Half of marriages do NOT end in divorce!!
After hearing this ridiculous claim again tossed out on a news report the other day, I felt compelled to set the record straight, for the edification of the vast galaxy of Writeminded visitors, anyway.
This false statistic is thrown around so casually, it seems that many people citing it are almost promoting the demise of marriage as an institution. Viewing marriage as if it were some kind of archaic holdover from puritanical days of old, they eagerly repeat (without the slightest thought to it's glaring illegitimacy) the notion that half of all the married couples we know will see their promises of lifelong committment deteriorate into bitter, painful divorces.
I've heard Michael Medved address this statistical screwup at least a couple times on his radio show, in which he's pointed out that some really sloppy analysis (so easily corrected) of the stats simply compared the number of marriages to divorces in a given year, as if those marriages were also the ones dissolving that same year!
For example, the National Center for Health Statistics reported 2.4 million marriages in 1981, and 1.2 million divorces.
Now, a moron not prone to giving anything more than a nanosecond of reflection might compute that into a 50% failure rate. But the average 3rd grader would probably be wise enough to immediately comprehend that the many millions of marriages from previous years, going back several decades even, would comprise the pool from which those 1.2 million divorces came.
Here, for those caring enough to inform themselves, is a state-by-state table of the marriage rates, per 1000 people, for eight different years.
Here is a similar table for the divorces in those same years.
In my Minnesota, for example, the marriage-to-divorce rate ratio in 1990 was 7.7 to 3.5, per 1000 people. (Happily, the divorce rate dropped thru most of the proceeding years to 2.8 divorces per 1000 people in 2004.)
But it should be obvious to everyone that the couples calling it quits in any given year were not half of the same couples that just said their "I do"s.
That this common error hasn't been put to rest by the media reporting it, doesn't speak well for their attention to detail and fact-checking. And, the fact that the obviousness of the assumption didn't jump out at those reporters (and everyone else citing it) in the first place, leads one to think that they may have a vested interest in heralding the demise of the institution that is the cornerstone of civilized society.
This false statistic is thrown around so casually, it seems that many people citing it are almost promoting the demise of marriage as an institution. Viewing marriage as if it were some kind of archaic holdover from puritanical days of old, they eagerly repeat (without the slightest thought to it's glaring illegitimacy) the notion that half of all the married couples we know will see their promises of lifelong committment deteriorate into bitter, painful divorces.
I've heard Michael Medved address this statistical screwup at least a couple times on his radio show, in which he's pointed out that some really sloppy analysis (so easily corrected) of the stats simply compared the number of marriages to divorces in a given year, as if those marriages were also the ones dissolving that same year!
For example, the National Center for Health Statistics reported 2.4 million marriages in 1981, and 1.2 million divorces.
Now, a moron not prone to giving anything more than a nanosecond of reflection might compute that into a 50% failure rate. But the average 3rd grader would probably be wise enough to immediately comprehend that the many millions of marriages from previous years, going back several decades even, would comprise the pool from which those 1.2 million divorces came.
Here, for those caring enough to inform themselves, is a state-by-state table of the marriage rates, per 1000 people, for eight different years.
Here is a similar table for the divorces in those same years.
In my Minnesota, for example, the marriage-to-divorce rate ratio in 1990 was 7.7 to 3.5, per 1000 people. (Happily, the divorce rate dropped thru most of the proceeding years to 2.8 divorces per 1000 people in 2004.)
But it should be obvious to everyone that the couples calling it quits in any given year were not half of the same couples that just said their "I do"s.
That this common error hasn't been put to rest by the media reporting it, doesn't speak well for their attention to detail and fact-checking. And, the fact that the obviousness of the assumption didn't jump out at those reporters (and everyone else citing it) in the first place, leads one to think that they may have a vested interest in heralding the demise of the institution that is the cornerstone of civilized society.
posted by Brad @ 4:00 PM
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