Why has the view of marriage changed?
“It turns out that poverty and family structure are intertwined in this country,” Professor Melissa Kearney of the University of Maryland told Freakonomic’s Stephen Dubner . “You can’t be interested in children’s well-being and not look at family structure.” Over 40 per cent of US births and 35 per cent in Australia are to unmarried mothers. But there’s been a big change. “It turns out that in 1960 only five per cent of births in the US were to unmarried mothers,” says Kearney. Marriage in the US has declined mostly amongst less educated sections of the population. This big change has its victims: “The kids born to less-educated single mothers are falling further and further behind.” “Fewer than ten per cent of births to women with a college degree are outside marriage,” says Kearney. The figure for those with a high school certificate or less is 60 per cent. Freakonomics points out that decades of socio-economic research has confirmed many times that there is a link between fam...