The Marrying Kind: (Ghettoization of the working class) [View all]

[HiPointDem]

As we celebrate Valentine's Day, we should be aware that underlying the many stories on the changing nature of marriage and relationships is a central irony: the college-educated middle class that embraced the sexual revolution is now leading the way back into marriage. And this group has more stable families because of the combination of two qualities hard for everyone else to find. The first is a flexible approach to family roles. Men who help with the children and women with six-figure incomes are very much in demand. The second is good jobs: over the last 30 years, the number of men with stable employment has stayed even with women only at the top...

The college educated, for example, marry and bear children later than the less educated, while those with less education have become increasingly likely to bear children first. The non-marital birth rate has stayed at two percent for white college graduates over the last 25 years and risen only slightly for college-educated racial minorities. During the same period, the non-marital birth rate has reached 40 percent for the country as a whole. College graduates enter into any kind of family life significantly later than their less-educated peers and have become even more likely to marry only each other.

The new elite devotes more parental time to their children than their parents did and the ability to do so requires either one high-earning partner or two wage earners with compatible schedules. In commenting on Obama's plans to increase taxes on those with income above $250,000, a University of Chicago law professor complained that it took he and his wife that much income to raise a family in Chicago in accordance with a professional standard of living. What he emphasized less is that it also took a spouse with a six-figure income to afford the nannies, private schools, and college and graduate education that would allow their children to realize opportunities comparable to their own...

For the approximately two-thirds of the population that does not have a college degree, an increasing number of men don't have the steady, adequate-paying jobs that allow them to provide the foundation for a successful family life. Nor are working class men who feel like failures in the job market prepared to play roles backing up their wives and children. College-educated artists or faculty spouses may be willing to dote on their children while their wives take on the "breadwinning" role, but less secure men are more likely to chafe at the domestic tasks. Financially independent women who both earn the bulk of the family income and assume the majority of the domestic tasks don't want -- or need -- men who are unable to support their families, emotionally or financially. While divorce rates plummeted in the '90s for college graduates, they continued to rise among the hard-pressed working class.

The secret underlying these patterns has been the growing divergence in male job opportunities and a change in the gendered wage gap. In 1990, all women, irrespective of education, made about the same percentage of the median hourly wage of the men, with college graduate women making a slightly higher percentage of the male wage than those who did not graduate from college. Today, those figures have changed appreciably. College graduate women are now paid a smaller percentage of the median hourly wage the men earn, while all other women are earning a higher percentage of male income. During the same period, male employment stability, which remained largely unchanged for college graduate men, and improved for most women, became notably worse for working class men...

http://www.nextnewdeal.net/marrying-kind-how-class-shapes-our-search-soul-mate


Further developments in the ghettoization of the working class... now charles murray is extending his "black people are poor because they don't get married" to the white working class...


Blame Marriage Rates on the Family Values of the 1%

Charles Murray is at it again. He burst onto the national scene in the '80s, announcing that he knew why the African-American non-marital birth rate had risen so dramatically: the government made them do it. He explained that welfare and a host of other liberal sins had weakened the moral fiber of the poor, producing disaster. It would take free market discipline to instill the right values once again. Now Murray is back with a new book and a long article in the Wall Street Journal attempting to explain income inequality among whites. His claim: working class whites have lost ground because they have abandoned a commitment to marriage, religion, and hard work. In his world, unemployment is high because those on the losing end of today's economy refuse to work, non-marital births occur because of a lack of emphasis on marriage, and the upper class can assist only by expressing its disapproval and "preaching what it practices" -- presumably investments in Ivy League education, parent-subsidized internships, and marriage between two investment bankers at 32...

Murray can't tell you what really caused the class divide in marriage because the class-based changes in families he laments closely track the class warfare of the 1%. Up through the mid-'80s, upper class and working class divorce rates rose and fell together. Starting in 1990, the lines diverged, with the divorce rates of college graduates falling back to the level of the mid-sixties (before no-fault divorce) while the divorce and non-marital birth rates of everyone else continued to rise. What really happened?

First, the income of college graduate men increased handsomely in the '90s and the incomes of the 1% increased even more through the next decade...Second, the income of all other men declined in real dollar terms (adjusted for inflation). American industry enjoyed impressive gains in productivity, but working class men received almost none of the benefits...

Third, women's employment increased in the same period and women's wages gained the most vis-à-vis men at the bottom of the income scale. As recently as 1990, women of all educational levels earned about the same percent of the hourly wages of men with the same education. To the extent the gendered "wage gap" varied, college educated women enjoyed slightly more parity with men than working class women. By 2007, the wage gap varied dramatically by class. College-educated women earned a smaller percentage of the hourly income of their male counterparts, while the wage gap between working-class men and women shrunk substantially.

Fourth, working-class male employment in the same period became less stable, while employment stability for college graduate men did not change and employment stability improved for women.

The result: a change in family norms...It is time to recognize the real cause of family change. A corporate strategy that destroys unions, raids pension funds, lays off workers, and values speculative or dishonest ventures (i.e. subprime loans) over long-term institutional development may earn six figure bonuses, but it destroys families and communities. It is the values of Murray's elite, not working class values, that should be the focus of family reform.

http://www.nextnewdeal.net/blame-marriage-rates-family-values-1