October 09, 2003

More on the Myth

Cold Spring Shops responded to my post on the 50% divorce rate myth. That got me to dig out my copy of Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Annointed where I first encountered the myth's refutation.

In a given year, the number of divorces may well be half as large as the number of marriages that year, but this is comparing apples and oranges. The marriages being counted are only those marriages taking place within the given year, while the divorces that year are from marriages that took place over a period of decades. To say that half of all marriages end in diveroce, based on such statistics, would be like saying that half the population died last year if deaths were half as large as births. Just as most people were neither born nor died last year, so most marriages did not begin or end last year.

Sowell then uses some actual (though now dated) data to find out what portion of the population has been divorced:

According to census data for 1992, 11 percent of all adults who had ever been married were currently in the status of divorced persons. If 50 percent overstates the divorce rate, 11 percent does not include people who had been divorced but were now remarried, or those who were never married. However, these census statistics are relevant to the claim that traditional marriages are disappearing, for remarriages are still marriages. Married couples outnumbered unmarried couples by about 54 million to 3 million. (p. 59)

I still wonder if there is a longitudinal study going on where we can have some idea of what percentage of marriages in a given timeframe end in divorce.