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.
Women are divorcing for unbiblical reasons.
Women who claim to be Christian shouldnt be going to the secular courts.
You rtfm.
In 1940 you graduated high school, got a job got married, Now you graduate college at 28 (or longer) and live in mom's basement, and play video games.
Mrs WBill did this. Worked part-time a couple of evenings a week - more to get out of the house, than to make any money - but more-or-less dropped out of the workforce to raise WBill Jr.
IMO, it's the smartest decision that we made. I'm more than a little jealous, I missed out on a bunch of important kid stuff. But, someone needs to keep the bills paid, too.
However - the amount of scorn and derision that she received from people for making this choice.... Former co-workers and friends, especially .... amazed even a jaded guy like me. "How could you stay at home while women are out there competing in the..." blah blah blah, you get the idea, take whatever the latest feminist mantra is and spin it up. Even her own MOTHER gave her some static - "Are you sure that you'll be happy and satisfied, dear? Really Sure? Positive?" That really blew me away.
Fortunately, my lovely wife has the self confidence to tell them all to go to hell. :-) One of the myriad of reasons why I married her.
I figure that it's mostly guilt. My lovely wife has everything that they want, they dislike her for it, and want to drag her down to their level. Crabs in a pot, all of them.
And, I never understood why anyone would need to work too darned much in order to be "happy and satisfied". I've never said, "Jeez, I just need to spend more time at the office, and away from my family!"
My son will be graduating from a Christian college next month. Lots of his friends have already married or are engaged. Pretty surprising they are getting married so young. I’m guessing that they have made the choice of abstinence until marriage, and that is part of it.
I have a feeling that the wonderful girl that he is dating will be asked the question within the year. Of course they aren’t all like that - the school was just in the news as the student council wants to make all the bathrooms gender free or something!
>>You rtfm.
Illogical much?
Women divorcing and millennial’s extramarital/hedonistic lifestyle are both symptomatic of a culture that worships itself in defiance of the health code provided by the creator of Natural Law.
Read Romans chapter 1.
All part of the due penalty for not RTFM.
Christ didn’t tell anyone to enter into the modern American legal contract known as marriage. He didn’t tell anyone to get a license from the state.
Stand up with a woman you love on front of a holy man. Mumble promises, be faithful. Love her. Have kids. But skip the American legalism known as marriage.
I can only speak for myself but as a 29 year old female, I want nothing more than to get married and raise a family. That being said I will not compromise my beliefs to rush the process. If he isn’t a Christian I’m not interested. The Bible says to not be unequally yoked, and regardless of societal norms and this age of tolerance, I cannot, in good conscience, sacrifice my convictions in the name of rushing to meet my own desires.
Not all of us suck, but the number of Bible believing Christian men seems to be dwindling. That or they’re already taken.
Yes, we will need lots of cats and lots of nursing homes. Being alone works okay when you are under 65 and reasonably healthy. It is very hard when you are old and sick.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3551216/posts
The above link is on the importance of mom’s at home raising the kids. I’ll be showing it to my wife as well.
Who raised them?
“Abstinence or Marriage.
That’s the choice.”
I guess that’s just gonna be another one of the many sins ive been forgiven for.
>>I’m guessing that they have made the choice of abstinence until marriage, and that is part of it.
A healthy choice in the context of STDs that will kill you.
Must’ve had healthy parents, or something.
I know that reliable conclusions drawn from reality shows like ‘The Bachelor may be a bit of a snipe hunt but there some wisdom to be gleaned not from the fame-hungry on the show but from the many observers of the show, most of them female and, yes, many of them on Twitter or other online forums.
As others have noted on this thread, militant feminism, soft parenting and the self-esteem culture are mixers for a kind of social hemlock. Girls are convinced that 90% of the males out there aren’t good enough for them and that they shouldn’t have to compete for the remaining 10%. They are...special, gorgeous, pretty, intelligent, independent...according to them of course.
And so we have multiple generations of females who have either missed out entirely on normal rituals of courtship passing judgment on those who engage in those same rituals. We have multiple generations of females who lack a track of record of relationships but still feel authorized to dictate the where/why/how/when of others’ relationships.
The reality (no pun intended) is that these are socially stunted cowards who obey their training and demand that society ignore appearance as a criterion for attractiveness...then spend untold, mostly clandestine, hours looking at and critiquing both males and females based strictly on appearance (ie selfies).
To say this is a recipe for confusion is an understatement but it’s much more sinister than that. It is a recipe for loneliness and a superiority complex ie ‘you’re not good enough for me.’ Granted, such a defense mechanism seems to have always been part of the young female psyche but now they are saying it even BEFORE they meet a young man.
Once again, the heterosexual female in search of a mate and a family has been absolutely sold a bill of goods by a cadre of radical lesbians and old maids.
“All part of the due penalty for not RTFM”
Well holy man, what does RTFM mean? What does the bible say about profane language?
That’s not much of a story. Now if they were not REPRODUCING, that would be a story!
Because those parents will be beholden to big government for support in bringing those children up. Translates to votes and security (for the government.)
I will be disappointed if any of my children fail to get married, and I strongly encouraged them to start looking at about age 20 with an eye to a lifelong marriage. None will find the perfect man/woman for them, but they should be able to find someone who aspires to be the perfect marriage partner for them . . . if they also aspire to that status for their partners.
Marry at age 30-plus, and your odds of finding someone who values marriage and wants children go way down. Those who want those things are already married. Marry at age 18, and you have to get lucky to notice the right reasons with hormones raging. In between, perhaps from age 19-29, is the best time to look.
You can add unemployment to that list.
>>I guess that’s just gonna be another one of the
>>many sins ive been forgiven for.
What’s the difference between forgiveness of sin in the body of Christ, His bride which is the Church — and permission to sin manufactured by those operating in the spirit of anti-Christ who covet and seek to defile the bride of Christ?
Read The Field Manual.
What do you think if means?
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