Morning Must-Read: Sean McElwee and Marshall I. Steinbaum: Marriage Decline in U.S. Didn’t Increase Inequality, the Economy Did

…the relative decline of… married couple [households] increases inequality… cited a paper by Professor Molly Martin of Penn State. But Martin… ‘cannot determine the degree to which family structure changes caused the observed changes… family formation probably reacts to prevailing economic conditions and, in that response, sets the conditions for perpetuating broader inequality patterns’…. She notes that ‘the relationship between family formation behavior and inequality appears to be declining over time’ and even during the period where it was most influential, it accounted for very little of the change…. Bruce Western writes, ‘Most of the increase in family income inequality was due to increasing within group inequality that was widely shared across family types and levels of schooling…. Though family structure, more than the educational inequality in earnings, is closely associated with the rise in inequality from 1975 to 1995, both effects were small after 1995’…. The evidence shows that family structure has changed because economic opportunities for most people have worsened…