In the Atlantic article shared by @88jm19, there were several points that addressed some of these most recent posts.
One of the biggest takeaways is that education is one of the biggest dividers as to whether someone will get married:
one way to describe the data is that marriage was not a kind of high- or low-status thing to do 50 or 60 years ago. It was just simply something everyone did. So for members of that cohort born around 1930, something like 80 percent of them would end up married at age 45, regardless of education. Whereas when we go out today, you’re seeing rates closer to 50 percent for Americans without a four-year degree, even lower for folks who don’t have a high-school diploma, and then substantially higher rates still closer to around 71 percent for Americans who do have a four-year degree.
As the quote that @88jm19 shared, women with college degrees are marrying men without college degrees, but they’re generally marrying the non-college grads who have more financially strong outcomes.
And so one way to see that is if you look, over time, at the earnings of the non-college men married to college-educated women, they’ve been doing pretty well. So now today they have, on average, earnings of around $65,000. Whereas if you look at all the other non-college men, in some sense, the ones left in the dating pool, there’s just been a huge collapse in outcomes for those folks.
But one can ask, for the non-college men—let’s say you have to meet two criteria to be quote-unquote “marriageable.” One is that your earnings need to be above the national median. So for much of this period, this would mean something like earning above $30,000 per year—so nothing crazy, but a relatively stable, well-paying job. And of course, you can’t already be married to a college-educated woman.
And if one takes that view, if you go back to the 1930 birth cohort, roughly 70 percent of non-college men in that cohort were quote-unquote “marriageable,” according to this view. Whereas when we go out to the 1980 cohort, this has dropped remarkably. It’s now much closer to 35 percent of non-college men that fit the bill today.
What I’ll say is that we’re really using earnings here as an aggregate or summary to describe what’s happened to these folks. So at age 45, if you look at the pool of non-college men who are not married to college women, they used to earn in the 1930 cohort about $56,000 per year, on average. Now they earn about $46,000 per year, on average, for the 1980 cohort. This is remarkable, the fact that earnings have declined over this 50-year period at a time when the U.S. economy has grown substantially. So the fact that you’re able to find any group that’s had a decline in real earnings is remarkable and, I think, a signal of what is going on with this group, but I don’t want to give the impression that it’s all about earnings.
It then discusses the marriage rate gaps between women with college degrees and then women with the lowest levels of education.
It’s more of this broad pattern, which is: Where in the U.S. are the areas where these education gaps in marriage for women are the largest? And they are really concentrated in the subset of places where men who didn’t go to college are struggling.
Demsas: Yeah, and I was just struck by the finding that “marriage rates between college and non-college women are 50 percent smaller in commuting zones where men have the lowest incidence of [what economists refer to as] ‘left-tail’ outcomes,” whether it’s joblessness and incarceration or something else.
And I think that’s a huge, important finding for policy makers who care about this issue and want to make it increase the life outcomes for these men, and also for women who are searching for a partner, unable to find one who meets their needs.
And then it discusses some of the topics in Richard Reeves’ work related to overdoses, incarcerations, sports gambling, etc, and things that might be more relevant to this thread: Males Under 35: Are they struggling and what can be done about it?.