The Wichita Eagle published an article Tuesday by Blaine Harden of the Washington Post. It was titled "Marriage a symbol of affluence" and is worth quoting whole:

Punctuating a fundamental change in American family life, married couples with children now occupy fewer than one in every four households -- a share that has been slashed in half since 1960 and is the lowest ever recorded by the census.

As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent. The working class and the poor, meanwhile, increasingly steer away from marriage while living together and bearing children.

"The culture is shifting, and marriage has almost become a luxury item, one that only the well educated and well paid are interested in," said Isabel Sawhill, an expert on marriage and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Marriage has declined across all income groups, but it has declined far less among couples who make the most money and have the best education. These couples are also less likely to divorce. Many demographers peg the rise of a class-based marriage gap to the erosion since 1970 of the broad-based economic prosperity that followed World War II.

"We seem to be reverting to a much older pattern, when elites marry and a great many others live together and have kids," said Peter Francese, a demographic trends analyst.

In recent years, the marrying kind have been empowered by college degrees and bankrolled by dual incomes. They are also older and choosier.

As cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births increase among the broader population, social scientists predict that marriage with children will continue its decades-long retreat into relatively high-income exclusivity.

One reason this article impressed me is that I recently read Thomas Edsall's Building Red America, where he makes a big point about how married couples are economically much better off than singles and unmarrieds, which gives them a view of economic dominance that fits so nicely into Republican Party strategizing. Most figures indicate that real wages have been stagnant or declining in the US since circa 1970, but those figures are based on individual wage earners. But married couples can buck that trend with a second paycheck, which increasingly is the case.

I guess what's surprising about the article is that it provides a surprising twist on the "family values" spiel that has been such a prominent piece of the Republican sales pitch. We don't readily think of marriage as an economic issue, even though it is easy to see that it is one. (E.g., would there be such a push by gays to be able to marry if doing so had no economic advantages?) And when we do connect it to economics we tend to assume that marriage is part of a cluster of virtues that incidentally net economic rewards. The idea that marriage is something the privileged do to cement their advantages isn't obvious, but it appears to hold up.

Especially interesting is the argument that the prevalence of marriage is a measure of economic equality. We know, for instance, that the 1950s, which we recall as a sort of family values golden age, was most significantly the period in US history when we came closest to economic equality. Not real close, of course, but much more so than in the robber baron era before the 1930s depression, and more so than the Reagan-Bush greed-for-all. One thing this suggests is that if you really wanted to promote marriage and family values, the way to do so would be to pursue egalitarian economic policies.

On the other hand, the Republicans' harping on values isolated from economics works nicely as a piece of class bigotry, providing a self-flattering rationale for well-to-do marrieds to look down on the less fortunate, and to blame the latter for their fate.