Conventional wisdom says that if you want to be richer, a useful thing to do is to get married. Life is cheaper when there’s only one 1 to pay and someone else can do certain tasks--cooking or car repair--more 2 than you. Research by Ohio State University’s Jay Zagorsky shows that married baby boomers increase their 3 an average 16% a year, 4 those who are single increase their net 5 at half that rate.
Yet the economic 6 of marriage isn’t what it used to be. In a chapter of a book newly out from the Russell Sage Foundation, Changing Poverty, Changing Policies, two social scientists show that the marriage premium has subsided since 1969.
They 7 to study how the changing makeup of American families has affected the number of people below the poverty line. 8 how the rate of marriage has fallen and the rate of divorce has 9 , the researchers expected the number of people living below the poverty line to grow 2.6%. But when they looked at the data, poverty had increased by less than half that 10 .
Why In a 11 , because single women, even those with kids, have an easier time supporting themselves outside marriage than they used to. More women are working, increasingly for wages that are 12 with those of men. Women are having children later in life, and 13 of them. On top of that, a growing percentage of women who have children but aren’t married don’t live on their own. In 1970, 62% of single mothers were the only adult in their 14 , but by 2006, just 55% were living without another means of support— 15 more women cohabitating with a male partner or grandparent.
Now, that’s not to say marriage doesn’t 16 with significant economic benefits. As research by Zagorsky and others illustrates, it does. A child in a single-parent family, for instance, is five times as 17 to live below the poverty line. What the two social scientists try to illustrate, though, is that marriage wouldn’t necessarily 18 more per-person wealth. Marrying someone who is chronically 19 might 20 not be an economic step up.