
Promoting Marriage Has Failed and Is Unnecessary to Cut Poverty (2015) - cokernel
http://www.demos.org/blog/12/4/15/promoting-marriage-has-failed-and-unnecessary-cut-poverty
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lmm
> Once you understand how this marriage anti-poverty story works, two things
> should immediately occur to you. First, it's not marriage that's cutting
> poverty here. It's the recombination of income. If you marry someone who
> does not add extra income to your family, that will do nothing to reduce
> your chance of poverty and, because your family is now bigger, it could even
> drag your family into poverty. Adding someone to a resource pod only reduces
> that pod's chance of poverty where, as a result of the addition, the
> increase in the pod's income is greater than the increase in the pod's
> poverty line. Sometimes marriages accomplish this, sometimes they do not.

This is missing the point. The argument is not that being married increases
your average income, it's that pooling risks (like that of losing one or other
of your jobs) reduces them, that it increases the ability to provide childcare
(which is better measured in hours than dollars, so income isn't really the
point), and perhaps that it allows certain efficiencies in housing, transport
etc. And I guess if you want to look at the dark side then the final argument
is that it ensures parents are in a fixed, stable relationship, reducing the
likelihood of endangering their children through their dating behaviour.

~~~
chongli
The rise in housing prices, particularly in neighbourhoods with access to a
decent public school, has totally wiped out any advantage you might have
gained by pooling risks. What once was a 1-income household with a single
point of failure is now a 2-income household where _neither_ person can afford
to lose their job!

~~~
sbjustin
I imagine you probably live somewhere where the cost of living is
significantly higher than the rest of the country. I left the Washington DC
Metro area which is exactly as you describe and moved to Greenville, SC. My
wife has been able to be a stay at home mom here and we get access to a decent
education for our daughter. Any difference in quality of education can be made
up by the parents imo.

Leaving an area which required 2 parents to work has been one of the greatest
things I've ever done and I won't go back. We are significantly happier
without that pressure.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
It doesn't have to be the entire cost of living, just the cost of housing.

In Upstate NY there are farms everywhere so food is cheap. The upside to
everything being gray and snowy all the time is that water is basically free.
And as for other services like telcos and electricity, we pay around the same
as the rest of the country.

But then comes rent.

It is ridiculous to think that unless you live waaaaaayyy out in the sticks
there's no chance you are gonna afford a mortgage down payment anytime soon
after graduating college (forget high school), and even as a professional with
a professional partner the idea of buying a house is still years away. If we
can't own a house we can't build equity. We can't use the property as
collateral if we need a loan. It all goes back to housing, and right here, it
sucks.

~~~
morgante
What upstate NY are you talking about?

I've looked into buying a house up there and it looks incredibly cheap.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Ithaca, where income-to-housing costs rival San Francisco.

Like I said, it's fine if you want to live in the boonies, but that also means
you're an hour away from anything resembling civilization.

~~~
infinite8s
Ithaca is also a college town (Cornell) so it's not quite a fair comparison to
most rural areas.

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ars
This article basically says How to stop poverty? Give people money.

Yah, that works, but it's better to stop poverty by giving people the
tools/opportunity/social environment so that they won't be in poverty in the
first place.

That's the idea of promoting marriage, and this article justs seems completely
oblivious.

Giving people money to get out of poverty should be short term help, not the
long term end goal.

~~~
danans
Tools, opportunity, and a good social environment are largely a function of
money, whether purchased via government programs or bought by individuals
themselves with the cash given by the government (I.e basic income, EITC).
Marriage alone without that money isn't going to avail those bootstrapping
goods to people when they don't have them to begin with.

~~~
ars
> are largely a function of money

Lots and lots of immigrants beg to differ. I will grant that you do need at
least a good community, but you don't need money to get ahead.

That's why I added "social environment" \- you need a community who help each
other much more than you need money.

~~~
danans
Membership in a good community is itself a form of social capital that you can
even put an monetary valuation on (compared to not having a good community).
Many immigrants arrive with that form of capital intact, and admission to such
communities is often gated by cultural barriers.

Further, educated immigrants, while they don't start in their adoptive country
with much money, arrive with a lot of educational capital, which someone
invested in before they arrived. They arrive with the "tools and opportunity"
built in.

For less educated immigrants, and native-born poor, assuming a functional
community exists (which is not a given for either), it's members might be able
to scrape together proceeds gained by expending their physical capital in
marginal labor, and share resources among themselves (housing, childcare,
etc.).

But depending on their circumstances, that may not be enough to move their
members out of poverty, as the surplus of their labor may not be enough to pay
for, in your words, the "tools and opportunity" needed to escape poverty.

Sometimes the requirements for the community's survival can actually hinder
the acquisition of tools for advancement, i.e. a 16 year old has to take a
menial job to help support the extended family instead of staying in school.

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awt
Encouraging marriage is totally the wrong approach anyway. Government should
just stop _discouraging_ it.

~~~
sickbeard
They encourage marriage to increase population growth.. not because they like
married couples.

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sickbeard
I don't understand this report. You usually marry because you want to be with
someone, not because it's efficient. Approaching it from a purely mathematical
perspective assumes that randomly grouping people is equal to marrying
someone.

~~~
dagw
_You usually marry because you want to be with someone, not because it 's
efficient._

I don't know. You decide to live with someone, share your life with them and
and possibly have children with because you want to be with them. Your
decision to actually marry them is, in my experience, often driven by some
additional external force.

~~~
ars
Or you can do like me: Redefine marriage as "living together in a committed
relationship". The piece of paper is irrelevant, the way the people live is
what matters.

~~~
dagw
Depends where you live. In many places the piece of paper is very relevant
when it comes to things like inheritance and child custody. That was one of
the reasons my wife and I got married after living together for 8 years and
having a kid.

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pjc50
The most striking line is "US married-parent child poverty is so high that
it's higher than the child poverty rate in single-mother families in the low-
poverty Nordics".

~~~
AnimalMuppet
The most striking thing to me wasn't a line, it was a graph. It showed that
single-mother child poverty rates were _five times_ married-parent child
poverty rates.

So, yeah, marriage actually does seem to help with poverty, quite dramatically
so. But the article didn't talk much about that graph, because it kind of
ruins their thesis.

Note well: I am _not_ claiming that pushing people to marry will protect them
(or their children) against poverty. Correlation is not causation. But there's
something connecting marriage and non-poverty, no matter how much the article
tries to tap-dance around it.

~~~
pjc50
It could equally well be that marriage is an unaffordable luxury.

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Lawtonfogle
Promoting marriage? All I've see is a massive increase in the risk of
marrying, especially as a man.

~~~
dajohnson89
Could you please elaborate? Are you referring to alimony, child support, etc?

~~~
antisthenes
I'm sure that's what he's referring too.

Also the massive increase in hypergamy thanks to the commodification of
dating.

~~~
sickbeard
You're not exempt from alimony or child support because you weren't married.

