What is the Chance of Marriage Ending in Divorce in the US?

In Chapter 10 of my book, I note that "it has been estimated that about half of the marriages contracted since the 1970s will end in divorce," with a followup comment that the rate seems to have leveled off and so we are likely past the period of rising divorce rates. Today my attention was drawn to a website called "truthorfiction"claiming that the 50 percent figure is too high.

Let me say it straightforwardly: Fifty percent of American marriages are not ending in divorce. It's fiction. A myth. A tragically discouraging urban legend.

If there's no credible evidence that half of American marriages will end up in divorce court, where did that belief originate?

The author of this website goes on to note, correctly, that the US no longer routinely collects divorce data (a sign of its general irrelevance to society, I suppose), so we must rely on surveys and other data sources. The article provides a variety of other estimates, but actually does not come up with a solid number. One of the issues, of course, is that even if you were looking at vital statistics, you cannot compare divorces in this year with marriages, because most divorces occur after several years of marriage. So, we need a longitudinal type of analysis. We need something comparable to what the life table provides as a way of standardizing the average length of life. In this way we can capture both the timing and the tempo of divorce over the life course of marriages. The person who has done more of this type of analysis than anyone else is Robert Schoen, now Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Penn State. In 2006, he and co-author Vladimir Canudas-Romo of UC, Berkeley published a paper in the Journal of Marriage and Family (Volume 68, August, pp 749-758) in which they applied a life table approach to data for those years for which information was available, and then a set of simulations for years in which data are not available. There overall conclusion was that:

Adjusted values for recent years do not suggest a decline in the likelihood of divorce, with year 2000 values indicating a divorce probability of 0.43 – 0.46.

To be fair, this is a little less than 50 percent, but still pretty high and pretty close to "about half." Of course, in the absence of good data since 2000, you might well argue that the divorce rate has declined. But, in the absence of data, you could just as easily argue that it has gone up. In point of fact, most data suggest that there has been no change.

Asians in Southern California

On September 11th, 2001, my wife and I were packed and ready to fly to Singapore to visit our older son, who was teaching a course there at the time. The events of that day meant that we never got to Singapore because our flight was cancelled and our son returned to France, where he was living at the time. Since we wound up not going, we asked him to describe Singapore for us, and his response was: "A lot like like Southern California, but with fewer Asians!" I thought of that story today when reading a story in the New York Times about the growth of the Asian population in Southern California--as though this was a new phenomenon:

The transformation illustrates a drastic shift in California immigration trends over the last decade, one that can easily be seen all over the area: more than twice as many immigrants to the nation’s most populous state now come from Asia than from Latin America.

The only problem with this particular statement, however, is that it isn't true. I looked at the American Community Survey for the combined years of 2007-11, downloaded from www.ipums.org at the Minnesota Population Center. I used the same criterion of "recency" as does the updated Pew Research Center report on the rise of Asian Americans referred to in the NY Times story--namely that people have arrived since 2004. The results show that there are 657,000 Latin Americans in California who have arrived since 2004, compared to 517,000 Asians, with the single biggest group of Asians coming from the Philippines. 

Furthermore, the author of the story, Jennifer Medina, suggests that:

Much of the current immigration debate in Congress has focused on Hispanics, and California has for decades been viewed as the focal point of that migration. But in cities in the San Gabriel Valley — as well as in Orange County and in Silicon Valley in Northern California — Asian immigrants have become a dominant cultural force in places that were once largely white or Hispanic.

However, she fails to point out that the immigration debate is largely about undocumented immigrants, and the Pew Research Center's analysis suggests that Latin American (mainly Mexican) undocumented immigrants outnumber Asian undocumented immigrants by a ratio of 7 to 1. Nonetheless, it is useful to point out the conclusion drawn by the Pew Research Center in the report mentioned above about the Asian population in the United States:

Asian Americans are the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States. They are more satisfied than the general public with their lives, finances and the direction of the country, and they place more value than other Americans do on marriage, parenthood, hard work and career success, according to a comprehensive new nationwide survey by the Pew Research Center.

Urban Informality--People Making Do in Cities

Although the cities of developing countries are absorbing almost all of the population growth these days, and likely for the foreseeable future, this is not an easy process. Few countries have the resources to keep up with urban population growth and the result is what Ananya Roy and Nezar Alsayyad have called urban informality. This theme was also central to Mike Davis's book Planet of Slums. Today's New York Times takes a look at what is happening along these lines in New Delhi.

New Ashok Nagar is a typical crosscut of Indian urban chaos: Dust rises off battered, narrow lanes, tangles of telephone and electricity lines hang between poorly constructed, mismatched brick buildings. Sewage overflows from uncovered channels. And people are in the streets, in the doorways, everywhere.

What is also fairly typical about New Ashok Nagar is that it is not supposed to exist. The district, on the eastern edge of New Delhi, is an “unauthorized colony,” with an estimated 200,000 residents despite its lack of government approvals or full city services. Across New Delhi, as many as 5 million of the city’s 17 million residents live in unauthorized colonies, whether in slums, middle-class areas or even a few illegally constructed enclaves of the rich.

Accompanying the story is a photo slide show that helps illustrate the situation. Although the photos are from New Delhi, you could insert similar photos from almost any large city in the Global South.

Life Expectancy Showing Signs of Improvement in Russia

For several decades now, life expectancy has been lower in Russia than in any other country of the Global North. Indeed, as I note in Chapter 5, the declines in mortality among infants and among men in Russia were among the early signs that the Soviet Union was in serious trouble, prior to its dissolution. But, things seem to be changing, finally. A team of researchers has just published a paper in Demographic Research showing that life expectancy has been steadily rising in Russia since 2004.

Like the previous mortality fluctuations that have occurred in Russia since the mid-1980s, the increase in life expectancy was driven by deaths at ages 15 to 60 from alcohol-related causes. Uniquely in the recent period, there were also improvements at older ages, especially in cerebrovascular disease mortality among women. In addition, there were reductions in deaths from avoidable causes, such as from tuberculosis and diabetes. The life expectancy gap between Russia and Western countries remains large, and is mostly attributable to deaths from cardiovascular disease, alcohol-related conditions, and violence. 

The authors note that the life expectancy gap between males and females remains very high--63 for men and 75 for women. On top of alcohol and violence, Russian men continue to smoke a great deal and that also contributes to the gender gap. 

An interesting side note is that Russia has been a strong supporter of Assad in Syria--almost certainly a key reason why the civil war there continues as intensely as it does. Yet, prior to the civil war, Syria actually had higher life expectancy than did Russia--71 for men and 77 for women.

Is H7N9 Avian Flu Going to be a Big Killer?

About three weeks ago a report came out indicating that two people in China had died from a new strain of Avian flu. It seemed early then to be too worried, but concern has spread quickly. As of yesterday, more than 100 people in China had been infected and, more crucially from a global perspective, it has now spread out of China into Taiwan. Cases in China have been concentrated on the east coast, as shown in this very cool map produced yesterday. More troubling is the concern over whether China is handling this potential epidemic in the best way possible. Nature News thinks that they are going a good job:

China deserves credit for its rapid response to the outbreaks of H7N9 avian influenza, and its early openness in the reporting and sharing of data.

A bad reputation is difficult to shake. A decade ago, China failed to report early cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and fumbled its initial response to the threat. Today, some commentators view its reaction to H7N9 with mistrust. But from all the evidence so far, China’s response to the virus, which had caused 104 confirmed human cases and 21 deaths asNature went to press, is next to exemplary.

Laurie Garrett, writing for Foreign Policy, is more concerned, although this is largely based on China's very slow and inadequate response to SARS. However, she does include a good quote that is a cautionary tale for everyone:

As the flu czar of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Keiji Fukuda, tersely put it to reporters last week, "Anything can happen. We just don't know."