Millennial marriage rates

“Men on Strike” sale – Men Boycotting Marriage and Adult Responsibilities

Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters by Dr. Helen Smith is on sale at $3.29 on Amazon Kindle. This is a good overview of how the bureaucratic/academic tilt toward rewarding feminine traits like compliance and tolerance for social hierarchies is damaging men. It’s a broader view of the social problem I discuss in Death by HR.

Here’s the description:

American society has become anti-male. Men are sensing the backlash and are consciously and unconsciously going “on strike.” They are dropping out of college, leaving the workforce and avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. The trend is so pronounced that a number of books have been written about this “man-child” phenomenon, concluding that men have taken a vacation from responsibility simply because they can. But why should men participate in a system that seems to be increasingly stacked against them?

As Men on Strike demonstrates, men aren’t dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development. They are instead acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands and providers. In addition, men are going on strike, either consciously or unconsciously, because they do not want to be injured by the myriad of laws, attitudes and hostility against them for the crime of happening to be male in the twenty-first century. Men are starting to fight back against the backlash. Men on Strike explains their battle cry.

Legacy publishers charge too much for ebooks, so it becomes useful to note when they have a good book on sale. My books are generally priced at $2.99 or $3.99 because they don’t have to support the legacy overhead of offices in Manhattan, multiple editors, and costly staff. There is now a two-tier market, with legacy publishers holding their ebook prices much too high (often higher than paper!) to protect sales of paper copies, while small and self-publishers offer very similar quality books at half or less price. Authors make more by self-publishing but tend to sell fewer copies since self-published books lack the imprimatur and marketing of the legacy publishers. It is still true that reviews and media exposure are much harder to obtain for self-publishers since it’s simpler to ignore all self-published books than to pick through the dross for the gems, but by volume there are roughly equal numbers of “excellent” books being published each way.

Women Making More, Find Few Men to Marry

That’s drastically oversimplifying the results of the study “Gender Identity and Relative Income Within Households,” by Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica, and Jessica Pan, summarized beautifully with graphs in “Say You Don’t Need No Diamond Ring” in Spotted Toad.

In short, marriage rates have declined much more among low earners, and married women on average make much less than their husbands, presumably because of a social taboo on the converse and a tendency (discussed in my post on the wage gap) to see the wife’s role as a compromise between homemaking-childraising and outside earnings which tends to prevent women who accept that compromise from commanding maximum earnings in professions requiring more than full time commitment and continuity.

This is a cultural and biology-based artifact, and can’t be legislated away. Another takeaway: women who do want the high-powered, full-time, maximum-earnings career will almost always find it hard to attract a husband since the pool of men at their earning level or above will be small, and marriages with lower-earning men tend not to endure.

To quote from the study:

We examine causes and consequences of relative income within households. We show that the distribution of the share of income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop to the right of 1, where the wife’s income exceeds the husband’s income. We argue that this pattern is best explained by gender identity norms, which induce an aversion to a situation where the wife earns more than her husband. We present evidence that this aversion also impacts marriage formation, the wife’s labor force participation, the wife’s income conditional on working, marriage satisfaction, likelihood of divorce, and the division of home production. Within marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline. In couples where the wife’s potential income is likely to exceed the husband’s, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work. In couples where the wife earns more than the husband, the wife spends more time on household chores; moreover, those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. These patterns hold both cross-sectionally and within couples over time.

Among the millennials, average incomes for women have risen to top men’s as women have increasingly dominated higher education, which suggests marriage rates and family stability will continue to decline unless the millennials are much better at overcoming male egos and gender norms than previous generations. It’s not looking good.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Record Never-Marrieds, Few Marriageable Men

Hey, Girl…

Pew Research released a new report last week on the state of the unmarried in the US. It’s not good, but the Pew report (“Record Share of Americans Have Never Married,”) soft-pedals the results; for a harder-hitting distillation of their findings, we’ll look to The Economist.

The study confirms that marriage among the young is becoming far less common, especially among the less educated and lower income. The upper class, college-educated men and women are marrying each other in reasonable numbers, though later (around 28-30), but less educated and lower-class males, especially, are having a hard time finding employment, and the number of eligible working men is now much lower than the number of women who might be looking to marry.

Let’s look at the story for the shocking numbers:

Got to have a J.O.B. – Women still most want to marry men with money

Jane Austen’s characters took it for granted that men with money made more eligible mates. “A man like that is hard to find, but I can’t get him off my mind,” lamented the female vocalists of ABBA. A new study from the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank, finds that little has changed. Fully 78% of American women who have never been married say it is “very important” that their future spouse has a “steady job”. By comparison, only 46% of men mind much what their future spouse does for a living.

Despite the goal of some feminists to free women from any need for the support of men by encouraging women to join the professions and have outstanding high-paying jobs, most women desire the completely rational insurance policy of having a higher-earning male as their mate. This should surprise no one, and since it is deeply embedded in culture and emotional preferences, unlikely to change.

Wrenching changes in the labour market, combined with these ancient preferences, have shaken up the marriage market. Women are much more likely to have jobs than they were half a century ago; men, somewhat less so. Women today find it easier to cope without a male breadwinner. At the same time, many find the pool of potential husbands less appealing.

In 1960 young, never-married women were spoilt for choice. For every 100 of them aged 25-34, there were 139 young, never-married men with jobs vying for their attention. In 2012 there were just 91. For some groups, the gap is much bigger. Young never-married black women outnumber young never-married black men with jobs by a startling two-to-one. This helps explain why although African-Americans are more likely than other races to say they value marriage, only 26% of black women are actually married, compared with 51% of whites.

As in other areas, the problems created by public school’s devaluation of blue-collar and non-academic male careers were worse, first, in the black community, where prison or drug dealing is now a major supporter/employer of young males–about 30% of younger black men without a high school diploma are in prison; the comparable figure for whites is 6%. Meanwhile, rising regulation and certification requirements for small businesses have made it especially hard for people to start their own small businesses; multi-year cosmetology school requirements to do hair weaving, for instance. Meanwhile, schools in poor districts are run for the benefit of their employees and unions, not for the students, and children living in those areas don’t get a chance at mastering even the basic high school education of 1950 (which was approximately at the level of today’s 4-year public university.) Unequipped to fit into Blue Model corporations and bureaucracies, they are un- or underemployed, and not stable enough to form a good family.

The raw ratio of bachelors to bachelorettes varies with age. There are 118 unmarried 25-year-old men for every 100 single women, since women are more likely to marry older partners. Around the age of 40, the ratio is roughly even. From then on, the surplus of men turns into a deficit: by the age of 64 there are only 62 unmarried men, with or without jobs, for every 100 unmarried women.

Overall 20% of Americans 25 or older, the highest share ever, have never said “I do.” That is partly because they are marrying later. Kim Parker, one of the study’s authors, reckons that kids are more cautious these days, whereas lovebirds of yore “used to leap into the unknown together.”

But some Americans are never marrying at all, either because they prefer not to, or because they can’t find the right person. Pew predicts that by 2030 28% of American men who were aged between 25-34 in 2010—and 23% of women—will never have tied the knot. In 1980 only 6% of 45-54 year olds had never been hitched. For men with not much education, the picture is especially grim. Among young American adults with a high school certificate or less, there are 174 never-married men for every 100 never-married women. The difference largely reflects the difficulty poorly-educated men have finding work.

Men and women with college degrees are still highly likely to wed and stay that way. But the cost of college can delay the day when young people feel they can afford an engagement ring, let alone a family. A third cited their finances as the reason they were not yet hitched, compared with just 20% of those over 35. As one Eminem fan at a recent music festival in Atlanta romantically put it “I’m just trying to sort things one at a time. I’ve got a girlfriend but I’ve also got college debt.”

What can we say from this?

• Large numbers of less advantaged men are being discarded and never allowed to gain responsibility;
• Blue Model programs locking children into bad schools and continuing the Drug War are partly responsible;
• Women have been empowered to do whatever they want professionally, but if they want a stable husband and family, many are out of luck;
• College for everyone has turned out to be a cruel waste for many and left them deeply in debt;
• Vocational education should be restored in importance and subsidized college loan programs reduced.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Are Millennials Losing Interest in Marriage?

Millennials appear to be far less interested in many of the primary concerns of older generations — they are not buying into expensive cars (or driving), buying homes, or landline phones. In most cases these preference shifts are reasonable responses to new conditions — millennials see a bleak economic landscape that doesn’t promise much support for future plans, family, and consumption. While not all of them live in their parents’ basements, many are forced to live with roommates or relatives long after earlier generations had started their own households.

It also appears they are less interested in marriage and starting a family. This may also be due to economic uncertainty, but there is also a movement away from marriage by young men who have seen what marriage did to their fathers and their friends in divorce; the risks seem much greater, and so where a previous generation of men might have had some doubts but dismissed them, this generation has grown up with enough examples of loss and pain to be more wary.

The Atlantic has a good piece by Emma Green commenting on the Pew study of marriage preferences:

The future of marriage, the future of Millennials: two topics the Internet loves to freak out about. Thanks to a new report from Pew, here the twain shall meet: Researchers asked people of all ages whether society is better off if people focus on getting married and having kids.

Pew: American Attitudes Toward Marriage and Kids

Looking at this chart is a little like taking a Rorschach inkblot test on the topic of “American values”: You could see a lot of different things, if you wanted. The most obvious would be Chicken-Little style fears about the coming end of marriage: With just 29 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds affirming the importance of matrimony and maternity, it would be easy to say a quick eulogy for wedding vows. This narrative of decline may be true for certain people in America—those living in poverty, in particular—but for the wealthy and the educated, the institution of marriage is still in very good shape.

You could also read this graph as a manifesto of “not right now”: In 2010, the average marriage age was 26-and-a-half for women and nearly 29 for men. It’s understandable that 22-year-olds might be blasé about the benefits of marriage and kids—and equally understandable that their 65-year-old counterparts are twice as likely to say it’s important. As marriage-shy Millennials age, they might warm to the idea of lifelong commitment.

But again, the data suggests something slightly more complicated: In a 2013 Gallup poll, 75 percent of respondents were either married or said they wanted to be married. This included 84 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds; only nine percent of Millennials in that poll said they never wanted to get hitched. How can both sets of poll findings be true?

It probably has something to do with the curious way the question was worded in the Pew survey, which asked people to choose from the following two statements:

“Society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority.”

or

“Society is just as well off if people have priorities other than marriage and children.”

The second option seems to leave a lot of room for interpretation. If you think it’s okay to want a career plus marriage and kids, you might plausibly end up in that category, even if you think family values are important.

It’s unfortunate that they didn’t also ask the younger cohorts about their personal plans for marriage and family; the question asked is about society, not what they want for themselves. But this is another piece of evidence that Millennials are not planning to be as married as generations before them. Gen-X postponed marriage and children until late, but Millennials may never bother, unless a more dynamic economy starts to convince them they will have the resources.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

Jeb Kinnison

Writing About Life and Love

Millennial marriage rates

“Men on Strike” sale – Men Boycotting Marriage and Adult Responsibilities

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Women Making More, Find Few Men to Marry

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Record Never-Marrieds, Few Marriageable Men

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Are Millennials Losing Interest in Marriage?

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