Abstract
The Limits of Marriage makes a clear and compelling point: the recent “retreat from marriage” in the United States is not due to changing cultural values or to the pernicious rise in individualism; it is instead the result of growing job instability, stagnant real wages, and rising income inequality. Its author, sociologist Gary R. Lee, carefully sifts through a large, complicated, and often polarized academic literature to make his case. He uses accessible language that will appeal to a large popular audience but also to policy makers and undergraduate and graduate students without patronizing a more technical audience of academic social scientists. The Limits of Marriage provides an unusually clear-eyed portrait of changing U.S. marriage patterns, while avoiding the polemics sometimes contained in recent treatments of the subject. Lee acknowledges general points of both consensus and uncertainty in the empirical literature; he neither sees marriage as a problem nor outdated institution, nor as a solution to America’s social problems. There is much to like in his even-handed and dispassionate approach to marriage in America.
In a nutshell, Lee discounts the commonplace argument, especially common in popular discourse, that America’s declining marriage rates, growing cohabitation, and high marital instability are rooted mostly in the rise of “secular individualism” or, more generally, in ideational and cultural assaults that are rooted in modernization and an urbanizing society. Lee largely disputes the primacy of these cultural arguments—and of proposed policy solutions that emphasize the need to change our values or to better educate young people about the economic and social benefits of a stable marriage. Marriage promotion programs, which were ushered in with the 1996 welfare reform bill and pushed hard during the Bush administration, will not solve America’s problems. Instead, Lee argues that solutions reside in strengthening the economic foundations of marriage, especially for those at the bottom of the income distribution.
The Limits of Marriage is organized into four parts. The chapters included in Part I (“Marriage in Modern Times”) outline the basic conundrum of declining rates of marriage in modern society. Lee points to the limitations of strictly cultural arguments (e.g., the rise of expressive individualism or modernity) by correctly showing that the retreat from marriage has been observed unevenly across the social hierarchy. Declining marriage rates have been observed disproportionately among historically disadvantaged minorities, the poor, and the least educated—those individuals least likely to be opinion leaders or have the economic wherewithal to satisfy the need for individual expression through personal choices. Lee—the consummate sociologist—emphasizes instead the lack of choices for those “at the bottom” rather than the choices that are actually made. In doing so, he rightly shifts the focus away from viewing the lack of marriage as a bad choice that undermines personal wellbeing but instead regards the lack of marriage as a consequence of limited opportunities to marry or to marry a suitable (i.e., economically attractive) partner. This is not a new idea, but it is one that Lee distills in a clear way from a literature that draws from many different theoretical viewpoints, empirical approaches, and disciplinary perspectives.
Part II provides an especially comprehensive but nuanced view of recent literature on the putative benefits of marriage. Lee highlights the immense literature on the positive association between marriage and personal happiness, mental and physical health, and job productivity and socioeconomic status, as well as the benefits for children from growing up with both co-residential biological parents. The contribution of this section is in providing a clearly reasoned but non-statistical discussion of well-known challenges to drawing strong causal inferences about the benefits of marriage (i.e., issues of selection and endogeneity). His main point is not to discount the real benefits of marriage (“marriage is a wonderful institution”), yet he is careful not to overstate the causal claims based on observational data. This careful discussion serves to buttress a central point of his argument: Young people neither need to change their attitudes or values about marriage nor be convinced of its benefits. Like most others in American society, poor people, including poor single mothers, have values about marriage that are remarkably similar to their more affluent counterparts. The problem is that many poor and uneducated people are simply unable to marry, despite the desire to marry. This is not a matter of making bad choices, but of not having a real choice to marry.
Part III focuses on social and economic explanations for the decline in marriage. Here, Lee re-centers the discussion on structural changes in the economy since 1970 and the real-world implications for those of marriageable age. For example, he emphasizes the negative effects of technological change and automation, which have displaced low-skilled workers, globalization and off-shoring of jobs, the decline in stable union jobs that pay a family wage, and a tax structure that has favored the rich through cuts in tax rates, while drying up government support for public education and social programs, including cash assistance programs. For those at the bottom of the income distribution—minorities, the least educated, and the chronically poor—opportunities to marry have largely evaporated and the “gains to marry” have been eroded by fundamental shifts in the economy.
The final section asks the question “what to do?” Policy approaches that view marriage as a panacea or a solution to poverty are misreading the evidence. Promoting marriage, for example, treats the symptom rather than the causes of nonmarriage. Lee argues against those who blame poverty on the “bad” choices that people make rather than on the real causes, which are located in a shifting economy. Marriage alone will not rehabilitate most poor and low-skilled men, that is, it will not make them better partners and parents. Marriage alone, Lee claims, won’t make poor people more responsible or more productive. In fact, marriage, at least for women, may make matters worse if it eliminates the “flexibility and freedom to change partners” if their intimate partners no longer live up to their economic and familial obligations. According to Lee, there are “good reasons” why many low income people don’t marry, and it’s not because of moral lassitude or bad values.
The Limits of Marriage is an important book, and it deserves a large audience. Not everyone will be happy with Gary Lee’s highly distilled summary of a large literature on marriage, one that risks reducing complicated arguments to overly broad generalizations that are perhaps less balanced and more unequivocal than necessary or warranted. Lee also largely ignores some highly contentious topics—explanations focused on mass incarceration, welfare incentive effects, and teen and out-of-wedlock childbearing—that also are sometimes implicated in research on the retreat from marriage. And my reading of the literature is that America’s post-1970 economic woes have been experienced rather unequally, yet the “retreat from marriage” has been observed across many different populations—rich and poor, black and white, urban and rural. Economics matter, of course, but other societal shifts must also be implicated in recent marriage trends. Lee nevertheless stays on message—an economic one. Lee is right to remind us that marrying (or not marrying) is not a matter of making good or bad choices but about the choices many of us don’t really have. His goal, in the end, is not to “promote marriage” or extoll its virtues. It is to promote greater opportunity—to expand the choice set—that will allow us to pursue our aspirations (or not) for a fulfilling marriage and satisfying family life. In this, Gary Lee succeeds with flying colors. The Limits of Marriage has my strongest recommendation.