New Census data shows that, for the first time, 51+% of women are living without a spouse. In 2000, the number was 49%, and in 1950, it was 35%. More astute demographic theorists than me can speculate about What It All Means, but the Ezra spin on the numbers is that these sorts of trends have a relatively massive impact on absolute inequality, particularly as measured by household. Cut to Brookings economist Gary Burtless:
The atomization of U.S. families has been widely discussed and intensely
debated. None of the debate has focussed on the role of household atomization in producing a major link between inequality and economic growth, however. The process of atomization is quite likely to produce more inequality. A family containing more than one potential earner has the equivalent of an insurance policy to offset the variability of the principal earner's wages. A family with only a single potential earner lacks that insurance. The result is that income (and equivalent income) is more equally distributed among married-couple families than it is in one-adult families. Presumably, families with three or four potential earners would have even better insurance than married-couple families. This may be one reason that extended families containing more than two adults are a common household arrangement in developing countries.
If a family splits up, one by-product is an increase the variance of the equivalent incomes of the resulting family units. According to the official U.S. poverty guidelines, it takes 56 percent more money to support two people living apart than it does to support the same two people if they live together. Unless actual income increases substantially at the same time a family splits up, atomization reduces the equivalent income of the typical family member. The atomization of American families – holding actual incomes constant – thus reduces the average person's equivalent income and increases the variance of equivalent income.
That last bit is important. If a household breaks up, and both wage earners made equal salaries, they will both have less than 50% of the buying power they enjoyed previously. In most cases, that's probably a good thing: We don't want couples trapped in unhappy or abusive relationships. So that's a type of inequality we may well not want to reduce, hence my argument that we need to talk about unequal political and economic power, which is a bad source of rising inequality, rather than inequality itself.
