Naum Kazhdan/The New York TimesThere’s an interesting discussion over at Room for Debate on how the recession is affecting family life. A key question is whether recessions lead to a rise in divorce or not.
Here’s Betsey Stevenson (my frequent coauthor and significant other):
While the economically vulnerable are in less stable relationships, there is little evidence that the economic cycle drives divorce. The big swings in marriage and divorce follow dramatic social, rather than macroeconomic change. Blame the wars, the sexual revolution, and changes in the meaning of marriage, rather than cyclical ups and downs.
Here’s Barbara Dafoe Whitehead:
The divorce rate soared during the stagflation of the mid-1970′s, continued to rise during the deep blue-collar recession of the early 1980′s, and thereafter stabilized at historically high levels.
And here are the facts (updating Betsey’s and my Journal of Economic Perspectives paper):
The chart shows the two standard ways of measuring the divorce rate, and the shaded areas on the chart highlight the recessions. Contrary to Whitehead’s claim, the divorce rate actually fell during the early 1980′s recession. And she’s wrong to say it stabilized after that, as divorce rates continued to fall. In fact, divorce rates have been falling for the past 30 years. It’s time for social commentators to start to recognize these facts.
To my eye, the most amazing fact in this chart is just how little the divorce rate is affected by the business cycle. The 1970′s recessions didn’t see a sharp uptick in divorce, but rather the continuation of the pre-existing trend. Divorce rates declined during the 1980′s recession and barely changed during either the 1990 or 2001 recessions. And if we examine data over the longer run, again we see that divorce doesn’t seem to move around much with the business cycle:
If anything, the Great Depression suggests that divorce rates may decline during dramatic slowdowns. Unfortunately my charts report only the most recent complete annual data, which are for 2007, while the recession began in December of that year. To learn about the consequences of this recession, we have to turn to the most recent NCHS data. And these data tell us that in seven months through to July 2008, the number of divorces is down about 6 percent compared with the equivalent period in 2007. That is, the ongoing decline in divorce is continuing.
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Really interesting – that’s a positive social trend we don’t hear often enough.
Interesting too the divergence between “Divorces per 1000 people” and “Divorces per 1000 married couples”. Had to think about that for a moment. The answer, of course, is a decline in the marriage rate.
What’s with the spike around 1948? Did everyone come back from the war and get divorced three years later??
Given the difficulty in selling a house, I wonder how many couples might postpone actually divorcing to wait out the housing market a bit rather than both getting killed on selling and even possibly having to pay if they are under water.
People can’t afford divorce lawyers, separate housing, to lose health care, etc. The costs of divorce are high compared to having a lousy roommate.
I seriously doubt that many people are so calculating as to consider housing values as a deterrent to divorce. It seems much more likely that pyschological side effects of the economy will have a more direct effect on divorce rates if any. In particular when it comes to financial factors, I think people are more hesistant to end a marriage if there is less certainty whether they would be able to provide for themselves or their children on their own.
That brings up an interesting question. Is there a difference between divorce rate trends of couples with children vs without during different economic cycles?
So basically there’s a spike when marriages unraveled after WWII and then a more permanent increase when society liberalized – and the divorce laws became less punitive for women – but otherwise divorce doesn’t act much as a good subject to price adjustment.
I’d guess late 1940s was a change in the legal situation, but that’s just a guess, and 60 seconds of searching didn’t turn up any support for it. Anyone know?
Interesting that things turned around in 1980. Since this is the Freakonomics blog and all, it seems natural to ask if there could be any connection between Roe v. Wade and the divorce rate. The logic would go like this: Fewer unwanted pregnancies lead to fewer unwanted marriages lead to fewer divorces. It would make sense that the effect would take a few years to show up in the divorce rate. Say a hypothetical pregnancy doesn’t lead to a child in 1974 and the corresponding hypothetical shotgun wedding doesn’t happen either. Six years later (after they hypothetical couple has time to realize they can’t stand each other), the corresponding divorce doesn’t happen.
I expect to see this addressed in the sequel to Freakonomics.
I’d bet there is a significant financial impact — most notably, when more women started getting out of the house and having careers of their own, and thus weren’t reliant on marriage for their income, divorces went up.
Subsequently, during economic downturns the financial risk of going from a two income family to a two household family becomes more unappealing.
Regarding the post-war spike — a spouse you don’t get along with that well is much easier to get along with if you’re stationed 5000 miles or more away, but the old problems come to the surface when you’re finally re-united and coming home after a big event is also a good reason for both partners to give the relationship a serious second look.