Marriage and Poverty

In Capitalism Magazine, Walter Williams http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4460 points out that the most remarkable difference between black folks living in poverty and black folks who are not impoverished is that the latter category marries more often than the former. This is an interesting correlation, often cited, but Williams goes on to conclude that these differences in family structure are the cause of the differences in economic well being. I am not at all convinced that this is the case, and I am pretty sure that the relationship between these variables is spurious, i.e. they are both due to yet another third variable, or that the posited causal arrow should be reversed, i.e. poverty causes poor people to eschew marriage.

Let us take the case of a hypothetical poor woman with little education, skills or job prospects. Whom is she to marry, and what would she gain from marriage? Her potential marriage partners are likely to be in the same straits as she and unable to do much in the way of ameliorating her poverty. Marriage might render it more difficult for her to secure public assistance in case of need, and in the absence of employement benefits or an estate to be allocated, there is precious little else to be gained by marrying anyone of her class. If she can "marry up", that might make sense, but this pathway may not be open to many women in her circumstances. Likewise, a poor man in similar circumstances may simply not be a good candidate for marriage. What might he bring to a marriage, and how would marrying him improve the lot of a poor woman? There is no need to marry to get children and enjoy the blessings of parenthood, and there is no sense in delaying childbearing until better times that will likely never come.

For folks a little higher up on the socioeconomic ladder, marriage is an institution that works. There may be employment benefits that extend to spouses and children, and there are property interests that marriage protects. More significantly, the spouses are in a position to bolster one another socially and economically, and having a sense of stability in this partnership would be important to them.

The fault, if fault must be assigned, is not with the poor who obstinately refuse to marry, presumably from a lack of virtue; rather, it is the institution of marriage as it is presently constituted that has little attraction for the poor. Walter Williams makes a leap from correlation to causation in the service of blaming the poor for their poverty.