I've just had a chat with Dr Samantha Callan, author of the family breakdown section of Breakthrough Britain, the vast report by Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice into our Broken Society, as it now semi-officially being called. The media is concentrating on its recommendation - which David Cameron has welcomed - that marriage should be incentivised through the tax and benefits system to the tune of a £20 a week for all married couples. The argument, of course, is that married couples stay together for longer than do cohabiting ones, which means that marriage is more stable than cohabitation and that this stability enhances the wellbeing of both spouses and their children. Chris Dillow makes a neat critique of the incentivising argument to advance its opposite, which is that marriage is an effect rather than a cause of such wellbeing - in other words, if you're from an economically affluent, stable social background you are more likely to get married, rather than "the direction of causality" being the other way round. These are known as "selection effects", and I have no doubt that they are highly significant. But here's an interest passage from an earlier paper by Samantha Callan:
"The ‘selection effect’ argument says that the healthier, wealthier and less violent will marry anyway, so why reward the ‘naturally advantaged’? However, although there will always be some selection effect it does not explain all of the difference between marriage and cohabitation. When regressions are carried out in statistical analysis to strip away this ‘natural advantage’, marriage is shown to have an effect in and of itself."
Talking to Dr Callan confirmed that she does not discount the importance of other factors in influencing how successful a relationship is - she readily accepts that the partnerships of the most affluent co-habiting couples last longer than those of the poorest married couples. She still insists, though, that marriage is a force for stability in its own right. What her argument seems to boil down to is that the public declaration involved in marrying, and all the planning and paraphanalia, that goes with it has the useful effect of concentrating minds. To me, this is the most persuasive case that can be made for marriage over cohabitation. But is it strong enough to justify a government actively supporting marriage as against the present one's line of supporting children, whatever sort of family they are part of? I'm still to be convinced. It does, though, give added force to a well known saying as it applies to starting any kind of relationship - look before you leap.