Comment by ergl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergl | Hacker News Reader

As someone from Europe, I can't understand the inability of mainstream US culture and media to disentangle marriage from long term stable relationships. Take this paragraph from the article:

> More women are deciding to have children and also remain single. Almost half of all babies born in the U.S. were born to unmarried women in 2019, a dramatic increase since 1960, when only 5% of births were to unmarried mothers. And it's not because of divorce; today's unpartnered mothers are also more likely to have never been married.

They go from "single" to "unmarried" back to "unpartnered" without batting an eye. The statistics they cite are about marriage yet they are generalized to all single women. It doesn't make sense.

At least the author of the book is aware of this:

> In the U.S., she says, unmarried adults who decide to live together do it for a much shorter duration than in Europe. [...] "If you just look in the data, marriage is what delivers kids a stable, long-term, two-parent household in this country."

In my opinion looking into what's driving that difference between couples in the US and Europe would be worth a discussion on its own.

"In my opinion looking into what's driving that difference between couples in the US and Europe would be worth a discussion on its own."

The problem is especially acute in the underclass, and American underclass differs a lot from European underclass.

For example, a lot of the Western European poor are Muslims (in countries that keep the relevant statistics, Muslim immigrants and their descendants tend to score below average on income and educational outcomes), who are nevertheless socially very conservative and don't tend to have kids out of wedlock. Having kids out of wedlock is much more typical among secular Europeans, including highly educated ones.

In the US, the trend leaders when it comes to having kids out of wedlock are the poorest parts of the population, mostly blacks, where "unmarried" and "unpartnered" tend to go hand-in-hand.

no knowledge about this topic: Arent Black people also religious?

‘It depends’ - if they are, looks like they’d be ‘historically black Protestant’, or oddly ‘jehovahs witness’.

Otherwise no - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...

> In the US, the trend leaders when it comes to having kids out of wedlock are the poorest parts of the population, mostly blacks, where "unmarried" and "unpartnered" tend to go hand-in-hand.

I know you’re talking about “trend leaders”. But you must have forgotten about Native Americans and Latinos. Native Americans and black people tend to have children out of wedlock at about the same rate. Latinos have children out of wedlock at a high but lower rate. But there are more Latinos in the United States than there are black people, so there’s actually more Latino children born out of wedlock. And Latinos have the highest birth rate too.

Same goes for white people in the United States. If the rate for black people is about 70% and the rate for white people is about 30%, there are still hundreds of thousands more white children born out of wedlock than black children each year in the United States.

(Sorry, the whole “trend leader” thing rubs me the wrong. It’s like when people talk about welfare recipients based on race. Someone always says “X percentage of black people are on welfare, tsk.” But then when you look at the numbers, Native Americans have the higher percentage within their own race. But again, most welfare recipients are white so there are literally hundreds of thousands more white people on welfare than black people lol. Why doesn’t that fact get a “tsk”?)

Someone replied to you saying/asking “aren’t black people religious”. Your “mostly black” comment limited the discussion. Imagine if you had said “mostly Latinos” instead. There could have been a discussion about Catholicism. There could have been something more, something else at least.

> As someone from Europe, I can't understand the inability of mainstream US culture and media to disentangle marriage from long term stable relationships.

In the US, the category of non-marriage stable long term relationships is very small. The veneer of christian morality still exists in America, even if the substance has rotted away. So anyone who is in a stable long term relationship tends to just go ahead and paper things up. Even people in unstable relationships tend to just get married and have three or four divorces.

You basically described Italy.

Unmarried people who got children then get married on paper just because of Christian morality, especially in the South

There’s a huge amount of religious effort pushing the conflation of the two, and that’s a very powerful combination with America’s healthcare & retirement system. If you’re in a stable relationship, marriage saves many thousands of dollars per year and gives you privileged legal status for many important life events (childbirth/adoption, childcare, medical situations, retirement and end of life care).

That confuses simple analysis because most positive outcomes will strongly correlate marriage, and any researcher who has biases for whatever reason is probably not going to adequately correct for that.

To be fair, the author may provide a discussion of this in the book. The NPR reporter was just summarizing what they thought was important.

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