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You’re not the only one spending fewer summer weekends watching other people get married—but don’t worry, the weddings you’re still invited to might feel a little more special these days.
Fewer Americans are getting married, and the ones who still are have scaled back their weddings. Their nuptials are becoming smaller, though not necessarily cheaper, affairs.
Many couples are waiting longer and longer to schedule their weddings. In 2015, the median first-time American bride was almost 28 years old and the median groom almost 30, according to the most recent data available from the Census Bureau. (Ten years earlier, the typical bride was 25.5, the typical groom 27.)
The U.S. marriage rate—the number of new marriages per 1,000 people—has been falling for decades. It fell especially fast during the recession, in 2008 and 2009, but there’s little evidence that people started getting married again even as the economy recovered. And research firm IbisWorld predicts the marriage rate will keep falling over the next five years.
From a global perspective, that wouldn’t be a surprise. The U.S. marriage rate would need to fall by about a third to reach the marriage rates in other developed countries. The most recent data show a U.S. marriage rate of 6.9, compared with an average rate of 4.6 for countries in the European Union.
Are weaker economics the cause, or has marriage gone out of fashion?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Magic Oddball on Monday July 31 2017, @01:31PM (1 child)
Factually speaking:
The rich tend to stay rich in large part because they hire top-notch accountants/lawyers/etc. to invest & manage their finances for them, and as a result get more than enough money from the investments than they need to live even an extravagant lifestyle — the vast majority show no sign of being more than bog-average in terms of intellect.
The poor (which includes me) tend to stay poor for several reasons. A big one is the fact that the cost of living has increased rapidly over the past 50 years while wages have stagnated or decreased — the federal minimum wage, for example, hit its peak way back in 1968. Another is that when you've got very little money to spend, you can't save by buying in bulk and have to buy cheap low-quality/secondhand items that wear out faster; with a low income, the relatively small amount you can manage to save each month gets wiped out by the need to repair/replace things or handle other emergencies.
If you become disabled or unemployed for too long (which can happen to almost anyone), you'll learn that fun little reality, too.
Schools are also a problem. In poverty-stricken areas, good students are likely to have classes with kids who barely understand English, have serious behavioral problems due to mental health issues, or who are otherwise disruptive (including due to undiagnosed learning disabilities), and the teachers are primarily either inexperienced or not good enough to get jobs in other schools — so even with decent funding, the quality of the classes is abysmal. Most of the kids don't have breakfast before school and their lunch/dinner isn't particularly nutritious, so they're hampered by fatigue. In inner cities, most of the students have clearly-diagnosable PTSD from the gang violence in their neighborhoods, so they're additionally distracted & not sleeping well.
You can be a bright, driven kid, but after seeing several other kids killed by stray bullets, not sleeping well, not getting enough nutrition, then going to school in a classroom where the lessons are constantly interrupted to translate for the non-English kids & tell the troublemakers to behave themselves, you're likely to have If you don't, there's the issue of the school not having any of the honors or advanced-placement classes recommended to qualify for grants or scholarships or get into a really good university...
Then there's reproduction. First problem, of course, is that public schools in religiously conservative areas limit 'sex ed' to telling the kids to never have sex, not how to avoid getting pregnant when they eventually do. The kids end up not knowing how to put on a condom properly or how to take birth control pills so they'll work, and pick up dumb myths about the whole mess from their peers.
But let's assume the poor person is a non-parent. Condoms are expensive at a low income (plus some men won't wear them), so let's assume the woman is taking birth control pills. She'll have to co-pay for birth control pills, co-pay to see the gynecologist every year or two, plus they have to use one of her few unpaid sick days off for the appointment. Of course, if she has no sick days, she can't go to the appointment (thus no pills), and if the insurance doesn't cover BCP then she's stuck covering the full cost. If the pill fails and she gets pregnant anyway (which does happen), she'll now need an abortion: if the insurance doesn't cover it, that's at least another $500 she might not have, she'll need to take at least one day off work, and if she's in the South she may need to travel quite a ways to reach a place that offers abortions — which means risking losing her job, assuming she can scrape together the money for travel.
In the worst poverty-stricken areas, the kids see the adults working their asses off without ever getting ahead regardless of whether they have kids or not, so unless they're among the brightest & most driven students who actually escape to college, they see having sex & babies as the one way to get something "good" in their lives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 01 2017, @02:02PM
Annnnd....this is why we need more boots on the ground warfare. Instead of kids, you could get a medal of honor! or at least a purple heart.
Of course, the military pushes you to have more kids with very sizeable raises both for marriage and each future rifle carrier you manufacture, so we might really need to ensure high casualty battles to offset this whole thing. WWI seemed to be the style that was best suited for managing population growth; after all, it resulted in the foundation of the French Foreign Legion.
Time to start digging trenches.