Bell Curve

168 Cognitive Chses and Social Behavior Family Matters 169he conventional understanding of troubles in the American fam-In the early 1970s, the marriage rate began aT ily has several story lines. The happily married couple where theprolonged decline for no immediately apparent reasonhusband works and the wife stays home with the children is said to beas outmoded as the bustle. Large proportions of young people are stay-Marriages per 1,000 womening single. Half the marriages end in divorce. Out-of-wedlock births are120-soaring.These features of modem families are usually discussed in the mediaThe Great(and often in academic presentations) as if they were spread more or lessevenly across society.ll' In this chapter, we introduce greater discriminationinto that description. Unquestionably, the late twentieth centuryhas seen profound changes in the structure of the family. Rut it iseasy to misperceive what is going on. The differences across socioeconomicclasses are large, and they reflect important differences by cognitiveclass as well.MARRIAGEendsMarriage is a fundamental building block of social life and society itselfand thus is a good place to start, because this is one area where muchhas changed and little has changed, depending on the vantage pointone takes.From a demographic perspective, the changes are huge, as shown inthe next figure. The marriage rate since the 1920s has been volatile, butthe valleys and ~eaks in the figure have explanations that do not necessarilyinvolve the underlying propensity to many. The Great Depressionprobably had a lot to do with the valley in the early 1930s, andWorld War I1 not only had a lot to do with the spike in the late 1940sbut may well have had reverberations on the marriage rate that lastedinto the 1950s. It could even be argued that once these disruptive eventsare taken into account, the underlying propensity to marry did notchange from 1930 to the early 1970s. The one prolonged decline forwhich there is no obvious explanation except a change in the propensityto marry began in 1973, when marriage rates per 1,000 women begandropping and have been dropping ever since, in good years and bad.In 1987, the nation passed a landmark: Marriage rates hit an all-timelow, dropping below the previous mark set in the depths of the depression.A new record was promptly set again in 1988.This change, apparently reflecting some bedrock shifts in attitudestoward marriage in postindustrial societies, may have profound signifi-Sou~ces: U.S. Rureau of the Census, 1975, Tahle 8214-215; SAUS, 1992, Tahle 127, andcomparable tahles In various editions.cance. And yet marriage is still alive and well in the sense that it remainsa hugely popular institution. Over 90 percent of Americans ofboth sexes have married by the time they reach their 40s.'Marriage and IQWhat does cognitive ability have to do with marriage, and is there anyreason to think that it could be interacting with society's decliningpropensity to marry?We know from work by Robert Retherford that in premodern societiesthe wealthy and successful married at younger ages than the poorand underprivileged.' Retherford further notes that intelligence and socialstatus are correlated wherever they have been examined; hence, wecan assume that intelligence-via social status-facilitated marriage inpremodern societies,With the advent of modernity, however, this relationship flips over.Throughout the West since the nineteenth century, people in the more