June Carbone and Naomi Cahn Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family Oxford University Press, 2014. 272 p. $29.95; 19.95 (pbk.)

Abstract

Marriage Markets, by legal scholars June Carbone and Naomi Cahn, is ambitious in scope and covers many topics and trends of interest to demographers, sociologists, and other family researchers. These include race and class stratification in family formation, the interplay between economics and norms and values, the culture wars, the rise in executive compensation, and family law. The book's motivating question is why changes in the American family have not affected all socioeconomic groups equally. As many demographers have documented, the family patterns of college-educated Americans have been relatively stable over time, while the retreat from marriage and the rise in nonmarital childbearing and family instability have been concentrated among their less-educated counterparts. Marriage Markets draws on a large body of literature to explain the divergence in family patterns across socioeconomic groups. The authors propose that marriage markets help to explain divergence in family patterns across education groups. Sex ratio imbalances have generally been powerful explanations of cross-sectional differences in family patterns, but whether they can also account for changes over time in such patterns is less clear. The authors write that there are “more successful men seeking to pair with a smaller pool of similarly successful women” (p. 4) and suggest that this helps to explain the stability of marriage for the college-educated, but these assertions are questionable. For their evidence, the authors cite a chart from a blog post showing that the number of college-educated men exceeds the number of college-educated women when we condition on full-time employment and earning over $60,000 a year. There seems to be no strong rationale for conditioning in this way; moreover, we see the opposite picture for the college-educated group as a whole. Overall, the ratio of college-educated individuals has fallen from about 114 men per 100 women in 1980 to 78 per 100 in 2010. The gender ratio for the college-educated group as a whole has moved in a direction that complicates rather than explains the puzzle of why the college-educated have more or less held steady in their family behavior while less-educated groups have led the retreat from marriage. Carbone and Cahn's use of pop cultural references and casual generalizations may appeal to lay readers but is likely to be less appealing for family scholars. The use of stylized narratives throughout the book, based on a pair of couples who are acquaintances of the authors, may also miss the mark for a scholarly audience. This storytelling strategy has been used effectively elsewhere, but here the experiences of these couples are often only indirectly relevant to the arguments being advanced. In spite of such shortcomings the book has merit. The discourse on family change can certainly be enriched by perspectives from outside the usual disciplines—in this case the perspective of legal experts. The book's novel contribution is its discussion of the shifting legal definition of parental obligation and how the implications and effects of these shifts vary by class. In particular, the legal standing of non-biological, “social fathers” has thus far received little attention, and the authors raise important questions about whether and when social fathers should have legal rights and responsibilities for children, in the absence of legal adoption and even in the presence of a child's tie with his or her biological father.