“Dalrock” writes,
The jump in the late thirties bracket is striking, with 17% of White women in their late 30s having never married
This figure was just 10.4 percent as recently as 2003. However, the proportion of never-married white women in their early 40s has remained below 12 percent. Arithmetically, one can predict either that a large proportion of women in their late 30s will marry within the next five years or there will be a sharp rise in the proportion of women in their early 40s who never have been married. “Dalrock” writes,
women marrying after forty means their fertility window is all but closed by the time they walk down the aisle.
We know that many children are being born out of wedlock. It looks like we are going to see a lot of marriages that do not produce children. The disconnect between marriage and children is a striking change over the past fifty years. My guess is that it has large effects on the distribution of income.
My question is why is this change a bad thing? We had a strong marriage enforced society in 1960 and everybody rebelled and we the 1960s and 1970s. We hit the high point of divorce and abortion rates in the late 1970s and it has been falling ever since.
In today modern global productive economy, people are not secure in their career until 30ish so it is probably best they put off marriage (and child-bearing as well) until that point. (Young workers need more career and hour flexibility to establish themselves.) And this is the reality in all developed countries and the most productive functional country in the world, Singapore, also has among the lowest birth rate in the world as well.
So it is the necessary economic flexibility that is causing this movement away from early family formation.
Well, I think it would be better if people had kids younger. First, genetic mutations make having kids older worse. Second, we do college when we are 18-22 because we don’t have anything better to do. We should also do kids then for the same reason. To the extent that the government front-loads the competition for “establishing” a career, they should quit it.
One thing possibly overlooked: Some (7-10%) of those late marriage women may already have offspring.