The 50% divorce rate stat is a myth, so why won’t it die?
qz.com
qz.com
People correctly sense that marriage is a deeply wounded institution in the west, particularly for the lower (and, increasingly, middle) classes.
[1] - http://www.prb.org/images10/usyoungadultmarriage.gif
[2] - http://dalrock.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/ny-times-happy-talk-...
[3] - http://www.bgsu.edu/content/dam/BGSU/college-of-arts-and-sci...
Seriously, I know the holidays are tough but my drive to and from work the local stations are all covered with divorce lawyer ads.
That's pop psychology. Plus assumes the belief is some myth...
The divorce rate IS close to that number. Whether it's 50% or 45% doesn't matter much, as another poster said, it's not like its 5% or 15%. From Wikipedia:
In 2002 (latest survey data as of 2012), 29% of first marriages among women aged 15–44 were disrupted (ended in separation, divorce or annulment) within 10 years.
Using 1995 data, National Survey of Family Growth forecast in 2002 a 43% chance that first marriages among women aged 15–44 would be disrupted within 15 years. More recently, having spoken with academics and National Survey of Family Growth representatives, PolitiFact.com estimated in 2012 that the lifelong probability of a marriage ending in divorce is 40%–50%.
The stat that people really care about is, if I get married to my partner, what's the divorce rate of people similar to me.
If you're reading HN and are thinking about marriage, it's quite likely that most or even all of the following apply to you. All of which have shown indications that they lower the divorce rate. The first three alone drop the divorce rate below 25%.
- getting married later then 1980 - first marriage for both - both older than 30 - both have college degrees - both make wages > $60k, < $1M - similar ages - man makes more $ than woman - getting married later than 1990 - neither goes through an extended period of involuntary unemployment - neither goes to jail
If, on the other hand, you want to know what percentage of marriages result in divorces, then you probably want to implement some very suspect social policies and probably should be stopped. Not certainly, but probably.
Who are those people? I (and those the article mentions talking about the US in general) care about the general numbers. Not how to use the numbers to gauze my own wedding's future.
He doesn't debunk much, if anything at all. He has a predetermined conclusion and he hacks his way to reach it.
Instead of quoting statistics and measurements, he quotes a NYT article (that doesn't back him up as much as he think) and does the equivalent of rigorous hand waiving with nebulous arguments.
Instead, we need a richer representation, like an age pyramid [1]. Plot on a histogram the number of divorcees for each year they got married. Of course there is going to be few divorces for those married this year, and a lot more for those married 50 years ago.
Then you can compare the shapes of the histogram over time or between regions. And that can yield insight on the matter.
Divorces/Marriages in a given year is worthless.
Divorces (of people married in 1970) / Marriages (of people married in 1970) gives you a number for that "cohort" but isn't exactly true - there are many years left for them to divorce, and that is generations ago.
Personally I'd say it would be useful to look at divorce rates and marriage rates in terms of overall population and growth and argue whether
(Divorces / total people married) (Marriages / total people unmarried)
Counting the marriages or the divorces is a mistake. You need to count the people over time, but also not consider people who never get married.
What's wrong with "percentage of marriages that end in divorce"?
My start-up is a marketplace that connects coaches and athletes, so we wanted KPI's like "What % of clients rebook their coach?".
But the issue there is the same as marriage stats: You can't just do a simple (# of rebookings / # of bookings), because that will get skewed if, say, are marketing push generates a ton of new bookings.
So then you think, "okay, the denominator should be first-time bookings and the numerator should be how many of those have a later re-booking?" But then you need to give that a chance to happen, because what if someone comes back a year or two later to re-book? Conversely, recent bookings won't have had a chance for the rebooking to happen, so again a wave of brand new bookings will skew the number unfairly.
Ultimately, I think we settled on the "right" decision: cap the time frame, and frame it not as a "rebooking rate" but a "1 month rebooking rate": i.e., "what percentage of new bookings have a re-booking within 1 month?" That one will always generate a correct number, but the disadvantage is your cohort is at least one month old.
So, the same issue applies here with divorce. The only accurate number you can calculate is something like "What is the 20-year divorce rate?" But then you're looking at marriages that occurred a generation ago, so it's not very predictive of marriages that just happened today.
It doesn't make sense to exclude some marriages from something and calling it the overall divorce rate, even if there are cases where the most interesting divorce rate isn't the overall rate.
Whether you were married once and divorced once or married 6 times and divorced 6 times, all the times should be counted.
The important factor is marriages/divorces not people/divorces.
And if some people have some "social dicease" that makes them marry and divorce more than others, I'd expect them to be outliers and statistical noise, compared to people that legitimate try to make it work and fail.
So we don't need some with 'negative number of divorces' to balance it, we just have some error bars that don't take away from the average numbers.
That's it if we did want to exclude those people in the first place. But why? A marriage is a marriage. If their 3rd marriage cannot hold, it's not that different than someone marrying once and divorcing.
If 90% of the population marry once and never divorce but the remaining 10% marry and then divorce 5 times this means that the divorce rate is 36%.
The article mentions that divorce rate is usually quoted to support some political platform rather than for it's own sake. For example a politician talking about the breakdown of the nuclear family. If you want to measure how divorce affects nuclear families then you should include only marriages that produced offspring. You should probably also exclude divorces that happened after the children left home. You might get a very different stat.
The very final actual number no.
But as with most things in life we can have a sense (based on what you know and see around us in society) of it's scale.
In this case, I don't think "percentage of people with multiple marriages" is such a difficult and exotic subject to consider that our guesses will be that far off them mark.
>If 90% of the population marry once and never divorce but the remaining 10% marry and then divorce 5 times this means that the divorce rate is 36%.
That's only if the calculation is based on naive average. You can get percentiles, medians, etc.
"90% of the population marry once and never divorce" is already a valid metric.
It mentions numbers from 16 percent (those married between 1990 and 1994) to 41% (men who were then between the ages of 50 to 59 [in 2001]). They agree that the divorce rate has been declining, particularly among college grads.
If you dig into it, most of the divorces are people 50-59 who married when the marriage rate was much higher.
The marriage rate has gone down over time because more people are choosing not to marry.
You can think of it as either a depressed marriage rate or an inflated divorce rate, but large number of people getting divorced who were married 30 years ago is unrelated to the number of people being married today.
Article not worth reading
In itself it would not be too bad, this is how we learn how things work, but add a media looking for sensation and political interests and this whole area of research becomes as scientific as astrology.
The physical basis of the theory is easy to understand, and was discovered in the 19th century: the atmosphere is obviously a heat reservoir, so what is trapping the heat? The answer is that certain atmospheric gases absorb and re-emit infrared light.
The obvious hypothesis is that if you increase the amount of those atmospheric gases, you'll trap more heat--just like building a taller dam will trap more water in a reservoir. This hypothesis was first proposed at the end of the 19th century. And today, that is indeed what a wide variety of measurements are showing: the gases are going up, and so is the temperature.
The hard part is predicting what exactly will change in a given location. Will New York get warmer or colder? Will Seattle get drier or wetter? Will Tokyo see more of the same storms, or fewer stronger storms? These are the questions that computerized GCMs will help us answer.
But we know that something is going to change. You can't dump more energy into a complex system (the climate, in this case) and expect it to keep working exactly the same way.
That obviously does not say the likelihood of an individual marriage succeeding given that some people marry more than once.
The article doesn't claim any sources for the "overestimation" either -- or attempts to give any more accurate number.
It's mostly a rehash of the linked NYT article that actually points out rates around 38-45% (so pretty damn close to 50%).