Why Do Married Couples Have More Money?

The Washington Post today headlined a trend that has been developing for decades: "Numbers Drop for the Married With Children." The married-with-children demographic, the Post correctly notes, is an especially advantaged group financially - they are disproportionately represented in the top economic tiers and their income has grown faster than that of the average household.

Where the Post reels off the tracks from fact into ideology is in their accounting for why married people have more money. The paper conveniently locates one man and one woman who squandered their money while single, then married and lived fiscally responsibly ever after. In the Post's own words:

"When the Fitzhenrys married, it changed the way they managed their finances, which Jim said had been in a 'death spiral' when they were single. Michelle quickly paid off $20,000 in credit-card debt. Jim cut up most of his credit cards and got rid of a BMW convertible."

This is the standard ideological tale of how single people have bad values, such as selfishness, until they are magically transformed by marriage into good and responsible adults. In my book, SINGLED OUT: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, I show how this myth does not stand up to the available social science evidence. For an added flourish, I debunk the myth of the self-centered single and the giving married person using data from an author who is a true believer in the myth. Steven Nock, in Marriage in Men's Lives, proclaims that bachelors are "changed by their marriages": "They become better men."

Nock reported a very straightforward measure of selflessness, giving money to friends and relatives. Examining a nationally representative sample of Americans over five years, Nock found that the men who got married did NOT give any more money to their relatives than they had when they were single, even though they often had two incomes to draw from and were making more money than single men. Once they married, though, men gave far less money to friends than they had when they were single. Men who divorced resumed giving more money to friends, and those who remarried returned to giving less.

But why were the married men making more money than the single men? Here's the Post's framing: "Among its many benefits, marriage raises the earnings of men and motivates them to work more hours." Steven Nock puts it even more bluntly: "Employers value marriage and reward it."

The implication is that married men are more selfless and devoted workers than single men, presumably with more accomplishments to show for their dedication, and that's why they are paid more. If employers paid married men more simply because they were married, that would not be an example of good values. It would be discrimination.

So which is it? Nock analyzed several indications of men's commitment to the workplace, their fellow workers, and their professions. For example, he looked at how often they participated in farm organizations, unions, and professional societies. Married men actually spent LESS time at those work-related activities than they had when they were single. Men who married for the first time did work 2.2 more weeks per year than that had before. As I noted in SINGLED OUT, "That's the kind of work that pays - them, but not anyone else. Even this one marriage incentive fizzles for men who remarry; they worked 7.4 weeks less than they had when they were divorced."

What matters more than the number of hours logged is the accomplishments that are attained. When single and married men are equal in their job-related contributions, are married men still paid more? A pile of studies (reviewed in Singled Out) suggests that the answer is yes. In one study of identical twins, the married twin was paid an average of 26% more than the single twin.

Salary discrimination singles out single men. But other workplace perks, such as healthcare benefits, disadvantage single women as much as single men. As Thomas Coleman pointed out long before I did, many single people also pay more than their share in insurance, taxes, and many other domains, while getting less than their share of consumer discounts.

The Post ends its piece by peddling one last stereotype about people who are single - that they are running away from marriage because they are so embittered or so scarred by their parents' marital failures. Again, the Post finds one single person (rather than, say, a scientific study) to make these insinuations: "'Marriage ruins life,' Roach said, 'I saw how much my parents fought, I saw how miserable they made each other.'"

There are about 90 million single people in America and untold numbers of miserable marriages, so surely the one person the Post quoted is not the only adult with a dim view of wedlock. Still, as a general statement of Americans's view of marriage, or even of single Americans's view, it is exactly wrong. As Time magazine recently pointed out, Americans love marriage. But here's something else that millions of Americans love - the time they spend single. Increasingly, single people are not running away from marriage, they are embracing their singlehood.

We should shelve our stereotypes about single people because they are inaccurate and unfair. But if we could get past our biases, it is not only single people who would benefit. In a world in which singles were not scrambling to escape the stigma of being single, people who wanted to marry would approach the matter from a position of strength.

If we had fairness and justice for single people, we would also have healthier marriages.