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The marrieds are weathering COVID better than the singles, as @EmilyBobrow notes @TheAtlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/07/pandemic-marriage-out-of-reach-americans/614506/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
But is @EmilyBobrow right to argue that marriage is *just* an expression of privilege, rather than also an engine of emotional, social & economic advantage? IOW, doesn't the arrow of causality run both ways?
No doubt that educ & $ increase odds of getting and staying married. I've made this pt since 2010: http://stateofourunions.org/2010/when-marriage-disappears.php. But marriage is also a path towards the American Dream. How so? Let me count the ways:
1) Young adults from low-income families who marry before having kids much more likely to avoid poverty and realize a Middle Class+ lifestyle https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/millennials-and-the-success-sequence-how-do-education-work-and-marriage-affect-poverty-and-financial-success-among-millennials/
2) Americans from *bottom* quintile are @ 2x more likely to ascend to *top* quintile if they come from intact families & those from *top* quintile are much more likely to descend to *bottom* quintile if raised non-intact @RichardvReeves @BrookingsCCF https://www.bostonfed.org/inequality2014/papers/reeves-sawhill.pdf
3) And family structure -- at the community level -- is one of the best predictors of upward mobility for *poor* kids in America, according to Raj Chetty @Harvard & his colleagues https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/01/new-harvard-study-where-is-the-land-of-opportunity-finds-single-parents-are-the-key-link-to-economic-opportunity.html
So, moving forward, we need to shore up the economic--as well as the cultural & policy--foundations of marriage to make it more accessible to working-class couples and thereby bridge the class divide in marriage.
