By not discussing the plummeting marriage rate [1] and changes in the data sets [2] this article is deeply flawed. There is reasonable evidence that divorce rate has remained about the same for the last 20 years despite the plummeting marriage rate [3].
People correctly sense that marriage is a deeply wounded institution in the west, particularly for the lower (and, increasingly, middle) classes.
Well maintaining that believe relieves those from toughing it out to fix their marriages, supports the divorce lawyer market and their marketing, and politicians who like to capitalize on strife.
Seriously, I know the holidays are tough but my drive to and from work the local stations are all covered with divorce lawyer ads.
>Well maintaining that believe relieves those from toughing it out to fix their marriages, supports the divorce lawyer market and their marketing, and politicians who like to capitalize on strife.
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%.
Actually, I think you can easily get that number down to 5 or 15%. Well below 25%, anyways.
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
"Later than 1980" distorts because lots of marriages newer than that haven't ended through either divorce or death yet. If you were looking at, say, a 20 year success rate and the window in question was 1981-1994, it might be comparable to earlier periods where you were looking again at the 20 year success rate.
I'd say that if you care about your personal chance of divorce, there's way better ways to gauge it, including talking with a marriage counsellor and/or psychologist before marrying (which could bring it very close to 0, especially if you choose to not marry).
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.
>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.
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.
So you are disagreeing with the entire premise of the article. You are calling bullshit. That's interesting, given that the author specifically debunks the stats you are quoting.
>That's interesting, given that the author specifically debunks the stats you are quoting.
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.
Am I reading this wrong or does this article start out by implying that the number is over estimated and then goes on to give two examples of general long term trends, increasing population, and decreasing marriage rate that would lead to underestimating the number by the commonly used method?
Plus it never gives an actual number, and never mentions tons of estimation efforts and stats that place it close to 35-50% (as if all of those were merely based on repeating the myth).
Dataviz angle here... To me, it's like determining the age of a population. Saying that the population is 40 years old on average doesn't have much value.
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.
Sorry, but this is bollocks. We don't know what the number is because we don't have the data or an agreed upon methodology to calculate the stat. But I have seen stats that do indeed put the rate in the 40% range; whether you agree with the methodology or not, does not mean that the number is a myth. And any pedant saying that 46% isn't 50% is correct, but clearly missing the forrest for the trees.
The entire article here is equivocation -- a rate is a ratio between one variable and another, and the frequently cited 50% rate is a ratio of (marriages ending in divorces):(all marriages), and the lower rate that the article presents and charts is the ratio of (divorces in a year):population.
I think the actual number is not the point of the article, exactly. The author is trying to point out that the method is flawed, and statistics is much more complicated than anyone one number from one source.
Nobody knows, because no one even agrees how to calculate it.
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
I'd be interested in the "survival rate" of marriages that end in divorce, like they calculate for chronic diseases. What's the 5-year survival rate for a marriage across the population? What's the 10-year rate, or 20-year rate? You could segment such data pretty easily by other factors, like region, ethnicity, age at wedding, etc.
You don't know if people will divorce or not until 1) they get a divorce or 2) one of them dies instead. As a result, we can only reliably calculate this percentage for the cohort of couples who married 50+ years ago. We have many reasons to assume that couples marrying now, or who married ten years ago, will not divorce at the same rate as those who married 50 years ago. As another poster says, we can estimate based on historical comparisons and other data. The NY Times article referenced in the link shows some of that: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/upshot/how-we-know-the-div.... But we can't measure it directly. And we may get surprised - the number of people currently divorcing in their 50s and older is at a historic high, which wouldn't have been predicted by comparisons to previous cohorts.
Ha, this is exactly the issue we ran into at my start-up when trying to determine KPI's.
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.
That can be skewed by people who marry and divorce multiple times, making "percentage of marriages that end in divorce" somewhat disconnected from the probability of any one marriage surviving.
Actually, it is very much connected to the probability of any one randomly selected marriage failing. Any specific marriage, of course, you'll want to look at the rates of similarly-situated marriages (the same sources that give numbers in the neighborhood fo 50% for the overall divorce rate often report different rates for, e.g., first vs. subsequent marriages, and those that I've seen have consistently had lower divorce rates for first marriages and increasing divorce rates for each subsequent marriage.)
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.
Is it though? I think the idea is to see how stable marriages are.
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.
I think you just explained why the simple ratio: (# of divorces / # of marriages) is prone to difficulty. The ratio is artificially skewed by people who marry/divorce frequently. So the simple ratio may not actually tell you much about how stable marriages are.
My point is that "a small percentage of data points with many divorces" will not skew the statistics much, precisely because it's small.
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.
But you don't know how small the effect is unless you measure!
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.
>But you don't know how small the effect is unless you measure!
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.
As discussed in the article, that's a horrible number.
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.
I think the title should be "The 50% stat is meaningless." This would head off at the pass the arguments in this comment section, which seem to focus on what the number actually is instead of the point of the article.
According to every TV show in the country, the divorce rate must be at least 100%. If anyone still wants to get married, they have to get un-divorced first and nobody seems to think it's worth the trouble.
Now, if something as seemingly straightforward as divorce rate is controversial to calculate, how about causes/existence of global warming which is orders of magnitude more complex and is driven by much more powerful special interest groups.
The science behind global warming is relatively uncontroversial [0], it's what we should do about that is fraught with peril, special-interests wise. But that's inevitable, really, given that environmentalism is itself a "special interest," albiet one that concerns us all in one way or another.
The US government stopped tracking divorce rates in 1996, so we have little data. We still have a shitload of weather stations and air monitoring stations that actually give us data.
Yep, we have shitload of data and then use complex model of earth climate to extrapolate this data. Being complex the model is extremely sensitive to parameters (Butterfly effect)
and gives a lot of freedom in choosing parameters, which in turn makes it easy to tune the model to get the expected result.
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.
Your comment reflects a common misunderstanding, which is that the theory of global warming depends on the use of computerized general circulation models. It does not.
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.
Your comment was funny, duly upvoted, but you seem to be making somewhat of a category error, as we're not talking about divorce rate prediction but divoce rate measurement, while global warming controversy is about prediction, not much about measuring current temperature. (Measurement, I seem to remember, didn't even corrobate older global warming predictions, or some such thing, which is beside the point, because at no point global warning was about high temperatures to be measured "now".)
The 50% divorce rate is pretty spot on. 50% of all marriages end in a divorce. This has been calculated independently for many different countries over different years (and within a year) and from what I can tell those numbers do not vary much.
That obviously does not say the likelihood of an individual marriage succeeding given that some people marry more than once.
Since you're going against the facts presented in the article, would you mind citing your sources? It will help readers evaluate your claims more effectively by allowing them to account for biases.
The article never actually provided fact or studies showing it is NOT 50%, they just ridiculed the national marriage project. All they showed was that less people per population were getting divorced. This does not answer the question about the divorce rate or where more or less people were getting married.
Not quite. The article says there is insufficient data. The commenter says there is (by virtue of making the claim). If I am to be convinced the opposite of the article's claim, I need to see the data the article claims doesn't exist.
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...