Harold Meyerson Needs to Rethink a Few Things About Families

In the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson claims that it is the Reagan 80's not the liberal 60's that has led to the decline of marriage among middle and lower class Americans. Meyerson points to this article by Blaine Hardin that appeared in the Sunday Washington Post.

Meyerson writes that the decline in marriage amoung the lower economic strata coincides with a lower rate of economic growth and higher economic insecurity since the heydey of marriage in teh 1950's. Those in the upper income echelons were better off and better able to afford marriage:

They enjoyed financial stability; they could plan for the future.

Such was not the case for working-class Americans. Over the past 35 years, the massive changes in the U.S. economy have largely condemned American workers to lives of economic insecurity. No longer can the worker count on a steady job for a single employer who provides a paycheck and health and retirement benefits, too. Over the past three decades, workers' individual annual income fluctuations have consistently increased, while their aggregate income has stagnated. In the brave new economy of outsourced jobs and short-term gigs and on-again, off-again health coverage, American workers cannot rationally plan their economic futures. And with each passing year, as their level of economic security declines, so does their entry into marriage.

Meyerson argues that the conservatism of the Reagan years made this trend a reality. But nowhere in Hardin's article or in the online Q&A session he had on the article did he actually state that the lower economic growth for lower class Americans actually caused the decline in marriage.

Meyerson no doubt got his inspiration from this exchange:

Laurel, Md.: I realize you're a reporter, not an activist, so you're not going to take a stand on this, but this illustrates to me the outright hypocrisy of the Republican party: They long for a return of the family-orientation of the post-war period (roughly 1950-65) while rejecting the economic leveling that made it possible. The fact that the period experienced a record marriage rate and baby boom is inextricably tied up with its job security. When a sensible person decides whether to start a family, "do I have reasonable expectation of steady income for 20 years" is an important datum, but today's Republican party wants a free-agent economy that discourages family formation and community roots. I strongly suspect their "pro-family" orientation is just a cover for the fact that they know their economic priorities are bad for families and communities, so "if the people had family values, poverty wouldn't cause crime" is how they escape responsibility.

Blaine Harden: Partisan politics aside, I think it is fascinating that marriage with kids became the overwhelming norm in the U.S. after World War II, during a phenomenal time of widespread prosperity -- and that marriage with kids has gone into a long downward slide that roughly coincides with the rise of income inequality. This is a subject that deserves a lot of research. There are some other factors are work, however, in the relative decline in the U.S. of households occupied by parents with kids. Most important, are demographic trends -- people living longer (so they raise kids who leave and occupy empty-nester households) and the increasing age at which people marry (from the low 20s to the high 20s).

Note carfully that Harden takes great pains to say that the long downward slide in marriage with kids coincides with the rise in income inequliaty but that it is a correlation, not a causation.

But Meyerson takes hold of the "GOP Policies are bad" meme and runs with it. Noting that the GOP favors policies that lead to poor family struggles, Meyerson writes:

Yet the very conservatives who marvel at the efficiency of our new, more mobile economy and extol the "flexibility" of our workforce decry the flexibility of the personal lives of American workers. The right-wing ideologues who have championed outsourcing, offshoring and union-busting, who have celebrated the same changes that have condemned American workers to lives of financial instability, piously lament the decline of family stability that has followed these economic changes as the night the day.

American conservatism is a house divided against itself. It applauds the radicalism of the economic changes of the past four decades -- the dismantling, say, of the American steel industry (and the job and income security that it once provided) in the cause of greater efficiency. It decries the decline of social and familial stability over that time -- the traditional, married working-class families, say, that once filled all those churches in the hills and hollows in what is now the smaller, post-working-class Pittsburgh.

But again, the premise of this argument is that economic policies are affecting the marrigage habits of people.

Perhpas another demographic trend to look at is the number of younger adults, those in their 20's and early 30's who came of age in the late 1980's who come from divorced parents. Harden hints at this being a problem, that the children of the 60's and 70's were far more likely to divorce than the parents of the 40's and 50's and those failed marriages painted a different picture for today's marrying cohorts. Meyerson does not ascribe any credence, indeed does not even mention, that failed marriages of people who grew up in the 60's could be having an echo effect now.

If a young couple, currently cohabitating, sees that their parents struggled and quit their marriage, there is little incentive for them to atempt a marriage, despite the strong relationship and financial benefits of marriage. People in the 1980's were not getting divorced because of Reagan's economic policies, there were getting divorced because in the 1980's it was acceptable to do so. Divorce was for people who were unhappy or wanted something else other than marriage and it didn't matter one whit whether their children were impacted. Indeed the selfishness of children of teh 60's, who are still quite selfish, is probably greater predictor of whether their own children will marry or not.

Harden, to his credit notes that much more study should be done on this subject and I agree. Meyerson just wants to blame Reagan and the GOP, maybe he would do better to take a little harder look at his inspiration.