Study: Marriage Key to Healthy Economy

The economic well-being of the United
States is strongly tied to family structure, a new study suggests.
While marriage helps the economy grow, divorce helps it regress.

The Family Research Council’s Marriage
and Religion Research Institute’s study shows how intact
married-couple families outperform remarried families, divorced
families, single-parent families and cohabiting families in the
economic areas of: employment status and income; net worth; poverty
and welfare receipt; child economic well-being.

“Long-term
income, wealth and hence poverty are largely a matter of choice in
America today—the
choice of marriage and the pathways to it,” Patrick F. Fagan, MARRI
senior fellow and director, says in his report.

The
study notes that only 5.8 percent of married couples lived in poverty
in 2009. Husbands’ employment histories tend to be more stable, and
on average they earn almost 30 percent more than unmarried men. Wives
are less likely to be impoverished, and children experience more
economic mobility and less poverty in childhood, making it more
likely that they will work their way to better jobs in their
lifetimes, the data shows.

Even
remarried families can have positive economic outcomes. “Remarriage
after divorce increases a family’s income, though income and net
worth rarely rise to pre-divorce levels,” Fagan says. He also
points out that children are less likely to live in poverty if their
mothers remarry, rather than cohabit, after divorce.

“Cohabiting
relationships are frequently unstable and of short duration.
Cohabitation produces weaker economic outcomes than marriage,”
Fagan explains.

On
the other hand, divorced families face sudden decreases in their
income. Single mothers are 2.83 percent more likely to be
impoverished than women who stay married. The study says half of
single mothers live in poverty, while an estimated 60 percent live on
welfare.

Children
of divorced families also experience negative economic effects.
“Children of single mothers are at increased likelihood of
dependence on welfare benefits during childhood and enjoy less
economic mobility than children in married families as adults,”
Fagan’s report says.

“There
is an intimate relationship between our income and wealth and our
sexual

culture,”
Fagan concludes. “They rise or fall together, and thus, strange
though it may seem, there is a significant connection between our
sexual culture and our national economic strengths and weaknesses.”

Click here for the full report.