The wedding chapels where August works have seen business dwindle, he said, and Vegas is pushing to reverse the decline in an industry that generates as much as $3 billion in economic activity annually. In 2015 the surrounding county introduced a $14 surcharge on marriage licenses to pay for marketing, and local business leaders helped start a Wedding Chamber of Commerce last year. The data show an effort working against a broader national shift. [...]
Marriage has become a clear dividing line in a stratified country. Its decline is most pronounced among those who didn’t go beyond high school, as better educated people tend to marry each other. America’s working and middle classes are faring badly, and the research points to unraveling families as one cause.
Half of Americans older than 18 were married in 2014, down from 72 percent in 1960, according to the Pew Research Center. The shift is more pronounced for the less educated, which is a loose proxy for income: As of 2014, almost 75 percent of women with bachelor’s degrees were married by their early 40s, versus less than 60 percent of women with only a high-school diploma, according to the Brookings Institution. [...]
Men who marry drink less, work more and report greater happiness. Marriage allows couples to combine incomes, share costs and take advantage of tax breaks. Finally, children from stable, two-parent families do better in school and the job market, so today’s divide promises to entrench advantage or disadvantage. Recent research on middle-class despair showed that mortality is rising in middle age for less-educated white Americans, and authors Anne Case and Angus Deaton have been pointing to the move away from marriage as one possible factor.
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