Census Bureau’s Plan to Cut Marriage and Divorce Questions Has Academics Up in ArmsPosted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Economics, Gay & Lesbian, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2015-01-01 20:37Z by Steven |
Census Bureau’s Plan to Cut Marriage and Divorce Questions Has Academics Up in Arms
The New York Times
2014-12-31
Justin Wolfers, Senior Fellow
Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, D.C.
also: Professor of Economics and Public Policy
University of Michigan
If the Census Bureau proceeds with a recently released plan, then in a few years’ time, we will know very little about how the contours of family life are changing.
We will not even know whether marriage and divorce rates are rising or falling. For all the talk of evidence-based policy, the result will be that important debates on issues including family law, welfare reform, same-sex marriage and the rise of nontraditional families will proceed in a statistical void.
Much of what I, an economist who has studied family issues, and my colleagues in this field have learned about recent trends in marriage and divorce has come from questions in the American Community Survey. It asks people whether they have given birth, married, divorced or been widowed in the past year. Their answers allow demographers to track marriage and divorce rates by age, gender, race and education.
These data have revealed many important social trends, including the rise of sharply different marriage and divorce patterns between rich and poor, and the increase in divorce among older Americans, even as it has fallen for younger people. And they have provided the only statistical window into the adoption of same-sex marriage.
The Census Bureau is proposing to eliminate these questions. It would follow a series of steps taken over recent decades that have collectively devastated our ability to track family change. This isn’t being done as a strategic policy choice but rather is the result of a series of isolated decisions made across several decades by statisticians scattered across various government agencies who have failed to understand the cumulative effect of their actions…
Read the entire article here.