Promoting Marriage Has Failed and Is Unnecessary to Cut Poverty (2015) (opens in new tab)

> Once you understand how this marriage anti-poverty story works, two things should immediately occur to you. First, it's not marriage that's cutting poverty here. It's the recombination of income. If you marry someone who does not add extra income to your family, that will do nothing to reduce your chance of poverty and, because your family is now bigger, it could even drag your family into poverty. Adding someone to a resource pod only reduces that pod's chance of poverty where, as a result of the addition, the increase in the pod's income is greater than the increase in the pod's poverty line. Sometimes marriages accomplish this, sometimes they do not.

This is missing the point. The argument is not that being married increases your average income, it's that pooling risks (like that of losing one or other of your jobs) reduces them, that it increases the ability to provide childcare (which is better measured in hours than dollars, so income isn't really the point), and perhaps that it allows certain efficiencies in housing, transport etc. And I guess if you want to look at the dark side then the final argument is that it ensures parents are in a fixed, stable relationship, reducing the likelihood of endangering their children through their dating behaviour.

I don't understand this report. You usually marry because you want to be with someone, not because it's efficient. Approaching it from a purely mathematical perspective assumes that randomly grouping people is equal to marrying someone.

Promoting marriage? All I've see is a massive increase in the risk of marrying, especially as a man.

This article basically says How to stop poverty? Give people money.

Yah, that works, but it's better to stop poverty by giving people the tools/opportunity/social environment so that they won't be in poverty in the first place.

That's the idea of promoting marriage, and this article justs seems completely oblivious.

Giving people money to get out of poverty should be short term help, not the long term end goal.

The most striking line is "US married-parent child poverty is so high that it's higher than the child poverty rate in single-mother families in the low-poverty Nordics".

Encouraging marriage is totally the wrong approach anyway. Government should just stop discouraging it.