So
Matt Yglesias and
Mike Konczal and presumably others are talking about divorce rates and the economy. Unfortunately, they are taking the conventionally-calculated divorce rate at face value, when in fact the statistic is useless. I bring this up again and again. As it only tracks number of divorces compared to number of new marriages, the conventional divorce rate is both easily susceptible to small numbers of serial marriers, and more importantly, matching the data pool of divorces from all
existing marriages against the data pool of just
new marriages. A couple that has been together for years and stays together has no positive impact on the divorce rate of any given year, despite the fact that this is precisely what we're interested in. Indeed, a couple that stays together until
death is never represented in the divorce rate at all other than in the year that they are married. A more accurate divorce rate, tracking individual marriages until they end in divorce or don't, is a much more difficult statistic to derive, but much more accurate. The best info I've seen is that the true divorce rate peaked in the early 90s, never exceeded 40%, and has declined since.
This isn't some crank view of mine, by the way, but a well-known problem in sociology.
Quoth the
New York Times:
But researchers say that this is misleading because the people who are divorcing in any given year are not the same as those who are marrying, and that the statistic is virtually useless in understanding divorce rates. In fact, they say, studies find that the divorce rate in the United States has never reached one in every two marriages, and new research suggests that, with rates now declining, it probably never will.
This particular discussion that Konczal and Yglesias are having is actually the perfect example of when the conventional divorce rate is most misleading. I don't blame them at all for using the conventional divorce rate, as despite its lack of analytic rigor, the popular press never stops using it. Maybe somebody with a better reputation than I have could get the word out.
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8 comments:
Yglesis is looking at divorces/1000 people, not divorces/marriages. I think that is the relevant statistic for his purposes. Konczal does not define what he means by divorce rate, which is worse than not labeling your axes. He must be cast off into the utmost darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.
But it doesn't really matter if empty-nesters divorce, does it? Which would not-inconceivably increase as the population ages. Enumerating affairs of the heart makes me a little vertiginous, anyway. What's the optimum divorce rate? Surely not zero.
Divorces/1000 tells you nothing.
The % of marriages that end in the divorce has nothing to do with Yglesias' point here. In fact that statistic doesn't even make sense wrt to his point. The % of which marriages? We could track e.g. the % of marriages that happened in the 1970s that have since ended in divorce. That's a whole other subject. But Yglesias is trying to look for signs that people are staying married because of the economy when they'd rather divorce. For that purpose, it doesn't matter when they got married, only that they are married in the years he's looking at (2009-2011).
Divorces/1000 Americans is not perfect but is OK for this short time period.
On the other hand, the so called decline in the divorce rate might be bogus too. If one uses divorces per thousand people, as Yglesia apparently did, then one misses the trend against marriage in general. If fewer people, as a percentage of the entire adult population, are married in the first place, a drop in the number of divorces per thosuand people doesn't necessarily mean that fewer, again, as a percentage, of marriages are ending in divorce. What we do know is that a greater percentage of the adult population is not married then ever before (or, at least, since such records have been kept). Moreover, that is not solely the result of latter average date of first marriages (although that is part of the reason). The reality is that the percentage of the adult population (for EVERY adult age group, not just younger adults) that is not married and has never been married is also at an all time high. And is growing. Marriage is declining. That being the case, it only follows that the number of divorce is declining too. Whether the percent of marriages ending in divorce is decreasing, increasing or staying the same must be considered in light of this fact.
Not sure the NYT article linked has taken this into account. From the article:
"According to the report, for people born in 1955 or later, 'the proportion ever divorced had actually declined,' compared with those among people born earlier."
But what does that prove, given that fewer, as a percentage, of people born in 1965 or later had ever been married in the first place? Fewer married, fewer divorced. Sure, but that in no way proves the divorce RATE (if one takes that to mean, as, one would think, common sense dictates, the percent of marriages that end in divorce, not simplhy the per cent of divorced people as compared to the entire population), has gone down.
"And, compared with women married before 1975, those married since 1975 had slightly better odds of reaching their 10th and 15th wedding anniversaries with their marriages still intact."
That SOUNDS like someone had actually considered marriage and divorce as a relation, rather than divorce simply in relation to the overall population, but is that the case? Or is this sentence too simply derived from the overall drop in divorce "rate" (ie percent divorced of overall population).
"The highest rate of divorce in the 2001 survey was 41 percent for men who were then between the ages of 50 to 59, and 39 percent for women in the same age group."
And this pretty clearly is another example of the same fallacy. In 2001, more people (as a percentage) had ever been married than is the case now. That being true, the per cent divorced being higher than it is now doesn't prove the divorce rate (percent of marriages ending in divorce) has gone down. It might well be that the divorce rate is the same, or has even increased, because the marriage rate has gone down.
Forgive me for the following question. So the "true" divorce rate means that about 40 percent of marraiges fail?
today divorces are so common that hearing a divorce hardly effect any of your sensation.
There's always going to be a debate about statistics as they're just too easy to manipulate. Regardless of what the divorce rate percentage is - the bottom line is that the rate of divorce is way too high.
It's almost like, "What the heck - lets give it a shot" and 2 months later decide that it wasn't such a good idea and run off to the divorce courts.
It just makes the whole marriage process a sham as is it has hardly any meaning anymore.
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