Restructuring the Household and the Workplace

After I got past the introductory rehash of decline of marriage laments, this NYTimes article got me thinking of a slightly different way to frame the issue that, as Robert Samuelson puts it, "marriage has lost much of its pecuniary pull."

In earlier times, men and women both brought something to the table: women, shut out of the workplace, needed financial support, and men, in theory, needed children and the attendant child care, creating the conditions for mutually beneficial relationships.

These days, women have better adapted to the changing workscape, well men have lost ground.  What neither gender has adapted to is the changing household composition.  Men and women can both bring financial support to the table, while it is largely still women who must bring the childrearing. 

The traditional narrative from the right is that the welfare state has created marriage disincentives, which may be true, but when taking into account the basic structure of self-interest engendered by the new economy, it hardly seems plausible that this accounts for the decline, or can be expected to solve it with a simple change in welfare policy.