The 50% divorce rate stat is a myth, so why won’t it die?

http://qz.com/306166/the-divorce-stat-that-just-keeps-cheating-50/

by prostoalex • 12 years ago

46 60 12 years ago

qz.com

cousin_it2• 12 years ago

So what's the actual number? The article doesn't say. It's kinda rambling.

Ntrails• 12 years ago

Nobody knows, because no one even agrees how to calculate it.

Divorces/Marriages in a given year is worthless.

Divorces (of people married in 1970) / Marriages (of people married in 1970) gives you a number for that "cohort" but isn't exactly true - there are many years left for them to divorce, and that is generations ago.

Personally I'd say it would be useful to look at divorce rates and marriage rates in terms of overall population and growth and argue whether

    (Divorces / total people married)

was increasing compared to

    (Marriages / total people unmarried)

(I'm sure a statistician can tell me I'm wrong)

throwawayaway• 12 years ago

marriage ends in either death or divorce, surely they can combine the stats!

geocar• 12 years ago

Except someone can be married and divorced multiple times (even within a single year).

Counting the marriages or the divorces is a mistake. You need to count the people over time, but also not consider people who never get married.

cousin_it2• 12 years ago

I think the main meaningful number is the chance of divorce for marriages starting today. There are probably many ways to estimate it indirectly.

nodata2• 12 years ago

Nobody knows, because no one even agrees how to calculate it.

What's wrong with "percentage of marriages that end in divorce"?

snowwrestler2• 12 years ago

I'd be interested in the "survival rate" of marriages that end in divorce, like they calculate for chronic diseases. What's the 5-year survival rate for a marriage across the population? What's the 10-year rate, or 20-year rate? You could segment such data pretty easily by other factors, like region, ethnicity, age at wedding, etc.

jmckib• 12 years ago

The best they had was divorce rate per person (including children and unmarried adults). However, I did find some information in one of the links from the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html?_r=0

It mentions numbers from 16 percent (those married between 1990 and 1994) to 41% (men who were then between the ages of 50 to 59 [in 2001]). They agree that the divorce rate has been declining, particularly among college grads.

the_mitsuhiko2• 12 years ago

The divorce to marriage rate is about 50% in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_demography

cowsandmilk2• 12 years ago

As discussed in the article, that's a horrible number.

If you dig into it, most of the divorces are people 50-59 who married when the marriage rate was much higher.

The marriage rate has gone down over time because more people are choosing not to marry.

You can think of it as either a depressed marriage rate or an inflated divorce rate, but large number of people getting divorced who were married 30 years ago is unrelated to the number of people being married today.

the_mitsuhiko2• 12 years ago

The 50% divorce rate is pretty spot on. 50% of all marriages end in a divorce. This has been calculated independently for many different countries over different years (and within a year) and from what I can tell those numbers do not vary much.

That obviously does not say the likelihood of an individual marriage succeeding given that some people marry more than once.

intopieces5• 12 years ago

Since you're going against the facts presented in the article, would you mind citing your sources? It will help readers evaluate your claims more effectively by allowing them to account for biases.

coldtea9• 12 years ago

would you mind citing your sources?

The article doesn't claim any sources for the "overestimation" either -- or attempts to give any more accurate number.

It's mostly a rehash of the linked NYT article that actually points out rates around 38-45% (so pretty damn close to 50%).

spydum• 12 years ago

The article never actually provided fact or studies showing it is NOT 50%, they just ridiculed the national marriage project. All they showed was that less people per population were getting divorced. This does not answer the question about the divorce rate or where more or less people were getting married.

aleh2• 12 years ago

Now, if something as seemingly straightforward as divorce rate is controversial to calculate, how about causes/existence of global warming which is orders of magnitude more complex and is driven by much more powerful special interest groups.

intopieces5• 12 years ago

The science behind global warming is relatively uncontroversial [0], it's what we should do about that is fraught with peril, special-interests wise. But that's inevitable, really, given that environmentalism is itself a "special interest," albiet one that concerns us all in one way or another.

[0]http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

feinte• 12 years ago

We have more precise data about global warming. Sensors are good at measuring temperature or sea rising, less at measuring divorce rates.

cowsandmilk2• 12 years ago

The US government stopped tracking divorce rates in 1996, so we have little data. We still have a shitload of weather stations and air monitoring stations that actually give us data.

aleh2• 12 years ago

Yep, we have shitload of data and then use complex model of earth climate to extrapolate this data. Being complex the model is extremely sensitive to parameters (Butterfly effect) and gives a lot of freedom in choosing parameters, which in turn makes it easy to tune the model to get the expected result.

In itself it would not be too bad, this is how we learn how things work, but add a media looking for sensation and political interests and this whole area of research becomes as scientific as astrology.

newuser88273• 12 years ago

Your comment was funny, duly upvoted, but you seem to be making somewhat of a category error, as we're not talking about divorce rate prediction but divoce rate measurement, while global warming controversy is about prediction, not much about measuring current temperature. (Measurement, I seem to remember, didn't even corrobate older global warming predictions, or some such thing, which is beside the point, because at no point global warning was about high temperatures to be measured "now".)

epx• 12 years ago

Well, the actual divorce rate is certainly not that different in magnitude. It is not 5-10%.

intopieces5• 12 years ago

I think the actual number is not the point of the article, exactly. The author is trying to point out that the method is flawed, and statistics is much more complicated than anyone one number from one source.

pmorici• 12 years ago

Am I reading this wrong or does this article start out by implying that the number is over estimated and then goes on to give two examples of general long term trends, increasing population, and decreasing marriage rate that would lead to underestimating the number by the commonly used method?

coldtea9• 12 years ago

Plus it never gives an actual number, and never mentions tons of estimation efforts and stats that place it close to 35-50% (as if all of those were merely based on repeating the myth).

Shivetya• 12 years ago

Well maintaining that believe relieves those from toughing it out to fix their marriages, supports the divorce lawyer market and their marketing, and politicians who like to capitalize on strife.

Seriously, I know the holidays are tough but my drive to and from work the local stations are all covered with divorce lawyer ads.

coldtea9• 12 years ago

Well maintaining that believe relieves those from toughing it out to fix their marriages, supports the divorce lawyer market and their marketing, and politicians who like to capitalize on strife.

That's pop psychology. Plus assumes the belief is some myth...

The divorce rate IS close to that number. Whether it's 50% or 45% doesn't matter much, as another poster said, it's not like its 5% or 15%. From Wikipedia:

In 2002 (latest survey data as of 2012), 29% of first marriages among women aged 15–44 were disrupted (ended in separation, divorce or annulment) within 10 years.

Using 1995 data, National Survey of Family Growth forecast in 2002 a 43% chance that first marriages among women aged 15–44 would be disrupted within 15 years. More recently, having spoken with academics and National Survey of Family Growth representatives, PolitiFact.com estimated in 2012 that the lifelong probability of a marriage ending in divorce is 40%–50%.

hawleyal• 12 years ago

So you are disagreeing with the entire premise of the article. You are calling bullshit. That's interesting, given that the author specifically debunks the stats you are quoting.

bryanlarsen• 12 years ago

Actually, I think you can easily get that number down to 5 or 15%. Well below 25%, anyways.

The stat that people really care about is, if I get married to my partner, what's the divorce rate of people similar to me.

If you're reading HN and are thinking about marriage, it's quite likely that most or even all of the following apply to you. All of which have shown indications that they lower the divorce rate. The first three alone drop the divorce rate below 25%.

- getting married later then 1980 - first marriage for both - both older than 30 - both have college degrees - both make wages > $60k, < $1M - similar ages - man makes more $ than woman - getting married later than 1990 - neither goes through an extended period of involuntary unemployment - neither goes to jail

mhd• 12 years ago

Is it because we only use 10% of our brains?

tempodox• 12 years ago

According to every TV show in the country, the divorce rate must be at least 100%. If anyone still wants to get married, they have to get un-divorced first and nobody seems to think it's worth the trouble.

pherocity_2• 12 years ago

Sorry, but this is bollocks. We don't know what the number is because we don't have the data or an agreed upon methodology to calculate the stat. But I have seen stats that do indeed put the rate in the 40% range; whether you agree with the methodology or not, does not mean that the number is a myth. And any pedant saying that 46% isn't 50% is correct, but clearly missing the forrest for the trees.

Flimm• 12 years ago

40% of what?

pherocity_2• 12 years ago

Seriously?

guilbep• 12 years ago

What? what about those stats? http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage_divorce_tables.htm

Article not worth reading

athenot• 12 years ago

Dataviz angle here... To me, it's like determining the age of a population. Saying that the population is 40 years old on average doesn't have much value.

Instead, we need a richer representation, like an age pyramid [1]. Plot on a histogram the number of divorcees for each year they got married. Of course there is going to be few divorces for those married this year, and a lot more for those married 50 years ago.

Then you can compare the shapes of the histogram over time or between regions. And that can yield insight on the matter.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid

intopieces5• 12 years ago

I think the title should be "The 50% stat is meaningless." This would head off at the pass the arguments in this comment section, which seem to focus on what the number actually is instead of the point of the article.

carsongross• 12 years ago

By not discussing the plummeting marriage rate [1] and changes in the data sets [2] this article is deeply flawed. There is reasonable evidence that divorce rate has remained about the same for the last 20 years despite the plummeting marriage rate [3].

People correctly sense that marriage is a deeply wounded institution in the west, particularly for the lower (and, increasingly, middle) classes.

[1] http://www.prb.org/images10/usyoungadultmarriage.gif

[2] http://dalrock.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/ny-times-happy-talk-...

[3] http://www.bgsu.edu/content/dam/BGSU/college-of-arts-and-sci...

dragonwriter4• 12 years ago

The entire article here is equivocation -- a rate is a ratio between one variable and another, and the frequently cited 50% rate is a ratio of (marriages ending in divorces):(all marriages), and the lower rate that the article presents and charts is the ratio of (divorces in a year):population.

The 50% divorce rate stat is a myth, so why won’t it die?

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