The number decreases to 43.3% if you restrict that range to 29 to 49 year olds, with white women in the same age range having less than one-third (13.5%) the likelihood of having never been married.
Putting this into a more graphical form:
I've heard some of my younger classmates argue before that marriage is an unnecessary institution. Putting moral arguments aside for a moment, the reality is that (among other things) a lack of marriage leads to poverty. And a shortage of black men leads to a lack of marriage among black women. This is very, very sad.
5 comments:
...a lack of marriage is correlated to poverty, does it necessarily cause it?
I love Williams, of course, but I'm not sure that this is causal.
I think it is at least partially causal. Two parents have more resources (time, money, etc.) to invest in their children than a single parent. It's not that single parents can't be good parents or that divorce predetermines poverty, but it is true that single parents have huge hurdles they have to jump over that are not as extreme for married spouses.
This is particularly true given that the great majority of single parents are women and that women with children tend to make lower income than women without children and men.
P.S. -- I do agree that those living in poverty are also more likely to have children out of wedlock than those who are living above the poverty line. In that sense, causality can run the other direction.
...data is self-selecting: those most likely to be wealthy are also most likely to get married (not in terms of people wanting to marry wealthy people, but that the skills that make for good wealth--especially above-poverty wealth--dependability, level-headedness, and people-skills--also make for longer/existing marriages, as well as those most likely to get fired continually--subsequently becoming poorer--are most likely to not be able to stay married (note: converse is not true necessarily there, as divorcing does not mean getting fired more often--in fact i'd bet that as we go up the income scale we see a reversion to higher divorce rates)
I agree that 2>1 in terms of efficiency in household tasks, but the correlations are too big to be ignored...this whole thing sounds a little too 'conservative' to me (and therefore fits with my priors), and so I'm more willing to critique it.
first paragraph isn't clear...i need to read more before hitting publish comment.
if you need me to revise that, let me know. :)
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