Disarming story in today's New York Times, Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’. The increasing gap between rich and poor in this country is having an effect on who marries, and the gap is most evident in the middle third of American incomes. You know all the studies that are used to object to marriage equality that say you need two parents to maximize your chances to bring up happy and healthy children? Well, the issue is two PARENTS, both of whom are making money; it has nothing to do with sexual orientation.
The article takes us to a daycare center in Ann Arbor, Michigan and introduces us to the two women who run it, Jessica Schairer and Chris Faulkner,. Each woman has two children, only Ms Faulkner is married and Ms. Schairer isn't. Life is SO much harder for the unmarried woman that it shows how damaging the economic downturn and resulting uncertainty is for, well, everybody. Follow me below the fold to see how this affects marriage, tax policy, and even the 2012 election.
First, there's education. Ms. Faulkner graduated from college, Ms. Schairer didn't; Ms. Schairer became pregnant while she was attending college and didn't finish her degree.
Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.
The effect? Less than 10% of births for college-educated women occur out of wedlock, while more than 60% of births for non-college educated women do. Race used to be the determinant here, but now class is almost as determinative, and studies show that this leads to, in the words of Sara McLanahan at Princeton, "divergent destinies."
Behind this? A dramatic increase in income inequality:
Four decades ago, households with children at the 90th percentile of incomes received five times as much as those at the 10th percentile, according to Bruce Western and Tracey Shollenberger of the Harvard sociology department. Now they have 10 times as much. The gaps have widened even more higher up the income scale.
Why? College is expensive, and technological "advances" have eliminated blue-collar jobs, creating more financial-sector jobs while leading to a decline in the membership of labor unions.
And then there's this:
Across Middle America, single motherhood has moved from an anomaly to a norm with head-turning speed. (That change received a burst of attention this year with the publication of Charles Murray’s new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” which attributed the decline of marriage to the erosion of values, rather than the decline of economic opportunity.)
As recently as 1990, just 10 percent of the births to women like Ms. Schairer (white women with some postsecondary schooling but not a full college degree) occurred outside marriage, according to Child Trends. Now it has tripled to 30 percent, compared with just 8 percent for women of all races with college degrees.
Of COURSE. For the right, it can't be the Bush economy, it has to be an "erosion of values." So tell me, how do traditional values jibe with union-busting?
In one of my earlier diaries, If Marriage is in Trouble, Don't Blame Marriage Equality, I discussed an article, “All the Single Ladies,” by Kate Bolick that ran in the November 2011 issue of The Atlantic. In it, she commented that more and more Americans are spending more years of our adult lives unmarried than ever before, and cites the 2010 census. The census shows that the proportion of married households in the United States is 48 percent, that fifty percent of the adult population is single (compared with 33 percent in 1950) and that this is likely to keep growing. It finds that the median age for marriage is rising, especially for those who are affluent and educated.
The Times article confirms Bolick's findings, but dramatizes what the consequences are for real people, which nobody bothers to do much. Worse yet,
Forty years ago, the top and middle income thirds had virtually identical family patterns: more than 95 percent of households with children in either tier had two parents in the home. Since then the groups have diverged, according to Mr. Western and Ms. Shollenberger: 88 percent at the top have two parents, but just 71 percent do in the middle.
It's not just the 1% and the 99%, we now have a major gap between the 33% and the 67% in terms of child rearing. Yes, marriage is in BIG trouble, but not for affluent people, which is probably why we don't know more about this. As the article says,
What most separates them is not the impact of globalization on their wages but a 6-foot-8-inch man named Kevin.
This has implications for education, as well, and it shows that the education privatizers have their telescopes aimed the wrong way. We know about the importance of breakfast, for instance, but, as the bottom 67% increasingly have family issues that affect their children and their children's performance in school, it feels that any "reform" efforts are just tinkering with the problem. And how does this play out politically?
One party wants to bridge the income gap, and the other wants to keep making the rich richer. Nobody
ever considers the fact that there are children involved when they talk about tax policy.
So here we are. Is it really a meritocracy if the game is rigged, since economic factors affect who marries and who doesn't? I don't think so, and thus the economic policies of the Republicans actually betray the American promise. MORE AND BETTER DEMOCRATS!