Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers in today's NYT:

The story of ever-increasing divorce is a powerful narrative. It is also wrong. In fact, the divorce rate has been falling continuously over the past quarter-century, and is now at its lowest level since 1970. While marriage rates are also declining, those marriages that do occur are increasingly more stable. For instance, marriages that began in the 1990s were more likely to celebrate a 10th anniversary than those that started in the 1980s, which, in turn, were also more likely to last than marriages that began back in the 1970s.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that the media reporting of divorce rates is incorrect. Unfortunately, anything involving economics or statistics has a decent probability of being butchered. That said, I have two questions about Stevenson and Wolfers' discussion of declining divorce rates. First, do they hold constant the age of marriage? People getting married in the 1990s were older than those getting married in the 1970s. It's possible--probable?--that folks who get married at older ages are less likely to divorce. Second, I suspect that the marriage rate is falling; increasing out of wedlock births suggest so. If so, is it possible that Stevenson and Wolfers' finding of falling divorce rates is an artifact of some high probability of divorce folks never getting married in the first place? Stevenson and Wolfers are smart folks so they might well control for these factors; perhaps space constraints caused them to leave some material out of their NYT piece.