Howe

Most discussions of declining fertility focus on across-the-board social forces affecting younger generations coming of age--forces like declining upward economic mobility (relative to parents), the rising opportunity cost of raising children, and growing educational attainment, urbanization, or secularization. The idea is that men and women in each new generation will end up coupling in one form or another and that how many children are born as a result will be determined by overall inclination and economic feasibility.

But there is another way of looking at declining fertility. And that is to observe that (a) couples at any age are much more likely to have children if they are married than if they are unmarried, and (b) that marriage rates at all ages have been steadily declining since the early 1980s. This is not happening primarily because people are less interested in marriage or are choosing to marry later. Surveys show that the vast majority of young men and women still want to get married. The biggest reason they offer for why they haven't yet is that "they have not found the right person." "Not ready to settle down" is a much less important explanation. Meanwhile, the share of women who end up remaining never-married at every age continues to rise.

In short, there is a widening gap between the share of women who want to marry and those who actually do get married. Just as there is a widening gap between the number of children women want to have and the number they realistically expect have. All this may point to a growing and systemic obstacle to marriage facing younger (Gen-X and Millennial) generations.

What might this obstacle be? Many social scientists think they have found it: The declining "marriageability" of men in the eyes of women. The bottom line is that young women are beginning to outperform young men on many measures of and educational and professional attainment and salary. This matters, because even in today's progressive cultural environment, both men and women (in every educational and racial group) overwhelmingly deem high status and the ability to "provide financially for a family" to be more important for a husband than for a wife. Matching these attitudes is the fact that women in all demos tend to marry "up" in terms of education and income. And the fact that low-income women (who today are the least likely to marry) are far more likely than high-income women to cite unavailability of financially stable men as a reason not to get married.

This "man deficit" perspective has given rise to several emerging bodies of research and commentary. One (see, for example, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage) interprets the steep fall in marriage rates in poor neighborhoods as the result of a decline in the economic fortunes of poor men rather than a decline in the cultural values of these communities.  Another (see Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters) focuses on all the deep-seated social changes that are driving more men to give up and opt-out. At the shrill extreme, this take merges into the mad-as-hell men's rights movement. (Ready to take the red pill?) Finally, there are more practical guides on how this growing disequilibrium affects women's dating prospects--and what they can do about it. See Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game. 

The new article by Dan Lichter, Joseph Price, and Jeffrey Swigert is an academic effort to bring the best Census data to bear on this numbers gap. (Go here for a slightly earlier public version, "Mismatches in the Marriage Market"; see also this popular summary in Inc.) First, the authors sort all married women by several variables (age, race, education, income, and so on) and then similarly sort their husbands. Next, they construct "synthetic husbands" for all unmarried women assuming these have preferences similar to those already married. Then they do the same for men. Finally, they match all of the unmarried women to all of the unmarried men--and look at how many are leftover.

Lichter et al. find that that there is a considerable excess of unmarried women for (two-way matchable) men in every age bracket over 22--especially for men in their 20s and men in their 50s and early 60s. They also find an excess among men with at least 2-year or 4-year college degrees (but not among grad degrees). And an excess in income brackets over $30K (but not over $125K). Women want men who achieve more than they do--but men, apparently, shy away from women who achieve at the highest levels! See charts below.

The authors' findings are provocative and worth exploring further. I would be especially interested in how this marriage-gap has changed over time. Demographers have generally shied away from this topic--mainly, I think, because it offends politically correct sensibilities. This observed mismatch, after all, is premised on unequal gender-role expectations and might be interpreted as suggesting a zero-sum conflict between men's achievement relative to women and their compatibility in marriage. I say, don't start with value judgments. Start with the evidence. And just look where it leads.

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