The "a family requires two incomes" bit has been taken apart any number of times, most recently by Stossel.

It seems to me she's pushing more than a few platitudes of her own.

Myria

[M]arried men, rather than trading their libidos for lawn mowers, have more sex than single men.

There must be some pretty sad single men out there...

I was in the doctor's office waiting room when an older gentleman came out holding a "six pack" sample of Viagra. He said to his wife, a little too loudly, "Look at what the doctor gave me."
She replied, "Now I know why prices are so high. They're giving out a whole year's supply as samples."

That John Leo article doesn't say anything about marriage in general, just marriages with children. The CBPP quote looks like it's about marriages with children, too.

I've been noting the "two incomes not needed" articles for a while, and they are always in the form of "the couple could do with less and still have a fine lifestyle by our parents' standards".

The problem is that (1) we aren't our parents and (2) we measure wealth relatively. In general, people will feel (and be treated as) poor if they aren't consuming at a level relatively close to the peers. So, while in absolute terms you may not need the extra income, in any way that is meaningful to human beings, they do.

It's the same reason that measures of poverty using absolute income are useless. What may have been considered wealthy in previous times (colour television!) won't stop you from feeling poverty-stricken (and suffering all the attendent effects of poverty).

While being relatively wealthy doesn't buy happiness, being relatively poorer tends to buy unhappiness... So, if everybody else is working like a dog (and being unhappy because of it), you've pretty much got to joing the rat race and be unhappy along with them or opt-out and be unhappy about being poorer than them.

That's all true, Tom, but it avoids the point that two incomes aren't "needed" to keep body and soul together. Two incomes are "wanted" so that the family can pay the leases on their two late-model vehicles, can pay the mortgage on their 4000 sf house, can pay the cable bill, the DSL bill, etc., etc.

I might even suggest that this lifestyle could be much more easily funded with one paycheck if not for confiscatory levels of taxation. When you include all state and federal taxes, my wife's income just barely covers our tax bill. We are a two-income family, but we really only have one income - mine - to live on.

Similarly, defining poverty as "relatively poor" is all well and good until it becomes a justification for taking my money and giving it to a family that owns a house, a couple of cars, a TV, computer, DVD player, washer, dryer, dishwasher, etc. etc. - all of which is not unusual for families officially classified as "poor" and therefor deserving of taxpayer-funded aid.

Let's see how Amazon describes Kipnis' polemic: "this book is the perfect antidote to any lingering guilt about being happily single." Now, I know some happy singles and some unhappy ones, but I don't know any happy singles who feel something resembling "lingering guilt" over their marital status.

William Raspberry has a calm, sensible op-ed in today's WaPo on this subject: marriage is good for society and individuals both, it IS in serious trouble, and there is very little the government can do to "fix it." Certainly nothing to recommend an outlay of $1.5 B in a deficit laden economy.

Kipnis is tapping into a vein of anger that is as destructive as it is profitable. It is the voice of single people who have convinced themselves that if only boring marrieds could stop being in their faces all the time, they would be perfectly happy. But my happiness as a married person does not conflict with their happiness as a singleton, so why should the reverse be true?

My sense is that too few women and men view marriage as an investment, in which small but steady "payments" yield long-term dividends emotionally and financially. Coming to believe this, however, has helped me to cope with the necessary sacrifices that I feel I make in the pursuit of a healthy family.

Let's face it, no one gets a thank you note from ANYONE validating their lifestyle choices. It's time we all grew up and accept that we all muddle through life with no roadmap and precious little appreciation for "all we do."

As a married man, I think all of this is fine. But I still don't see why the government should spent 1,5 billion dollars in what is essentially a moralizing effort. If action is needed at all, why not create good economic incentives, like eliminate the marriage penalty for dual income earners (there is no marriage penalty for single income families, but the conservative family value folks do not want the dual income penalty reversed as this would give mothers an increased incentive to work).

What I wonder is whether marriage makes people happier, or whether there are types of people who are happier within marriage. For every Levin, there is an Anna Karenina, no? Some people are more restless than others, more easily dissatisfied than others. It seems difficult to assume that the institution will affect everyone in the same way.

It depends what your partner is like, doesn't it? If you are married to someone who is violent, or uncaring, or alcoholic - that marriage is bound to have more problems than others.

The difficulty of finding a good partner seems greater at lower income levels, where the available men may be unemployed, or involved in criminal activity. Working class or unemployed men tend to be more violent, as well, to assert manliness when other avenues (such as high wage-earning) are closed to them.

I agree that marriage is in a transitional state, but why does that have to be a bad thing? Isnt it possible that this is simply a healthy change? I come from the divorce genereration, basically every one of my peers, including myself, comes from a divorced family. What that tells me is that the generation before was getting married for the wrong reasons, having children too quickly, and hence divorcing. In my opinion, marriage rates are down for good reason. Divorce is a terrible thing, especially for children, and I think that my generation is especially leary of allowing such a situation to come to pass. So we get married later, have children later, and this is a good thing imo. I still think there is a major state of flux, and divorce rates havent lessened, but I believe that will come in time. My hope is that marriage will stabilize into a much more healthy form, with people marrying later in life and hopefully making better decisions.

Just asked my single, professional mid-30s sister (who doesn't know what a blog is, tsk) her opinion.

Her thoughts: singles don't need the government telling them to get married. They need SOMEONE to come up with better opportunities for singles to meet each other. Government-run dating services seemed a bad idea to both of us. But she had one intriguing idea (having just come back from a business trip to Europe): why don't more private companies come up with quirky ideas like "single sections" on long plane flights?

Maybe Bush could take a less contentious (and expensive) approach to marriage promotion by setting up a "blue ribbon" panel to brainstorm public-private ventures like this?

But then, the schizophrenic side of the problem showed itself once more: she acknowledged that most singles (herself included) would probably be too embarrassed to sign on to such programs (reek of "desperation").

Scratch that--no new good ideas.

Unless...Bush hired Rev. Moon as a "marriage consultant" and paid for the rental of stadiums all across America...

Laura Kipnis:

"And I have really big breasts -- double-D cups."

Now does anybody have pictures?
--------------------------------

And I pay her salary.

Seriously, Many years ago I read World We Have Lost by Peter Laslett who had read the parrish registers for Tudor/Stuart era churches in England which recorded births, deaths and wedings. IIRC, the bottom line was that marriages were not longer in that era. They were ended by death (particularly in child birth) or disease with fair frequency.

Of course, readers of Jane Austin, Anthony Trollope and John Galsworthy know that marriage was more about property and dynasty than love and sex in the pre-modern era.

The more things change . . .

Why hasn't anyone pointed out that the economic fact she cited is also wrong. Middle class wages did not stagnate. It is true that most of the increases in wages were used to pay for large increases in benefits and social security taxes, but real wages did increase significantly.

Kipnis' iffy stats aside, what does it even mean to "defend marriage"? Are we talking about encouraging otherwise-happy singles to find a mate? Making it harder to get divorced? Providing counseling for couples with difficulties? Putting stricter controls on who can get married (ie make sure they are committed, financially stable, etc)? Keeping homosexuals from diluting the meaning of it? What?

Well, as far as I can tell most married men really do get it more often than single men. Single men are more often prone to focus on their exploits, than to focus on the often long dry spells in between. In addition, courting is an exhaustive energy intensive activity and contrary to stereotypes of male lotharios courting more than one woman at once is extremely exhausting. Now we've all known men who have been "cut off" or "put in the dog house", but it's a two way street. Often in my experience (as they often tell me themselves), these women are retailiating for being totally cut off from attention/respect/affection that can dry up when a man stops courting and focuses on his career. In addition, many women I know feel pressure to act prudish in public and feel more "liberated" in private. That poor guy's wife might have only been giving him sugar six times a year, or she might have been just cutting on him because she felt neglected or embaressed about his public exposure of their sex lives. Trust me, the old man has courted more than one lady at once - once roomates - and has been cut down by women in public who later get more affectionate in private. Sometimes they just want to know if you're confident enough to take a ribbing and really want them instead of just wanting to look good, and whether or not they can lean or you or will have to baby your ego. Take it from the oldman, if you have a chance with a non-psycho spouse or long-term committed consensual partner(s) then take it. It's way better in all arenas (on average) than being single.

"So we get married later, have children later, and this is a good thing imo. I still think there is a major state of flux, and divorce rates havent lessened, but I believe that will come in time."

Actually, we get married later, and have more children before marriage than we used to.

Teenage pregnancy is down over the last few decades, but unmarried teenage pregnancy is way up. Maybe getting married later isn't all it's cracked up to be.

"The problem is that (1) we aren't our parents and (2) we measure wealth relatively. In general, people will feel (and be treated as) poor if they aren't consuming at a level relatively close to the peers. So, while in absolute terms you may not need the extra income, in any way that is meaningful to human beings, they do."

The real problem is land-use policies that jack up housing prices, and the refusal to adequately protect cheap neighborhoods. Generally, you keep up with the Joneses or you risk getting shot. Not an especially good deal, in my book.

If I may, I think we're moving too far from the central questions: why are fewer of us married and why should anyone care?

For the record (judging by friends and family members) the difference between folks below (roughly) 40 and the boomer generation is that Xers set up independent households on a large scale, set themselves up in good (often, previously male dominated) jobs, THEN looked around for a mate, at which time nearly all of their potential spouses were holed up in their offices and/or nice condos for large chunks of day and night. In other words, by the time they said "I'm ready" lots of good catches had gone home either alone or with someone else.

Now it seems to me that to get beyond this impasse, we have to be ready to recognize the STRUCTURAL impediments to mating in this post-industrial wonderland and surmount them. Unfortunately, too many single people who would prefer to get married (and yeah, not everyone wants to, and they can stop reading this if they haven't already) end up saying "I'm really very happy single, thank you very much" until the day they collapse in agony at the thought of going home yet again to an empty apartment.

One question I have for the economists out there is whether the decline in family living is in some way related to the rise in productivity with which it is coterminous. Lots of individual hamsters on their own exercise wheels may just run faster and harder than those who share cages and have lots of little hamsters. Maybe it's cheaper and easier for a society to import new blood than grow its own. Maybe we should all follow Kipnis' advice and follow our bliss into the beds of strangers. Let the state sort out our screwed up kids. I've got better things to do with my time (and my D cup breasts).

Why should we care?

I suppose we should start with the concept that the statisical data tends to lean toward it being benficial to individuals and even moreso to the society as a whole.

If taht's true, then it seems a proper area for concern.

Generally, you keep up with the Joneses or you risk getting shot.

Ah yes, that would be one of the "attendent effects of poverty" I was talking about :-).

whether the decline in family living is in some way related to the rise in productivity

It is interesting that a generation ago, companies preferred to hire married men, as they were supposed to be more stable and thus more productive. Now, if there is any preference, it is to (quietly) prefer to hire the unmarried who (presumably) have no interests outside of their job, and can be more easily transferred to other locations.

Short (informal) theory:

The state wants its citizens to spawn, in order to generate a neverending supply of new taxpayers (and soldiers?). The institution of marriage (between a man and woman) is a time-tested way for raising a new, relatively stable generation of taxpayers (and soldiers?). Thus, the state supports marriage, through laws and various incentives.

[See also Catholic church and its views on marriage and abortion.]

love,
an lapsed Catholic, straight, happily single man who gets some from time to time.