Promoting Marriage Has Failed and Is Unnecessary to Cut Poverty (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Promoting Marriage Has Failed and Is Unnecessary to Cut Poverty (2015)

demos.org

29 pointscokernel39 comments

> Once you understand how this marriage anti-poverty story works, two things should immediately occur to you. First, it's not marriage that's cutting poverty here. It's the recombination of income. If you marry someone who does not add extra income to your family, that will do nothing to reduce your chance of poverty and, because your family is now bigger, it could even drag your family into poverty. Adding someone to a resource pod only reduces that pod's chance of poverty where, as a result of the addition, the increase in the pod's income is greater than the increase in the pod's poverty line. Sometimes marriages accomplish this, sometimes they do not.

This is missing the point. The argument is not that being married increases your average income, it's that pooling risks (like that of losing one or other of your jobs) reduces them, that it increases the ability to provide childcare (which is better measured in hours than dollars, so income isn't really the point), and perhaps that it allows certain efficiencies in housing, transport etc. And I guess if you want to look at the dark side then the final argument is that it ensures parents are in a fixed, stable relationship, reducing the likelihood of endangering their children through their dating behaviour.

There's also a correlational issue: do people - with the maturity and fortitude to stay committed to a lifelong relationship and forestall the temporary (or even not so temporary) urge to leave someone out of boredom, irritation, and desire to reclaim independence - tend to succeed in education and the workforce by exercising those same character traits? Even the accurate recognition and prioritization of risk mitigation connotes similar traits.

Remember the unfortunate murder of the Google exec by his escort?

Anecdotal counterpoint:

http://heavy.com/tech/2014/07/forrest-timothy-hayes-google-a...

I apologize for referencing this, but your comment reminded me of this horrific situation.

Overdosed on heroin on his private yacht with a hooker next to him, probably one of the better ways to go.

Some people at the margins are gifted, but hopelessly self-destructive. The point I'm making is, in an age where being non-married well into adulthood and even as a parent is accepted (even incentivized!), consciously choosing to get and stay married may be a proxy for other successful characteristics, which the middle of the bell-curve could afford not to have when social pressures toward the stable marriages was stronger.

The rise in housing prices, particularly in neighbourhoods with access to a decent public school, has totally wiped out any advantage you might have gained by pooling risks. What once was a 1-income household with a single point of failure is now a 2-income household where neither person can afford to lose their job!

I imagine you probably live somewhere where the cost of living is significantly higher than the rest of the country. I left the Washington DC Metro area which is exactly as you describe and moved to Greenville, SC. My wife has been able to be a stay at home mom here and we get access to a decent education for our daughter. Any difference in quality of education can be made up by the parents imo.

Leaving an area which required 2 parents to work has been one of the greatest things I've ever done and I won't go back. We are significantly happier without that pressure.

It doesn't have to be the entire cost of living, just the cost of housing.

In Upstate NY there are farms everywhere so food is cheap. The upside to everything being gray and snowy all the time is that water is basically free. And as for other services like telcos and electricity, we pay around the same as the rest of the country.

But then comes rent.

It is ridiculous to think that unless you live waaaaaayyy out in the sticks there's no chance you are gonna afford a mortgage down payment anytime soon after graduating college (forget high school), and even as a professional with a professional partner the idea of buying a house is still years away. If we can't own a house we can't build equity. We can't use the property as collateral if we need a loan. It all goes back to housing, and right here, it sucks.

What upstate NY are you talking about?

I've looked into buying a house up there and it looks incredibly cheap.

Ithaca, where income-to-housing costs rival San Francisco.

Like I said, it's fine if you want to live in the boonies, but that also means you're an hour away from anything resembling civilization.

Ithaca is also a college town (Cornell) so it's not quite a fair comparison to most rural areas.

One major difference in the North East is that many areas have very high property taxes. It isn't uncommon to find similar property taxes to be a tenth of those values in the South.

Bingo. Absolutely. Couldn't be stated enough.

My brother goes to college in North Carolina. Demographically it is very similar: medium sized cities with rural stretched in between. Only real difference is weather and taxes. Can't do anything about the weather...

I agree strongly with this. The opportunities the above scenario provides & the reduction in stress is worth more than most average income jobs provide.

My wife and I have been looking at cost of living options in a few areas such as the northern part of Virginia. Here in SC, we both work (no kids) and are able to save up. In Virginia we would be barely scraping by at the same income level. My house in SC is worth <$150k. That would literally purchase a double-wide trailer outside of Charlottesville.

Hey Skiningham!

So a configuration that was once RAID 1 is now RAID 0.

excluding write performance

This article basically says How to stop poverty? Give people money.

Yah, that works, but it's better to stop poverty by giving people the tools/opportunity/social environment so that they won't be in poverty in the first place.

That's the idea of promoting marriage, and this article justs seems completely oblivious.

Giving people money to get out of poverty should be short term help, not the long term end goal.

Tools, opportunity, and a good social environment are largely a function of money, whether purchased via government programs or bought by individuals themselves with the cash given by the government (I.e basic income, EITC). Marriage alone without that money isn't going to avail those bootstrapping goods to people when they don't have them to begin with.

> are largely a function of money

Lots and lots of immigrants beg to differ. I will grant that you do need at least a good community, but you don't need money to get ahead.

That's why I added "social environment" - you need a community who help each other much more than you need money.

Membership in a good community is itself a form of social capital that you can even put an monetary valuation on (compared to not having a good community). Many immigrants arrive with that form of capital intact, and admission to such communities is often gated by cultural barriers.

Further, educated immigrants, while they don't start in their adoptive country with much money, arrive with a lot of educational capital, which someone invested in before they arrived. They arrive with the "tools and opportunity" built in.

For less educated immigrants, and native-born poor, assuming a functional community exists (which is not a given for either), it's members might be able to scrape together proceeds gained by expending their physical capital in marginal labor, and share resources among themselves (housing, childcare, etc.).

But depending on their circumstances, that may not be enough to move their members out of poverty, as the surplus of their labor may not be enough to pay for, in your words, the "tools and opportunity" needed to escape poverty.

Sometimes the requirements for the community's survival can actually hinder the acquisition of tools for advancement, i.e. a 16 year old has to take a menial job to help support the extended family instead of staying in school.

Encouraging marriage is totally the wrong approach anyway. Government should just stop discouraging it.

They encourage marriage to increase population growth.. not because they like married couples.

I don't understand this report. You usually marry because you want to be with someone, not because it's efficient. Approaching it from a purely mathematical perspective assumes that randomly grouping people is equal to marrying someone.

You usually marry because you want to be with someone, not because it's efficient.

I don't know. You decide to live with someone, share your life with them and and possibly have children with because you want to be with them. Your decision to actually marry them is, in my experience, often driven by some additional external force.

It's just more convenient to have a marriage certificate than to be common law, legally and otherwise. There are built in protections for you, your spouse and children. I'm not saying you need to do it but it one less hassle to deal with in your day to day lives.

That's my point. My wife and I might still have gotten married eventually anyway, but the external legal protections where a very strong point in the pro column.

Or you can do like me: Redefine marriage as "living together in a committed relationship". The piece of paper is irrelevant, the way the people live is what matters.

Depends where you live. In many places the piece of paper is very relevant when it comes to things like inheritance and child custody. That was one of the reasons my wife and I got married after living together for 8 years and having a kid.

He's arguing against those who have tried to make advancement of marriage part of public policy as an anti-poverty measure.

The math stuff is just to prove that, as a policy measure, it's nonsense.

The most striking line is "US married-parent child poverty is so high that it's higher than the child poverty rate in single-mother families in the low-poverty Nordics".

The most striking thing to me wasn't a line, it was a graph. It showed that single-mother child poverty rates were five times married-parent child poverty rates.

So, yeah, marriage actually does seem to help with poverty, quite dramatically so. But the article didn't talk much about that graph, because it kind of ruins their thesis.

Note well: I am not claiming that pushing people to marry will protect them (or their children) against poverty. Correlation is not causation. But there's something connecting marriage and non-poverty, no matter how much the article tries to tap-dance around it.

It could equally well be that marriage is an unaffordable luxury.

Promoting marriage? All I've see is a massive increase in the risk of marrying, especially as a man.

Could you please elaborate? Are you referring to alimony, child support, etc?

I'm sure that's what he's referring too.

Also the massive increase in hypergamy thanks to the commodification of dating.

You're not exempt from alimony or child support because you weren't married.

Combined with a bias in family courts, an acceptance of alternate families (so a reduction in social costs of not marrying), and a rise in the acceptance of divorce. Why marry when you can cohabitate in a state without common law marriage. Having kids is still a challenge because if the couple splits custody still has to be decided, but there are a few options for that as well.

Can you explain this? Most of the other responses seem to indicate a transfer of risk from the wife to the husband (e.g who pays for the children after a divorce) but you specify a massive increase in risk that applies to both parties. So what are you referring to?

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