More couples are deciding to live together instead of marrying, and strained finances are a top reason many cite. A survey last year by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that among those who live with a partner and wish to get married, more than half said they or their partner weren’t financially ready.
About half of middle earners were married in 2018, a drop of 16 percentage points since 1980. Among the highest U.S. earners, 60% were married in 2018, a decline of 4 percentage points over the same period. That marks a reversal. In 1980, a higher proportion of middle-class Americans than top earners were married.
1. You have to decide whether or not to have children.
2. You have to decide whether to live independently or together.
3. If you live together, you have to decide whether or not to get married.
It seems to me that the decision that ought to most be affected by economic circumstances is (1). Raising children is expensive. And that decision in turn would affect (2) and (3).
Whatever you decide about (1), I can also see (2) having an effect, since it is cheaper to live together. And that in turn would affect (3).
But mostly the article is written as if financial status directly affects (3). Both the headline and one of the academics quoted in the story refer to marriage as having become a “luxury good.”
I don’t see (3) as the likely margin along which financial status affects decisions. Something is wrong with this picture.
If the chain of thinking were “We’ve decided that we can’t afford children, and if we can’t afford children then there is no point in getting married,” would make sense. It also would be very sad.
But the article says:
More couples are forming families without matrimony. One in four parents living with a child is unmarried, according to Pew. More than one-third of them are living with a partner, up from one in five in 1997, the Pew study of 2017 data found.
Seriously? People are thinking We wanted children, but getting married seems like too much of a commitment. We can’t afford to make that kind of commitment yet. ?????
I still think that replacing means-tested entitlements with a UBI would make low-wage men more attractive as marriage partners. Indeed, the article profiles a couple with children who fit with my model of non-marriage.
They said they want to get married but are holding off because Ms. Dlouhy is enrolled in a publicly funded program that pays for her to earn a nursing license. Combining their income could jeopardize that assistance, she said, as well as her state health-insurance subsidies.
Kathryn Edin’s ethnography Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage talks about this at length. Among some poor subcultures, marriage is seen as a “capstone” to be achieved later in life. The realities of female fertility being what they are, kids have to come first. It goes without saying that broken homes are the norm in such communities.
I really hate the myth of kids are expensive. No they really aren’t. My kid cost me at most, maybe 3% my income. .My mother made minimum wage her entire life as a single mother with one job, she raised three kids just fine without government benefits in America. But yeah kids are expensive lol. They cost less than most people entertainment funds.
The real expense was marriage and divorce. One thing people miss is housewives are less likely among cohabitation
I’m not sure where you figures come from.
Take something simple. If you don’t have kids, you can live in smaller cheaper spaces and your don’t need to pay more for “good schools”. Our living expenses are going up a lot going from a condo to a house.
And of course daycare is an incredible expense.
I dunno, I don’t think we spend lavishly and its pretty clear kids are expensive. We can “afford them”, but we do better than most.
Beyond that, either you think kids are important or you don’t. When I was sick and worried about my job we still decided to have a second child, because that was something important to us. For some its just not important, so they find an excuse.
No, kids are expensive when you want to treat them as a middle class accessories. I lived in a one bedroom apartment and slept on the couch for twelve years so housing costs didn’t change in the slightest. Kids can go to public school for free. Kids aren’t stupid either if you raise them correctly, never paid for daycare once. Daycare is for helicopter parents. Kid did fine hours a day alone even at four, as an infant did fine too. Teach them not to drink bleach and you eat twice a day to avoid lunchtime cooking injuries. Before kids I spent $40 a day on food for myself, after just spent $40 a day for both of us and downscaled restaurant choices from fine dining daily to family dining. All and all it was basically a wash.
And before you scream “but but best life possible”, that argument is a red herring and unrelated to cost. She got straight A’s, honors, and ended up with an academic free ride.
People used to squat kids in rice paddies and still have fufilling family lives. They really aren’t expensive, I basically fit mine in my entertainment budget and most of that came out of giving up the alcohol as $500 a month on booze alone was an easy transfer.
But yep, expensive lol. Like I said my single mother did three kids minimum wage no gov benefits just fine Filipinos can fit an entire family per bedroom, so can you.
So if you shove your whole family in a one bedroom apartment and abandon your infant all day while you go to work costs aren’t higher…
“People used to squat kids in rice paddies and still have fulfilling family lives. ”
And people used to have 8 kids and hoped 2 survived.
“alcohol as $500 a month on booze alone was an easy transfer”
This is easily a bottle of wine a day. Are you ok?
There are a lot of econoblogosphere posts on price divergence between stuff, like plastic toys and electronic devices, and human services, like education and health care. The former have gone way down, and the latter have gone way up, along with “the rent”, so figuring “the” inflation rate is fraught with all kinds of problems.
But speaking of kids, take a look at the price of stay-away summer camp lately. Not quite Zimbabwe or Venezuela or Epi-pen levels of price increase, but really, really high. Many places have gone from mild additional expense of a few hundred bucks to, well, college tuition levels. Yes, just like with college, more “amenities and liabilities” play an important part. Still, sticker shock.
Kids do NOT have to be expensive. Nor do cars.
Most folks can live pretty well with a 6+ year old car that runs OK, out of new car warranty. Available for what, $3k-$6k?
Plus some uncertain $1k/year repair expense.
Kids can be similar. Library books instead of new books. Home/ friend/ neighbor care instead of day care.
Or, and here’s a heretical thought, MOTHER care instead of day care – live on one male husband salary, in a smaller house, with the mother doing almost all the cooking and looking after the kids.
Choose that option for first child, and marginal cost of new kids is really really low.
No DINK (double income no kids) lifestyle of lunches and dinners out, tho.
Lifestyle choices dominate in “cost of kids”.
It’s terrible if gov’t programs are pushing against marriage, tho, and many do so. Those policies should be changed so that fathers marrying mothers is always a better gov’t benefit choice.
Living on one female wife salary in a comfortable if somewhat crowded apartment is also possible. Get kids clothes from thrift shops and friends with slightly older children. Cook semi-vegetarian and avoid expensive crap (lips that touch potato chips will never touch mine). A new basic Corolla is a big one-time expense but that’s why you were saving money. Then when your kids go off to college, they get a boatload of financial aid. In fact, some admissions offices will want them for income diversity reasons.
We tried to have my parents watch the kids this week since we were keeping them out of daycare over the virus. Three days so far and they have cancelled on us twice due to illness. I’ll grant you that is abnormal, but sent us scrambling (it didn’t help that we were sick too).
As backup caregivers to some other primary parents are great. As a primary it’s not necessarily reliable.
I don’t know what neighbors you have that will watch two young children for free.
My wife might stay home if her job won’t let her telecommute after we move. But the reason we wanted her working isn’t because we want to have dinners out. It’s because I have bad health and mixed job security, so while I’m doing well now that could change on a dime (I’ve had enough near death hospital stays to be worried about being the sole provider). So if something happens to me we need an income to pay the mortgage, and if nothing happens then our mortgage is like 10% gross income and it gets paid off early.
And we are a lot better off then most. Many of our friends have a combined income equal to my single income. It’s not clear how they would make it work on a single income.
There seems to be this idea that people just waste money willy billy and it’s easy to afford everything if you don’t eat out. Then you find out that what they really mean is cram into a tiny apartment and be one illness away from bankruptcy.
Perhaps abundance allows for the kind of R-selected mating pattens that people would fall into without strong carrots and sticks against it. UBI might help, but I think the bigger issue in the lower orders is that R-selected behavior isn’t going to lead to starvation. Have you seen low class reality TV? I’m not sure UBI vs means testing is the primary problem here.
Another problem is that UBI is worth a lot less to these people than current benefits (which might be worth several times what UBI would be worth).
Amongst the upper classes not being married is a huge financial and status hit. Probably more of a hit then the benefits of R-selected behavior are worth. I mean can a single mother afford a nice house in a good school district? If not then is she going to find fooling around worth it?
Scandinavian countries have been leading the way for a long time in terms of abandonment of marriage and adoption of long-term, semi-monogamous but unmarried cohabitation.
In Sweden such people are termed “sambos” and in Finland “avoliitto”, and there are so many of them (about 2 million in Sweden today) that the Swedes passed a “Cohabitees Act” in 2003, which establishes something akin to common law marriage, but not quite, and with more limited rights and duties. There are always pushes to expand those rights and duties to the edge of actual marriage, something closer to a “Civil Union”, but by default as established by longterm behavior and production of children (though establishment of paternity is a tricky legal issue there), instead of official tying the knot.
Of course sambo ‘unions’ dissolve just like marriages dissolve, and the thorny legal question is what happens, or to what extent does one have to do anything besides simply leave, or start acting more like roommates and seeing other people, even if there are mutually biological children in the picture.
It’s worth noticing that something akin to this arrangement is quite common in Hollywood and certain elite circles, with reports of ‘marriage’ occasionally not backed up by any legal documents or formality giving rise to claims for property and support, and instead just reflective of having had some kind of photogenic Potemkin ceremony put on for purposes of celebrity media publication and marketing.
It’s not agreed as to what kind of contract Jack Cade was talking about with Shakepeare’s famous line, but it might have been a marriage contract, “Some say the bee stings; but I say tis the bee’s wax, for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.”
Quebec is drastically different in terms of unmarried cohabitation rates compared to English Canada. This difference doesn’t seem to be correlated to any social ills, and oddly, Francophone Canadians tend to be much more anti-immigrant and anti-muslim compared to Anglophones. I think the Nurture Assumption holds fast with these investigations of family structure.
After college, I got married rather quickly and my friends spent several years “not wanting to be tied down.” They did not, however, think twice about taking jobs that kept them busy 12 hours a day and unable to take more than very short vacations (or pursue much of anything else). My first few years of married life were much less “tied down” than my friend’s lives were during the same time.
With kids it’s rather the same. Our analysis of when to have kids hinged on the fact that they will spend the same number of years in our house regardless of when we have them, so it’s mostly a matter of choosing when we want that to be and what parts of life we want to be before and after. For my friends it seemed to almost completely be a matter of, once again, not wanting to be tied down.
I think most people just don’t think about these things very well.
I think this is very true but, after reading Part I on gender in Charles Murray’s “Human Diversity”, I think I’d substitute “most people” with “most men”. Women seem to have the life-balance equation front-and-center. This is why I have hope for the technical fields that currently have low female participation; these firms can improve communication about human interaction in teams and they can de-emphasize unproductive 12-hour-endurance signalling with life-balance oriented incentives.
Jobs actually provide a good example of what people are tempted to do with sexual relationships and, indeed, what traditional perpetuity-marriage is intended to prevent them from trying to do.
What employees want with jobs is the ability to keep the comfortable routine going and have a secure stream of income coming in, but always to keep an eye out for something better and to retain the option value of trading up to a superior job the moment the opportunity presents itself. You might call this “Hyper-ergosy”, you might call it. Anything that tends to interfere, impair, or penalize the immediate exercise of this option strikes the typical employee as, well, ‘oppressive’.
On the other side of the coin, the employer faced with employee who just up and quits one day to take a job with a rival firm, and who will have a hard time finding an adequate replacement, feels that this is at least somewhat improper, if not altogether a devastating ‘betrayal’.
Now, there can be little day-to-day operational difference between being actually married and functionally married. But there is a big social difference, which includes this “option value” and which makes it much easier to trade-up.
When people ask about your situation, saying you are “Single and currently living with my girlfriend, but you know, it’s complicated.” (and leaving the matter of kids vague) sounds a lot different than saying “I’m married and my wife and have a kid and live in an apartment up the street.”
The existential-level sexual anxiety about your partner dumping you to trade up, or about not having the ability to dump and trade up, is behind a lot of the traditions we had, and dynamics we currently observe.
I’ve always found the “people can’t afford to get married” meme bizarre. Marrying young as undergrads allowed my wife and me to live more cheaply than either of us would have independently and allowed her to get through med school without debt since I was working fulltime, but we kept living our student lifestyle. What on earth do they mean they are not financially ready?
Humans, like all animals, are evolutionarily wired to want … children? or just sex?
Most normal women definitely want children. Not so clear about men, genetically, but in a healthy society, there is a big support for children.
“Sexual liberation” was to promote those folks, especially men, who wanted lots of free sex without kids. A lot of college students seem to want that; I recall 40 years ago as a college student *I* wanted that. Now I think it was a mistake.
Arnold says:
I still think that replacing means-tested entitlements with a UBI would make low-wage men more attractive as marriage partners.
Any and every low-income gov’t program should be changed to ensure that married folk in that program get as much as two unmarried folk, with any number of kids.
The Liber ideal of (Rand and Heinlein both) “responsible promiscuity” is in conflict with having an optimal society for raising kids, tho it might be optimal for those, like Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, who never raised kids. It’s sub-optimal for society, and very sub-optimal for the raising of kids.
For some people it’s not the cost but the opportunity cost of children.
They don’t call it that.
They’ve heard that children are expensive, but it’s FOMO more than that.
Bring your baby on a plane? To the beach and the restaurant? Drink no alcohol at all for several months?