Marriage of true minds

After my posts on children being brought up in single parent households, Commentator twinkie has sent me a paper on inter-racial divorce rates. A summary of the results is shown above.

YUANTING ZHANG and JENNIFER VAN HOOK Marital Dissolution Among Interracial Couples. Journal of Marriage and Family 71 (February 2009): 95–107

This paper looks back at marriages from 1990 to 2001. The main result is that most marriages are within racial groups:

Approximately 2,059 couples (8.9% of the sample) divorced or separated during the time interval they were followed in the SIPP. The majority (93.5%) of the couples in our sample were endogamous, including 77.4% White-White, 6.4% Black-Black, 7% Hispanic-Hispanic, and 2.7% Asian-Asian couples. The remaining 6.5% of couples were interracially married (including 1% White-Black, 3.5% White-Hispanic, 1.4% White-Asian pairings, and 0.6% of all types of minority-minority marriages combined). Consistent with prior studies (e.g., Qian, 1997), there are distinct racial or ethnic differences in being in an interracial marriage (results not shown). Blacks are substantially less likely than Hispanics or Asians to have a White spouse (10.1% vs. 23.5% and 24.6%, respectively).

That summary packs a considerable punch. One in 11 couples have divorced/separated in the study period of roughly 4 years. Most couples had stuck to their own race when choosing a spouse, only 1 in 15 going outside their racial grouping. Hispanics and Asians wed across racial boundaries with Whites, Blacks far less so.

Here are the results, ranked by divorce rates:

First, these are not plain scores, but hazard ratios based on the white couple divorce rate as a benchmark. So, the rates more than 1 can be considered “percentages above average” and those less than 1 are “percentages below average”.

Hazard ratios may mean well, but they are complicated to handle. Marriage isn’t that much of a hazard, not usually anyway.

So, “Black husband-White wife” couples are 85% more likely to divorce than a white couple.

Asian husband-Asian wife” are (100-14) = 86% less likely to divorce than a white couple.

All the others are in between, but the general sequence of broken marriages is Black-Hispanic-White-Asian. Interestingly, this is the inverse of the group intelligence scores. Perhaps the marriage of true minds requires both parties to solve the ultimate intelligence test: will I get on with this person in the long-term?

Black husbands with White wives split up often. Their chance of divorce is 85% higher than the reference level of a white husband and a white wife. As marriages go, these go all too quickly.

Even Black husbands with Black wives don’t prosper, despite racial and cultural matching which would predict a successful pairing, in that they are 69% more likely to divorce than the white reference level. Furthermore, when Black wives marry White husbands they ameliorate their dismal marriage survival chances somewhat, but still end up 58% more likely to divorce than white couples.

On these data, Black men and women are not the marrying kind. Why is this so? Some possible reasons are that they choose less well, or expect too much, or offer too little. Broader hypotheses have been offered, about cultural pressures generally, or about historical effects of welfare legislation, the latter argued by Thomas Sowell, who regards the reduction of marriage rates as due to the perverse incentives of welfare payments. Whatever the reason, their marriages are more at hazard than other races.

Hispanic husbands with White wives are less divorce-prone, but still 33% more likely to split. White husbands with Hispanic wives are a better bet, but still 11% worse than white couples.

White couples are the reference group.

Marriage works best when Asians are involved, and they are the ones who can claim their marriages are made in heaven. Putting in a white wife or white husband reduces this heavenly state roughly five-fold.

In race-discordant marriages, Black husbands are much more injurious to White Wife marriages than Black wives are to White Man marriages; Hispanic husbands more injurious White Wife marriages than Hispanic wives are to White husbands, White husbands a bit more injurious to Asian wives than white wives are to Asian husbands.

What can we say about all these figures? Why not start with the obvious: black men and women are 12 times more likely to divorce than Asians. Hispanic men and women are 6 times more likely to divorce than Asians. Given these findings, we should be asking Asians for marriage advice.

Why not then look at the next obvious finding: a White woman’s chances of divorce are 85% higher with a Black man and 33% higher with a Hispanic man compared to marrying a White man.

A Hispanic woman’s chances of a divorce are 22% points higher if she marries a White man than a fellow Hispanic man.

An Asian woman’s chances of divorce are much, much higher with a White husband than a fellow Asian one.

What is to be done? Perhaps, despite all the tracts written about marital choices, it is at heart an intelligence test: will I get on well enough to live together for ever?

I don’t do policy, but at least circulating these figures could be considered a charitable act for all parties concerned.