Marriage is correlated with prosperity in the U.S. So many conservatives promote marriage as a financial elixir. Yet this perspective is scientifically flawed. It also suffers from too narrow a geographical focus on conditions in the U.S.
Marriage Causes Wealth or Wealth Causes Marriage?
There is no doubt that married couples are better at accumulating wealth than their single counterparts, mainly because they are more frugal, and because they are more likely to buy homes. There is a very different causal connection between money and marriage that gets less attention. Poor people, particularly poor men, are at a disadvantage in the marriage market. In other words poverty results in non-marriage. Unfortunately, these different aspects of the connection between marriage and money are easily confounded by the unwary.
In a recent Wall Street Journal column, William A. Galston proposes that more poor people should get married so as to pull their offspring out of poverty. His reasoning is that children (and particularly boys) are more vulnerable to behavioral problems if their fathers are not around. I see two problems with this thesis. The first is that Mr. Galston reverses the causal arrow connecting marriage with poverty. The second is that "single parenthood's harms" are really due to poverty rather than marital status.
The true causal relationship between poverty and marriage was elegantly revealed by William Julius Wilson in his book, When Work Disappears (3) that focuses on the decline in marriage amongst African Americans from the 1960s onward. According to Wilson, it was the decline in wages for African American men that sidelined them as husbands.
Thanks to mechanization, African American men lost the lucrative blue collar jobs that had sustained the African American two-parent family of the 1950s. They no longer earned enough to support both themselves and a family and were marginalized as husbands and fathers.
It should be apparent that merely getting married can never solve the fundamental economic problems that prevent many African Americans from getting married and making that case is putting the cart before the horse.
From that perspective, blaming single parenthood for all the ills of our society is absurd. Single parenthood is an effect of poverty in this country, not the cause.
This conclusion is highlighted by what happens in Scandinavian countries where marriage rates are very low (and divorce rates are high) but where there are few problems with childhood poverty. This reflects aggressive collection of child support from fathers in combination with generous welfare state investment in children. Fathers may not be around for long but they, and the government, foot the bill for childcare.