https://www.wsj.com/opinion/marriage-makes-a-comeback-8c68ea8a?mod=opinion_lead_pos12
Marriage Makes a Comeback
Families become a little more popular at the moment they are most needed.
ET
This column has been hopefully asking for a while if the long, sad decline of the family might be coming to an end. The answer appears to be yes, and not a moment too soon, given the benefits of marriage to men, women, children and civilization itself.
The University of Virginia’s Brad Wilcox shares the good news in the Atlantic:
Rather quietly, the post-’60s family revolution appears to have ended. Divorce is down and the share of children in two-parent families is up. Marriage as a social institution is showing new strength… Since the early 1980s, the divorce rate has now fallen by almost 40 percent—and about half of that decline has happened in just the past 15 years… The idea that marriage will end in failure half the time or more—well entrenched in many American minds—is out-of-date. The proportion of first marriages expected to end in divorce has fallen to about 40 percent in recent years.
… nonmarital childbearing, after almost half a century of increase, stalled out in 2009 at 41 percent, ticking down to about 40 percent a few years later, where it has remained. For children, less divorce and a small decline in childbearing outside wedlock mean more stability. After falling for more than 40 years beginning in the late 1960s, the share of children living in married families bottomed out at 64 percent in 2012 before rising to 66 percent in 2024, according to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. And the share of children raised in an intact married family for the duration of their childhood has climbed from a low point of 52 percent in 2014 to 54 percent in 2024.
A third shift may now be under way as well, although it is much less established than the first two. The rate of new marriages among prime-age adults, which hit a nadir during the pandemic, has risen in each of the three years of data since 2020. In 2023, the most recent year available, it was higher than in any year since 2008. At least some of this increase is a post-pandemic bounce, but the share of all prime-age adults who are married has also leveled off in the past few years, which suggests that the decades-long decline in the proportion of Americans who are married may have reached its low point.
“Some of these shifts are modest,” cautions Mr. Wilcox, so let’s hope that this is just the start of a big swing of the cultural pendulum toward thriving, stable households. Regular readers know Mr. Wilcox as a cheerful champion of marriage. He’s been making the case for the benefits to children of living in a two-parent household and also the benefits to parents of staying married. He notes in the Atlantic:
According to the 2024 General Social Survey, married men and women ages 25 to 55 are more than twice as likely to be “very happy” with their life as their nonmarried peers. Married people—men and women both—live longer, are more financially secure, and build more wealth than single Americans.
In an era of historically low birthrates, young people on the political left have been especially resistant to the idea of marriage and kids, but there’s some encouraging news on this front as well. The Journal’s Greg Ip has found some liberal economists who are making the case. Mr. Ip notes the work of Dean Spears and Michael Geruso of the University of Texas at Austin, who are warning about the worldwide trend toward depopulation. Mr. Ip writes:
They rest their argument not on the familiar need for workers to propel economic growth or shore up Social Security but on a more fundamental proposition: More people is a good thing in and of itself.
Global fertility—the number of babies a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—averaged 2.25 last year, the United Nations estimates, the lowest in recorded history, barely above the replacement rate of 2.1 that keeps population stable.
Mr. Ip notes the ironic enduring influence of a prediction that was spectacularly wrong:
In his 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb,” Paul Ehrlich predicted world overpopulation would lead to mass starvation and destitution. No serious demographer worries about overpopulation now, but Ehrlich casts a long shadow. Today, many people, especially on the progressive left, equate increased population with environmental degradation and climate change…
It was a free-market economist, Julian Simon, who demolished Ehrlich’s thesis by betting him, back in 1980, that a basket of commodity prices would decline over the next decade. He won.
In that spirit, Spears and Geruso show how humans, through ingenuity and behavioral change, have reduced pollution and expanded available resources as their numbers grew. For example, in 2013, China’s smog was among the world’s worst. Over the next decade its population grew by 50 million, but particulate air pollution fell by half. As India’s population has grown, so has the average height of its children thanks to better nutrition and sanitation.
Simon understood that human beings, with their capacity to solve problems and create new innovations and efficiencies, are the greatest of the world’s natural resources. It seems that Messrs. Spears and Geruso understand it too.
The history of civilization makes the case for more people, and of course without new generations of people there can be no more civilization. Back in 1984, Julian Simon wrote in the Journal:
… the prices of food, metals and other raw materials have been declining by every measure since the beginning of the 19th century and as far back as we know. That is, raw materials have been getting less scarce rather than more scarce throughout history, despite the common sense that if one begins with an inventory of a resource and uses some up, there will be less left. More generally, the life expectancies and the incomes of the people of the world have been rising along with rising population, despite the increasing use of resources.
Evidence shows that, given some time to adjust to shortages with known methods and new inventions, free people create additional resources, confuting Malthusian reasoning. The extraordinary aspect of this process that begins with actual or perceived shortage due to population or income growth is that it eventually leaves us better off than if the shortage had never arisen, thanks to resulting new techniques…
Nor is high population density a drag on economic development. Comparison of the data on density and economic growth across nations reveals that higher density is associated with faster rather than slower growth…
The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of human knowledge. Our ultimate resource is skilled, spirited and hopeful people exerting their wills and imaginations to provide for themselves and for their families, and thereby inevitably providing for the benefit of us all.
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