The New York Times:THE great myth about divorce is that marital breakup is an increasing threat to American families, with each generation finding their marriages less stable than those of their parents....The story of ever-increasing divorce is a powerful narrative. It is also wrong. In fact, the divorce rate has been falling continuously over the past quarter-century, and is now at its lowest level since 1970....Greg Mankiw writes:
Why were so many analysts led astray by the recent data? Understanding this puzzle requires digging deeper into some rather complex statistics.
The Census Bureau reported that slightly more than half of all marriages occurring between 1975 and 1979 had not made it to their 25th anniversary.... But here’s the rub: The census data come from a survey conducted in mid-2004, and at that time, it had not yet been 25 years since the wedding day of around 1 in 10 of those whose marriages they surveyed....
The narrative of rising divorce is also completely at odds with counts of divorce certificates, which show the divorce rate as having peaked at 22.8 divorces per 1,000 married couples in 1979 and to have fallen by 2005 to 16.7.
Why has the great divorce myth persisted so powerfully? Reporting on our families is a lot like reporting on the economy: statistical tales of woe provide the foundation for reform proposals.
This seems to be an example of what Bryan Caplan calls " the pessimistic bias, a tendency to overestimate the severity of economic problems and underestimate the economy’s performance in the recent past, the present, and the future."Could be, but seems to be more like lack of media fact-checking to me.
Here's more from Tyler Cowen:
Another common divorce myth is that Christians are just as likely to divorce as everyone else. The truth is that regular church attenders are much less divorce-prone than the general population.I want to start my week guest blogging by talking about divorce. Betsey Stevenson and I had an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times noting a very simple fact: those married in the 1990s have proved less likely to divorce than those wed in the 1980s, which were less likely to divorce than those wed in the 1970s. The Divorce Facts are that divorce is falling, and marriages are more stable.
What is surprising, is just how easily and how often the Divorce Facts lose out to the Divorce Myth. The Divorce Myth is that divorce is rising. When the latest divorce numbers came out last week, they once again confirm this quarter-century long decline in divorce, but the media (including the Times, Post, and the Inquirer) chose instead to write (incorrectly) about rising divorce. (In their defense, the data were presented in a way that invited misinterpretation, a subject that I shall return to in a future post.)
I wonder what other bad news we believe that simply isn't true?
P.S. -- More thoughts by Justin Wolfers.
See my previous posts on divorce:
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