W. Bradford Wilcox and Alan Hawkins (hereafter, WH) introduce a marriage paradox: in the United States, the benefits to marriage are increasing and its social value remains high, but people are increasingly disinclined to get married. Why? My response is that the gains to marriage are uneven and uncertain, and for today's adults, getting and staying married is largely predicated on costly prior personal achievements that are out of reach for many. WH propose strategies to make marriage more desirable and accessible and thereby improve personal welfare and population well-being. I suggest that instead we target well-being directly. Doing so may increase marriage among those who desire it while also ensuring that achievement, fulfillment, and security are not dependent upon family structure.

WH argue that stable marriage causally improves well-being because it is an institution with legally and normatively enforceable bonds where family members share resources, time, and care efficiently and effectively. Meta-analyses and other comprehensive reviews also provide evidence that marriage improves economic security and health relative to remaining unpartnered or divorcing. But there are many caveats. The magnitude and scope of these effects diminish in study designs that rigorously account for selection mechanisms and use plausible comparison groups (McLanahan et al., 2013; Raley & Sweeney, 2020; Smock & Schwartz, 2020). Studies have often reported average effects that overlook sociodemographic variation in the returns to marriage (Baker & O'Connell, 2022; Cross et al., 2022) and the harm that comes from remaining in a poor-quality marriage (Williams, 2003). And WH appear to focus on families headed by couples in a shared first marriage with all children in common. Repartnered families do not gain from marriage in equal measure (Ginther & Pollak, 2004; Raley & Sweeney, 2020).

Another perspective generally missing from comparisons of married and non-married households is that many of the apparent benefits to marriage arise from and contribute to deeply-rooted social inequality in ways that may actually be counterproductive to marriage formation and satisfaction. For example, as WH note, married men and fathers earn more than unmarried and childless men. Yet for women, a longstanding motherhood wage penalty persists (Cukrowska-Torzewska & Matysiak, 2020). Gendered market responses to marriage and parenthood reflect outmoded expectations about role specialization in families and distort how different-sex, dual-earner couples make decisions about parental leave, family caregiving, and housework. These constrained choice sets clash with contemporary preferences for an egalitarian distribution of household labor, leading to shared frustration and within-family inequality among married couples and diminished enthusiasm for marriage among unmarried people, especially women without a college degree (Pedulla & Thébaud, 2015; Pessin, 2018).

Further, WH note that the benefits to marriage are increasing for parents and children relative to other family arrangements, and they illustrate this point with the example of a growing disparity in children's college completion. What explains this trend? The cost of college, 70% of which is covered privately by families and students on average (Sallie Mae, 2023), may be a contributing factor. One response would be to encourage parents to marry and remain married to amass college savings together and avoid foreclosing on their children's educational opportunities (also see Kearney, 2023; Wilcox, 2024). I would endorse an alternative response: to identify where public policy can intervene to disrupt the association between parents’ marriage and children's college completion by reducing the amount and share of postsecondary education costs that parents and students bear (Cooper, 2019).

Why should we invest in strategies to disrupt the association between marriage and well-being rather than to improve well-being through marriage promotion? Among other reasons, there is little evidence that marriage promotion works. WH propose several mechanisms that focus on public education and training to encourage marriage formation and persistence. These recommendations assume that (a) unmarried people are unaware of or uninterested in marriage's purported benefits and (b) marriage promotion programming is effective. Indeed, on the same premise, the Administration for Children and Families has funded Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood programming since 2001. Yet meta-analyses indicate that these programs have had only small positive effects on communication and relationship quality in selective populations and no effect on marriage uptake, and marriage promotion curricula may even diminish father involvement (Arnold & Beelmann, 2019; Hawkins et al., 2022). A recent National Academies of Sciences (2024) report evaluated marriage promotion as a strategy to reduce intergenerational poverty and summarized the situation this way: “While it appears that married, two-parent family structures may, in fact, reduce intergenerational poverty, we lack direct evidence of policies and programs that are capable of promoting such structures” (p. 174).

Programs to intervene directly on marriage are unlikely to increase marriage formation or improve population well-being. But WH also advocate for two strategies that might do both: eliminating marriage penalties in public means-tested programs and addressing housing unaffordability. Initiatives such as these can increase family income, assets, and residential stability, all of which can have positive effects for adults and children—regardless of whether one lives in a married-couple family.

W.布拉德福德·威尔科克斯和艾伦·霍金斯（以下简称WH）提出了一个婚姻悖论：在美国，婚姻的好处不断增加，其社会价值依然很高，但人们却越来越不愿意结婚。为什么？我的回答是，婚姻的收益是不平衡和不确定的，对于今天的成年人来说，结婚和维持婚姻在很大程度上取决于之前付出高昂代价的个人成就，而这些成就对许多人来说是遥不可及的。世界卫生组织提出了一些战略，使婚姻变得更加理想和容易实现，从而改善个人福利和人口福祉。我建议我们直接以福祉为目标。这样做可以增加那些渴望婚姻的人之间的婚姻，同时也确保成就、满足和安全感不依赖于家庭结构。

WH 认为，稳定的婚姻可以因果关系地改善幸福感，因为它是一个具有法律和规范上可执行的纽带的机构，家庭成员可以有效地共享资源、时间和护理。荟萃分析和其他综合审查也提供证据表明，相对于保持单身或离婚而言，婚姻可以改善经济安全和健康。但有很多注意事项。在严格考虑选择机制并使用合理的比较组的研究设计中，这些影响的程度和范围会减弱（McLanahan 等人， 2013 年；Raley 和 Sweeney， 2020 年；Smock 和 Schwartz， 2020 年）。研究经常报告忽视社会人口统计学差异对婚姻回报的影响（Baker & O'Connell， 2022 ；Cross 等人， 2022 ）以及维持低质量婚姻所带来的危害（Williams， 2003 ）。 WH 似乎重点关注以第一次婚姻中的夫妇为户主且所有孩子都是共同的家庭。重新结婚的家庭不会从婚姻中获得同等程度的收益（Ginther & Pollak, 2004 ；Raley & Sweeney, 2020 ）。

已婚家庭和非婚姻家庭的比较中普遍忽视的另一个观点是，婚姻的许多明显好处都源于根深蒂固的社会不平等，并助长了这种不平等，而这些不平等实际上可能对婚姻的形成和满意度产生反作用。例如，正如 WH 所指出的，已婚男性和父亲的收入高于未婚和无子女的男性。然而，对于女性来说，长期存在的母亲工资惩罚仍然存在（Cukrowska-Torzewska & Matysiak， 2020 ）。性别市场对婚姻和生育的反应反映了对家庭角色专业化的过时期望，并扭曲了不同性别、双职工夫妇如何做出有关育儿假、家庭照顾和家务的决定。这些受限的选择集与当代家务劳动平等分配的偏好相冲突，导致已婚夫妇共同感到沮丧和家庭内部不平等，并降低了未婚人士，尤其是没有大学学位的女性对婚姻的热情（Pedulla＆Thébaud， 2015 ；佩森， 2018 ）。

此外，WH 指出，相对于其他家庭安排，婚姻对父母和孩子的好处正在增加，他们用孩子大学毕业率差距日益扩大的例子说明了这一点。如何解释这一趋势？大学费用可能是一个影响因素，其中平均 70% 由家庭和学生私人承担（Sallie Mae， 2023 ）。一种应对措施是鼓励父母结婚并保持婚姻状态，共同积累大学储蓄，避免剥夺孩子的教育机会（另见 Kearney， 2023 ；Wilcox， 2024 ）。我赞同另一种回应：确定公共政策可以在何处进行干预，通过减少父母和学生承担的高等教育费用的金额和份额来破坏父母婚姻与子女大学毕业之间的联系（Cooper， 2019 ）。

为什么我们应该投资于破坏婚姻与福祉之间联系的策略，而不是通过婚姻促进来改善福祉？除其他原因外，几乎没有证据表明促进婚姻有效。世界卫生组织提出了若干侧重于公共教育和培训的机制，以鼓励婚姻的形成和维持。这些建议假设 (a) 未婚人士不知道或对婚姻所谓的好处不感兴趣，以及 (b) 婚姻促进计划是有效的。事实上，在同样的前提下，儿童和家庭管理局自 2001 年以来一直资助健康婚姻和负责任的父亲计划。然而荟萃分析表明，这些计划对特定人群的沟通和关系质量只有很小的积极影响，而对婚姻观念和婚姻促进课程甚至可能会减少父亲的参与（Arnold & Beelmann， 2019 ；Hawkins 等人， 2022 ）。美国国家科学院最近的一份报告（ 2024 ）评估了促进婚姻作为减少代际贫困的一项策略，并这样总结了情况：“虽然看起来已婚、双亲家庭结构实际上可能减少代际贫困，但我们缺乏能够促进这种结构的政策和计划的直接证据”（第 174 页）。

直接干预婚姻的计划不太可能增加婚姻形成或改善人口福祉。但白宫还倡导两项可能同时实现这两点的策略：消除公共经济状况调查计划中的婚姻处罚和解决住房负担不起的问题。诸如此类的举措可以增加家庭收入、资产和居住稳定性，所有这些都可以对成人和儿童产生积极影响——无论一个人是否生活在已婚夫妇家庭中。