> 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.