" (after all, unmarried people have less sex than married people).

I guess I'm not clear how one could distinguish between "unmarried pregnancies are happening because women choose" and "cultural change" since clearly one of the things of note about our culture 50+ years ago is that women generally chose not to get pregnant outside of marriage (or to get married quickly if they did.)

I'd say that among the many cultural changes (and obviously there's a complex interaction of cultural and economic factors as well) some key ones are that:

1) It's become accepted as morally okay to have sex outside of marriage

2) Being an unwed mother is not nearly as looked down on as it was 50+ years ago

3) A magnified sense of marriage: how expensive a wedding should be, how fulfilling the marriage itself should be, what a great guy you should marry, how financially secure you should be to "afford" to get married

Also, on a weird side note in re abortion rates falling:

If you take a look at the abortion ratio (the percentage of pregnancies that end in abortion) and the pregnancy rate (including both pregnancies carried to term and those aborted) what you get is that Roe v. Wade (and the sexual revolution) seems to have caused the pregnancy rate to go way up, which was compensated for by more abortions, and then since a peak around 1980 there's been a gradual decrease in both. (I played with the data a bit near the end of this old post: http://darwincatholic.blogspot.com/2008/03/poverty-and-abortion-new-analysis.html)

I'd read that as kind of a cultural shock in which extra marital sex became more accepted, abortion became more available, and contraception wasn't used and consistently as it might have been. Then as people got used to the new status quo (and the fact that abortion is a pretty lousy experience) they got better at using contraception and things pretty much returned to their mid sixties equilibrium.

Boonton said...

Jenny,

Your 3:45PM comment seems to imply that unmarried women are having more sex than they used too, hence even though the sex is 'sterile by intention and design' (meaning the women are using contraception), we still get more unwed mothers because birth control has a failure rate.

Darwin, though, argues an opposite angle, that married couples have more sex than unmarried ones. I think here again averages are deceptive. Unmarried people include single people as well as people who are in relationships. Among the single individuals you will have those where sex rarely happens so they will drag down the average. But regardless, the failure rate of contraception is actually very low and is basically zero for a person who takes it very seriously. We know, of course, that abortion exists if contraception does fail so the increase in unwed motherhood cannot be tied to ignorance on the part of women as to the actual risk of sex and pregnancy. While I'm sure you can find many who said their pregnancy was unplanned, I think if you could probe deeper you'd find that their pregnancy was not exactly an unwelcome shock like a car wreck but instead something they may not have been aggressively planning but were relatively open to it if it fell in their laps (so to speak).

Boonton said...

Darwin,

What I find interesting about the chart on the link you cited is that for teens 1995 was the highwater mark for unwed births (30 per 1000) and since then we've reverted to the 1980 rate of about 21 ever since. The real increase is in 18-19 which almost doubled from 1980-1995 and then pulled back slightly. From 20-39 the numbers have been increasing but again the real shift happened from 1980-95.

For the older women I think the issue becomes more confused since some are unmarried but living in what would have been called 'common law' marriages in older days. You also have more divorced women as you increase the age ranges so the dynamics of what is going on here probably are getting more complicated.

I think the ultimate shift here is still economic rather than cultural. The US wasn't all that puritan in 1980, but what has changed is income.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/people/2010/P05AR_2010.xls In 1980 the median male made about $31,567 in 2010 dollars and female $12,395. Or a male had 2.5 times the income to the table.

In 1995 males were at $32,051 and females at $17,232 or males had 1.8 times the income. By 2010 males had $32,137 and females $20,831 and the ratio is 1.54.

From 1980 to 1990 we see a large shift in economics. Women earned more and the edge males had diminished most dramatically. If both men and woman earned more evenly, then the 'edge' at being married to a man would still be impressive even if a woman could more easily afford single motherhood. After '95 or so women continued to improve their income and the male edge continued to diminish but not as dramatically. This coincides with the data where most of the increase in single motherhood happened from the 80's to 90's but grew slowly after that or diminished.

3) A magnified sense of marriage: how expensive a wedding should be, how fulfilling the marriage itself should be, what a great guy you should marry, how financially secure you should be to "afford" to get married

Indeed. Why does Trump always divorce his wives? Why don't they divorce him? Could he really be so unlucky as to marry women who are bigger jerks than he is? Probably not.

Marriage to a jerk is a cost. If the jerk makes 1000 times more than you, that might make up for it. If he makes equal to you or less then the reasons not to go back to the store and see if you can get a better model start to become more pressing.

I would say my economic model implies that women more often than not find men bring as many problems with them to a marriage as they solve. A large income differential can make up for this but as that 'edge' narrows so does the appeal of getting married.

This economic factor likely drives the culture. If you only get married if it is a great deal for you, then you're going to expect a big wedding, excellent financial security etc.

Boonton said...

Darwin,

speaking of 'financial security', a while ago Marginal Revolution had a good link to a historical discussion of social 'birth control' in Colonial and Victorian times. One real interesting fact was that it wasn't so much premarital sex as a taboo that drove culture but the idea that it was absolutely unacceptable to many in society that a couple marry and have children in their parents' home. For most, marriage had to be delayed until they could establish their own household. AS a result in the 1800's marriages happened later in ones' 20's and as a result fewer children were born than would have otherwise been.

This taboo might account for why you also see an increase in marriage 'quality' these days (i.e. more expensive weddings, agonizing over whether the person is the 'right' one etc.). In 1880 if you were 26 and unmarried you couldn't afford to remain that choosey. Cut a deal if you must and accept a less than perfect guy or gal. In 2015 getting married isn't going to be a magical bonus for you so don't do it unless it really improves your lot.

This could explain the paradox you see where rates of poverty are lower for married versus unmarried yet many who are poor seem less likely to marry. If getting married causes such good things why wouldn't the poor, most of all, jump on it? Because it doesn't so the only marriages you see are the cases where it does...which leaves the impression that it has the causal effect.

A bit like attending a convention of lottery winners, noting everyone is well off. Then you wonder why more people don't play the lottery. It only makes sense to play if you have a winning ticket. If you don't then you're just out money.

Jenny said...

Boonton,

"Your 3:45PM comment seems to imply that unmarried women are having more sex than they used too, hence even though the sex is 'sterile by intention and design' (meaning the women are using contraception), we still get more unwed mothers because birth control has a failure rate.

Darwin, though, argues an opposite angle, that married couples have more sex than unmarried ones."

I am not seeing the disconnect.
Remember your contention is that since the pregnancy rates have dropped, single women who wind up pregnant must have done it on purpose.

If there are fewer married people now than in the past and unmarried people have less sex than married people, it seems completely rational that the pregnancy rates would drop even as the contraception failure rates stayed constant. It only means that more single people having sex will eventually lead to more single people having children even if the absolute amount of sex across the population is less than it used to be.

Also being overlooked is that a married person with a child or two is much more likely to choose permanent sterilization as his contraception of choice than a single person who is hoping to someday get married and have children. If you hope to one day have children, you don't get sterilized now which makes it much more likely that your contraception of choice will fail at some point and an unexpected nonmarital pregnancy will occur. When you are sterilized, your pregnancy risk is quite small indeed even if you have sex morning, noon, and night every day of the week. But sterilization only makes sense after you have children if you ever intend to have them, which most people do.

Darwin said...

I'm also kind of skeptical that we can use the argument: "People could prevent this reliably with enough effort. They don't prevent it. Therefore, they must not mind."

For instance, there are a lot of really easy things you can do to prevent car accidents: Don't drive drunk or buzzed. Don't speed. Don't do two things at once. Don't rush intersections. etc.

People often do these things, and the result is that more accidents happen than strictly need to. However, that's not because people don't really mind having traffic accidents, it's because when making specific trade offs they think they can get away with it without having a traffic accident. (And often they're right, but sometimes they're wrong.)

On the economic stuff: I think we're starting to his some diminishing returns, though it's certainly all interesting stuff. (The work on marriage age is fascinating. I remember researching and writing about this years ago, and one of the major differences between Eastern and Western European wealth and population in the Middle Ages is based around marriage ages. (In the east people married younger, in the west people married later.)

I don't deny that various things you cite probably have some effect. For instance, I talked about the ratio of female to male earnings in the post. However, while these economic facts matter (for instance, if women simply weren't allowed to work, or always made only 25% of what men did, you can bet it would reduce the number of women setting up households on their own) I think culture clearly matters a tremendous amount too.

We can see this, for instance, in immigrant cultures, and in comparisons across countries. I used to work with a lot of immigrants from India, and there (despite the fact that some of them had arranged marriages and thus a real luck of the draw on how compatible a spouse they got) there was a huge cultural taboo against divorce. Despite the fact that there's a huge boom (even more so in Indian immigrants in the US) in women's education and women's job prospects, they tend much less towards divorce and single parenthood. Why? Because they have strong cultural baises and moral beliefs around that. You see the same thing in the US where across class lines people with regular church attendance are less likely to have children out of wedlock.

Now, I guess, some would ask: Is it just cultural taboos or are there actual non-monetary benefits to marriage other than not being given grief by your family and neighbors for having a kid outside of marriage? I don't by the lottery winners convention argument. I think there pretty clearly are benefits in the long term to the couple, and far more so to the children, in marriage versus single parenthood or serial cohabitation.

There's been a decent amount of research around this, and I suppose we could go round on it, but on the particular issue I was writing about it was kind of assumed in that we had conservatives and progressives arguing over why marriage was down, but taking it for granted that it was a problem that it was.

At the moment, though, I need to duck out in order to be all World War One all the time in support of the novel.

I do really appreciate you coming over, though, and it's been a fun and informative conversation!

Boonton said...

So your argument is married people have more sex, but there are many more unmarried people. Even though they don't have as much sex, you take a huge amount of unmarried people, multiply by the rate at which they have sex and multiply at a small rate of conception failure and you get a lot of children born out of wedlock.

Except the graphs on http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db18.htm don't seem to back this up. Look at the chart titled "Has the rate of childbearing for unmarried women changed by age?". This shows how many births per 1,000 unmarried women in different age groups by year. All show a sharp increase since 1980, except for young teens.

Contraceptives are no more prone to failure now than they were in the past. If the issue was just a huge increase in the raw size of the amount of unmarried women then the rate wouldn't have to increase.

Jenny said...

Boonton,

"If the issue was just a huge increase in the raw size of the amount of unmarried women then the rate wouldn't have to increase."

The rate could very easily go up if the number of unmarried women having sex also increased. The question isn't the number of unmarried women in existence. The question is how many of those unmarried women are having sex.

This is what has changed in the culture. It became the norm for single women to have unmarried sex.

That graph certainly does not refute my argument. My argument isn't that contraception fails more now than in the past. My argument is that single women have a lot more sex (contraceptive or not) than single women did in the past. Contraception fails at a predictable rate. Thus there are more pregnancies for unmarried women.

Married or not, sex causes babies. More nonmarital sex = more nonmarital pregnancies.

Boonton said...

Darwin

For instance, there are a lot of really easy things you can do to prevent...


Also remember the big leap in unwed births was 80-94. After that the increases are pretty modest. Did people suddenly forget how contraception works in 1980? Did failure rates leap? I don't think so. Your typical 25 yr old woman of 2015 is no more or less ignorant of pregnancy risks than your 25 yr old woman of 1980.

For instance, I talked about the ratio of female to male earnings in the post.

Well in a world where men earn 2.5 times what women earn, what does the equation look like for a woman who quites work and marries a man? She goes from an income of 1 to an income of 2.5. OK she has to share that income with her husband so that's a con, but then by living together they can lower certain expenses by eliminating duplication. If she doesn't quite work, as a household they can have an income of 3.5 times what she had before. That's quite positive and an income boost of that size is quite enough to make someone feel safer adding a baby to the mix.

When the ratio falls to, say, 1.5 it doesn't look as tempting. Income goes from 1 to 1.5 for the woman who follows the old playbook. An improvement, yes, but nowhere near as dramatic as before and while that is an increase in raw pay it leaves less room for expected mistakes and surprises than leaping from 1 to 2.5 or even 3.5.

I think your experience with Indian immigrants confirms this economic analysis rather than refuting it. How easy is it for a woman to make it alone in India? Probably not so easy, hence divorce is going to be uncommon since marriage is not just for love but also as a barrier against economic distress and risk. Decrease risk and distress, and you decrease one reason people have to overlook a flawed marriage. As a consquence you will start seeing delayed marriages and more divorces among existing ones.

I think there's two powerful economic forces here. Higher income for women means that it is easier to afford single motherhood than it was before. Lower 'male advantage' in income means that there is less reason to swallow faults and failures just for the sake of being married. Those two forces alone are going to significantly drive culture rather than the other way around.

The important thing to remember here is that stats give one a bird's eye view but individuals have to play the game on the field. Real life women and men look a the options they have in the dating markets and marriage markets and act to their self-interest. On paper it may look like a great deal for woman X to marry man Y...split living costs and combine income. But a lot can still go wrong so such a deal is not risk free. When the advantage goes from 2.5 income to 1.5 income that lost premium was paying to offset a lot of risk and a swing of that scale is not going to be undone by tweaking tax deductions and credits.

And perhaps this is a deeper, long term trend. Women started to increase their earning in the early 1900's. IMO the World Wars provided a temporary disruption to that trend by creating an artificial shortage of men and artificial labor to upgrade infrastructure and rebuild. The 50's and 60's then were unsustainable from the beginning.

Son Mom said...

I read a really interesting book about this, called, "Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage." It was quite thought-provoking, though of course the sample size was small (the two authors lived for a year in a poor, inner-city neighborhood, interviewing different young single parents over the course of the year) - have you seen this one? I know I read about it on a blog - might even have been this one, LOL, as I often take your book recommendations!