The Future of Success (22 page)

Attitudes about marriage and work have changed as the economy has changed, but with a slight lag time. In the late 1970s, for example, most Americans felt that wives shouldn’t even contribute to a household’s income. By the late eighties, as the emerging economy bore down harder on families, a slim majority (51.7 percent) continued to hold this charmingly anachronistic view. But by the early nineties, a majority agreed that wives
should
contribute to household income, and by the late nineties, a generation of men and women fully adapted to the new economy pushed it up to two-thirds. Similarly, in the mid-1970s, almost two-thirds felt it was “much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” But by the end of the nineties, two-thirds disagreed with this view.
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THE BIG SQUEEZE

Regardless of whether women are heading into paid work in order to prop up family incomes or to pursue great opportunities, families have been shrinking in response. Women are having fewer children, or no children. This is either because women can’t afford them or because they can’t give children the time and energy they require, or both.

In an economy becoming ever riskier—where every enterprise is busily turning its fixed costs into variable costs and thus subjecting all jobs and incomes to greater uncertainty—many women (and men) simply don’t want to take on the biggest fixed cost of them all, which is a child. To speak of children as a “fixed cost” is a cold-blooded way of making the point that children’s needs are continuous. And a child’s world requires some stability and reliability if the child is to grow and thrive. Yet the emerging economy is discontinuous, and is anything but stable and reliable.

So it’s not surprising that, as the economy has shifted, the birthrate among married women has steadily dropped: from ninety-eight births per 1,000 married women twenty years ago to eighty in the late 1990s. In all likelihood, as the new economy claims more terrain, that rate will continue to drop. In fact, it’s no longer unusual for a woman to decide to forgo children altogether. In the mid-1970s, only about 10 percent of middle-aged women had never had a child. Among them were teachers, nuns, or nurses who had dedicated their lives to their work. Their decision to be childless was respected but also set them apart, in their own childless subcultures. Now a decision to forgo children isn’t so odd. Nineteen percent of women between the ages of forty and forty-five have never had a child. Some of them are happily married. They’re just pursuing interests other than raising children.
¹⁵

Even women who plan to have children are delaying. Births to teenagers have dropped dramatically, reaching by the year 2000 the lowest rate in the United States since the government began tracking births in 1906. The same pattern holds true for all racial and ethnic groups. Birthrates for women in their twenties, meanwhile, have been flat. The only increase in birthrates has been among women in their thirties.
¹⁶
In my home state of Massachusetts, more babies are now born to women over thirty than under thirty.

Women are waiting because that’s a perfectly rational response to the emerging economy. Some poorer women hold off until they and their partners can afford a child. Professional women want to wait until they make partner, or otherwise establish themselves. All women sense that once they give birth they won’t be on the same earnings trajectory as they were before, and they’re probably right. Whether rich or poor, younger working women without children come closest to matching men’s pay levels. But once a woman has her first baby and faces the choice of fast track or slow, she most often chooses the slower one, and thereafter starts losing ground relative to men. Unless, of course, she’s willing to go the route of high-powered women like Alice Hector.

S
MALLER OR DELAYED
families can be understood in terms of the emerging economy, but why is marriage disappearing as well? Americans are now less likely to marry than at any time since statistics on marriages began to be tallied almost a century ago. Here’s a clue: The sharp decline in marriage rates began in the 1970s. A snapshot in 1970 would show 68 percent of adults married and 15 percent never married (the rest divorced, separated, or widowed). A snapshot at the end of the 1990s would show only 56 percent of adults married and 23 percent never married.
¹⁷

Recall that when the large-scale production economy began to shrink in the seventies, the wages of most blue-collar men began to stagnate or drop, relatively speaking, and they’ve dropped further since then. Even earnings that aren’t dropping are becoming less predictable. As a result, men are nowhere near as good a deal for women as they used to be. Far be it from me to take the romance out of marriage, but most women are not completely irrational when it comes to making marriage decisions. They’ll consider who’s going to contribute what to the union. Twenty-five years ago, a man with a stable job in the old mass-production economy could contribute quite a lot. Moreover, most women lacked a separate source of income. Under these circumstances, a man’s commitment to a stable marriage had significant value to a woman. Since then, such a commitment has steadily declined in value, like a share of stock in a company that’s going downhill.

Consider also
her
own separate stream of income. Although starting from a much lower level than men and still lagging behind, her stock is generally going up. And consider, finally, that even if a man is doing okay now, there’s no telling what will happen to him in this unpredictable economy. And if he loses his job and can’t get another, or if the next job pays very little, who’s to guarantee he won’t take it out on her?
¹⁸

So it would be rational for her to hedge her bets. Perhaps she keeps her options open by adopting a sort of “pay and stay” rule that goes something like this: Fella, you can stay as long as you contribute to household expenses, but when your contributions stop, or take a dive, you’re outta here. I’m not suggesting that most unmarried women think about marriage in such a mercenary way. The point is that, in the new economy, such a calculation is entirely rational. And consciously or unconsciously, a growing number of women seem to be making it.
¹⁹

Moralists are demanding stricter grounds for divorce. Several states now require that a couple first enter counseling if their marriage begins to falter. Some are calling for better preparation for marriage. Florida offers a discount on a marriage license if the prospective couple has taken a “marital education” course. There’s nothing wrong with efforts to make people think harder before they commit themselves to forming a more perfect union, and harder still before they abandon each other. But such efforts miss the basic point. The decline of marriage isn’t due mainly to a slump in morality or a wave of carelessness. It’s due, in large part, to a change in the economy, resulting in big differences in what men and women bring to the union. Many men no longer represent particularly good deals. Women no longer have to marry in order to have some economic security. In fact, marriage might even jeopardize their economic and personal well-being. The rising rate of divorce already has slowed, largely because fewer women are getting married in the first place.

LESS OF A MORAL CRISIS THAN YOU THINK

What really galls moralists is the sharp rise in the percentage of births that occur outside marriage. Consider that at midcentury a tiny 5.3 percent of births involved unmarried women. By the nineties, more than 32 percent of births took place outside wedlock. You can see the same trend in other nations. In Britain, for example, the proportion of children born outside marriage is now about the same as in the United States, quadrupling in the span of one generation.
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There is a serious crisis of illegitimacy, all right, but not quite the crisis it’s often made out to be. Remember that fewer women are getting married, and that even when they do, they’re having far fewer children. So it’s increasingly likely that when children are born, they’ll be born to women who are unmarried. This may be bad for the children (more on this in a moment), but it doesn’t signal a marked trend toward illegitimacy. Imagine that a married woman gives birth to three children and an unmarried woman to one, so that one out of four of these children is born out of wedlock. Compare this to a situation where the married woman has two children and the unmarried woman has one, with the result that now one out of three children is born out of wedlock. Has the rate of illegitimacy risen? Only relative to the total number of children born. But in the second situation, the unmarried woman behaved exactly as she did in the first. In other words, some of the so-called “crisis of illegitimacy” is a by-product of the larger trends toward fewer marriages and fewer children born to married couples. As more women have begun to have fewer children, or no children, even the rate of births to unmarried women has begun to level off.
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Here’s another misleading half-truth: Nearly 70 percent of black babies are born to black single mothers. What you don’t hear is that black women are having fewer babies to begin with. The steepest drop has been among married black women, which, again, automatically increases the rate of black babies born out of wedlock, since when a black baby is born, its mother is now more likely to be single.
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But even single black women are having fewer babies. Their rate of giving birth has been declining steadily since 1989, reaching a forty-year low in the late 1990s.
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In short, there’s no rising tide of “immoral” out-of-wedlock births among black women.

The interesting question is why black women are having far fewer babies overall. The answer is a slightly more extreme version of the answer for white women. Starting in the 1970s, the earnings of black men dropped sharply, with the result that black women have had to work longer and harder to make up the gap. At the same time, black women have gained more and better job opportunities. In consequence, the cost to them of having children and
not
attending to a job has risen, just as it has for white women who are doing better in the job market. In fact, the decline in the black birthrate has been steeper than the decline in the white birthrate, which has a lot to do with the fact that black women have moved up the earnings ladder faster than white women—while starting from a point far behind them. Black women with high-school diplomas now earn almost as much as white women with high-school diplomas ($926 for every $1,000 earned by a white). By contrast, black men with high-school diplomas are still far behind white men with diplomas, earning only $732 for every $1,000 earned by white men. Black women with four years of college behind them earn the same as white women with four years of college. And a growing percentage of black women are finishing high school and college.
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In other words, the “opportunity costs” for black women of getting bogged down with the responsibilities of teen pregnancy are far greater today than they were three decades ago.

None of what I’ve written should be taken to minimize the tragically high incidence of poverty among children of single mothers. As I write this, almost 40 percent of all unmarried mothers are earning less than what’s needed to buy themselves and their children adequate nutrition, clothing, and shelter. But these mothers’ problem isn’t that they’re single. Many of them, in fact, are living with men. Some would be better off if they were married, but not all of them would be. Many of the men available to them as potential husbands are earning very little; some are abusive. These men are among those who have fallen deepest into the postindustrial hole. Rather than marry or remain married to one of them, it’s sometimes smarter for these women to shop for temporary mates who will contribute more to the household for a time.

The problem of single-parent poverty is not due to an increasing percentage of poor women giving birth to children they cannot afford. As I’ve emphasized, the trend among all women is toward having fewer children, and this includes poor women. The real problem is that, inevitably,
some
women will have children they cannot afford. Some of these women may have behaved carelessly or irresponsibly. Others may have tried to plan their families beforehand but have hit upon bad luck, or been let down by men they thought they could count on, or been slammed by an economy that’s become less predictable.

The basic reality is that jobs at the bottom of the income ladder don’t pay enough to support a working woman and her children, even if she’s living and sharing expenses with a working man who’s also at the bottom of the income ladder. Doing away with our national system of welfare in 1996 may have made poor, nonworking mothers less “dependent” on government handouts, but it hasn’t lifted them out of poverty. Although the employment rate for single mothers with children has risen since then, and a majority are now in paid jobs, the blunt fact is that, despite the best economy in a generation, poverty rates have barely changed. Most of the welfare poor have now become working poor. If, by the time you read this, the economy has turned sour, this problem will loom much larger.

In short, the real issue isn’t so much a “moral crisis” within the American family as it is the growing asymmetry between what the emerging economy offers by way of work, and what children need by way of financial support, care, and attention. Many men are earning less relative to what society considers a decent standard of living, as well as what they had come to expect. More jobs require greater time and energy, regardless of whether a man or a woman is doing them. And all earnings are less predictable. Yet children’s needs have not changed. This basic asymmetry has caused many women to give birth to fewer children, or to delay having children, or to decide against having them at all—not because women (or men) love children less or get less satisfaction out of parenting, but because children don’t fit in easily with the demands of the emerging economy. In a different economic world, in a different time, children would be more welcome.