Thread by @hamandcheese

This is a great report on the causes of family breakdown, however its focus on trends (wages, transfers, college attainment, social liberalization) misses what may be the most important cross-sectional factor: imbalanced sex ratios.

jec.senate.gov/public/index.c…

There is substantial variation in sex ratios across the US, driven by a variety of forces that correlate with their explanatory variables. Eg. Women now have much higher rates of education, but differential success in college has also skewed sex ratios in cities and college towns

Cross sectional analysis of US states and counties finds: "When sex ratios are male-biased, men and women are more likely to be married, fewer children are born out of wedlock, and fewer households are headed by women." The reverse holds when women>men.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P….

There are controversial sociobiological reasons that try to explain why imbalanced sex ratios lead to more "liberalized" cultures and mating norms. However, they're incidental to the basic disequilibrium problem created by a mismatch between available men and women in a cohort.

In addition to their college success, women have greater labor mobility because they (statistically speaking) select occupations that are demanded in most labor markets (eg. health care, education), in part to be flexible to the location choices of men. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00…

Sex ratios have become more imbalanced at both high and low levels of socioeconomic status.

During the same period, for example, the rise of mass incarceration created dramatically skewed female > male sex ratios in many low-income black communities.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P….

So did the growing safety-net cause black single motherhood, or did locking up so many black fathers induce both a first-order reliance on safety-net programs and a second-order cultural shift via skewed sex ratios?

If these cross-sectional forces are important, it'd help explain why the male:female earnings ratio sometimes explains family formation and sometimes doesn't.

It'd also suggest changing norms are transitory, the result of a temporary disequilibrium. Check back in 40 years.