If President-elect Donald Trump is going to make good on his promise to deliver a “golden age of America,” he will have to find a way to make marriage great again. There is no institution more essential to the prosperity of the nation and its culture than the family. Yet no institution has declined as much as marriage over the past 50 years.
From the first census through 1960, close to 80% of all households in the United States were led by a married couple. That percentage fell slightly in the 1960s and then rapidly during the 1970s. By 2010, fewer than half of all households included a married couple, and today, that percentage stands at just 45%. Marriage has receded so much that adults between 18 and 44 are now more likely to have cohabited than to have been married.
As a direct result, America leads the world in the percentage of children born without married fathers (40%) and in the percentage of mothers who have children by different fathers (25%).
But so what? Why should we care if marriage has declined? The public is decreasingly concerned about marriage. Just 29% of adults say it is “very important” for a couple who have a child together to be married, according to Gallup. A whopping 40% of adults say it is not important at all.
Some of them even celebrate the decline of marriage as an outright positive development. In her book The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, Hanna Rosin notes that women “are more likely to have a college degree, and, in aggregate, they make more money” than men. “What makes this remarkable development possible is not just the pill or legal abortion,” Rosen continues, “but the whole new landscape of sexual freedom — the ability to delay marriage and have temporary relationships that don’t derail education or career.”
“To put it crudely,” Rosin concludes, “feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of hookup culture.” Yes, that’s crude — crude and woefully misguided. Has feminist progress at the expense of marriage been great for everyone? Has it even been great for women?
Decades of research says not.
Marriage matters
For starters, married men and women are happier than single men and women. The positive effects of marriage are stronger for men, but even after controlling for physical health, mental health, and economic variables, married women, even those who eventually got divorced, are happier than never-married women and less likely to suffer from depression. Married people are also healthier and wealthier than their unmarried counterparts, and they have more and better sex.
Then, there is the effect of marriage on children. Children raised by married parents are more likely to graduate from high school, less likely to get suspended, more likely to graduate from college, more likely to be employed, and less likely to be in prison than those raised in unmarried households.
The positive effects of marriage extend beyond the home to the entire community. Research has found that more than any other factor, including race, education, and income, neighborhoods with the highest percentage of married parents are more likely to produce children who become more economically successful than their parents. In other words, no institution better ensures the fulfillment of the American dream than marriage.
The decline of marriage is a leading cause of income and wealth inequality. Couples who get married and stay married earn more money than single people, and they develop more wealth over time, which they then can pass on to their children and future generations. Neighborhoods without married fathers in the home have far higher crime rates than communities dominated by married families.
The collapse of marriage is also the principal cause of America’s demographic decline. Married women have more children than single women do. When there are fewer married women, and when those women who do get married are doing so later in life, there are far fewer children overall. If we cannot project ourselves into the future, our nation will cease to exist.
Reversing the decline
Fortunately for the institution of marriage, much of Trump’s existing agenda would help young men and women to get married and stay married.
One of the key causes of falling marriage rates is the relative decline of low-skill male wages. Women don’t want to marry men who make less money than them. Since 1979, median real wages for men have fallen by 3%, while men in the bottom 10% of earnings saw their wages fall by 7.7%. (The data on men aren’t all bad — the top 10% of male earners saw their wages rise by over 40%). Meanwhile, the median wage for all women rose 28%, and women in the bottom 10% of earners saw their wages rise 10%.
Falling men’s wages combined with rising female wages means a lot more men are not making enough money to attract a wife. By raising men’s wages, especially in low-skill jobs, Trump can increase the number of men whom women would consider worthy of marrying for lifetime partnership, thus raising marriage rates.
Securing the border
While there is no silver bullet for raising male wages, there are elements of Trump’s agenda that can help. His crackdown on illegal immigration, for example, should help start undoing some of the damage caused by past administrations. According to Harvard University economist George Borjas, a 10% increase in the number of workers with a particular skill set lowers the wages of native workers with that same skill set by 3%. Since most illegal immigrants lack a college education, this means the growth of illegal immigration has been a disaster for low-skill male wages. Borjas estimates that, on aggregate, employers enjoy about $50 billion in higher profits every year due to the lower wages they are able to pay thanks to high levels of immigration.
There are somewhere between 10 million and 15 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., and despite his confident rhetoric, Trump will not come close to deporting them all. But by closing the border to them, targeting those illegal immigrants who commit crimes, and raiding employers who hire illegal immigrants, Trump would force employers to raise wages. In 2006, after 1,300 illegal immigrants were arrested at six meat processing plants across the Midwest, full production at all the plants resumed within five months, with average wages up 10%.
Reviving manufacturing
Trump’s tariffs on China could also help manufacturing jobs and wages recover. In the first 10 years after China joined the World Trade Organization, the U.S. lost 1 million manufacturing jobs, about a third of the sector. In theory, these job losses were supposed to be replaced by higher-paying jobs in other industries that served China’s market. However, due to China’s manipulation of its currency and its regulatory efforts to squeeze out foreign competition, the new higher-paying jobs never materialized. By raising the prices of imported Chinese goods through tariffs, Trump can give domestic manufacturers a fighting chance.
Trump can further help manufacturers by doing everything possible to make energy as inexpensive as possible. President Joe Biden poured trillions of dollars into solar and wind power but restricted oil and gas development on federal lands. Those lands should be made available for development. More importantly, Biden did nothing to make it easier to build the infrastructure needed to develop both clean and fossil fuel energy production. The electric grid is overstretched as is and will need more investment as technology companies suck up power for artificial intelligence.
Permitting reform
We desperately need permitting reform, not only to build more oil and natural gas pipelines but also to build transmission lines needed to connect rural solar and wind projects to urban centers. Permitting reform can unleash the construction industry, which predominantly employs men.
Lower male wages are not the only reason marriage is declining. Social attitudes toward sex have changed dramatically since the 1960s, perhaps best epitomized by the ubiquity and acceptance of pornography. Once confined to seedy theatres in urban areas, now the most violent and degrading hardcore pornography is available anywhere there is cellphone coverage, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Prosecute pornographers
How addictive pornography is can be debated, but what is not debatable is how widespread pornography use is among young men and how it damages their lives. If viewed in moderate amounts, pornography has little impact on behavior, but the more pornography a man watches, the more likely he is to be unhappy with his body and the less likely he is to be satisfied with his sex life. Other research has found that men often use pornography as a low-effort substitute for female intimacy, with high-frequency users much less likely to get married than those who abstain or use it infrequently.
States are already leading the fight against the pornography industry, including 19 that have passed age verification laws that have caused some online pornographers to abandon those states entirely. A Trump administration could do more at the federal level by bringing obscenity cases against hardcore pornographers that depict things such as choking and slapping women. The Supreme Court justices who loosened obscenity standards in 1973 were far more liberal than today’s justices, many of whom would probably be willing to recalibrate the ease with which pornography can be viewed.
Restrict online gambling
Pornography is not the only online distraction ruining young men’s lives. Since the Supreme Court held in 2018 that Congress could not force states to criminalize gambling, there has been an explosion of apps allowing young men to bet on sports. Currently, 38 states and the District of Columbia allow sports betting. And thanks to the uneven nature of how legalization occurred, we can see the effect legalized gambling has had. Studies show that in those states that have legalized online betting, bankruptcies are up 30%, as are delinquent payments on auto loans and credit cards. Of particular interest to the institution of marriage, young men in low-income counties are the hardest hit.
Congress might not be ready to ban online gambling at the federal level, but Congress could at least ban advertising for gambling apps, as it has done for cigarettes and other tobacco products. Then, we could all watch a football game again without having gambling ads forced down our throats.
Unlikely hero
Democrats may scoff at the suggestion that Trump, who is twice divorced, could lead a movement to reverse the decline of marriage. And their criticism is well taken. But Trump can also serve as a reminder of just how important the institution of monogamous marriage is.
As bad as one might think Trump’s behavior is now, imagine how much worse it would be if we lived in a polygamous society or one without marriage norms at all. He’d have a mistress, or wife, set up on every floor of Trump Tower. He’d have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children. This is how many wealthy men live in polygamous countries today, and it is how most powerful men lived for almost all of recorded human history.
As detailed in my book, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage is Destroying Democracy, monogamous marriage has only recently returned as the primary way most cultures channel sexual desire. While humans evolved to thrive in monogamous nomadic foraging tribes, since the dawn of agriculture, humanity has been polygamous. Only after the Catholic Church prescribed monogamy did the institution slowly return. But when it did, it broke down patriarchal power structures, allowing new civil institutions such as guilds and universities to grow and thrive, setting the stage for democracy and the industrial revolution.
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From its founding until just 50 years ago, marriage was understood to be the foundation of America’s success. When he visited the country in 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, “Of the world’s countries, America is surely the one where the bond of marriage is most respected and where they have conceived the highest and most just idea of conjugal happiness.”
This commitment to marriage made the U.S. the strongest, wealthiest, most admired nation in the world. With Trump’s leadership, we can help reverse the recent decline in marriage and ensure another “golden age of America.”