The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home

July 23, 2020

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Who are you? What have you become? Throughout our lives, we are enmeshed in a network of social relationships that influence us, for better or for worse. Most of our relationships have some value to us, else we would not be in them. They constitute social capital—a form of wealth every bit as valuable as financial or human capital.

Family relationships are the first a person experiences in life. Children are nurtured, taught, and socialized in the family, and from there learn to relate to others and participate in the broader society. A stable family offers the emotional security a child needs for healthy development. As Princeton University sociologist Sara McLanahan has noted:

If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children's basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent ideal. Such a design, in theory, would not only ensure that children had access to the time and money of two adults, it also would provide a system of checks and balances that promoted quality parenting. The fact that both parents have a biological connection to the child would increase the likelihood that the parents would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice for that child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the child.¹

As sources of valuable social capital, few relationships are as important as the family ties between parents and children. However, as with other features of our associational life, family ties have been weakening for several decades.² Today, around 45 percent of American children spend some time without a biological parent by late adolescence.³ That is up from around one-third of children born in the 1960s and one-fifth to one-quarter born in the 1950s.⁴ Even more strikingly, among the most disadvantaged socioeconomic groups, even fewer children are raised in continuously intact families. Single parenthood is experienced by two-thirds of the children of mothers with less than a high school education and by eighty percent of black children. This inequality in family stability contributes to but also compounds economic inequality.⁵

This report examines the state of family stability in the United States and describes policy approaches to ensure that more children are raised by two happily married parents. This policy goal is one of five identified by the Social Capital Project in our essay The Wealth of Relations, as central for expanding opportunity by shoring up families, communities, and civil society.⁶ Future reports will propose specific policies toward this end.

Intact Families and Opportunity

Researchers have well established that children raised by married parents do better on a wide array of outcomes. They have stronger relationships with their parents, particularly with their fathers.⁷ They are also much less likely to experience physical, emotional or sexual abuse.⁸ They have better health, exhibit less aggression, are less likely to engage in delinquent behavior, have greater educational achievement, and earn more as adults.⁹ They are also far less likely to live in poverty.¹⁰

Rigorously establishing the causal importance of family structure is far from straightforward, however. Few studies are up to the task. And among the most rigorous studies, about half find the estimated effects of experiencing single parenthood are not large enough to reliably say they are real rather than artifacts of imprecise statistical methods.¹¹ It is surely the case that many children are harmed by family disruption. But other people raised by single parents may have had worse outcomes if their parents had married or stayed married. People raised by two happily married parents would almost surely have done worse if their family had been disrupted. But the alternative for people who were raised by single parents would not necessarily have been being raised by two happily married parents.¹²

The basic methodological problem is that we cannot observe these “counterfactual” outcomes—what would have happened if a person’s family situation had been different. A few papers are better able to address this problem by looking at specific subsets of children whose parents’ family decisions were affected by specific features of their environments. Two examples reveal the importance of considering “what would have happened” when we think about the effect of single parenthood on child outcomes.

The first paper, by Keith Finlay and David Neumark, looked at the effects of growing up with a never-married mother on high school graduation rates.¹³ In their study, they isolate the impact on children who would have grown up with a married mother but for the fact that she lived in a state with a high incarceration rate (after accounting for crime rates), leading to fewer men available to marry. The results indicate that these children would have been no better off—or possibly even worse off—if their mothers had married. This finding makes intuitive sense. The counterfactual for these children if the state incarceration rate had been lower would have been living with a father with a high criminal propensity. Such men are unlikely to be positive influences on their children.

A second paper, from Austrian researchers, considered whether experiencing a parental divorce affects a range of outcomes.¹⁴ They isolated impacts on children who would have been raised by both their parents if not for the fact that their fathers’ workplaces had relatively high numbers of women similar in age to the father and working in the same occupation. That is, these children experienced divorce because their fathers were more likely to enter into an extramarital affair simply by virtue of circumstances that make an affair more likely. The study found that experiencing divorce worsened educational, employment, and health outcomes for this subset of children. Again, the results make sense: many of these children may have been in what seemed to them to be fairly healthy families, and the divorces they experienced were likely to have involved a great deal of acrimony and pain.

The relevant policy question—for which we lack good answers based on rigorous research—are what share of children would have ended up better off (and by how much) in the counterfactual where their parents had married or stayed married. To know that, we would need to understand what caused specific parents not to marry or to divorce and how things would have been different had these causes not led to family disruption.

What is self-evident—without consulting research—is that more children would fare better if more were raised by their married parents within a healthy relationship. As the Social Capital Project wrote in its earlier report, The Wealth of Relations, compared with children of single parents, children with happily married parents

get to see both parents every day, spend the holidays with both, and they don’t have to feel guilty about spending or enjoying more time in one household than the other. Nor do they have to question whether they caused their parents to break up. They have a single set of household rules, a single bedroom and wardrobe. Their schedule does not depend on which parent they are staying with. They get engagement from both parents and avoid hearing parents acidly complain about each other. Their parents are less exhausted by childrearing. They get the material benefits of economies of scale and of higher family income. They are witness to what a loving relationship looks like and have first-hand evidence that such relationships are secure and sustainable. And they avoid having to adjust to the changing romantic lives of their mother or father—changes which can include disruptive remarriages and family-blending.

The Wealth of Relations also noted that cutting-edge research by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues implies that growing up surrounded by family stability is also beneficial to children:

the team looked at adults who, as children, were poor but lived in low-poverty neighborhoods. They found that black men had stronger upward mobility the more low-income black fathers there were in their childhood neighborhood. This was true regardless of whether someone’s own father was present, suggesting that even the family cohesion of other black children in the neighborhood affected them. Meanwhile, having more low-income white fathers in the neighborhood did not increase the upward mobility of poor black children; nor did having more low-income black men who were childless. More low-income black fathers in a neighborhood also corresponded with higher future employment among poor black boys. The relationship between the number of low-income black fathers and future employment was much smaller for poor white boys and negligible for poor black girls.

The social capital inherent in a child’s relationships to her parents will be more valuable when both are part of her life and when they have a healthy relationship with each other. And social capital available to children is more valuable to the extent that they are surrounded by other healthy family relationships.

Family Stability Has Declined

However, American families are far less stable today than in the past. Fewer Americans are married, more romantic relationships take place outside of marriage, more marriages end in divorce, and ultimately, more children are born into or raised outside of intact families.

Although most Americans still marry or say they would like to marry, marriage is not nearly as common as it was in previous generations.¹⁵ Overall, between 1962 and 2019, the percentage of women ages 15-44 who were married dropped from 71 percent to 42 percent (Figure 1).¹⁶ Furthermore, Figure 2 shows the percentage of women ages 30-34 who had never married increased from 7 percent in 1962 to 35 percent in 2019.¹⁷

Figure 1. Percent of Women Ages 15-44 Who are Married, 1962-2019

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Online Data Analysis System. Separated women are included as married.}

Figure 2. Percent of Women Ages 30-34 Who Have Never Married, 1962-2019

In 1960, there were 74 marriages per 1,000 unmarried women ages 15 and older, but as of 2018 that rate had declined by more than half to 31 per thousand.¹⁸ People spend less of their life married, as the median age at first marriage in the United States has steadily climbed from 20 and 23 for women and men, respectively, in 1960 to a median of 28 and 30, respectively, in 2019 (Figure 3).¹⁹

Figure 3. Median Age at First Marriage by Sex, 1960 to 2019

^{Source: U.S. Census Bureau, “Estimated Median Age at First Marriage, by Sex: 1890 to the Present,” Historical Marital Status Tables, Table MS-2, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/marital.html.}

The decline in marriage is due not only to increasingly delayed marriage and to the rise in never-married adults, but also to higher divorce rates. In 1960, the divorce rate was 9 per 1,000 married women, and that rate increased through the 1960s and 1970s, reaching 23 per 1,000 by 1980.²⁰ Comparable estimates are surprisingly difficult to obtain after 1980, but by 2010 the divorce rate probably was somewhat lower (21 per 1,000), and it fell further to 17 per 1,000 by 2018.²¹ Any post-1980 drop was confined to the under-35 population.²² (In the past decade, divorce has also fallen among those in their late thirties and early forties, but the rate remains elevated relative to 1980.)²³

Furthermore, the overall divorce rate after 1980 may have declined only because the Baby Boomers aged out of the part of the life cycle where divorce is most common. When Sheela Kennedy and Stephen Ruggles considered what would have happened had the population not aged between 1980 and 2010, they found that divorce rates would have risen about as much between 1990 and 2010 as between 1970 and 1980.²⁴

Because divorce rates have fallen during the part of the life cycle when divorce is most common, it may be that today’s post-Millennials, when they are the age of today’s Baby Boomers, will be less likely than Boomers to have divorced at some point in their lives (conditional on having been married). Kennedy and Ruggles estimated that ever-married Americans in their 20s or early 30s in 2010 were less likely to have divorced than their same-age counterparts in 1980. However, as noted, their marriages will likely be at greater risk for divorce when they are older than used to be the case. (Divorce rates among older women increased between 1980 and 2010 then stabilized.)²⁵

Figure 4. Percent of Ever-Married Women Ages 50-54 Who Ever Divorced, 1960 to 2018

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of Integrated Public Use Microdata Series microdata from the decennial census and American Community Survey.26}

As marriage has declined, couples have become more likely to cohabit as unmarried couples. In the 1960s, less than one percent of couples living together were unmarried—a figure that rose to 5 percent by 1990 and stood at 12-13 percent as of 2019 (Figure 5).²⁷ Furthermore, marriage is much more likely to be preceded by cohabitation today than in the past. Among women ages 19 to 44 who married between 1965 and 1974, just 11 percent had cohabited with their husbands prior to marriage, but that number jumped to 32 percent among those who married between 1975 and 1979 and continued to soar thereafter. For the past two decades, two-thirds of new marriages have been preceded by cohabitation.²⁸

Figure 5. Percent of Adults Cohabiting as a Percent of Adults Living with a Partner, 1967-2019

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of Census Bureau tabulations. See https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/families/time-series/adults/ad3.xlsx. There are breaks in the series between 1995 and 1996 (prior to 1996, cohabiters were not identified directly) and between 2006 and 2007 (prior to 2007, only cohabiters of household heads were identified).}

The decline in marriage and the increase in cohabitation has led to substantial growth in unwed childbearing. The percent of births to unmarried mothers has jumped from five percent in 1960 to 40 percent today (Figure 6).²⁹ That is only slightly below the peak of 41 percent in 2009.

Figure 6. Percent of Births to Unwed Mothers, 1960-2018

^{Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, various National Vital Statistics Reports. See note 29 for details.}

This increase in unwed births is due not only to the decline in marriage overall, but also to the decline in “shotgun marriages” or post-conception/pre-delivery marriages, as we show in a previous report.³⁰ In the early 1960s, births produced by nonmarital conceptions followed a shotgun marriage 43 percent of the time, but today fewer than 10 percent involve a shotgun marriage. In fact, besides the decline in marriage rates overall, which increased the pool of women “at risk” for an unwed birth, the decline in shotgun marriage has been the largest contributing factor to the rise in unwed births.³¹ It has been the single most important factor contributing to rising unwed childbearing among women under thirty.

While unmarried mothers are often cohabiting with the father of their child at the time of the child’s birth, cohabiting relationships are far less stable than marriages. In a 2007 study researchers found that 50 percent of children born to cohabiting parents experienced a maternal partnership transition by their third birthday, compared to just 13 percent of children in married-parent families.³² Thus, children born into households where the parents are not married are much more likely to see their parents break up.

The combination of unwed births and divorce has led to a marked rise in the share of children living with a single parent. Fifty years ago, in 1970, 85 percent of children lived with two parents, four percent of children lived with a divorced single parent, while another one percent lived with a never-married parent.³³ (The rest lived with only one married parent present, had a widowed parent, or lived with neither parent.) In 2019, just 70 percent lived with two parents.³⁴ Roughly 10 percent lived with a divorced single parent, and close to 15 percent lived with a never-married parent.³⁵

Figure 7. Percent of Children Living without One or Both Parents, 1970-2019

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of published Census Bureau tables on Historical Living Arrangements of Children. https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/families/time-series/children/ch1.xls. “Parent” refers to biological, step, or adoptive parents. The Current Population Survey was changed in 2007 to better identify both parents.}

It is true that some children of never-married parents live with their cohabiting parents. However, some children living with married parents have experienced a divorce or were born to a single mother but live with a parent and stepparent. Some will experience divorce later in childhood. As noted above, nearly half of children have spent part of their childhood without at least one biological parent, up from around one-third of children born in the 1960s. Since unwed childbearing has become so much more common, the duration of childhood spent without both parents has increased even more than these figures would suggest.

Family instability in the United States has also led to an increase in the percent of Americans who have children with multiple partners, creating complicated relationships across households. Nearly 16 percent of all parents in the United States have children with more than one partner, and in 20 percent of all marital or cohabiting relationships, at least one of the partners has children with more than one partner.³⁶ Furthermore, fathers with multi-partner fertility are less likely to say they feel close to their children and are more likely to have failed to establish paternity for at least one of their children.³⁷

The Socioeconomic Divide in Family Stability

Although family instability has increased among all Americans, family instability is far more common among the non-college-educated. The highly educated marry more often, stay married more often, and rarely bear children outside of marriage. (We define highly-educated as being in roughly the highest quintile of educational attainment, low education as being in roughly the lowest quintile of educational attainment, and moderate education as those in the remaining quintiles.³⁸) Family stability also varies by race.

As of 2019, 57 percent of highly-educated women ages 15-44 were married, compared to only 36 percent of moderately-educated women and 18 percent of women with low education (Figure 8).³⁹ These differences were much smaller in the mid-1960s, with less than ten percentage points separating the three groups in 1964.

Figure 8. Percent of Women Ages 15-44 Who are Married, 1962-2019, by Education Level

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of Current Population Survey data. See notes 16, 38 and 39 for more details.}

Two-thirds of births (65 percent) among women with low education occur outside of marriage as of 2018 along with half (52 percent) of births to moderately-educated women (Figure 9). Among highly-educated women, however, just 11 percent occur outside marriage.⁴⁰ While the share for highly-educated women rose modestly over the past 50 years (by roughly 6 percentage points), the increases for the less-educated groups were dramatic.

Figure 9. Percent of Births to Unwed Mothers, 1970-2018, by Education Level

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of National Vital Statistics Natality Birth Data 1970-2018, National Bureau of Economic Research, accessed July 2, 2020, https://data.nber.org/data/vital-statistics-natality-data.html. See notes 38 and 40 for details.}

The decline in “shotgun marriage” has been particularly steep among the two less-educated groups of women, as we discuss in a previous Social Capital Project report.⁴¹ In 2007, only 2 percent of births resulting from nonmarital pregnancies followed a shotgun marriage among those with low education levels, down from 26 percent in 1977; among moderately-educated women, the figure was only 8 percent in 2007, down from 34 percent in 1977. However, among the highly educated, 27 percent of 2007 births resulting from nonmarital pregnancies followed a shotgun marriage, down only modestly from 34 percent in 1977.

A high rate of unwed childbearing is not the only factor contributing to greater family instability among non-college-graduate adults. Those with less education are also more likely to divorce.⁴² Women with a bachelor’s degree and married for the first time are very likely to be married for a long time; 78 percent will still be married 20 years later. However, among women entering their first marriage who have some college but no bachelor’s degree, it is as likely as not that their marriage will end within 20 years. Among women with no more than a high school diploma, just 40 percent will still be in their first marriage after 20 years.

Family instability differences between racial groups in the US are also striking. In the early 1960s, the share of women who were married was quite similar for non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, Hispanics, and other women. Roughly 65 to 70 percent of women ages 15 to 44 in each group were married in 1962 (Figure 10). Marriage rates subsequently declined across racial groups, to the point where fewer than half were married in 2019; however, marriage declined much more among African American women than among the other groups; by 2019, fewer than a quarter (24 percent) of black women between the ages of 15 and 44 were married.

Figure 10. Percent of Women Ages 15-44 Who are Married, 1962-2019, by Race

These patterns are no less dramatic looking at the share of women ages 30 to 34 who have never married. In 1962, fewer than 10 percent of such women in any racial group had never married; by 2019, 28 to 37 percent of non-black women in their early 30s had never been married, but that was true of 64 percent of black women.⁴³

Racial differences in shotgun marriage have narrowed over time, however. In 2007, 13 percent of non-Hispanic white births resulting from a nonmarital conception followed a shotgun marriage, compared with 3 percent of non-Hispanic black births. In 1962, the figures were 51 and 29 percent, respectively. (However, blacks remained much more likely than whites to be faced with the decision to have or not to have a shotgun marriage. Three in four births—73 percent—to black women in 2007 involved nonmarital conceptions, compared with 38 percent for non-Hispanic whites.)⁴⁴

African-American women are also more likely to have a marriage end in divorce. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of first marriages among black women will end in divorce within the next twenty years. That compares with 47 percent for non-Hispanic whites, 46 percent for Hispanics, and just 31 percent for Asian Americans.⁴⁵

Although unwed childbearing has increased a great deal across all racial groups, it is higher among black and Hispanic women than white women (Figure 11). Over two-thirds of births to black women (69 percent) are to unwed mothers, and over half (52 percent) of births to Hispanic women are. Among non-Hispanic white women, the figure is just 28 percent, though that was up from only 2 percent in 1960.

Figure 11. Percent of Births to Unwed Mothers, 1960-2018, by Race

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of National Vital Statistics Natality Birth Data 1970-2017, National Bureau of Economic Research, accessed January 31, 2020, https://data.nber.org/data/vital-statistics-natality-data.html. See note 29 for details.}

As a consequence of all these patterns, African American children are especially likely to live apart from one or both of their parents compared with other children (Figure 12).⁴⁶ Roughly six in ten black children are apart from at least one parent—about twice the share of non-Hispanic white and Hispanic children. This proportion appears in Figure 12 to be down from the mid-1990s high, but breaks in the time series, including a significant one between 2006 and 2007, overstate the true decline.

Figure 12. Percent of Children Living without One or Both Parents, 1970-2019, by Race

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of published Census Bureau tables on Historical Living Arrangements of Children, Tables CH-2, CH-3, and CH-4. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/children.html. “Parent” refers to biological, step, or adoptive parents. The Current Population Survey was changed in 2007 to better identify both parents.}

What Is Driving Rising Family Instability and the Socioeconomic Divide in Marriage?

While the trends in family instability and the variation across socioeconomic groups are unambiguous, it is much less clear what has caused these patterns. One leading explanation is that they reflect a worsening in the economic fortunes of men—the so-called “marriageable man” hypothesis, first proposed by sociologists William Julius Wilson and Kathryn Neckerman.⁴⁷

The hypothesis proposes that men must meet some economic threshold that makes them “marriageable” to women and that fewer men have surpassed that bar over time. It assumes that the decline in marriage is primarily a result of fewer women wanting to marry the men on offer (rather than fewer men wanting to marry). The decline in marriage is then said to have increased single parenthood, by some combination of (1) more unmarried women at risk of a nonmarital pregnancy, (2) fewer shotgun marriages as a result of men being less economically attractive as husbands, and (3) more divorces for the same reason.⁴⁸ The low marriageability of the men on offer to poorer women is also said to explain why family stability is so much lower among more disadvantaged socioeconomic groups.

A number of studies have found an association across geographic areas between male employment and the prevalence of marriage, and research also consistently finds that men who are employed or have higher earnings are more likely to be married or to marry.⁴⁹ These studies are rarely able to convincingly make a strong causal case. Indeed, it might be argued that where marriage is weaker as an institution, men change their behavior in ways that worsens their economic outcomes.⁵⁰ Robert Lerman and Bradford Wilcox’s research suggests that men’s employment rates would be higher if the marriage rate were the same today in 1980. In their words,

When young men and women replace formal commitments with informal relationships or none at all, work becomes less urgent, especially for men, who have historically taken all kinds of jobs to support their families. With no wife or children to support, men become less focused on the job market.⁵¹

Another study finds evidence that the liberalization of divorce and increased economic opportunities for women have reduced the incentives for men to make themselves more marriageable.⁵²

Consistent with these lines of reasoning, rigorous research finds that marriage causally increases men’s wages.[53] One study comparing identical twins who differ in their marital statuses estimates that marriage increases wages by about one-fourth.⁵⁴ A weakening of the institution of marriage might have reduced men’s perceived obligations and changed their incentives, thereby leading to less “marriageability” in the form of lower employment rates and wages.

Moreover, separate from point-in-time analyses, very few studies have considered the extent to which the decline in marriage or the rise in single parenthood can be explained by a decline in economic circumstances of men. Most worrisome trends in family stability began in the 1960s or earlier, during the so-called “Golden Age” of the American economy. Beyond that discrepancy, the conclusion of David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks, writing in 2004, is almost certainly applicable today: “men’s real wages have not changed enough over the past generation to explain much of the change in family structure, even among the least educated.”⁵⁵ In fact, this conclusion is even more compelling today, because male wage trends have been much more positive over the past twenty-five years than they were in the preceding quarter century.

Have Men Become Less Marriageable?

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.⁵⁷

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 30^th percentile of pay (where 70 percent of men make more), and one for the 10^th 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.

Figure 13. After-Tax Hourly Compensation of Non-Hispanic Men Ages 25-29, 1973-2019

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of Current Population Survey data. See end note 56.}

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 10^th and 30^th 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 30^th percentile was never more than 5 or 6 percent lower than in 1973 and was above the 1973 level from 1975 to 1989. The 10^th 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 10^th percentile was never lower than 16 percent of its 1973 level.

Part of the drop in pay for younger men appears to reflect an increase in post-secondary schooling, which might have altered the timing of career earnings. Staying in school longer can be expected to increase lifetime earnings, but in the short-run, pay might be lower than it would have been had a person gained years of work experience rather than being in school. It may take a few years for the benefit of extra schooling to exceed the cost of foregone work experience. ⁶⁰

The deep recessions between 1973 and 1975 and between 1980 and 1982, as well as the more moderate recession from 1990 to 1992, may have hurt hourly pay rates, though by reducing employment, they had a bigger impact on annual pay. Falling productivity growth and accelerating inflation (through the early 1980s) also hurt men’s pay during this period.

Another likely contributor to declining pay among men was the shift from an era in which men were often sole breadwinners to one with many more two-earner households. The pervasiveness of the idea that a husband should be able to raise a family on one income may have translated into men—especially working-class men—enjoying “breadwinner rents” in excess of the pay that their productivity would have justified. Previous research has suggested that men’s pay outpaced their productivity during the decades of the twentieth century that marked the high point of the American labor movement, which had as a primary goal securing a “family wage” for male workers.⁶¹ As married women became more attached to the labor force in the 1970s, the rationale for paying a man enough to raise a family on one income became difficult to justify, especially as economic competition from abroad became more intense. Finally, as noted above, the decline in marriage itself may have reduced men’s hourly pay by weakening the sense of obligation to support a family that men faced.

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 10^th percentile was higher than ever before in 2019 (essentially at its 2002 level), though last year the 30^th percentile remained a percentage point lower than in 1973.

While Figure 13 is based on hourly pay, it might be argued that marriageability is a function not of earnings per hour but annual earnings. After all, someone can spend much of the year out of work even if their hourly pay is as high as ever. Employment among prime-working-age men has declined steadily over time, so perhaps the focus on hourly pay is missing the declining marriageability story.

We use hourly pay here precisely to avoid complications around declining employment rates, which are widely misunderstood. There is a cyclical component to employment that reflects changes in labor market conditions, but over the past fifty years, this component has been less important than the long-term decline in the share of men seeking work. While many observers interpret this decline in prime-age “labor force participation” as an indicator of falling demand for male labor at a given rate of pay, the evidence is stronger that it reflects declining labor supply—fewer male workers who want a job at prevailing pay rates.⁶²

Indeed, the fact that hourly pay is as high as ever is one indication that falling demand is not the main culprit, but it is not the only one. Research suggests that men who want a job or are not working because they have given up hope of finding a job account for only a small fraction of the decline in prime-age male labor force participation over the long run. Most of the decline involves disabled men and able-bodied men who tell government surveyors they do not want a job.⁶³

For comparison, Figure 14 provides the trend from 1973 to 2018 in non-Hispanic men’s after-tax annual compensation.⁶⁴ The basic story is the same as when hourly pay is tracked. The trend reflects the business cycle more over the first twenty years than is the case for the hourly pay trend, and the low points for the 10^th and 30^th percentiles shift back to the early 1980s double-dip recession. The 30^th percentile of annual compensation declined by 25 percent by 1982, and the 10^th percentile was one-third lower in 1983 than in 1973. Despite these striking drops, annual pay subsequently recovered. The median was higher in 2018 than in any previous year, and in the twenty-year period from 1998 to 2018, it was higher than in 1973 in all but six years. The 30^th percentile finally exceeded its 1973 level in 2018. The 10^th percentile was higher than in 2018 only in 1999 and 2001.

Figure 14. After-Tax Annual Compensation of Non-Hispanic Men Ages 25-29, 1973-2018

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of Current Population Survey data. See end note 64.}

Clearly a simple story about absolute thresholds determining marriageability cannot explain the fact that marriage rates are so much lower today than in 1973 and single parenthood so much higher, since male pay is about as high as it was then. 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.

Figure 15. Generational Mobility of Young Men, 1969-2018

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses using data from Chetty et al. (2017) and the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) Online Data Analysis System. See end notes 66 and 67.}

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.

Figure 16. Ratio of Male-to-Female Hourly Pay, Non-Hispanics Ages 25-29, 1973-2019

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of Current Population Survey data. See end note 56.}

Income inequality has become a focus of many public commentators and policymakers in recent years both generally and specifically in regards to its effect on marriage.⁶⁹ If marriageability thresholds for men in the bottom half of the distribution are tied to what upper-middle-class men make, then fewer such men have been marriageable over time. (See Figure 17.) In 1973, the median pay of non-Hispanic men in their late 20s was 65 percent the pay of the 90^th percentile of such men. By 2019, it was only 47 to 48 percent. Unlike the other trends examined, this trend is more or less continuous over the period. However, given that the median is no lower today than in 1973, it reflects the rise of pay higher up. It is unclear why the potential wives of men in the bottom half of the pay distribution would be more likely to marry someone in 1973 than in 2019 just because upper-middle-class men were doing a lot better by 2019.

Figure 17. Ratio of 90^th Percentile to Median Hourly Pay, Non-Hispanic Men Ages 25-29, 1973-2019

^{Source: Social Capital Project analyses of Current Population Survey data. See end note 56.}

The evidence, then, suggests that men are no less marriageable by the most straightforward metrics than they ever were. Analyses that suggest otherwise tend to suffer from one of two serious mistakes. Many show trends in hourly wages or annual earnings by educational attainment rather than for different percentiles.⁷⁰ Since educational attainment has risen over time, trends among men with, for example, no more than a high school diploma will compare a larger group of men in 1973 to a smaller group of men with lower skills today. That results in a downward pull on the trend in pay that reflects nothing more than an apples-to-oranges comparison between a relatively advantaged group and a relatively disadvantaged group. It is like comparing today’s 10^th percentile to the 40^th percentile fifty years ago. Other studies use estimates that overstate the extent to which inflation has eaten into rising income.⁷¹ Many analyses make both of these errors.

It should not be surprising that the marriageable men hypothesis is too simplistic to explain the decline in family stability. The United States has experienced dire economic circumstances, such as the Great Depression, without the kind of family change that the country has experienced over the past 50 to 60 years.⁷² Even if the hypothesis is held to apply asymmetrically to the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, the fact that rising male pay since the early 1990s has not translated into a reversal of family decline should give pause to policymakers who would seek to revitalize the family through economic means. (And again, the earlier decline in “marriageability” may have been a reflection of weakened incentives to marry rather than the effect of changing economic opportunities among men.)

An Alternative Hypothesis: Affluence Diminishes Social Capital

In contrast to the marriageable men hypothesis, which is premised on worsening economic conditions, the Social Capital Project has argued that rising family instability is actually a byproduct of the nation becoming richer. As discussed in our flagship report, What We Do Together, a wide variety of indicators suggest that “associational life” in America has withered over the past half century.⁷³ We do less together, with our neighbors, our coworkers, and other members of our local communities. Family connections have also become more frayed. In doing less together over time, the stock of valuable social capital available to us has diminished.

What We Do Together argued that declines in our associational life, including family decline, are the consequence of rising affluence. Americans can afford to satisfy more of their needs through paid services and commercial insurance. The ability to save and opportunities to insure risks and smooth income have increased. There is less need to rely on grandparents for child care or neighbors for help with ambitious projects or churches and unions for financial support in hard times. And in material terms, it has become less important to have a spouse, a co-parent, or in-laws.

Affluence also led to Americans aiming higher up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.⁷⁴ Earlier generations did not have the luxury of taking their basic material needs for granted. Today, however, Americans can devote considerable attention to self-fulfillment, privacy, and individualist pursuits.⁷⁵ Relationships, including marriages, became more about the satisfaction gained by the parties involved and less about broader societal obligations.⁷⁶ As Americans have become wealthier, the opportunities for self-fulfillment have proliferated: education, career, dating, hobbies, and travel, to name a few. Marriage and childrearing must compete with these alternatives, which has proved difficult as the transition to adulthood has extended into the twentysomething years.⁷⁷ Advances in personal technology have made it easy to substitute pornography or no-strings dating for sexual gratification within marriage (or even within committed nonmarital relationships).⁷⁸

This emphasis on self-fulfillment was a driving factor behind expanded professional pursuits for women, which was also facilitated by advances such as cheaper home appliances and processed food and the ability to afford child care (to say nothing of the development of more effective birth control). For well-educated women, the opportunity cost of getting married too soon or to the wrong person or of having children became magnified. Marriage and fertility rates fell correspondingly.

The new birth control methods, along with legalized abortion, also undermined the view that nonmarital sex was wrong and to be avoided.⁷⁹ In a more general sense, by reducing the consequences of risky choices, affluence eroded support for moral constraints that impeded the self-realization and freedom of well-off Americans who could manage risk well. Rising opportunities for well-educated single women made single parenthood less financially disastrous for them. More women could afford divorce, and that reduced the stigma surrounding it. Increased demand for divorce led to liberalized divorce law, making the trend self-reinforcing.⁸⁰

Affluence was also behind the increased purchasing power of the young baby boomers, spawning the counter-cultural changes in 1960s and 1970s music and fashion.⁸¹ Those changes further eroded traditional moral codes. Scientific discoveries and rising economic security also contributed to secularism’s advances, undermining traditional morality and weakening involvement with religious institutions.

If American declines in family life and associational life more generally were caused by affluence, then there is a paradox requiring explanation: why does associational and family life remain stronger today among the well-off than the worse-off?⁸²

Even in 1960, family instability was more common among lower-income Americans than upper-income Americans. The opportunity cost of an unwed birth has been and remains lower for disadvantaged women than for advantaged women in the sense that, for them, an unwed birth does not as often mean the delay or forfeiture of education or career goals. That can weaken vigilance about avoiding unwed pregnancies.⁸³ Also, for women whose lives are chaotic and unstable, motherhood, even without a stable relationship, may add a great deal of meaning to their lives.⁸⁴ For some couples, the same sorts of personal challenges that lead to employment problems can also produce relationship problems. For others, the stresses of poverty exacerbate the usual relationship challenges common to all couples.

But rising affluence has also affected the associational and family life of those with greater and fewer resources differently. Among the relatively advantaged, private safety nets have remained strong and have even grown stronger. The incomes of men and women have both increased significantly, and individuals looking around at their extended families, friends, and neighbors have seen the incomes of those in their networks rising as well. Professional opportunities have expanded, especially for skilled women.

With stronger private safety nets, well-off men and women have been able to relax their commitment to inconvenient moral constraints. However, these moral constraints have historically served to protect the more vulnerable of society, who are less well-positioned to manage risk, from the consequences of unwed childbearing, divorce, and single parenthood. Affluence and individualism also weakened the attachment of the well-off to institutions and to neighbors.

Lowered commitment on the part of the well-off to moral constraints and institutions has had implications for less advantaged men and women, however. Without buy-in and enforcement from the well-off, commitment to moral constraints such as delaying sexual activity until marriage weakened among the vulnerable too, but with greater consequences. Since the poor have less of a financial stake in marriage, moral codes and cultural norms were always more important for enforcing marital stability among the disadvantaged than among the advantaged.⁸⁵

With reduced participation in and funding of institutions by those with resources, those institutions became less able to serve the vulnerable (who were usually even less likely than the advantaged to participate in those institutions). Rising economic segregation also meant that whatever moral or institutional leadership might have been provided by the well-off followed them to enclaves often far removed from the social worlds of the less well-off.⁸⁶ The church pews remained fuller in more affluent communities than elsewhere, but those communities were ever further from the disadvantaged Americans who needed them.⁸⁷ Regardless, greater individualism made the have nots less interested in what the haves thought about their choices anyway.

Traditional moral guardrails, thus, became less effective as protective barriers against calamity among Americans with fewer resources. While the well-off could manage the greater risks of, say, nonmarital sex adequately, many other people could not. Incorrect or inconsistent use of contraception produced many more nonmarital pregnancies among them than among either well-off Americans or the worse-off Americans of earlier generations (who were more tightly bound by taboos against nonmarital sex). The availability of birth control and abortion reduced pressure

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