The Divorce Myth
I want to start my week guest blogging by talking about divorce. Betsey Stevenson and
I had an
op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times noting a very simple fact: those
married in the 1990s have proved less likely to divorce than those wed in the
1980s, which were less likely to divorce than those wed in the 1970s. The
Divorce Facts are that divorce is falling, and marriages are more stable.
What is surprising, is just how easily and how often the
Divorce Facts lose out to the Divorce Myth. The Divorce Myth is that divorce
is rising. When the latest
divorce numbers came out last week, they once again confirm this
quarter-century long decline in divorce, but the media (including the Times,
Post,
and the Inquirer)
chose instead to write (incorrectly) about rising divorce. (In their defense, the data were presented in
a way that invited misinterpretation, a subject that I shall return to in a
future post.)
Why the persistence of the Divorce Myth?
- Blame the
public for underestimating divorce: Tyler
has argued that Americans “underestimate the probability of divorce”, and
so when the statistics show that divorce is quite common, they infer divorce
must have risen. - Blame the
public for overestimating divorce: Greg
Mankiw thinks that this “seems be an example of what Bryan Caplan calls ‘the
pessimistic bias’, a tendency to overestimate the severity of economic problems.” - Blame the
press: Mankiw may be a bit unfair on Joe Citizen: the average person gets
their news from the press, and in this case, the press reported falsehoods as
facts. - Blame the
politics: We argued that “Reporting on our families is a lot like reporting
on the economy: statistical tales of woe provide the foundation for reform
proposals. The only difference is that
conservatives use these data to make the case for greater government
intervention in the marriage market, while liberals use them to promote
deregulation of marriage.” - Blame the
professors: Academics are meant to provide the facts offsetting the
political hacks. But we don’t. Economists have had too little respect for
simple facts; publication glory lies with grand theories. Ideologically-motivated profs teaching family
sociology or family law would rather reinforce the Myth than offset it.
Personally, I go for #4 causing #3, unchecked by #5, and
would love to see research by Bryan testing #1 v. #2. Your thoughts?