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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There are SOOOO many factors which figure into this. I have read that the average length of a marriage in 1860 was about the same as that in 1960, if you didn’t include the marriage termination by the death of one partner.
In 1900 there had to be many fewer marriages and many more out-of-wedlock births, many fewer records kept.
The chart shows that divorces went way up after the baby boom generation came of age and started to use the birth control pill and pot, then declined after AIDS came on the scene and VCR allowed porn to entertain married adults.
“….the spike around 1948? Did everyone come back from the war and get divorced three years later??- Allen Reynolds”
Yes, Allen. It’s easy to stay married when one partner is on the other side of the planet. There is a similar bump after WW1 and the war in Vietnam.
My guess is that the late 1940′s was not a change in the legal rules but that commenter 5 is right. Just a large number of war marriages, the “war brides”, coming apart quickly after years of not seeing each other.
Interesting data. But they can’t capture how many de facto marriage relationships are breaking up, only the de jure ones.
I wonder how that graph would look?
It would somewhat make sense that you wouldn’t see a spike in divorces during a recession, since a divorce tends to be expensive. Though my Dad would argue that each of his divorces was worth every penny.
The data is certainly puzzling… since financial issues are often cited as a top cause of marital problems.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Let’s have a close look at the NCHS link above – straight from the Technical Notes page of the National Vital Statistics Report on Marriages and Divorces:
“NCHS has ceased publishing divorce counts and rates based on provisional data from the combined 50 states because it is no longer statistically feasible to calculate estimates of monthly divorce counts for nonreporting states (California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, and Minnesota). Instead, NCHS publishes only the 12-month divorce rates shown in Table A, based solely on the combined counts and populations for reporting states and the District of Columbia. Aggregate 1-month, cumulative counts and rates, and 12-month counts for divorces have been discontinued because of their very limited usefulness when based on less than the full complement of states. Monthly marriage and divorce counts as reported by each state will continue to be shown in Table 2.”
Which, in layman’s terms means that divorce rates for the US as a whole are guesses based on only those states reporting. Considering the size and dynamics of California alone (which stopped reporting back in 1992) even the NCHS admits their numbers are skewed.
That said, considering that today we have the largest population of adults who come from divorced families, and who study after study concludes are 3 times more likely to divorce themselves it’s no wonder that a US Census report released in 2007 based on the 2004 SIPP Report predicted that people marrying today stand only a 33% chance of ever seeing their 25th anniversary. That’s hardly a decline in divorce rates.
Ryan hit the nail on the head regarding divorce in economic downturns. Better together and unhappy than divorced and bankrupt (and probably still unhappy).
With respect to the comment, ‘The big swings in marriage and divorce follow dramatic social, rather than macroeconomic change.”
I agree — the advent and adoption of social networking sites (i.e. facebook), and not the recession, will create a measurable increase in the divorce rate.
Of course, development of the data will take some time.
Thoughts on this?
the business cycle just amplify the scope of trends:if the pare trends to solve problem through divorce,then recession bring more divorce;vice versa
It’s not the recession/housing prices/money keeping people from divorce. If that were the case, you would see a serious spike in the 3 years following the end of the recession.