^{Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, various National Vital Statistics Reports. See Source Notes at the end of the paper for details.}

Trends Contributing to Unwed Childbearing

The rise in unwed births shown in Figure 1 could reflect any number of trends related to marriage and childbearing. In particular, any of the following changes would have pressured the unwed birth share up:

1. Changes among single people that increase unwed births:

• Increased sexual activity,
• Declining use or effectiveness of birth control methods among sexually active single people,
• Fewer pregnant single women choosing an abortion, and
• Fewer “shotgun marriages” to pregnant single women.

2. Changes among married people that reduce marital births:

• Reduced sexual activity,
• Increasing use or effectiveness of birth control among sexually active married couples, and
• More pregnant married women choosing an abortion.

3. Increasingly delayed marriage and/or rising divorce, which increases the number of single women and thereby increases the number of unwed pregnancies.

Changes in Marriage and Divorce

Taking these possibilities in reverse order, adults are less likely to be married today than in the past. Median age at first marriage began to rise after 1956, increasing modestly for the next 20 years (Figure 2). After 1975, however, the increase accelerated. Today, the median age at which a woman first marries is 27, up from 20 in 1956.

^{Source: US Bureau of the Census, Historical Marital Status Tables, Table MS-2, https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/families/time-series/marital/ms2.xls.}

Trends in the share of women never marrying show a similar pattern. (As we will see, many trends related to family and fertility appear to change around 1960.) In 1964, after a long period of rising marriage rates dating to the turn of the century, fewer than five percent of women between the ages of 30 and 34 had never been married (Figure 3). By 2016, however, the proportion of women in their early thirties having never married was up to an all-time high of one in three.

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of decennial census and Current Population Survey data. See Source Notes at the end of the paper for details.}

Marriages are also much less stable than in the past. The divorce rate (divorces per 1,000 married women) rose sharply between 1958 and 1979. It has fallen since, but it remains above 1970 levels.¹⁰ Since married women face these high divorce rates year after year, the share of ever-married women ages 50-54 with a marriage that ended in divorce has climbed more dramatically, from below 10 percent during the mid-twentieth century to 35 percent today (Figure 4).

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of Integrated Public Use Microdata Series microdata from the decennial census and American Community Survey. See Source Notes at the end of the paper for more details.}

The decline of marriage means there are more single women who potentially might get pregnant. While 71.5 percent of women ages 15-44 were married in 1960, just 41.5 percent were in 2016 (Figure 5). All else equal, this change would increase the share of births that occur to unmarried women.

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of decennial census and Current Population Survey data. See Source Notes at the end of the paper for more details.}

Changes in Behavior among Married Couples

Not only are fewer adults choosing to enter into marriage or stay married; when they marry, fewer married couples choose to have children (and they choose to have fewer children if they do start a family). Between 1960 and 1996, the number of births to married couples per 1,000 married women fell nearly in half, and it remained low thereafter (Figure 6). Since the share of births to unwed mothers is affected by the number of marital births, the decline in marital fertility has increased the relative prevalence of unwed childbearing.

^{Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, various National Vital Statistics Reports. See the Source Notes at the end of the paper for more details.}

Why did the marital birth rate decline? Understanding the drop requires distinguishing three kinds of pregnancy outcomes: marital conceptions that end in marital births, nonmarital conceptions that end in marital births (after a “shotgun marriage”), and abortions obtained by married women.

The first point to grasp is that pregnancies per married woman have declined over time (Figure 7). This drop reversed a trend of rising marital pregnancy that probably extended back at least to the early 1930s.¹¹ Compiling these trends is surprisingly difficult. Past research has counted marital pregnancies as the sum of births to married women and abortions obtained by married women. But because of shotgun marriage, some women who are married when they deliver were single when they became pregnant.

The fact that pregnancies declined hints that abortion may be a negligible part of the explanation for falling marital birth rates. Abortions were relatively difficult to obtain prior to Roe v. Wade, but that is when the largest decline in marital birth rates occurred. And, in fact, abortion is rarer today among pregnant married women than it was before Roe.¹²

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses. See the Source Notes at the end of the paper for more details.}

It is also unlikely that married couples are having less sex today (or were having less sex in the mid-1970s) than in the early 1960s, when the relative absence of effective birth control regulated sexual activity. Though long-term trends are difficult to find for married women, contraception became more common over time among those engaging in premarital sex, as we will see below, as did use of the pill. Married women had much greater access to the pill than unmarried women prior to the early 1970s. Between the early 1980s and early 2010s, contraceptive use among married women specifically rose and then fell but was largely flat.¹³

Changes in Behavior among Single Adults

Different people may have varying levels of concern about the long-term declines in marrying and having children after getting married. Much ought to hinge on the extent to which these trends reflect the preferences of men and women. The decline in staying married is more worrisome, especially to the extent children are affected. But the last set of changes affecting the share of unwed births is perhaps the most concerning: the increased rate at which children are born to couples who share no marital bond.

It should be noted that many “single” women—and many more than in the past—are cohabiting with a partner to whom they are not married. Indeed, more than half (58 percent) of unmarried women live with the father of their child at the time of the child’s birth.¹⁴ However, cohabiting relationships are far less stable than marriage. For example, about half of children born to cohabiting parents experience at least one maternal breakup by the time they turn three years old, compared to only 13 percent of children born to married parents.¹⁵

As shown in Figure 8, single women have grown far more likely to give birth over time. (The estimates in this chart compare single-mother births to the number of single women, while those in Figure 1 compare single-mother births to the number of total births.) Compared with 1940, single women were over seven times as likely to give birth in 2007. The rate declined temporarily in the early 1970s and in the 1990s, and it has fallen back to 1990s levels since the onset of the Great Recession. But the upward march has been otherwise relentless.

^{Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, various National Vital Statistics Reports. See the Source Notes at the end of the paper for more details.}

Why did more and more single women give birth over time? For starters, sexual activity among single women increased. Data are most readily available for teenagers, though the increase seems to have been larger for older women. The share of never-married 19-year-old women who were sexually experienced began rising around 1960, when roughly one in four reported they had ever had sex. The figure was 45 percent by 1972 (see Figure 9). From 1972 to 1982, the share of 18- to 19-year-old women ever having had premarital sex rose from 45 percent to 66 percent. Teenage sexual activity peaked in 1988 before it began to steadily decline. Today, teen sex is probably near or below its early 1980s levels, though still much higher than levels in the 1960s and early 1970s.¹⁶ In 2013, 43 percent of 15- to 19-year-olds had already had sex, and 63 percent of never-married 18- to 19-year-olds had.¹⁷

^{Source: Various previously published estimates. See the Source Notes at the end of the paper for more details. “Never-Married, Age 19” refers to never-married 19-year-olds and “Never-Married, Age 18-19” refers to never-married 18- and 19-year-olds. “Age 18-19, Premarital” and “Age 18-19” refer to 18- and 19-year-olds regardless of marital status. “Age 18-19, Premarital” refers only to premarital sex, unlike the other estimates.}

Long-term trends in the share of single adults of all ages who are sexually active are elusive. Federal data on sexually transmitted diseases indicate that they were over twice as common in 1990 as in 1960 and nearly three times as common in 2015.¹⁸ Survey estimates show that the share of unmarried women between the ages of 15 and 44 having had sex with three or more partners in the past year has risen since the late 1980s.¹⁹ The share of unmarried women between the ages of 15 and 44 who were using contraception rose from 19 percent in 1982 to 33 percent in the early 2010s.²⁰ All of these trends suggest that sexual activity among unmarried women generally has continued to rise even as it has fallen among teens. (The share of unmarried women ages 15-44 having had any sex in the past year shows no clear trend since the late 1980s, but no obvious decline.²¹)

Further evidence comes from changes in sexual attitudes. In 1969, according to Gallup, 68 percent of American adults agreed that pre-marital sexual relations were wrong. Just four years later in 1973, that number had dropped to 47 percent, a decline of nearly one-third,²² and as of 2016, only 33 percent agreed that sex between an unmarried man and woman is wrong.²³ Similarly, General Social Survey data shows that in 1972, just 27 percent of adults said that having sex before marriage is “not wrong at all,” compared to 60 percent in 2016 who said that sex before marriage is “not wrong at all.”²⁴

Unwed birth rates could also have risen if unmarried women who were sexually active became less likely to use effective contraception over time. But that did not happen. In the early 1960s, about 40 percent of women having had premarital sex used contraception the first time they did so, a figure which rose to 65 percent by the mid-1980s and which is above 80 percent today. The share using the pill rose from 4 percent to 12 percent and then to about 20 percent.²⁵ Another study looked at unmarried women “at risk” of pregnancy (meaning women contracepting or not contracepting but sexually active in the past three months). In 1982, 80 percent of these women were using contraception, and 86 percent were in the late 2000s.²⁶ Finally, there is no evidence that women are choosing less effective contraception methods over time. The share of contracepting unmarried women using a hormonal method such as the pill or an intrauterine device was constant at around 50 percent over the period.²⁷

Though single women were using contraception more and using more effective methods, because more of them were having sex, more became pregnant. As shown in the upper line of Figure 10, unwed pregnancy rates rose through the early 1980s. The good news is that the rate then flattened or even declined, reversing a trend that dated at least to the early 1930s.²⁸ This reversal could reflect the impact of the HIV epidemic, which may have scared many people into having less sex (see the teen trend in Figure 9) or using condoms more consistently. The bad news is that unwed pregnancy stabilized at roughly the 1970 rate, significantly higher than the rates that prevailed through most of the 1960s and earlier. Once pregnancy rates leveled off, birth rates eventually decelerated. However, the lower line of Figure 10 (showing five-year averages of the data in Figure 8) shows that unwed births rose during the 1980s while pregnancy rates fell.

^{Source: The top series shows unwed pregnancy rates. The bottom series shows unwed birth rates. See the Source Notes at the end of the paper for more details.}

Changes in the Frequency of Abortion

What explains the divergence between the unwed pregnancy and birth rates? The answer is that unwed pregnancies do not always end in a birth or an unwed birth, and both abortion and shotgun marriage have grown much rarer over time. The fact that unwed pregnancies increased much more than unwed births in the late 1960s and 1970s partly reflects the rising rate of abortion. The ratio of abortions to births among women unmarried at conception appears to have peaked in the late 1970s and then to have fallen steadily.²⁹ Today, single women who become pregnant are roughly one-third less likely to obtain an abortion than their counterparts at the time Roe was decided.³⁰

What is behind the drop in abortion? The number of abortion providers appears to have fallen by about the same amount as the number of abortions performed; if it had fallen by more, that might indicate that declining access was behind the drop in abortions.³¹ Public opinion regarding abortion has been remarkably steady over time, so it is also unlikely that changing views about the acceptability of abortion have been behind the decline.³²

The drop in abortion partly reflects a decline in unintended pregnancies, however among unmarried women, the latter was not as steep as the former (Figure 11). The other change that appears to have reduced abortion is that having a baby while unmarried has become more acceptable. In 1988, 61 percent of adults ages 18 to 44 (and 54 percent of single parents) agreed that “People who want children ought to get married.”³³ Only 20 percent disagreed (and only 26 percent of single parents). By 2012, however, just 50 percent of adults (and just 38 percent of single parents) agreed that marriage was a prerequisite to having children (26 percent and 32 percent disagreeing, respectively).

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of data from the National Survey of Family Growth, the Current Population Survey, and the Guttmacher Institute. See the Source Notes at the end of the paper for more details.}

Despite the fact that unintended pregnancies are more likely to end in a birth today than in the 1970s, unintended births are a smaller share of all births from nonmarital conceptions. That is to say, a rising share of births from nonmarital conceptions are intended. Today, half of births to unmarried women ages 15-44 from nonmarital conceptions are from intended pregnancies.³⁴

Changes in Shotgun Marriage

Even when carried to term, an unwed pregnancy does not necessarily lead to an unwed birth. In the past, it was common for an unwed couple to marry if they became pregnant, or colloquially, to have a “shotgun marriage.” Today, this response to an unwed pregnancy has all but disappeared. The decline in shotgun marriage has played a major role in the rise of unwed births.

As we have seen, marital pregnancy is less common and nonmarital pregnancy more common than in the past. The top line of Figure 12 conveys the consequence—that more and more births arose from unwed pregnancies. Between the early 1950s and the late 2000s, the share of births resulting from unwed pregnancies rose from 10 percent to nearly 50 percent. (The low point likely occurred in the early 1940s.)³⁵ At the end of the 2000s, two in three births to previously-childless women under age 30 were to women who were not married when they became pregnant (not shown).³⁶

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses. See the Source Notes at the end of the paper for more details.}

The bottom line of Figure 12 shows the percentage of births that were to a woman unmarried when she delivered. Because both lines involve births, the gap between them is unaffected by changes in abortion; the difference reflects the rate of shotgun marriage. In the 1950s and 1960s, many unwed pregnancies were followed by a shotgun marriage, and so they ended in a marital birth. That was much less true in the late 2000s.

The decline in the shotgun marriage rate is shown in Figure 13. In the early 1960s, 43 percent of births from nonmarital conceptions occurred to women who married before delivering. That rate fell to 9 percent in the late 2000s. Among previously childless women under 30 who became pregnant while single, the shotgun marriage rate fell from 60 percent to 11 percent (not shown).³⁷ The lower line in Figure 13 shows the trend is similar if births following a shotgun marriage are compared to all unwed pregnancies (not just those resulting in births).

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses. See the Source Notes at the end of the paper for more details.}

Which Changes Have Most Affected the Share of Births to Unwed Women?

To review, the past 60 years have seen more unmarried women and more of them engaged in sexual activity, leading more of them to become pregnant, even as fewer married women today get pregnant or give birth. Shotgun marriage has declined, and over the past 40 years declining rates of unintended pregnancy among unmarried women and rising acceptability of unwed childbearing have led to fewer abortions. Rising unwed pregnancies, declining shotgun marriage, and falling abortion produced more unwed births. All of those trends increased the share of births to unmarried women.

How important were each of these changes in raising the share of births that occur to unmarried women? We can roughly simulate counterfactual scenarios in which some factors changed as they actually did while others are kept at their early 1960s levels. In Figure 14, the top line shows the estimated increase in the share of births that were to unwed mothers from the early 1960s to the late 2000s, an increase from 8 percent to 43 percent. Many people might be inclined to see this rise and attribute it to an increase in pregnancy among single women. But the next line down indicates that this factor is a minor one. It shows that the share of births to unwed mothers would still have risen to 36 percent if the nonmarital pregnancy rate had stayed as low as it was in the early 1960s while everything else changed—the share of women who were married, marital pregnancy rates, marital abortion rates, nonmarital abortion rates, and shotgun marriage rates. (In all these analyses, for simplicity, we hold rates at which pregnancies end in miscarriages or stillbirths constant. The results are not meaningfully affected. See the note to Figure 14 in the Source Notes at the end of the paper.)

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses. See the Source Notes at the end of the paper for more details.}

In fact, the fall in the marital pregnancy rate appears to be a more important factor; if that rate had remained at its high early-1960s level while everything else changed (including the nonmarital pregnancy rate), the share of births to unwed mothers would have risen only to 32 percent. (See the third line from the top in Figure 14.) Holding both marital and nonmarital pregnancy rates at their initial levels, the unwed share of births would have risen to only 26 percent—half the actual rise (not shown).

Changes in either marital or nonmarital abortion explain none of the rise in the share of births to unwed mothers, so Figure 14 omits those counterfactuals.³⁸ There are two reasons for this absent effect. First, marital abortions, relative to marital births, were as rare in the late 2000s as in the 1960s, when abortion was illegal in most cases. We estimate that 7 percent of pregnancies (excluding miscarriages and stillbirths) ended in abortion in both periods. Nonmarital abortions were more frequent in the late 2000s than in the 1960s, but it appears not by much. While we have less confidence in our early 1960s estimate, we find the share of pregnancies ending in abortion rose from 33 percent to 35 percent. In sensitivity analyses, we find that the rise may actually have been from as low as 23 percent. Regardless, holding nonmarital abortion at its early 1960s level then would make the share of unwed births rise, not fall.³⁹

The decline in shotgun marriage has been a bigger factor than changes in either nonmarital or marital pregnancy rates taken individually (and about as important as changes in both taken together). The fourth line in Figure 14 indicates that the unwed birth share would have risen only to 27 percent if shotgun marriage rates had stayed as high as in the early 1960s while everything else changed.

The biggest single factor in raising the share of births that were to unwed mothers seems to be the decline in marriage, which has expanded the pool of potential unwed mothers. Had the share of women ages 15-44 who were married stayed at its early-1960s level while everything else changed, just 24 percent of births would have been to single mothers in the late 2000s. The decline in marriage primarily reflects an increase in never-married women rather than divorced or widowed women (not shown).

When the analyses are confined to previously childless women between the ages of 15 and 29, the picture changes. Figure 15 reveals the decline in shotgun marriage to be the single most important factor driving up the share of births to unwed mothers for this age group. The estimates rise from 10 percent in the early 1960s to 58 percent in the late 2000s, but holding shotgun marriage at its early 1960s level, the increase is only to 26 percent—just one third as large.

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses. See the Source Notes at the end of the paper for more details.}

Weakened Family Stability: A Downside of Affluence

A review of the charts displayed in this paper reveals that many trends related to childbearing reversed or accelerated during the 1960s. The rise in the share of births that occurred to unwed mothers steepened during that decade. Median age at first marriage began to rise around 1960. The share of 30- to 34-year-old women who had yet to marry started to increase in the late 1960s. The year 1960 is a rough inflection point at which the increase in the share of older women who have been divorced accelerates. The share of women who are married and the marital birth and pregnancy rates all began falling around 1960. Teen-age sex began rising around the same time, and shotgun-marriage rates began to fall.

The timing of these changes suggests that much of the rise in the share of births that are to unwed mothers reflects the interaction of two developments that came to a head in the 1960s: an increase in the weight given to the fulfillment of nonmaterial needs (especially among women, whose opportunities were harshly constrained relative to those of men) and an increasing ability to fulfill those needs. Both of these developments, in turn, are rooted in rising affluence.

The effect of affluence on unwed childbearing is reflected in a variety of ways. Fundamentally, it was affluence that allowed Americans to devote less attention to basic needs like food, shelter, and safety and more attention to higher-order needs like esteem, status, recognition, personal gratification, and self-actualization.⁴⁰ Men and women alike came to place greater value on such goods as higher learning, professional success, fulfilling romantic relationships, and sexual gratification. The demand for better professional opportunities was particularly strong among women, whose plight during the mid-twentieth century as second-class citizens is vividly captured in cultural references ranging from The Feminine Mystique to Mad Men.

Affluence brought a proliferation of novel ways to enjoy leisure time and fed a growing pay-off to enrolling in higher education. Marrying early, having children early, staying in unfulfilling marriages, and having large families became more costly relative to the available alternative ways to achieve fulfillment, whether through pursuit of a humanities Ph.D. or sexual gratification.⁴¹ The result was an increase in the pool of single people and a decline in marital birth rates.

At the same time that women began to demand more educational and economic opportunities, rising affluence facilitated the expansion of the two-earner family. The introduction of more and more labor-saving home appliances and types of processed food reduced the amount of time necessary for housework. As family incomes rose, more and more couples could afford paid child care, meals outside the home, and other services that replaced the considerable work housewives had traditionally undertaken.

Rising affluence also was responsible for the development of reliable contraception. The pill, in particular, allowed women to control their own fertility and facilitated family planning around career considerations. This new ability greatly increased the appeal to women of professional pursuits.⁴²

Affluence and technological development facilitated the decoupling of sex and marriage, which increased nonmarital sexual activity and elevated unwed pregnancy rates. Penicillin brought an end to the syphilis crisis that regulated sexual activity through much of the first half of the twentieth century.⁴³ The pill provided a way to dramatically reduce the chance of an unintended pregnancy. And abortion became safer, fueling rising demand for legal abortion services that culminated in the Roe decision.

As nonmarital sex became safer and its consequences less severe, more single men and women became sexually active. This trend became self-reinforcing. Normative regulation of sexual activity among single men and women loosened. In 1969, 68 percent of American adults agreed that pre-marital sexual relations were wrong. Just four years later in 1973, that number had dropped to 47 percent, a decline of nearly one-third, and as of 2016, only 33 percent agreed that sex between an unmarried man and woman is wrong.⁴⁴ What is more, pressure increased on ambivalent single women to engage in sex in order to win and maintain the affection of romantic partners and potential husbands.⁴⁵

As we have seen, despite advances in birth control (or, paradoxically, because of those advances), more sexual activity led to higher rates of unwed pregnancy. While wider use of more effective birth control might have been expected to reduce pregnancy rates, it may be that the greater availability of contraception itself increased sexual activity. Regardless of the reasons behind this increase, not all sexually active couples used effective methods of birth control or used them consistently. Many couples, in the pre-pill past, would have been poor contraceptors but were not sexually active. But as nonmarital sex became more common, their reproductive fates became more tied to their ability to prevent sexual intercourse from leading to pregnancy.⁴⁶ In this regard, relatively disadvantaged women suffered disproportionate consequences from the more general changes in societal norms around nonmarital sex.

The availability of the pill and legal abortion also affected shotgun marriage, which further contributed to the rise in unwed childbearing. Previously, single women could expect a promise of marriage from their boyfriends in the event of pregnancy. Men, after all, generally would have to make a promise of marriage in any other relationship. But over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, given the diminished risk of unintended pregnancy, more and more single women were open to sex without a marriage promise. That weakened the bargaining power of single women who preferred not to engage in sex without the promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. Some of these women subsequently became pregnant and were willing to become single mothers. Further, the availability of effective contraception and abortion may have led many men (and their friends and family) to reason that since women have a degree of control over whether they get pregnant or choose to carry a pregnancy to term, a man who impregnates a single woman is not obliged to marry her.⁴⁷

The decline of shotgun marriage, too, became self-reinforcing. As unwed childbearing became more common, the societal ideal that childbearing should only take place within marriage fell away. In earlier decades, a child born outside of marriage was a sign that moral norms had been violated. Thus, it was expected that a couple would wed in the case of an unwed pregnancy. As sexual behaviors changed, having a child outside of marriage became less stigmatized.⁴⁸

The increase in nonmarital sexual activity and decline of shotgun marriage particularly affected disadvantaged women. The opportunity cost of becoming pregnant—the foregone alternatives—was much lower for such women. Absent the imperative of remaining childless in pursuit of educational and professional goals, they were relatively less likely to avoid pregnancy at all costs.

Finally, affluence also made it more affordable to be a single mother relative to the era before World War II. Socioeconomically advantaged women could better afford to raise children on one income, sometimes with child support from their former partner. Disadvantaged women could draw on an expanded federal safety net that reflected the rising wealth of American taxpayers. That safety net afforded a fairly meager lifestyle on its own, but in combination with their own earnings and assistance from family, friends, and partners, women could increasingly make it work (especially if they had only known an impoverished living standard themselves growing up).

However, the particular way that American safety nets were designed often disincentivized women from marrying or staying married, since benefits were generally even less generous to two-parent families. That led to increases in unwed childbearing too.⁴⁹ (There is some evidence to suggest that the state and federal welfare reforms of the 1990s—in conjunction with an expansion of work supports—were behind the flattening out of unwed birth rates after the 1980s seen in Figure 8.)⁵⁰

What about Marriageability?

The idea that affluence is behind the rising share of births to unwed mothers may sound strange to those who hold a more negative view of the American economy. The prevailing wisdom is that unwed childbearing has been driven by the deteriorating position of male workers.⁵¹ Poor, working- and middle-class men, it is claimed, have seen lower pay over time, reflecting globalization, deindustrialization, and automation. The weak labor market has driven an increasing number of men out of the labor force entirely. Thus, some reason that the reduction in the share of potential male partners who women consider “marriageable,” combined with a persisting value placed on motherhood, explains why women have increasingly chosen to have children without getting married.

There are a number of problems with this position, however. For starters, most of the trends discussed above that have contributed to a rising unwed birth share began or began to accelerate in the 1960s. Nonmarital birth rates were rising in the 1940s and 1950s, and perhaps earlier. The increase in the unwed birth share itself started in the 1950s and accelerated beginning in the 1960s. In other words, these trends generally extend back at least to the “Golden Age” of twentieth-century America—when productivity and wage growth were much stronger than after the 1960s, and when household incomes were rising faster in the bottom half of the income distribution than above it.⁵²

Second, rather than seeing declines in pay, men have generally seen flat or modestly rising compensation since the 1960s.⁵³ That certainly has been a disappointment compared with the strong wage growth of the 1950s and 1960s, but it remains the case that men are mostly doing at least as well as their 1960s counterparts, and so it is unclear why they should seem less marriageable than in the past. A rising share of working-age men have left the labor force, but most of them tell federal surveyors that they do not want a job.⁵⁴ Their inclusion in hourly compensation data would dampen the trend in pay to some extent, but only modestly.⁵⁵ Meanwhile, as a future Social Capital Project blog post will show, the share of births that are from unwed pregnancies has risen even for women with a four-year college degree, and it has risen for whites and blacks, Hispanics and non-Hispanics. Similarly, the shotgun marriage rate has declined for all of these groups.

Third, to the extent that men’s labor market outcomes have worsened, this could reflect the increase in unwed childbearing rather than the former causing the latter. Research finds that married men have better labor market outcomes than single men, even accounting for the fact that they may be more marriageable.⁵⁶ If partners, families, and society writ large have come to accept single parenthood, it is likely that their expectations of nonresident fathers have diminished as well, which could have reduced the effort those men put into optimizing their economic status. This may be particularly true in disadvantaged communities where single parenthood is common. Alternatively, the legal or moral obligation to pay child support may lead some absent fathers to avoid the formal labor market and rely on family, friends, informal work, and the underground economy.

Even the “marriageable man” hypothesis ultimately presumes a baseline level of affluence that, historically speaking, is a recent phenomenon. The argument that because men are less marriageable, women are delaying or foregoing marriage but still choosing to have children presumes that many women are able to afford single motherhood. If not for increased female earnings potential relative to the past or a more generous government safety net, it would matter little if men became less marriageable. Women would be unable to afford single motherhood, and rather than seeing rising unwed childbearing we would simply see reduced childbearing.

Conclusion

Social phenomena are complicated and have multiple causes, but our read of the evidence—and we are by no means alone—is that negative economic trends explain little of the overall rise in unwed childbearing.⁵⁷ Instead, we think it is more likely that, as with other worsening aspects of our associational life, rising family instability primarily reflects societal affluence, which reduced marriage and marital childbearing, increased divorce and nonmarital sexual activity and pregnancy, and reduced shotgun marriage.

This does not mean we should lament rising affluence. There is no reason we must choose between having healthier families and communities or having stronger economic growth. Indeed, it is possible to imagine a future in which rising affluence will allow more women and men alike to work less and less and spend more time with children, families, friends, neighbors, and fellow congregants.

But to date, we have tended to spend additional wealth to pursue individual and personal priorities. That has eroded our associational life—including the stability of our families, especially among disadvantaged families who have enjoyed the fruits of rising affluence less than others have. Continuing to make the same choices with our ever-higher purchasing power threatens to diminish the quality of life for rich and poor alike.

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