Does Marriage Matter?

Abstract

The last several years have witnessed an active-sometimes acrimonious-debate, occasionally joined by demographers, over the state of the family.Some, like David Popenoe (1993), decry what they see as a dangerous erosion of the family as an institution, with dire consequences for society.Others, like Judith Stacey (1993), see the traditional family, balanced on the monogamous couple, as fundamentally incompatible with women's well-being.Although these two positions seem extreme, both have numerous adherents and are held by serious scholars.When politicians point to the high social costs and taxpayer burden imposed by disintegrating "family values," they overlook the fact that individuals do not simply make the decisions that lead to unwed parenthood, marriage, or divorce on the basis of what is good for society.They weigh the costs and benefits of each of these choices to themselves-and sometimes their children.But how much do individuals know about these costs and benefits?I think that we as demographers have something to contribute here.As individual researchers we investigate the relationship between marriage and longevity, wealth, earnings, or children's achievements, but we rarely try to pull all this evidence together.I would like to argue that we have an opportunity and an obligation to do that, and to tell people what their decisions about marriage and family potentially mean for them as individuals.That is my objective here. Trends in Marriage and CohabitationLet us review, first, trends in marriage over the last four decades.Figure I shows the proportions of the adult population age 15 and over currently not married for the period 1950 through 1993, taken from decennial censuses and March Current Population Surveys.Although black men and women had higher proportions unmarried in 1950 than did white men and women, these differences were modest.Since that time, marriage patterns have diverged dramatically for the races.Figure 1 shows that the proportion of the population age 15 and older which is currently "unmarried" has increased for both whites and blacks, but with especially striking rises for blacks, so that in 1993,61 % of black women and 58% of black men were not married, compared with 38% of white men and 41% of white women.Insofar as marriage "matters," black men and women are much less likely than whites to share in the benefits, and much less likely today than a generation ago.Figure 2 depicts the proportions of men and women age 15 and older who have never married for the period from 1950 to 1993.This figure shows that for blacks, much of the