Marriage bestows positive health benefits on couples who tie the knot. Despite the so-called marriage penalty in the tax code, marriage also has significant wealth benefits to those who marry. Wealth has some positive effects on health as well. Wealthier is healthier. Marriage also has long-lasting positive benefits on childrearing. The children of married couples tend to have better economic and health outcomes than the children of single-parent families whose parents never married. Some of the positive health effects include increases in healthy behaviors, and greater use of health care resources. Contrary to jokes and clichés, marriage enhances mental health. Marriage boosts physical health and longevity of both the couple and their kids. In other words, the benefits of marriage have intergenerational effects.
Some negative clichés about marriage are also accurate. Married men do tend to become more sedentary, while both married men and women tend to gain a little weight. Although the study is nearing 20 years old, a report by Mathematica Policy Research for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Planning and Evaluation has in-depth analysis of the effects of marriage on health.
Marriage rates vary based on economic conditions. Marriage has generally been around eight marriages per 1,000 population but the rate shot up to 16 per 1,000 at the end of WWII. However, marriage is on the decline in America. The following is from The Hill:
While it may not have ended, marriage in America has unquestionably declined over the recent past and is now at historic low levels for the country.
Since the start of the 21st century, the U.S. marriage rate has declined from more than eight marriages per 1,000 down to six marriages per 1,000 population in 2019. That marriage rate is the lowest level since the U.S. government began keeping marriage records for the country in 1867.
Also, 70 years ago a large majority of U.S. households, approximately 80 percent, were made up of married couples. In 2020, the proportion of households consisting of married couples fell to 49 percent.
The Atlantic explains marriage is not dying, rather it is stratifying into the haves and the have nots. The rate of marriage among college-educated women has been relatively stable over the years. Sometimes that means marrying down. The rate of college-educated women marrying noncollege educated men has quadrupled over the years. The real problem is the rate of marriage among noncollege educated women has plummeted.
One clue as to why marriage rates for non-college-educated women declined so steeply over the 20th century is revealed when you look at a map of marriage rates. In areas where men have the lowest rate of bad outcomes such as incarceration or unemployment, the marriage gap between college-educated and non-college-educated women is 50 percent smaller.
But what’s happening to women with the least education? If you look at the 25th percentile of the education distribution, roughly three-quarters of women born in 1930 were married. Zoom forward to women born in 1980, and just over half of them are married now. That’s a big drop.
Talking to The Atlantic, Cornell economics professor Benny Goldman explained:
So in econ parlance, this is what, going back to [Gary] Becker, one would call “assortative mating.” And at first, it was a puzzle. So you can think about this along many dimensions. You can think about income. You could think about education. You could even think about race. And it is, in some sense, a theoretical puzzle.
It might be a less important part of their life and how they view themselves. But I think in practice, time and time again, when one goes to the data, you really see what we would call “positive assortative matching,” which is people tend to match with likes. You know, so educated folks tend to be married to other educated folks. Higher-earning folks tend to be married to other higher-earning folks.
Progressives often lament income inequity in America. Supposedly the wealth of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Bill Gates is a problem. The far bigger problem that is causing inequity is in the marriage market. The poorest members of society are far less likely to get married prior to having kids and more likely to raise children in single-parent households in poverty. That is an actual problem and there is no easy fix for that type of inequity.
Read the entire interview at The Atlantic: The New Divide in American Marriage