4/6 Bridging America’s Social Capital Divide - FIVE PROBLEMS
Family is important for creating social capital. We reviewed data that suggests a strong relationship between stable, married families and positive outcomes for children, adults, society, and the economy. Yet, as individuals aspire to create stable families, we notice the following five problems:
1. A growing marriage divide that falls along class and educational lines
2. A marriageability crisis among men
3. Rise of young, low-income Americans having children outside of marriage
4. Federal policy penalizes marriage
5. Culture downplays the benefits of marriage
1. A GROWING MARRIAGE DIVIDE THAT FALLS ALONG CLASS AND EDUCATIONAL LINES
The United States finds itself in a predicament. Marriage remains relatively strong and stable for educated and affluent Americans. This means our affluent class is reaping the substantial economic, social, and educational benefits that flow to men, women, and children in stable, married families.
Meanwhile, the stability of less-educated and lower-income American families continues to erode, as marriage retreats for Americans who are not affluent. As we will explore in more detail later, this decline in marriage has been especially pronounced among working-class families.
The country still faces a deep divide when it comes to family structure and stability, with children from less-educated and lower-income homes still facing markedly higher rates of family instability and single parenthood. Single parenthood is about twice as high for children from families with less education compared to children from college-educated families. Indeed, in recent decades, the decline in marriage has been especially pronounced among working-class families—those headed by parents with no college degree and falling between the twentieth and fiftieth percentiles of income.
One of the most telling signs of this marriage divide is the number of currently married adults; shown below, a majority of more affluent Americans today are married, whereas a majority of their less-affluent fellow citizens are not. What is particularly striking about this divide is that it was basically nonexistent in the 1970s.
SOURCE: 2019 American Community Survey data queried through the Integrated Public Use Microdata System.
What has replaced marriage for poor and working-class Americans? A mix of cohabitation, divorce, nonmarital childbearing, and single living. For instance, in 2019, 59 percent of babies born to mothers with only a high-school diploma were born outside of marriage, compared to just 10 percent of those born to mothers with a four-year degree or more. As a result of these trends, children born into less-affluent and less-educated households are increasingly likely to find themselves in unstable family environments and are more likely to be raised by a single mother. In fact, single parenthood is about twice as high for children from less-educated families as it is for children from college-educated families.
Research suggests the marriage divide may have arisen for a host of economic, policy, and cultural reasons. Economic gains since the 1970s have disproportionately gone to the most-educated Americans, whereas Americans without a college degree—especially men— have not seen marked wage gains. And employment instability and nonparticipation have increased precipitously for less-educated men. This matters because stable employment is a powerful predictor of men’s odds of getting and staying married.
Declines in religious and secular civic engagement have been similarly concentrated among working-class and poor Americans, thereby depleting these families of the social support they need to thrive and endure. Taken together, these shifts have weakened the strength and stability of family life in poor and working-class communities across the United States.
The tragedy in all this, of course, is that many of these changes came at the behest of, or to the benefit of, our elites. This is particularly troubling because the marriage divide renders millions of children in working-class and poor families “doubly disadvantaged”—navigating life with not only fewer socioeconomic resources but also an absent parent.
The portrait painted by this research is one of a country with rapidly developing fault lines along family formation. Increasingly, wealthier Americans find growth, stability, and purpose by anchoring their lives on strong and stable families. Meanwhile, the numerous benefits of marriage increasingly elude working-class and poor Americans. The disparity has significant implications for the healthy development of our nation’s children, and policy reform should focus on empowering more lower-income Americans to fulfill their aspirations to build strong, stable families.
2. A MARRIAGEABILITY CRISIS AMONG MEN
The vast majority of women desiring marriage still consider important a man’s ability to provide financially for a family. Four out of five women say it is very important for a potential spouse to have a “steady job.”
New research by Rosemary Hopcraft suggests that a man’s probability of ever marrying is highly correlated with his income, whereas the likelihood a female will marry is not related to her earning potential. Unfortunately, a growing share of men without college degrees no longer have access to jobs open to men and women with only a high school diploma that provide the kind of stable income that may be necessary for potential spouses to consider them marriage- ready. In the late 1960s, nearly all prime-age (25–54) men with only a high-school diploma participated in the labor force, but by 2015, only 85.3 percent of these men were working or looking for work. Men who have left the labor market tend to spend most of the time they would otherwise invest in work on “socialization, relaxing, and leisure,” which includes eating out with friends, watching television, and playing video games. Few of these activities meaningfully prepare men to build strong and stable families.
One important employment challenge possibly contributing to declining labor-force participation for men with less than a college degree is that many jobs accessible to them may not pay enough to sustain a stable family life. Technological change, de- unionization, and globalization have dramatically altered the job market. When looking at hourly wages in the United States in 2018, Pew researchers found that “today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power it did in 1978.” But the overall stagnation in hourly wages has not been felt equally by all U.S. workers. Between 1973 and 2015, real hourly earnings for the typical high-school- educated man in his prime working years declined by 18.2 percent, while hourly earnings for college-educated men increased substantially. Further, in the 1980s,
two thirds of jobs were open to men and women with only a diploma. Today, only one-third of jobs are. With a wave of new service-sector jobs replacing a shrinking manufacturing sector, many find themselves with less representation and fewer rights in the workplace, reducing their access to dignified, supportive work environments.
In short, marriage could be slipping out of reach for many poor and working-class men as they lose critical opportunities to gain a career footing early in life and build families from a place of financial stability. Recent research has identified a large gap in the share of men who are good financial matches for a growing class of educated women earning good wages. The worsening economic conditions of lower-wage men are strongly correlated with declining rates of marriage among this group.
Men with low skills and low income will find themselves increasingly unable to realize aspirations for stable, married family life—or to model this kind of life to their children.
3. RISE OF YOUNG, LOW-INCOME AMERICANS HAVING CHILDREN OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE
The rise of unmarriageable men explains in part another important thread of fraying family life, especially for lower-income Americans: the rising share of young men and women having children outside of marriage.
In 2019, 40 percent of new infants were born to unwed mothers. This crisis of nonmarital births is especially concentrated among poor and working-class mothers. Women giving birth in 2016 were nearly six times as likely to be unmarried if they just had a high-school diploma, compared to those with at least a bachelor’s degree.
This experience runs contrary to most young adults’ desire to marry. As noted earlier, three in four high school seniors say having a strong marriage is “extremely important” to them. It is, therefore, perhaps apparent that impediments exist to realizing aspirations for stable family life, especially among low-income individuals. This is a perpetuating problem. If individuals do not have a stable family life modeled to them, they are less well equipped to navigate establishing their own. Many young adults are moving quickly into sex and parenthood without the skills and wisdom to make good decisions about marriage and family formation.
4. FEDERAL POLICY PENALIZES MARRIAGE
The way Congress has constructed the federal safety net over the last six decades has helped to shape the increasing marriage divide. While legislators tackled many of the marriage penalties hitting upper-income families in 2017, they did not address the perverse incentives against marriage included within many means-tested programs (such as Medicaid and childcare subsidies). These disincentives are hitting working- class couples especially hard today.
Despite decades of social science research confirming the importance of marriage for childhood development, means-tested benefit programs like Medicaid and the childcare subsidies often penalize marriage among lower-income families. These “marriage penalties” arise when two lower-income single adults—one or both of whom might qualify for public benefits when they file taxes separately—become ineligible for federal benefits when they marry because their combined income pushes them above the benefit threshold.
As a result, many unmarried couples today face losing thousands of dollars in government support if they choose to marry. For instance, a single pregnant woman earning $21,000 per year would normally be eligible for Medicaid/CHIP coverage for her own care and the cost of childbirth. But if this very same pregnant woman married the father of her child, who makes $29,000 per year, their combined income of $50,000 would disqualify her from Medicaid/CHIP coverage for childbirth and associated perinatal care, which costs an average of $12,000.
And these penalties make a difference in the family landscape. Researchers have generally found them to be associated with slightly less marriage and more cohabitation. One study found that every $1,000 of marriage penalties was associated with a 1.7 percentage point decrease in the probability a couple would marry; the decrease was worse—2.7 percentage points—for those without a college degree. Another study found that among mothers who were eligible for EITC (the earned income tax credit), those who were facing a marriage penalty were 2.5 percentage points more likely to cohabit and 2.7 percentage points less likely to marry when compared to the ones who did not face a marriage penalty.
The evidence suggests that the greater burden of marriage penalties now falls on couples whose income is between 100 percent and 250 percent of the poverty line— that is, working-class Americans. The financial burden of marriage penalties can be large. Research suggests that marriage penalties can exceed 30 percent of income for some couples. And nearly 40 percent of cohabiting parents with young children may face marriage penalties in programs such as SNAP, Medicaid, and TANF.
This means federal policy is forcing many with both low capital and low social capital to remain locked out of one of the biggest means to accumulate social capital—marriage— to the detriment of the whole of society.
5. CULTURE DOWNPLAYS THE BENEFITS OF MARRIAGE
Since the 1960s, American culture has de-emphasized many of the values and virtues that sustain strong and stable marriages, all in the name of “expressive individualism.” What is interesting about this well-known cultural trend is the countercurrent that has quietly emerged in recent years among the upper classes. While America’s educated elite overwhelmingly reject a marriage-centered ethos in public, they embrace it privately for themselves and their children. In this way, they afford their families a significant cultural advantage when it comes to forging a strong and stable family life. A recent study of California found, for instance, that college-educated Californians were much more likely than less-educated Golden Staters to embrace a public ethic celebrating “family diversity” while at the same time valuing the raising of their own children within marriage. This suggests an inverted hypocrisy among the elites who control the commanding heights
of our culture in California—successful showrunners, Silicon Valley titans, and media executives. When people in these positions of influence embrace a more virtuous family- centered way of life in private than they do in public, children and adults from less- advantaged communities are less likely to be exposed to the values that sustain strong and stable marriages—in their schools or on their screens.
