Research - United States Joint Economic Committee
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After-tax hourly compensation of non-Hispanic men has recovered over the past 25 years, making economic factors less likely to be driving the decline in marriage rates.
Scott Winship and Rachel Sheffield, “The Demise Of The Happy Two-Parent Home,” United States Joint Economic Committee, July 23, 2020, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/analysis
"...It is possible that the earlier, roughly 20-year, decline in male pay reduced marriage and increased single parenthood over the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, and then cultural or other factors continued these trends once pay started rising again. But there is nothing in the marriageable men hypothesis as typically stated that would predict an asymmetric response of marriage to men’s economic circumstances, where declining pay reduces marriage but rising pay does not increase it. Perhaps men born in the 1950s and 1960s were less marriageable, single parenthood became more normal, and men born in the 1970s and 1980s were socialized by their parents into different attitudes about marriage and single parenthood. The marriageable men hypothesis may fare better if more nuanced thresholds are invoked. One possibility is that what matters is how men are doing relative to how the previous generation of men were doing. Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his research team have found that the share of men with individual income that exceeds their father’s at the same age fell dramatically over time.65 Figure 15, based on our modification of their estimates, shows that while 95 percent of thirty-year-olds in 1970 exceeded their father’s income, by 2014 just 44 percent did (see the right axis).66 In only five years after 1990 did half of men surpass their father, a threshold shown by the bolded dashed line.The trend is similar if one instead computes the ratio of two median annual individual incomes—that of non-Hispanic men ages 25 to 29, and that of non-Hispanic men the same age thirty years earlier (also shown in Figure 15).67 Men in their late 20s in 1969 earned 3.6 times what their counterparts did in 1939. By 1979, the ratio had plummeted to 1.7, indicating that young men were 70 percent richer than young men in 1949 were. The figure was just 12 percent by 1989. At some point in the 1990s, the ratio reached one, indicating that the median personal income for young men was no higher than for young men thirty years earlier. The ratio dipped below one from 2001 to 2012. (Note, however, that these estimates do not take taxes into account, which have fallen over time.) In 2013, the median late-twentysomething male was finally once again better off than his counterpart thirty years earlier. That remained the case in 2018, though only barely. The dramatic declines in Figure 15, however, primarily reflect how poor men were around 1940 and 1950, which made it relatively easy for men around 1970 and 1980 to exceed those incomes. Marriage rates were high and single parenthood rare in the 1940s and 1950s. Further, it is difficult to imagine that young women in 1979 looked at men who were 70 percent richer than the previous generation of young men had been and found them wanting because they were not 260 percent richer (as was the case for young men ten years earlier). And the ratio of medians was about the same in 2018 as in 1989, though marriage kept falling during this period, and single parenthood kept rising. Another possible threshold for marriageability is that a husband should make sufficiently more than his would-be wife. Figure 16 shows the trend in the ratio of two hourly pay medians—that of non-Hispanic men ages 25 to 29, and that of non-Hispanic women in the same age range.68 In both 1973 and 1980, the male median was 40 percent higher than the female median, but the ratio dropped fairly steadily from 1980 through 1995. In both 1995 and 2019, men had an 11 to 12 percent advantage over women. That stability, while family instability continued to rise, weakens the case that marriageability is about what men make relative to women...."
“…Whether there is anything to the marriageable men hypothesis depends centrally on the thresholds for marriageability that women have applied and how many men have been able to reach those thresholds. The simplest threshold might be that men must bring to the table at least a minimum level of purchasing power. One way to assess whether fewer men have achieved that level is to consider trends in inflation-adjusted after-tax hourly compensation among young men, as in Figure 13.56 We confine our analyses to non-Hispanic men to isolate trends in marriageability from changes in population demographics over time. The chart displays three trends for non-Hispanic men between the ages of 25 and 29—one for median pay (where half of men make more and half make less), one for the 30th percentile of pay (where 70 percent of men make more), and one for the 10th percentile of pay. Hourly pay is available in this data only back to 1973. In Figure 13, all pay rates are scaled so that the 1973 rate is equal to 100. The inflation-adjusted hourly pay of young non-Hispanic men declined sharply between 1973 and the early- to mid-1990s. At its low point, in 1995, the median was down 17 percent. (The 1973 level was probably higher than it had even been to that point.58) The 10th and 30th percentiles fell as much as 22 to 23 percent.59 One caveat to these twenty-year trends is that in supplemental analyses not shown here, we found that these large declines were much less pronounced among middle-aged men. Among non-Hispanic men between the ages of 35 and 44, median hourly take-home pay dipped below the 1973 level in 1974 and 1996, but it was otherwise always at least as high as in 1973. Through the mid-1990s, the 30th percentile was never more than 5 or 6 percent lower than in 1973 and was above the 1973 level from 1975 to 1989. The 10th percentile fell more consistently between 1973 and the mid-1990s, but it bottomed out only 11 to 12 percent lower than in 1973. Even among men ages 30 to 34, the median never fell by more than 10 percent, and the 10th percentile was never lower than 16 percent of its 1973 level….Regardless of the causes, it does appear that fewer young men would have been able to meet a fixed absolute threshold for marriageability over the course of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. However, the simplest version of this hypothesis runs into a problem after the mid-1990s, as the pay of young men has recovered over the past 25 years. This quarter century has been marked by two strong periods of wage growth—the late 1990s boom, and the recent, pre-pandemic expansion—and by the Great Recession. Median pay exceeded its 1973 level from 2001 to 2010 (except in 2007), and in 2018 and 2019. Like the median, pay at the 10th percentile was higher than ever before in 2019 (essentially at its 2002 level), though last year the 30th percentile remained a percentage point lower than in 1973….”
He also argues that the argument that men have become less “marriageable” isn’t supported by the evidence, that men are choosing not to get married because rising affluence/loosening of moral constraints has resulted in higher opportunity costs of being married. (He notes this is speculative)
Ed Comment:Add to poverty. I suspect it’s men’s wage relative to women and not absolute wage. Woemn put up with a lot of BS to marry a man. They gotta get rewarded relatively for that. New Winship paper in which he makes several arguments against conventional wisdom, 1) research on single parenthood sum up to pretty weak evidence that kids whose parents aren’t married would see better outcomes if their parents were married (happy marriages helps kids, evidence doesn’t suggests unhappy one help kids)