The Marriage Gap Is America's Most Overlooked Source of Inequality

Every dollar of well-intentioned government assistance comes with a behavioral price tag that we've largely refused to count.

The most consequential inequality in America is not the wealth gap or the wage gap. It may not be the racial opportunity gap. The marriage gap is wreaking havoc. And unfortunately, it's the gap that gets the least attention.

I'm a libertarian. I don't care whom, or if, you marry. Yet I'm reminded that there is a problem by a new report from the American Enterprise Institute. Edited by Kevin Corinth and Scott Winship, "Land of Opportunity: Advancing the American Dream" covers a broad range of challenges facing the country today, from the cost of living and workforce development to education, crime, and the erosion of community life.

The authors are not culture warriors. They are empirical economists. But among their most important findings are those dealing with the collapse of the American family and what the government has done to accelerate it.

From economist Robert VerBruggen's chapter on the erosion of married parenthood, I learned that in the mid-20th century, only one in 20 children were born out of wedlock. Now it's two in five. I also learned that America has the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households: 23 percent in the U.S. against an international norm of 7 percent.

Drawing on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, VerBruggen shows that 40 percent of millennials from intact, two-parent families graduated from college and 77 percent achieved middle-class incomes or higher. Among those who didn't grow up in intact families, only 17 percent graduated from college and just 57 percent reached middle-class incomes. The latter are also roughly twice as likely to be incarcerated, even after controlling for other socioeconomic factors.

The damage doesn't stop at the front door: Research using tax-return data "suggests that neighborhoods with high rates of single parenthood cultivate lower social mobility, including among kids who themselves are not raised by single parents," VerBruggen notes.

This is a rather bipartisan idea at this point. In a 2013 review of the relevant research, Princeton University sociologist Sara McLanahan and coauthors found that "studies using more rigorous designs continue to find negative effects of father absence on offspring well-being." Economist Melissa Kearney's work shows that marriage protects against poverty among all races. In fact, married parents regardless of race and education suffer significantly less poverty than unmarried mothers.

This collapse in family stability is not happening evenly. Winship and O'Rourke found that while marital births dropped by 29 points overall from 1970 to 2018, they fell by 47 points for the bottom education quintile and by just 6 points for the top. Consistent with that divide, from the early 1960s to the late 2010s, marriage rates fell by roughly 46 percentage points for the least educated young women compared with about 17 points for the most educated, leaving those least able to bear the costs of single parenthood the most likely to experience it.

Marriage is clearly a singularly important institution for raising children and for income mobility. Still, I don't view government efforts to tilt the scale toward marriage favorably. I am also firmly opposed when the government puts its thumb on the scale against marriage.

Unfortunately, VerBruggen marshals evidence showing there is a lot of that going on. A couple with two kids, with each parent earning $30,000, receives around $5,000 in earned income tax credit benefits if they remain unmarried. They lose all those benefits if they marry. That's a tax on marriage.

Medicaid thresholds, housing vouchers, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits all phase out in ways that punish couples who combine households and incomes. VerBruggen cites a Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimate showing that "7.5 percent more low-income women with kids would be married by age 35 if they were not penalized for doing so."

You cannot simultaneously believe that family structure doesn't matter and that the single-parent disadvantage is a crisis. Or that children's outcomes are shaped by economic conditions and that it's irrelevant whether two committed adults are in the picture or one parent cycles through unstable relationships. Careful researchers, including those attempting to debunk the marriage effect, keep finding it.

My conservative friends focus on redesigning America's $1 trillion safety net to reduce the marriage penalty. But the harder question—the one almost no one asks—is whether that safety net's existence changes the marriage calculus in ways no redesign can fully fix. If the government reliably tries to replace the economic function of a spouse, more people will rationally choose not to marry.

Acknowledging this doesn't require abandoning people in genuine need. Nor does it require overcorrecting and incentivizing women to live in abusive unions. It does, however, require admitting that every dollar of well-intentioned assistance comes with a behavioral price tag that we've largely refused to count.

Sometimes the most compassionate long-term answer is to remove the marriage penalty in welfare programs. Sometimes, it's to have a smaller program or no program at all. We will never know until we honestly ask the question.

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