Fatherhood’s transformations: What if someone checked the facts?

For Father’s Day, W. Bradford Wilcox wrote a piece for Slate, “Daddy’s Home: Fatherhood transforms men. But only if they live with their kids.” Raising the question: what if Slate checked the facts they published? Oh, right.

Anyway, people who publish what Wilcox writes by now have been duly notified of his dishonesty, data manipulation, and incompetence in the service of ideological (and financial) ends. But I do this as an exercise in critical thinking and research, and to help people who want to be informed understand these shenanigans.

So here we go, on the specific claims only. Bogus claim-inflating spin between claims ignored. For each claim, the source, interpretation, and Veracity Score™ from 0 to 10.

The claim: “For many men, the transformative physical power of fatherhood first manifests itself when the pounds start piling up. One recent survey found that the average father puts on more than 10 pounds while waiting for baby to arrive.”

• The source: A Motherlode post that links to a BBC news story that reproduces a press release from a marketing firm. No information on the research methods. The marketing firm, Onepoll, has no information about the poll on its website. Does this supposed weight gain of fathers-to-be reflect the evolutionary draw of wedded fatherhood? Said a spokesperson for Onepoll (who we are listening to why?): “So if the kitchen cupboards are suddenly brimming with snacks and food, it’s no wonder blokes are tempted to tuck in as well.”
• Veracity Score: 2 (Maybe fathers gain weight during their partners’ pregnancies. This is “transformative physical power”?)

The claim: “Studies suggest that after the arrival of a baby men’s testosterone falls…”

• The source: This paper measuring testosterone level in a sample of Filipino men at two points four years apart. Those who were married with children four years later had larger drops and lower levels. This seems like a legitimate finding. Why wouldn’t men’s hormone levels change in response to such changes in their environment and behavior? It seems a little dicey that the men took their own saliva samples, since other research (from the same study) shows levels change dramatically in the first half hour after people wake up. Although they supposedly took the samples right when they woke up, and recorded the time, it seems possible sleep is the issue here (although they controlled for a simple indicator of “sleep quality.”)
• Veracity Score: 6

The claim: “Studies suggest that after the arrival of a baby men’s… prolactin levels rise.”

• The source: Unsourced claim from a parenting advice book.
• Veracity Score: 0 (Maybe true, who knows? No evidence here.)

The claim: “But these hormonal changes don’t just happen for any father; they appear to be most likely for men who are living in a long-term relationship with the mother of their children.”

• Source: The link is to the same Philippines study. There, the authors write: “Because this sample is drawn from a cultural setting in which it is rare for men to become new fathers outside of stable romantic partnerships or to file for divorce, there were few single new fathers (n = 12) or divorced men (n = 9), who therefore were excluded from longitudinal analyses.”
• Veracity Score: 0 (the study specifically said not that)

The claim: “Moreover, research by anthropologist Peter Gray indicates that drops in testosterone are most pronounced among men engaged in ‘affiliative pair bonding and paternal care.’”

• Source: This paper that measured testosterone levels at one point in time among 126 men in Beijing, 30 of whom were fathers (all conveniently having exactly one child). The fathers had lower testosterone levels. The paper doesn’t have a longitudinal design, however, so it can’t make causal claims – and does not mention drops in testosterone. Also, among the fathers there was no difference between those with younger children and those with older children, which is not good for the hands-on-nurturing effect theory.
• Veracity Score: 2 (some association, no causal connection, bogus description of “drops” by Wilcox)

The claim: “Fathers who live with their children are significantly less likely to be depressed, and more likely to report they are satisfied with their lives, compared to childless men.”

• The source: This paper using the National Survey of Families and Households. The paper did not use longitudinal data, and the authors wrote, “Before we can be confident that fatherhood is causally associated with the outcomes we observed, we must address this possibility [of selection effects], probably with longitudinal data.” Is it just possible that happier men are more likely live with their children, rather than the other way around? I’d consider it. Further, they entered some statistical controls for marital status, income, and race/ethnicity. They wrote:
  • Once a number of controls were entered, however, especially marital status, these effects of fatherhood largely disappeared. The two exceptions were that men with children living elsewhere remain somewhat more likely to have depressive symptoms than men who were currently living with their children, and men with older children were slightly more satisfied. For the most part, however, fatherhood does not appear to be independently associated with psychological and physical health.
• To clarify: (a) those living with children over age 19 were slightly more likely than those with younger children to be satisfied with their lives! (b) those living apart from their children were slightly more likely to be depressed than those living with their children. This does not require evolutionary rocket-science to predict.
• Veracity Score: 0 (would be 1 for the partial effect, but he loses a point for gross exaggeration and misstatement of the findings.)

The claim: “After the arrival of a baby, new fathers tend to work more hours and pull down more money.”

• The source: The link is to a 1998 book by the late Steven Nock. I don’t have the book, but more recent research by Rebecca Glauber (using the same data) confirms this. Glauber suggests the effects could be the result of the gender division of labor within marriage or employers’ preferential treatment (or other unobserved factors).
• Veracity Score: 8 (true statement, but doesn’t address whether “fatherhood is socially transformative for men.”)

The claim: “By contrast, men who have children outside of wedlock, Nock found, are less likely to be employed, earn less, and have higher rates of poverty compared to their peers who did not father children outside of wedlock.”

• The source: This paper by Nock. When you are talking about a group of men who are poor on average to begin with, it’s hard to know if unmarried fatherhood made them poorer. The paper reports that these negative outcomes are associated with men who father children outside of marriage. However, the paper also reports (grudgingly) that the effects are no longer significant when prior conditions are controlled or when brothers are compared with each other. Thus, there is no causal effect found for men having children outside of marriage.
• Veracity Score: 1 (“less likely” is true, but the non-causal nature means it offers no support for the claim that “fatherhood is socially transformative for men.”)

The claim: “men who live apart from their children attend church infrequently and drink more frequently, much like their peers without children.”

• The source: This paper again. Quick check of the tables shows that alcohol and drug abuse is no different between men who live with children versus without once a few basic demographic variables are controlled, so that’s wrong. As for church, the paper shows the association in the cross section but makes no causal claim.
• Veracity Score: 1 (association for 1/2 the claim, no causal effect.)

You will note some of these claims have Veracity Scores > 0. I didn’t ignore those claims because that would have been misleading (however, if I’m wrong and the testosterone stuff is wronger than I thought, please let me know).

To some blog editors, claims come and go. You might balance them out by posting something from someone who disagrees. Hanna Rosin, a founder of Slate’s XX, dismissively calls this “data wars.” More clicks for them. One alternative would be to not publish the bogus stuff in the first place.

h/t Neal Caren for suggesting this.

Marriage is declining globally: Can you say that?

Three issues on the decline of marriage: how universal is it, is delay the same thing as decline, and how can you predict it?

1. The worldwide decline in marriage

I basically argued that marriage decline in the U.S. is universal and inevitable. The headline for the post at the Atlantic was “How to Live in a World Where Marriage Is in Decline,” and at Sociological Images it was, “Marriage Is Over: Live with It.”

For context, I hinted at the globalness of this trend, but here I’ll give a little more detail. I consulted three sources: This Eurostat database on demographics from Europe, this United Nations compilation of marriage rates and marital status from 2008, the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) conducted by USAID, and this amazing IPUMS compilation of microdata from censuses around the world.

From Eurostat I got the crude marriage rate, which is marriages per year for every thousand people in the population. They have data for every year for most countries, so I took decade averages for each decade since the 1970s. Here it is:

The big countries on the left account for 78% of the population, and they all show a decline in marriage rates for every decade. Most of the little countries show the same pattern. Overall, 89% of the population lives in a country with that pattern.

Because it is affected by changes in the age distribution, the crude marriage rate is not ideal. So with the UN data, like I did with the US data in original post, I use the percentage of women married. Here it is for those ages 30-34 for almost the whole world, 174 countries, using two data points each, the first around 1985 and the second around 2002 (I’ve scaled the dots to represent population size). Countries below the diagonal line have falling proportions of women married:

In this selection of countries 87% of the population is living in a country with falling marriage prevalence, but that includes the biggest – China and India – which still have virtually universal marriage (98+%). Still, almost all the other big ones show declines (I’ve labeled Pakistan, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, the US, Japan, Italy, Germany and France). The only countries with more than 50 million people that show increases are the Philippines, Vietnam, Egypt, and the Dem. Rep. of Congo.

That is an impressive array of countries with declining marriage prevalence. However, the big countries with big drops in marriage are mostly rich: France, Italy, Germany, Japan and the US. Is this a rich-country phenomenon? One thing that sets apart some of those countries — as Gøsta Esping-Andersen pointed out in a comment here — is their high rates of non-marital cohabitation, either replacing marriage or as part of a pattern of delayed marriage. Delayed or reduced marriage is often part of package of demographic changes, including high income and low fertility. (The exception is Japan, where cohabitation rates, although rising, are still low, with just 21% of Japanese women born in the 1970s having ever cohabited, compared with two-thirds of US women.)

One of the sources for that UN compilation is the DHS, which has been collecting fertility-related data in poor countries since the 1980s. To look more closely at some poor countries, I used the DHS data compiler to get the proportion of women ever married in the ages 25-49, for the 17 countries that had a data for the 1980s, 1990s (except missing a few), and 2000s (most from late in the decade):

This shows the decline of marriage is common in poor countries as well, albeit smaller declines from high levels in recent decades (note I’ve scaled it from 70% to 100%).

Finally, after registering as an IPUMS International user, I downloaded data on 40 million women ages 25-49 from 26 countries, using the oldest census from the 1980s, one from the 1990s, and the most recent one from the 2000s for each (so two to four censuses per country).* This source is great because it’s got age and education variables, which I’ll use below. Here is the before-and-after graph using these data, again showing the percentage of 25-49 year-old women married:

Here, only Vietnam and Indonesia show increases in marriage prevalence. The big countries with declines are France, the US, and Brazil; medium-size countries include Argentina, Spain, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile and Turkey. And all the little countries show declines: Morocco, Ecuador, Greece, Malawi, Canada, Austria, Senegal, Thailand, Portugal, Hungary, Ireland, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Panama, Jamaica (I don’t know what’s up in Jamaica).

In almost all of these countries, women with more education are less likely to be married (the U.S. and Jamaica are exceptions to this; in Hungary, Argentina, Canada, and Ireland only those with university completed are less likely to be married). And in all countries older women are more likely to be married. So if world populations are aging (which should increase marriage prevalence) and women are gaining access to education (which should decrease it), we might get misleading results from simple rates. With the IPUMS data there is an indicator of whether people have finished secondary schooling and university education in all these countries. So I can adjust for those (and run a linear probability regression with 40 million cases across 26 countries in the time in takes to walk the dog). Here is the result:

With the adjustments, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam have increased marriage prevalence. In most cases the adjustments reduce the time effect, reflecting the spread of education.

Conclusion: The decline of marriage is worldwide although not universal, and it’s probably not accounted for by age and education changes.**

2. Is delay the same as decline?

But what if some or even all of this worldwide trend – or the trend in some countries, like the US – is really from people delaying marriage rather than forgoing it? Some people argue, reasonably, that delaying marriage can be a sign of its increased social significance. This is the “capstone” concept popularized by Andrew Cherlin, and it’s been raised in blog comments many times.

There is good evidence for this. In the US at least, despite the delay in marriage, and the drop in the marriage rate, the great majority of Americans have been married at least once by the time they reach their fifties. Here are the percentages ever married (that is, including separated, divorced and widowed) by age for cohorts born from 1930 to 1990 (using IPUMS data).

The steps downward from back to front show that, at each age, successive cohorts are less likely to have been married. But the high levels on the far right show that much of this is just delay. By 2010, 87% of about-50-year-olds – those born around 1960 – were ever married. That said, the decline is still pronounced – that 87% is down from 95%. Thus, marriage is being both delayed and foregone, albeit to different extents.

The measure used is very important. Consider these scenarios:

• If everyone suddenly put off their marriage till next year, the marriage rate this year would be zero.
• If everyone got married at age 50, the percentage of people married in the ages 25-49 would be zero.
• Even if no one got married ever again, we would still have a majority of adults married for a while. (Idea for demography exam question: how long?)
• If everyone decided marriage was just so important as a capstone that they would only get married on their death beds, the marriage rate would be low, the percent of the population married would be low, but the percentage who ever got married would be 100%.

So what’s the right way to look at this? Questions of meaning in demography are amorphous. I can’t say from these numbers how people think about marriage, especially across all these countries. That doesn’t mean the question isn’t important, but in one sense these numbers mean it’s undeniable that marriage is less important – fewer people are doing it, and doing it for a smaller portion of their lives. (More on this here.) That goes especially for the question of family structure for children, who are increasingly likely to be born to parents who aren’t married.

3. Says who?

So marriage decline is both worldwide and real. Can we predict what will happen, that the decline will continue? The scenarios above all are possible. But I think they’re unlikely. In the post I started with, I included an illustration of the marriage rate from 1940 to the present, and argued we should plan for a future in 2040 where the rate would be somewhere between 0 (complete collapse) and the 2000 level (strong rebound but still low by historical standards). Some tweeter gave that the award for “today’s most hilariously amateur data analysis.”

I’ve made short-term predictions by extrapolation (such as the name Mary), which is fine unless the trend changes. And I’ve made some based on evidence from leading indicators, such as Google searches for divorce- or fertility-related terms. But what about the long-term trend on marriage? Here’s a cautionary tale.

In 1955, Talcott Parsons wrote the introduction to his co-authored book, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process. The book advanced a theory about how families worked that relied on a static concept of complementarity between male and female roles. The idea was that this structure was pretty ideal, the breadwinner-homemaker model was highly evolved, and change was unlikely. So Parsons’ introduction sought to tamp down speculation that a sea change was underway. Unfortunately, he did that using data through about 1950, focusing his attention on whether changes observed in the 1930s were continuing, especially increasing divorce and falling fertility. Not to worry, he wrote, mistakenly seeing the beginning of the baby boom as a new plateau. With regard to women’s employment, he went on:

…there can be no question of symmetry between the sexes in this respect, and we argue, there is no serious tendency in this direction. … The number [of women] in the labor force who have small children is still quite small and has not shown a marked tendency to increase.

And the rest is history:

Parsons and I are only two generations apart (I took theory from a guy who co-authored a book with him). And all this change was pretty fast. So, why should I be confident in predicting the future of marriage – continued decline, with chance of rebound not exceeding 2000 rates by 2040? Were Parsons and I both blinded by our assumptions?

Sure. But one difference between us is our access to demographic data. It’s surprising to me that the great thinkers of social science mostly wrote in the olden days, when they had so little information. In just a few hours I summoned these global statistics covering decades and assembled them into a worldwide trend. Doesn’t it increase our confidence in the power of the trend to know that it’s so universal? And of course that’s just a drop in the bucket. Shouldn’t all this information yield more, better knowledge and better predictions?

Even if I’m not as smart a theorist as Parsons, I can eyeball the US and global trends and conclude that a major reversal in marriage is not likely: there is no recent precedent for that, and, with the exception of some countries that still have universal marriage, no major exceptions in the direction of change. That’s how I get from “marriage has declined globally” to “marriage is declining globally.”

(This post was a lot of work so gimme a couple days off now, okay?)

*This IPUMS data includes people who are in “consensual unions” that aren’t legally married, which is less than 5% of the total. IPUMS does have some other censuses, but I excluded ones that weren’t from the right period or had something unusual about the coding, sample or measures. In the regression version I excluded individuals with missing education levels, a very small percentage. The IPUMS data are weighted to reflect population totals.

**In addition to IPUMS International, which compiled the data, these statistical offices made it available for use.

We can’t build our social system around marriage anymore

Originally published on TheAtlantic.com.

In 1996 the Hoover Institution published a symposium titled “Can Government Save the Family? A who’s-who list of culture warriors—including Dan Quayle, James Dobson, John Engler, John Ashcroft, and David Blankenhorn—were asked, “What can government do, if anything, to make sure that the overwhelming majority of American children grow up with a mother and father?”

There wasn’t much disagreement on the panel: End welfare payments for single mothers, stop no-fault divorce, remove tax penalties for marriage, and fix “the culture.” From this list the only victory they got was ending welfare as we knew it, which increased the suffering of single mothers and their children but didn’t affect the trajectory of marriage and single motherhood.

So the collapse of marriage continues apace. Since 1980, for every state in every decade the percentage of women who are married has fallen (except Utah in the 1990s):

Source: Census data from IPUMS

Every state, every decade (except Utah in the 1990s): Red states (last four presidential elections Republican) to blue (last four Democrat), and in between (light blue, purple, light red), makes no difference.

But the “marriage movement” lives on. In fact, their message has changed remarkably little. In that 1996 symposium, Dan Quayle wrote:

We also desperately need help from nongovernment institutions like the media and the entertainment community. They have a tremendous influence on our culture and they should join in when it comes to strengthening families.

Sixteen years later, in the 2012 “State of Our Unions” report, the National Marriage Project included a 10-point list of familiar demands, including this point #8:

Our nation’s leaders, including the president, must engage Hollywood in a conversation about popular culture ideas about marriage and family formation, including constructive critiques and positive ideas for changes in media depictions of marriage and fatherhood.

So little reflection on such a bad track record—it’s enough to make you think that increasing marriage isn’t the main goal of the movement.

Plan for the Future

So what is the future of marriage? Advocates like to talk about turning it around, bringing back a “marriage culture.” But is there a precedent for this, or a reason to expect it to happen? Not that I can see. In fact, the decline of marriage is nearly universal. A check of United Nations statistics on marriage trends shows that 87 percent of the world’s population lives in countries with marriage rates that have fallen since the 1980s.

Here is the trend in the marriage rate since 1940, with some possible scenarios to 2040.

Source: 1940-1960; 1970-2011

Notice the decline has actually accelerated since 1990. Something has to give. The marriage movement folks say they want a rebound. With even the most optimistic twist imaginable (and a Kanye wedding) could it get back to 2000 levels by 2040? That would make headlines, but the institution would still be less popular than it was during that dire 1996 symposium.

If we just keep going on the same path (the red line), marriage will hit zero at around 2042. Some trends are easy to predict by extrapolation (like next year’sdecline in the name Mary). But major demographic trends usually don’t just smash into 0 or 100 percent, so I don’t expect that.

The more realistic future is some kind of taper. We know, for example, that decline of marriage has slowed considerably for college graduates, so they’re helping keep it alive—but that’s still only 35 percent of women in their 30s, not enough to turn the whole ship around.

So Live With It

So rather than try to redirect the ship of marriage, we have to do what we already know we have to do: reduce the disadvantages accruing to those who aren’t married—or whose parents aren’t married. If we take the longer view we know this is the right approach: In the past two centuries we’ve largely replaced such family functions as food production, healthcare, education, and elder care with a combination of state and market interventions. As a result—even though the results are, to put it mildly, uneven—our collective wellbeing has improved rather than diminished even though families have lost much of their hold on modern life.

If the new book by sociologist Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson is to be believed, there is good news for the floundering marriage movement in this approach: Policies to improve the security of poor people and their children also tend to improve the stability of their relationships.

To any clear-eyed observer it’s obvious that we can’t count on marriage anymore—we can’t build our social welfare system around the assumption that everyone does or should get married if they or their children want to be cared for. That’s what it means when pensions are based on spouse’s earnings, employers don’t provide sick leave or family leave, and when high-quality preschool is unaffordable for most people. So let marriage be truly voluntary, and maybe more people will even end up married. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

That economists’ paper about gender inequality, marriage and divorce

I was planning to write a note about this paper by economists, “Gender identity and relative income within households,” which got a lot of play two weeks ago. But I forgot about it until today, and then noticed that in the New York Times Catherine Rampbell, economics writer, dropped it in her story on the Pew Report about women as breadwinners. In the cautionary part of the article, Rampbell mentioned “A new working paper by economists” that showed:

…perhaps even more tellingly, couples in which the wife earns more report less satisfaction with their marriage and higher rates of divorce.

Maybe reporters like what’s new, or maybe it was just on her radar because she reads Freakonomics, the Economist or the Financial Times, which all uncritically wrote up the paper when it came out. But it’s really a shame in a story about current trends to cite a “new” paper which (for this part of its analysis) used data more than 20 years old.
Anyways

Here is a brief critique I was going to give when the paper came out. Just taking two lines from the abstract, I offer a few suggestions:

1. Couple matching

The distribution of the share of household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp cliff at 0.5, which suggests that a couple is less willing to match if her income exceeds his.

Suggestion: It’s not a good idea to use the relative incomes within couples years after they got married to discuss how relative income affects mate choice decisions. People move, change jobs, have children, etc., in the first few years after they get married. You need to look at income before marriage to study mate selection.

2. Divorce

Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce.

This part of the analysis uses data from Waves 1 & 2 of the National Survey of Families and Households NSFH), which were collected in 1987-88 and 1992-94. I don’t always insist that everyone use data from this minute, but at some point — around two decades — a study becomes historical. That judgment depends on the context and the question being asked. In this case, relative earnings of spouses (as we just saw in the Pew report) has seen an order-of-magnitude change over this period. And the paper is about norms! That is, the authors speculate that couples with high-earning wives divorce because they are outside the mainstream. So if, 20-25 years later, they’re not outside the mainstream anymore, the paper might not be salient.

Secondly, this is well-worn territory, and the specific hypothesis offered here has been tested and found wanting in several award winning papers using more thorough measures and testing competing hypotheses. (The NSFH, one of the most productive data collection efforts ever, maintained a bibliography up to 2004, which lists 180 papers under the category “union quality and stability.”) For those interested in the fuller story, I recommend these:

• “Women’s Economic Independence and the Probability of Divorce A Review and Reexamination” (2001), by Liana Sayer and Suzanne Bianchi (winner of the Reuben Hill Award from the National Council on Family Relations for best article of the year on family issues). Their critique of the research existing prior to 2001 applies specifically to the 2013 Bertrand et al. paper:

…[M]easures of marital commitment and satisfaction are better predictors of marital dissolution than measures of economic independence. This strongly suggests that the independence effect found in prior research, which did not include controls for marital quality, may have been measuring the role of wives’ economic independence in exiting bad marriages, not in exiting all marriages.

• “She Left, He Left: How Employment and Satisfaction Affect Men’s and Women’s Decisions to Leave Marriages” (2011), by Liana C. Sayer, Paula England, Paul Allison, and Nicole Kangas (winner of the Rosabeth Moss Kanter award from the Purdue Center for Families and the Boston College Center for Work & Family, for the best work-family research article of the year). Their key finding is that employment within couples does matter for divorce, but it depends on marital satisfaction:

We find that when men are not employed, either husbands or wives are more likely to leave. When wives report better than average marital satisfaction, their employment affects neither their nor their husbands’ exits. However, when wives report below average marital satisfaction, their employment makes it more likely that they will leave.

• “Wives’ Employment and Spouses’ Marital Happiness,” by Robert Schoen, Stacy Rogers and Paul Amato (2006). They report that employment effects on divorce depend on marital happiness. Specifically:

…shifting into full-time employment is more likely for unhappily married than for happily married wives. … [C]ontrary to frequently invoked social and economic theories, wives’ full-time employment is associated with greater marital stability.

This provides a followup to a previous study using the same data which found…

…clear evidence that, at the individual level, women’s employment does not destabilize happy marriages but increases the risk of disruption in unhappy marriages.

The reason these marital satisfaction controls matter so much is that how happy women are within marriage affects their employment, and therefore their earnings. So what looks like an earnings effect is often an unhappy-marriage effect. Careful sequencing of longitudinal data (which these papers do) is required to sort this out.

I only mention the awards because I was shocked (shocked!) to see these major sociology papers in top journals, using the same dataset and asking the same questions, published over a decade, which have been cited hundreds of times in the academic literature, go unnoticed in this economics working paper, which — not-yet published, not-yet peer reviewed — would be quoted all over the place.

Does declining marriage explain rising suicide rates for old men, too? (Trick question.)

The reason it’s a trick question is that, for older men suicide rates aren’t rising—even though their marriage rates are falling. This doesn’t fit the religious conservative story spun by Brad Wilcox here at The Atlantic and broadcast by Ross Douthat in the New York Times.

The government reported this month that the suicide rate for adults ages 35 to 64 increased 28 percent from 1999 to 2010. That’s a serious problem. Oddly, though, the report didn’t include data on those over age 64 or under 35. Why? Because the rates didn’t change significantly for those groups. That’s a fine reason for the report to focus on the other groups, but the pontificators shouldn’t let that blind them to the overall story (and longer trends).

The suicide rate for people age 65-plus dropped 5.9 percent during that period, but that was significant only at the 9 percent confidence level. In the longer run, though, the drop in suicide rates for older people is certainly significant. Here is the trend from 1991 to 2009 for men, by age:

From 1991 to 2009, the suicide rate among older men dropped more than 25 percent, from 40 to 29 per 100,000 people. During that time, suicide for middle-aged men dropped and then rose again, ending up within a point of where it started the period. So the two-decade story is not one of increasing middle-aged male suicide (at least not yet). And, of course, during that time marriage dropped for all three groups.

Source: Current Population Surveydata from IPUMS.

So who would tell a story of declining marriage causing increasing suicide? Christian conservatives promoting marriage and religion (among others). Douthat quoted Wilcox’s story and summarized:

That’s exactly what we’ve seen happen lately among the middle-aged male population, whose suicide rates have climbed the fastest: a retreat from family obligations, from civic and religious participation, and from full-time paying work.

If he’d looked at the larger trend by age, maybe he wouldn’t have written his next paragraph:

The hard question facing 21st-century America is whether this retreat from community can reverse itself, or whether an aging society dealing with structural unemployment and declining birth and marriage rates is simply destined to leave more people disconnected, anxious and alone.

For some reason our seniors just aren’t getting the pro-suicide message, so they’re not part of the story. In fact, neither are the 31 out of 35 wealthy countries that have seen falling suicide rates in the last several decades, even though every one has had falling marriage rates for decades.

Why not? Let me look more closely at that older age group of men, breaking them down into the younger-old (65-74) and the older-old (75-plus). The trend is clear for this group that has seen falling suicide rates: less marriage, more employment.

Douthat and Wilcox could have said, “We love marriage, but in this case it looks like declining marriage isn’t causing a big problem.” But why should they? They have their story and they’re sticking to it.

Of course, no sociologist is going to deny that married men usually have lower suicide rates—and I’ve written about it myself. But for older men, at least, that doesn’t seem to be driving the trend for the last several decades. Rising employment rates are a good place to start for explaining declining suicide. And falling marriage—if it has been had an opposing effect—hasn’t been as important.

Marriage is going down, so what does Kanye West have to do with it?

The marriage rate has fallen almost continuously for more than half a century, from a sky-high 90 per 1,000 unmarried women in 1950 (meaning almost 1 in 10 single women got married that year) to a bare 31 per 1,000 in 2011. Splashdown appears imminent.

Sources: 1940-1960; 1970-2011.

Social scientists understand that there is a combination of demographic, economic, policy, and cultural factors involved. These include the aging population, men’s declining fortunes, the incarceration of millions of poor men, the rise of secular ideology and the sexual revolution.

Often, however, cultural influence is left to what you might call residual interpretation. Proving that culture affects demographic trends is difficult. Instead, people consider how demographic, economic and policy factors play their roles, and then attribute what’s left of the trend to culture.

Recently, the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green University reported the marriage rate for each state and D.C., ranging from 61 marriages per 1,000 unmarried women in Utah down to 19 per 1,000 in Washington, D.C. and 20 in Rhode Island. To explain the pattern using normal demographic practices, I gathered some other data about states from the Census Bureau: The percent of the population over 65, percent female, percent with a BA or higher education, population density, per capita income and race/ethnic composition. With that information – using a regression – I can guess the marriage rate to within 3.1 points on average. This is what the regression looks like, showing what happens when I start with age and sex composition, add income and education, and then add race/ethnicity:

In statistical terms (R²), my simple model explains 73 percent of the variation in marriage rates, which is pretty good. Before I would use the marriage rate as an indicator of something like “culture,” then, I would say most of what’s going on reflects larger demographic and economic patterns that we more or less understand. The differences that remain, however, still might be the result of cultural, religious, or attitudinal factors that are harder to assess. (I stress this is not about low Black marriage rates: note the population percentage Black has no effect once the other factors are controlled.)

Culture, meet big data

What about big data, the billions of bits of information people leave strewn around wherever they go? Marketers and government spying agencies make most of the headlines, but social scientists, too, are scraping up millions of words and turning them into analyzable numbers, so they can tell you things like:

• Which words are most closely associated with men versus women in the New York Times? Men: prime, baseball, official, capital, governor. Women: pregnant, husband, suffrage, breast, gender.
• Do whites do more racist Google searches in states with larger black populations? Yes, fitting a longstanding pattern of racism flaring up in places with greater minority representation.
• Did Obama crush Romney in states where people search for Top Chef? (Obviously.)
• For many others, follow the Google tag.

One of the easiest sources to use for this kind of thing is the Google Correlate tool, which finds the search terms whose frequency most closely follows a specified pattern. I entered the marriage rate for each state, shown on the map on the left, with darker green indicating higher marriage rates. Google Correlate tells me which searches track this variation: which searches are most popular in Utah, least popular in D.C., and so on. (I actually trimmed the Utah rate to it wouldn’t be such an outlier, from 61 down to 57, just above the next highest). It turns out the most correlated search is for “rolls recipe,” which is correlated with the marriage rate at .85 on a scale of -1 to 1.

But since my interest is in the decline of marriage, I multiplied the marriage rate by -1 and tried again (so now darker green indicates a lower marriage rate). The answer, overwhelmingly: Kanye West. (Experts at finding any website anywhere will know that he’s a never-married proud father-to-be with co-parent Kim Kardashian.)

That correlation between the inverse of the 2011 marriage rate and “kanye west my beautiful dark twisted fantasy” (his last album) is .81. Further, Google produces the top 100 most correlated searches, and of those, no fewer than 28 were about Kanye West (such as “kanye west new album,” “devil in a new dress lyrics” and “air yeezys”). Another 16 were other hip-hop searches, including some about Jay Z and Lil Wayne. Other apparent themes include mafia-related entertainment (“sopranos episode,” “pacino movies,” “corleone”) Sex and the City, and shopping at Marshalls.

Does this tell us more than the simple demographic analysis I did above? When I put the top Kanye search into my model, it has the strongest effect, and the variance explained jumps to 81 percent. The model now can predict the marriage rate to within 2.5 points on average.  It’s a very good predictor, and it’s not just reflecting simple demographics like age, gender and race. Whether Kanye is in the analysis or not, Black population percentage has no effect on this prediction. Here is the regression, with new parts in red:

Explanations

So, I dredged all the search data in the world for something correlated with marriage rates, and found something. But what does it mean? Two cautionary stories are revealing. Forecasting guru Nate Silver has a good description of how noise looks like signal. For example, with the tens of thousands of economic statistics available to build a forecasting model, finding a pattern after the fact is deceptively easy. But it usually doesn’t work for predicting future economic trends.

Another caution comes from genomic studies. In a study of, say, cancer genetics, statisticians may conduct millions of tests for the association between any genetic variant and the occurrence of cancer. With the typical definition of “statistical significance” – which tolerates a 5 percent random chance of being wrong – that means they’d find hundreds of thousands of bogus “significant” associations. So good scientists set their significance threshold for such studies much tighter, more like.00005 percent than 5 percent. That way they are sure to only blow the whistle on genes if the chances of being wrong are vanishingly small.

So, this is a suggestive game of Big-Data Craps, not real research. It’s meant to provoke a little. I hope we’ll think creatively about new kinds of data we can use. Also, I want to generate ideas about cultural explanations for demographic trends. It should be at least as useful as some pundit simply declaring, for example, that gay marriage is killing real marriage. (“As the cause of gay marriage has pressed forward,” wrote Ross Douthat, “the social link between marriage and childbearing has indeed weakened faster than before.” That theory has about as much going for it as one linking the decline of marriage to the rise of high fructose corn syrup or the explosion of red cards in World Cup soccer.)

Kanye’s fantasy

With those caveats, here are three possible explanations for the finding:

1. Google, by trawling through millions of search term patterns, has come up with a random bit of noise that just happened to catch my attention. There’s nothing there, really.
2. The hip-hop Google search is capturing a more finely-grained demographic pattern than I did with my simple Census numbers. So what matters for marriage is not just things like the percentage female, education levels and racial composition of the population, but the presence of particular combinations of these demographic groups. Hip hop’s audience is notoriously difficult to define — it’s featured on top-five radio stations in markets such as San Francisco and Los Angeles as well as Detroit and Atlanta — but it’s certainly not as simple as age, gender, and race
3. Hip-hop actually is weakening marriage in America. People who listen to Kanye West and other hip-hop music are taken in by the music’s consumerist individualism and shun marriage, with its staid image of tradition, conformity and restraint. As a result, they are less likely to get married than the people Googling “rolls recipe.”

I lean toward explanation #2. Explanation #3 might have something to it. As the philosopher xkcd wrote, “correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’” But I wouldn’t draw that conclusion without a lot more evidence, including doing some comparisons to other cultural factors, like other kinds of music or religious patterns. Since I have no expertise in hip hop (post 1989), I would be glad to hear from people who know about it for realz.

Addendum: Here’s a scattergram showing the correlations between some of the variables in the regression. In each cell there’s a dot for every state plus DC. The Kanye variable is scaled (by Google) to have a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1 (click to enlarge).

Homogamy tipping point update: between elections edition

After the last election I described the trend toward legal homogamy as taking a tipping point shape. Not a media-hype tipping point that’s really just a milestone or watershed (like the arbitrary 50%), but a bona fide straw-that-breaks-the camel’s-back shape – that is, an exponential trend.

The between-election update shows us continuing on that trend, with Rhode Island and now Delaware falling on the line. Here I’ve plotted the percent of the population living under a post-homogamy state regime, and the number of states (including DC):

Even assuming they don’t legalize it nationally, if the Supreme Court lets California’s homogamy law stand after all this graph will go through the proverbial roof.

On the other hand, of course, the future is not yet determined. We won’t know till it happens what happened. In that I must agree with the Family Research Council, Heritage Foundation and National Organization for Marriage, who write in a recent pamphlet:

Q: Isn’t same-sex marriage inevitable?
A: No.

(I disagree with the rest of the pamphlet.)

The Connection Between Unemployment and Unmarried Parents

Originally posted at TheAtlantic.com.

The states with more single men without jobs have higher rates of nonmarital births.

“Le berceau” by Berthe Morisot

The Census Bureau has a new report on nonmarital births. Based on the American Community Survey—the largest survey of its kind, and the only one big enough to track all states—the report shows that 35.7 percent of births in 2011 were to unmarried mothers.

Beneath the headline number, two patterns in the data will receive a lot of attention: education and race/ethnicity. I have a brief comment on both patterns.

Education
The education patterns show a very steep dropoff in nonmarital births as women’s education increases. From 57 percent unmarried among those who didn’t finish high school to just nine percent among those who have graduated college.

Given the hardships faced by single mothers (especially in the United States), it looks like women with more education are making the more rational decision to avoid childbearing when they’re not married. And I don’t doubt that’s partly the explanation. But we need to think about marriage, education and childbearing as linked events that unfold over time. The average high-school dropout mother was 26, while the average college-graduate mother was 33. Delaying childbearing and continuing education are decisions that are made together, based on the opportunities people have. And completing more education increases both thelikelihood of marriage and the earning potential of one’s spouse.

So I think you could tell the story like this: Women with better educational opportunities delay childbearing, which increases their marriage prospects, and makes it more likely they will be married and financially better off when they have children in their 30s.

Race/ethnicity
The differences in nonmarital birth rates between race/ethnic groups in the U.S. are shocking, from about two-thirds for black and American Indian women to 29 percent for whites and 11 percent for Asians.

This pattern is related to the education trend, naturally, but that’s not the whole story. One aspect of the story is race/ethnic geography of opportunity in this country. I’ve written before about the shortage of employed men available for women to marry, a particular expression of racial disparity first popularized by sociologist William Julius Wilson a quarter century ago.

Using the new numbers on nonmarital birth rates for each state from the Census report, I compared them to the male non-employment rate—specifically, the percentage of unmarried men ages 22-50 that are not currently employed. Here’s the relationship:

The states with more single men out of work have higher rates of nonmarital births. Single mother, meet jobless man.

My conclusion from these patterns is that unmarried parenthood is primarily a symptom of lack of opportunity, especially for education and employment. Surely that’s not the whole story. Maybe we should be persuading people to marry younger or shaming them into avoiding parenthood. But I think those approaches increase stigma more than they change behavior or improve wellbeing—Pew surveys show that 77 percent of people already say raising a family is easier if you’re married and only 12 percent of single people say they don’t want to marry. So who needs convincing? Meanwhile, if we addressed the problems of education and employment, is there any doubt family security and stability would improve, and with it the wellbeing of children and their parents?

If the National Marriage Project told you it was going to rain, would you bring an umbrella?

Why do academics and journalists lend legitimacy to the National Marriage Project?

The Centers for Disease Control: You bought that.

I today’s New York Times Week in Review, Andrew Cherlin offers this:

Having a child outside of marriage has also become common. According to a report by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, 47 percent of American women who give birth in their 20s are unmarried at the time.

It took me 3 minutes to find the the 2010 report on birth data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a branch of the Centers for Disease Control, and another 1/2 minute to locate the table with this information, which is table 15. Because of my weakness in algebra, it took me another 5 minutes to turn the number of babies born to unmarried women in the age range 20-24 (600,833) and in the age range 25-29 (384,865) and the percent unmarried that those represented (63.1% and 33.9%, respectively), into the total births to women in their 20s (2,087,487) and the percentage of all those to unmarried women (47.2%).

The New York Times paid for that statistic through taxes, which its government has provided. So why publish an essay by a sociologist with a named chair crediting the National Marriage Project, a right-wing front run by the discredited Brad Wilcox on behalf of big-money Christian conservatives? (In other news, the Heritage Foundation reported that the unemployment rate in February was 7.7%).

Maybe the media establishment simply doesn’t know a simple government statistic when they see one. But they see the university label and fancy website, and guy with the (implied) elbow patches, and they think the number is more complicated than it looks. Rather than hire a qualified unpaid intern to check facts and credit them to their actual sources, maybe they just trust the experts they rely on. (This is the David Brooks strategy.)

With resources for journalism and social science research on the decline, and foundation money playing a growing role in providing information to the media, this is predictable – but still lamentable.

Women’s Employment and the Decline in Marriage Are No Longer Related

Originally published on TheAtlantic.com.

For a few decades, women’s rising share of the workforce probably led to fewer women getting married. But that’s not the case anymore.

CBS

It is common knowledge—and true—that marriage rates are falling and unmarried parenting is becoming more common (nicely illustrated here). On the other hand, it is also common knowledge—but not true—that women’s employment rates have continued to rise in the last two decades (as illustrated here.)

In the long run of history, there is little doubt these trends are related: As women’s economic independence increased with better job opportunities, marriage became more optional and fewer women got (or stayed) married. But in the medium run, on the scale of a few decades rather than long eras, it’s not that simple.

Here are the trends in marriage and labor force participation for women using U.S. Census data going back to 1900.

Source: My analysis of Census data from IPUMS.

In the long run of the past 111 years, there certainly are more employed women and more single women. But the trends only moved strongly in the same direction for the three decades from 1960 to 1990, when the percent of women not married more than doubled from 18 percent to 43 percent and the percent in the labor force almost doubled from 41 percent to 76 percent. In the last two decades labor force participation has frozen while the percent not married has jumped another 7 points.

Here is the trick: Despite the real connection between non-marriage and employment—in which women don’t feel as strong a need to be married if they are employed—the lion’s share of rising employment has been among married women. Women’s employment opportunities made non-marriage more viable but also changed marriage. As the employment rates of married and non-married women grew more similar, the decline of marriage has made less of a difference to the total employment rate. Moving women from married to single doesn’t do much anymore. Here are the employment trends:

The American Stall
So we need to understand the stalled rise in employment because it may be the key to understanding progress toward gender equality generally.

In a previous post I suggested that stalled progress resulted from feeble work-family policy, anti-feminist backlash, and weak anti-discrimination enforcement. A recent analysis by economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn lends support to the first: work-family policy. Economix writer Catherine Rampbell highlighted the paper, which tracked employment rates over 22 wealthy countries for two decades. During that time, U.S. women fell from sixth to 17th in labor force participation rates—rising just one percentage point while women in the average country increased 12 points.

Here are the labor force participation rates for the 22 countries for 1990 and 2010. Dots to the left of the blue line show countries where women’s labor force presence increased; dots to the right show decreases. At the extreme, for example, Ireland saw a jump from 45 percent to 72 percent.

Source: My chart from the Blau and Kahn paper.

What happened? One big change was the advance of several work-family policies. The average number of weeks of guaranteed parental leave increased from 37 to 57 in these countries, with the U.S. adding only a 12-week rule under the Family Medical Leave Act (covering only half the workforce). The average country on this list now provides a guaranteed 38 percent of parents’ wages while they’re on leave, while the U.S. provides none. Seven of the countries now protect a right to part-time work, and three-quarters guarantee equal treatment for part-time workers. Public spending on child care as a proportion of GDP increased by more than a third outside the U.S., and the average country now spends more than four-times as much as the U.S.

Together, based on the experience of these countries, Blau and Kahn estimate these changes account for more than a quarter of U.S. women’s slippage relative to other countries. That’s not everything, but it’s a substantial bite. If we had kept up with the average country’s policies, U.S. women would have had an 82 percent labor force participation rate, putting them at 11th on the list instead of 17th.

On the Other Hand
Not all work-family policies are the same. One way to divide them is between those that protect time out of paid work (parental leave, part-time protections) and those that protect time in paid work (especially state-supported childcare). As Blau and Kahn note, U.S. women have much lower rates of part-time work than those in most other rich countries, but we also have higher rates of women in professional and managerial jobs. That might be because employers in those countries are reluctant to hire or promote women who are expected to take time out of the labor force when they have children—which is exactly the goal of some of our low-fertility peer countries. How, and whether, such policies can improve family life while also promoting gender equality is the subject of a rich debate—which unfortunately remains in the realm of the hypothetical here in the U.S.