Washington - The "marriageable male" has steady income. He pays
his bills on time and could help support a child, too. He has long captured the
interest of economists, who associate him with a healthier economy.But in some parts of the country, the marriageable male is
no longer living up to his name, according to a new paper from researchers at
the University of Maryland.
Economics professor Melissa Kearney, the study's co-author,
wanted to explore how fracking booms have affected the share of babies born
outside of marriage.
Historically, bursts of prosperity among blue-collar men
have reduced the share of kids born to unwed parents. As the theory goes: Women
have more drive to marry their child's father if he can contribute to the
household. They'd rather not tie the knot with an additional dependent.
undefinedKearney checked on the romantic progress of men without
college degrees in states at the centre of America's oil and natural gas boom
which have seen spikes in employment and wages. She looked at population data
from swaths of Texas, Oklahoma, California and Pennsylvania.
What she found
surprised her.
"There was a different response this time, and it's
sobering," she said. " The commitment to childbearing with marriage
in the seventies and eighties is just no longer there."
Kearney and her co-author Riley Wilson calculated that every
$1 000 per capita increase in an area's fracking production was linked to an
additional 6 births per 1 000 women. About half of those extra babies, she
said, were born to married parents.
In other words, more money seemed to bring more kids regardless
of the parents' marital status.
This baby boom wasn't as shocking to Kearney as the
unofficial relationships. Babies, she explained, are viewed as "normal
goods" - a demand that increases when income increases. In the past,
however, baby booms from employment surges were restricted to married couples.
During the seventies and eighties, for example, surging
energy prices during the so-called Appalachian coal boom brought more work to
miners. It fattened the wages of similarly skilled men in southern New York,
Mississippi and Kentucky and shook up family formation in those areas. More
women got married, and fewer women had kids on their own.
A ten percent increase in earnings was tied to a 9.6 percent
decrease in the share of unmarried women (ages 15 to 34) and a whopping 25 percent reduction of
children born to single moms. Seth Sanders, a public policy professor at Duke
University who studied Appalachia's marital demographics, put it simply: Times
have changed.
"There has been growing acceptance of having children
outside of marriage, especially in the white community," he said.
"Appalachia in the seventies and eighties was socially conservative with a
high value to marriage."
Read also : Millennials, marriage and money
Not that higher wages magically created stronger unions.
Deciding to marry is an intimate choice, one that hinges on more than a
partner's wages.
Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution
and author of "Generation Unbound:
Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage, said
Kearney's findings reflect a cultural transformation. Marriage, she said, is no
longer seen as essential to a woman's upward mobility. [Until 1974, for
example, a woman needed a husband's permission to apply for a credit card.]
"Women couldn't be very choosy in the past - they had
to be married for both social and economic reasons," she said.
"They'd be stigmatized if they weren't and they might not be able to make
it on their own. Now the social context has shifted. They can raise the
bar."
In the United States, 40 percent of children are born to
unmarried women, the most recent CDC data show. Educational differences skews
the share, however: Sixty-two percent of such kids have moms who lack a college
degree. Academics have long wondered how to encourage marriage, since two
parents tend to have more resources than one.
A 2015 study from the American Enterprise Institute and the
Institute for Family Studies found that states with higher concentrations of
married parents also had higher median household incomes and lower rates of
child poverty.
Researchers who focus on poor communities have found that
women generally prioritize motherhood over marriage.
"Women who don't want to forgo being a mother will wait
to find a reliable, steady partner - someone who can bring stability to the
table," the economist Kearney said, citing the work of Johns Hopkins sociologist
Kathryn Edin. Thirty years ago, sociologist William Julius Wilson, who is now a
professor at Harvard University, invented the term "marriageable
male."
In his ground-breaking book, "The Truly
Disadvantaged," Wilson sought to explain why single motherhood was on the
rise in predominately black communities and found that employed women were
outnumbering employed men. That imbalance, he concluded, reduced women's
incentive to marry.
Five more studies have supported Wilson's theory, according
to a Brookings Institution report on the economics of eligible bachelors.
Declining male employment, coupled with stagnating wages, can explain 27
percent of the drop in matrimony since 1980, the researchers wrote.
Research from MIT's David Autor suggests the marriageable
male theory isn't outdated everywhere. After Chinese imports started creating
tougher competition for American products, employment dropped in the nation's
manufacturing hubs. Autor found these "trade shocks" in Rust Belt
states led to a 5 percent drop in marriage among young women (18 to 25) and a
four percent drop in the birth rate.
The share of babies born to unmarried parents, however,
slightly grew.
WASHINGTON POST