The country's exceptionally thin safety net prompts residents—especially those with less-steady employment—to view partnership in more economic terms.
Over the last several decades, the proportion of Americans who get married —a development known as well to those who lament marriage's decline as those who take issue with it as an institution. But a development that's much newer is that the demographic now leading the shift away from tradition is Americans without college degrees—who just a few decades ago were by the age of 30 than college graduates were.
In 2017, in their early 40s with a high-school degree or less education are married, compared to three-quarters of women with a bachelor's degree; in the 1970s, there was barely a difference. The marriage gap for men has changed less over the years, but there the trend lines have flipped too: Twenty-five percent of men with high-school degrees or less education have , compared to 23 percent of men with bachelor's degrees and 14 percent of those with advanced degrees. Meanwhile, have continued to rise among the less educated, while staying more or less steady for college graduates in recent decades.
The divide in the timing of childbirth is even starker. Fewer than mothers with a bachelor's degree are unmarried at the time of their child's birth, compared to six out of 10 mothers with a high-school degree. The share of such births has in recent decades among less educated mothers, even as it has barely budged for those who finished college. (There are , but among those with less education, out-of-wedlock births have become among alike.)
Plummeting rates of marriage and rising rates of out-of-wedlock births among the less educated have growing levels of income inequality. More generally, these numbers are causes for concern, since—even though marriage is —children living in married households tend to on a wide range of behavioral and academic measures compared to kids raised by single parents or, for that matter, the kids of parents who live together but are unmarried.
Whether this can be attributed to marriage itself is a contentious question among researchers, since suggest that what really drives these disparities is simply that those who are likeliest to marry differ from those who don't, notably in terms of earnings. (Other , however, find better outcomes for the kids of married parents regardless of the advantages those households tend to have.) Regardless, it is clear that having married parents usually means a child will get from their parents.
Why are those with less education—the working class—entering into, and staying in, traditional family arrangements in smaller and smaller numbers? Some tend to stress that the cultural values of the less educated have changed, and there is some truth to that. But what's at the core of those changes is a larger shift: The disappearance of good jobs for people with less education has made it harder for them to start, and sustain, relationships.
What's more, the U.S.'s relatively meager safety net makes the cost of being unemployed even steeper than it is in other industrialized countries—which prompts many Americans to view the decision to stay married with a jobless partner in more transactional, economic terms. And this isn't only because of the financial ramifications of losing a job, but, in a country that puts such a premium on individual achievement, the emotional and psychological consequences as well. Even when it comes to private matters of love and lifestyle, the broader social structure—the state of the economy, the availability of good jobs, and so on—matters a great deal.
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In early 2017, the economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson labor markets during the 1990s and 2000s—a period when America's manufacturing sector was , as companies steadily moved production overseas or automated it with computers and robots. Because the manufacturing sector has historically paid high wages to people with little education, the disappearance of these sorts of jobs has been , especially the men among them, who still outnumber women on assembly lines.
