The other marriage inequality: Column

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USATODAY

Over the weekend, thanks to CPAC, there was a lot of talk about gay marriage and "marriage inequality." Well, I've been supporting gay marriage for a long time --​ much, much longer than Barack Obama. But if you're talking about "marriage inequality," there's another kind of marriage inequality that isn't getting nearly as much attention and that is doing more harm to more people than the gay-marriage thing.

That's the inequality in marriage rates between the upper-middle-class, and the lower and lower-middle classes. While the upscale college-educated crowd continues to marry at very high rates, marriage rates are plummeting among those further down on the socioeconomic ladder. Unfortunately, the people who are foregoing marriage are probably the ones who need it most.

This past summer, Jason DeParle noted in The New York Times that we are now seeing "two classes divided by 'I do.'" And while people are going on and on about Wall Street and income inequality, it turns out that marriage inequality is one of the biggest things making people less equal, accounting for as much as 40% of the difference in incomes: "It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged."

This isn't new. Five years ago, The Washington Post noted the trend: a class-based marriage gap. "We seem to be reverting to a much older pattern, when elites marry and a great many others live together and have kids."

What we're seeing here, and elsewhere, is a breakdown in the great Progressive project of the late 19th and early 20th centuries of elevating the lower classes into the middle class. That project involved changes in society and in social mores that encouraged behaviors giving children more stable home environments and better prospects for social improvement. All of that is fading now.

So why don't people get married now, who would have gotten married in the past? In part, because they don't have to. Single motherhood (or fatherhood) is no longer looked down upon as it once was. Shotgun weddings are largely a thing of the past. Welfare payments and other social assistance can (partially) replace a father in the house. (When you subsidize something, you get more of it -- and we're subsidizing unmarried mothers). And, for people of both sexes, but especially for men, marriage appears to be a much less attractive deal than it once was.

Where marriage and kids were once seen as the beginning of life as an adult, they're now seen as something closer to exile from adult life -- imprisonment in the land of Chuck E. Cheese and My Little Pony. Suburban parents often drive SUVs instead of minivans because minivans, though more practical, are associated with low-prestige activities like parenting, while SUVs are associated with higher-prestige activities like whitewater kayaking. When you look for a figure embodying masculinity in today's society, it's not a dad -- just look at the bumbling doofuses who portray dads on pretty much every TV commercial and sitcom. Likewise, men fear divorce and child custody laws that heavily favor women. Safer, perhaps, to be a "baby daddy" than a real Dad.

The problem, though, is that the kids do worse. A government check isn't a substitute for a father, and while plenty of single-mom kids do fine, most tend to do worse on measures ranging from educational attainment and future income to criminality. And the process feeds on itself: Women want "marriageable" men -- those with good incomes and stable lifestyles -- but the more single-parent households there are, the fewer men are likely to be "marriageable" in the next generation. Government programs like Head Start don't make up the slack, because no institution can invest the amount of time and energy in a kid that his or her parents can.

So as we talk about "marriage equality" between gays and straights, give a little thought to the problem of marriage inequality between rich and poor. It matters, too.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

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