A new look at the causes and consequences of marriage breakdown by influential US economist Melissa S. Kearney is courting controversy.
Growing up with two married parents may be the greatest privilege of all.
This is the controversial conclusion of more than two decades worth of research on poverty and social inequality by influential US economist Melissa S. Kearney.
It is no secret that the benefits of marriage go beyond just companionship, as a couple’s pool of wealth grows once resources are combined, which helps them and their children alike.
However, this has not prevented marriage falling out of fashion among most couples, apart from the most wealthy and well-educated.
The link between marriage and wealth has been debated in academic circles for years.
But Kearney quickly realised that when she tried to broach the topic with other economists, no one wanted to talk about it.
One prominent economist even approached her in private after she raised it at a talk, armed with pointed questions about why marriage would make any difference to household prosperity at all.
She suspected he was a divorced father.
Her upcoming book, The Two-Parent Privilege, also sparked fears of backlash at the University of Chicago Press.
“I happen to know that behind the scenes there were definitely some people who were less keen or had strong reactions to the topic,” she says.
“There were definitely some reviewers who didn’t think the publisher should be publishing a book lamenting the decline in marriage.”
While none of the criticism has been related to the soundness of data, her argument that “we really need to address this decline in marriage” is contentious.
The book’s title alone triggered a slew of angry emails and tweets.
“Some people as soon as they saw the title on Twitter started saying things like: ‘Here we go, we’re going to stigmatise single mums back to the point where they have no choice but to stay in violent marriages’. Of course, I do not think that is what any of us should be doing,” Kearney says.
“The other line of anticipated pushback is: ‘Well, there’s been a rise in single parenthood because women now can financially support themselves and not have to marry jerks and that’s a good thing’. Again I say yes, I agree.”
The same debate has been raging within social sciences for years, so the scrutiny did not come as much of a surprise to Kearney.
Marriage slump
In nearly all advanced economies, the share of people getting married has plummeted in recent decades.
In the US, there were 9.2 new marriages for every 1000 people in 1991, according to the OECD.
Nearly 30 years later this figure had fallen to 6.1 in 2019 – down by a third.
The decline was even steeper in the UK over the same period, with only 3.7 marriages for every 1000 people in 2019. This was down 40 per cent compared to 1991.
Such trends are problematic, Kearney says, because of the lost economic benefits.
The reason marriage is so powerful is because two people combining their income, assets and time create economies of scale that can support families on a range of fronts, whether it be securing a mortgage or paying for childcare.
Figures show that well-off people are more likely to get married in the first place.
Research from the Marriage Foundation, a think-tank, previously found that nearly 90 per cent of new mums across Britain’s richest households were married.
This then dropped to just over 20 per cent when looking at the UK’s poorest.
Notably, children whose parents are married also tend to earn more than their peers.
“The kids who grow up with two parents are more likely to avoid poverty during their childhood,” says Kearney, who adds they are more likely to avoid trouble in school and progress to higher education.
“A lot of that can be traced back to the fact that they have more resources in their home during childhood,” she says.
“It’s just the simple fact of hard maths that when there’s two parents in the household, there’s more income. That income is beneficial to kids in all sorts of ways and we see that translate into better outcomes.”
Kearney says that despite the general decline, not everyone has fallen out of love with marriage, with economics holding an explanation for that too.
“The group who have done really well economically over the past 40 years, college-educated workers in particular, have continued to get married and [have] their kids in two-parent households in roughly the same proportion.”
This has happened even as the share of people with university degrees has grown.
In the US, overall the share of children living with married parents fell from 77 per cent in 1980 to 63 per cent in 2019.
The drops were far less pronounced among those with mothers who had a four-year college degree – falling by just 6 percentage points to 84 per cent.
In the UK, research by the Institute of Fiscal Studies last year found that 68 per cent of highly educated mothers were married in 2006-2012 – down from 86 per cent in 1991-95.
Kearney’s research also shows that marriage rates in working-class areas tend to fall when the economy enters a downturn.
In the UK, the highest rates of single mothers are in areas with high levels of deprivation – such as Hartlepool, Middlesbrough and Blackpool.
“My read of what’s happened is this interaction of liberalised social norms and changing economic conditions and that’s why we’ve seen this predominantly happen outside the college-educated class,” Kearney says.
In other words, changing attitudes to marriage and relationships have coincided with stagnating wages, especially for those with lower levels of education.
De-facto risk
While many parents today live and raise their children together without ever tying the knot, data shows that this doesn’t bring the same benefits for children.
This is especially true in the US and also evident in the UK.
For Kearney, she believes this is driven by a greater chance of relationships failing if cohabiting parents are not married.
“Marriage is the institution that most reliably delivers long-term commitment between parents to live together and pool their resources to take care of children,” Kearney says.
“In the US, even unmarried parents who are romantically involved and perhaps even living together at the time of a child’s birth have a very low rate of actually staying together until the child’s fifth, let alone 14th, birthday.”
In the UK, researchers have found that 88 per cent of married parents were still together by their child’s fifth birthday.
As for those who were living together but were not married, this figure was 67 per cent – meaning one in every three relationships had broken down.
Taboo topic
Yet despite all of the data, the debate around marriage and wealth has rarely made a societal or political impact.
“This issue has not gotten the attention it deserves as a policy matter or as an urgent matter on a society level, precisely because many folks have decided this is something that should be off-limits,” Kearney says.
She is keen to emphasise that her findings are not trying to paint those whose marriages fail or who end up raising children alone as the problem.
“Single parents are in most instances their kids’ greatest asset. They are doing the best they can in a really disadvantaged situation,” she says.
However, this does not mean policymakers should ignore the issue, Kearney says, as the key question to answer is why so many mothers are raising children alone.
Only then will we understand the barriers to achieving a stable marriage and two-parent household.