Posted on 05/09/2017 11:20:14 AM PDT by BJ1
Last year I presented a paper called "Will Millennials Ever Get Married?" at SciPy 2015. You can see video of the talk and download the paper here.
I used data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) to estimate the age at first marriage for women in the U.S., broken down by decade of birth. I found evidence that women born in the 1980s and 90s were getting married later than previous cohorts, and I generated projections that suggest they are on track to stay unmarried at substantially higher rates.
Yesterday the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) released a new batch of data from surveys conducted in 2013-2015. I downloaded it and updated my analysis. Also, for the first time, I apply the analysis to the data from male respondents.
Women Based on a sample of 58488 women in the U.S., here are survival curves that estimate the fraction who have never been married for each birth group (women born in the 1940s, 50s, etc) at each age.
For example, the top line represents women born in the 1990s. At age 15, none of them were married; at age 24, 81% of them are still unmarried. (The survey data runs up to 2015, so the oldest respondents in this group were interviewed at age 25, but the last year contains only partial data, so the survival curve is cut off at age 24).
For women born in the 1980s, the curve goes up to age 34, at which point about 39% of them had never been married.
Two patterns are visible in this figure. Women in each successive cohort are getting married later, and a larger fraction are never getting married at all.
By making some simple projections, we can estimate the magnitude of these effects separately. I explain the methodology in the paper. The following figure shows the survival curves from the previous figure as well as projections shown in gray
These results suggest that women born in the 1980s and 1990s are not just getting married later; they are on pace to stay unmarried at rates substantially higher than previous cohorts. In particular, women born in the 1980s seem to have leveled off; very few of them have been married between ages 30 and 34. For women born in the 1990s, it is too early to tell whether they have started to level off.
The following figure summarizes these results by taking vertical slices through the survival curves at ages 23, 33 and 43.
In this figure the x-axis is birth cohort and the y-axis is the fraction who have never married.
1) The top line shows that the fraction of women never married by age 23 has increased from 25% for women born in the 40s to 81% for women born in the 90s.
2) The fraction of women unmarried at age 33 has increased from 9% for women born in the 40s to 38% for women born in the 80s, and is projected to be 47% for women born in the 90s.
3) The fraction of women unmarried at age 43 has increased from 8% for women born in the 40s to 17% for women born in the 70s, and is projected to be 36% for women born in the 1990s.
These projections are based on simple assumptions, so we should not treat them as precise predictions, but they are not as naive as a simple straight-line extrapolations of past trends.
Men The results for men are similar but less extreme. Here are the estimated survival curves based on a sample of 24652 men in the U.S. The gray areas show 90% confidence intervals for the estimates due to sampling error.
1) At age 23, the fraction of men who have never married has increased from 66% for men born in the 50s to 88% for men born in the 90s.
2) At age 33, the fraction of unmarried men has increased from 27% to 44%, and is projected to go to 50%.
3) At age 43, the fraction of unmarried men is almost unchanged for men born in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but is projected to increase to 30% for men born in the 1990s.
Methodology The NSFG is intended to be representative of the adult U.S. population, but it uses stratified sampling to systematically oversample certain subpopulations, including teenagers and racial minorities. My analysis takes this design into account (by weighted resampling) to generate results that are representative of the population.
The survival curves are computed by Kaplan-Meier estimation, with confidence intervals computed by resampling. Missing values are filled by random choice from valid values, so the confidence intervals represent variability due to missing values as well as sampling.
To generate projections, we might consider two factors:
1) If people in the last two cohorts are postponing marriage, we might expect their marriage rates to increase or decrease more slowly.
2) If we extrapolate the trends, we might expect marriage rates to continue to fall or fall faster.
I used an alternative between these extremes: I assume that the hazard function from the previous generation will apply to the next. This takes into account the possibility of delayed marriage (since there are more unmarried people "at risk" in the projections), but it also assumes a degree of regression to past norms. In that sense, the projections are probably conservative; that is, they probably underestimate how different the last two cohorts will be from their predecessors.
Some of that is due to the lowered earning potential of Millennial males compared to previous generations, thanks to globalization and more women competing with them for careers.
Paul was neutral at best, 1 Corinthians 7:8-9.
When the millennial women do get married they like the big expensive weddings at resort destinations. It cost the guests thousands of dollars to attend, not to mention the cost of the wedding. A few years later they get divorced, but she had her big day.
>>It appears that women born in 1980 are going to have a 30% of chance of never being married. And women born in 1990 much higher.
>>Very interesting in that 75% of women were married by age 23 who were born in 1940, compared with 19% born in 1990.
We’re gonna need cats.. lots of cats... to keep up with demand.
Don't get me wrong -- speaking as a millennial myself, a lot of millennials just suck. But not all the blame can be placed on them.
...cheaper and easier to stay sat NGOs and have the occasional girlfriend....
Not biblical, though.
Two of my kids are married now. One at 18 one at 19. If you are keeping Gods law you are motivated.
>>> Well ...
A mother who grew up being taught that KILLING your kids is a sacred right (or rite) might consider doing that.<<<
I think women have more choice than ever before. And it is having a negative effect on happiness. As any choice you make closes the door on other paths your life could have taken. And then you start to think the choice you made to settle down and have kids isn’t the good one: Because you’re not happy and fulfilled.
IMHO women would be more happy as a group if they were simply expected to get married, keep a home and raise kids. I see women, an ex-wife up close and personal too, try to do it all. It’s exhausting and you can’t do it all well. But these women are raised to believe otherwise. And that sets them up for dissatisfaction. Just my humble opinion as a male chauvinist ;)
For more than a few women that I know, "Compromise" means "I do what I want, when I want, and as often as I want". Any disagreement makes you a misogynist. I try and avoid them like the plague.
Unsurprisingly, many of them are single. "No men want me, what's wrong with all of them?". Those that are married are married to men who are a nebbish, or in a few cases, never at home - travelling for work, etc.
Anyone here on FR with a successful marriage knows that it's a ton of hard work, and constant compromise on both sides. And, in my particular case, the most worthwhile thing that I've done other than raising WBill Jr.
Paul didn’t define Natural Law.
He sounds like a Muzzie.
“You mean other than Christ’s directions to do so?”
Christ never ordered us to get married.
“The list goes on...”
Add environmentalism, staying in college longer, college loans.
In the US 40% of kids are born out of wedlock, in Israel and Japan it is 5%. It seems like the US government prefers unmarried people raising children.
Millennials: The Worst Generation. They are pathetic and apathetic.
Today’s culture teachers teach women hypergamy is aok! So “just being” and not lifting a finger is just fine in a relationship; and if he does not like it - hes a misogynist, narcissist, whatever. Its really bad advice.
Abstinence or Marriage.
That’s the choice.
This is part of it. Yes.
The other part is that the majority under 30 are still living with parents.
Red Pill awareness.
“Yeah I think the young guys are starting to mock the “man up” advice.”
They’re immune to it by now. It was the first tactic tried by the feminists when men went on “marriage strike” (shaming). It won’t work any better coming from older men than it will coming from women.
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