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.
Very interesting in that 75% of women were married by age 23 who were born in 1940, compared with 19% born in 1990.
Gosh I have a hard time caring about millennials at all.
Why would any man want to get married with the way the courts screw them over in divorce?
My 29 year old Nephew is getting married this year. Another next year and another LAST year.
The panicking is unwarranted as people get married later.
Quite odd that you don’t care about an entire generation of Americas.
But it’s a free country. :)
Of course not. Half our parents got divorced or we got to see the results of what happened to our friends. Or our fathers.
And we were all like, screw that. Might as well just not do it in the first place.
Fortunately.
“Quite odd that you don’t care about an entire generation of Americas.”
Odd that you think it’s odd.
With the high rate of divorce, and men being taken to the cleaners by their ex-wives, who in their right mind WOULD WANT to get married???
It’s cheaper and easier to stay single and have an occasional girlfriend.
someone has to push the toy dogs in the strollers
>>why would any man want to get married with the way the courts screw them over in divorce?
You mean other than Christ’s directions to do so?
RTFM.
think of the solid foundation that was laid for this country and undoubtedly, the fastest upsurge in the prosperity of the middle class that ever was, at least in my opinion...
they had children...
the schools were full of happy children..
the churches full and flourishing...
it was the best of times...
the leftists in the 60's just killed it all off and now look where we are......
As much as it shames me to admit, I’m a millennial, born 1984. There’s a reason I married foreign. 90% of American women these days are total garbage.
Another obvious reason in these days of sexual revolution:
Why would you buy the cow if you get the milk for free?
Apres moi, le deluge (if my luck holds).
Yea I tend to care about all Americans. :)
Call me silly that way.
But you focus on yourself. Sounds like you’re good at it :)
Well duh- They don’t want to get married only to end in divorce because trump is president- (referring to earlier thread about how some whiny little liberal dolts are divorcing because trump is president and causing arguments in their marriages)
“Why would any man want to get married with the way the courts screw them over in divorce?”
that was the first thought that popped into my head when I saw the headline.
prenups help with property ownership in Colorado, but in Colorado a prenup can not override the State’s determination as to whether alimony must be paid.
1. There is a "marriage penalty" under the IRS.
2. The government promotes women in business. Worrying about marriage and a family prevents women from breaking the "glass ceiling."
3. Women get more money/benefits from the government for having children out of wedlock.
4. Courts are quick to side with the woman. The husband is assumed guilty.
It is the government, through official policy, which is destroying the American family.
I’ve been paying $20,000/yr alimony since about 1989. Kids look at me and maybe decide against it.
Moving out of your parents home is the first step.
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