All Over Albany

Wedding bells... somewhere else

Kids who grew up in the Capital Region in the 1980s and 1990s have been somewhat less likely to get married than the national average.

That's one of the bits from the The Upshot's latest sift through the data about how place affect a kid's income mobility. For the Capital Region core, people were less likely to be married at age 26 compared to national average by:

+ Albany County: 6 percentage points less likely
+ Rensselaer County: 4 percentage points less likely
+ Saratoga County: 3 percentage points less likely
+ Schenectady County: 5 percentage points less likely

From the article:

These conclusions -- based on an Upshot analysis of data compiled by a team of Harvard economists studying upward mobility, housing and tax policy -- are not simply observations about correlation. The economists instead believe that they have identified a causal role that geography plays in people's lives. The data, which covers more than five million people who moved as children in the 1980s and 1990s, suggests that children who move from, say, Idaho to Chicago really do become less likely to marry, even if the numbers can't explain exactly why these patterns exist.

David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy write that the patterns appear to be hold form through age 30. Another takeaway:

One of the most striking relationships we found in the data was between political ideology and the marriage effect: The more strongly a county voted Republican in the 2012 election, the more that growing up there generally encourages marriage.

There's a good graph accompanying the article that illustrates that point.

One angle that didn't surface in the article that we're interested to see how it fits in: Is there any pattern involving the relative income of single women and men and the likelihood of people getting married?

Earlier on AOA: If place matters, why?

map clip: New York Times The Upshot