The other day I criticized Brad Wilcox and Bob Lerman for claiming that increasing marriage would reduce inequality. In that post I passed up the chance to reinforce a lesson about misleading claims regarding selection and unobserved factors by members of the right-wing family social science community.
Which comes first, social advantages or marriage?
Photo by Jonathan Tellier from Flickr Creative Commons.
Passages like the following have become standard for Wilcox when he makes overblown claims regarding the benefits of marriage. Here is the latest:
Notwithstanding this report’s extensive data analysis, we do not claim that the associations we find among family structure while growing up, marriage as an adult, and economic outcomes are definitively causal. … Even after netting out the effects of many observed differences among individuals, both marriage and economic well-being may be the result of some third factor, such as unobserved differences in personality or character … Moreover, most of the evidence in this report is descriptive and does not derive from…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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