Every policy has unintended consequences

I've already written about the unintended consequences of government and business policy here once before, on the topic of globalization. It ended up turning into a several post rant, which I think shows just how widespread unintended consequences can be, and how difficult they can become to undo.

Almost any policy has the potential to create these types of issues; it's a bit like introducing a predator into an environment for the purposes of pest control, only to see that predator create more problems than the original pest (yes, this example is something that's had some relevance here in Charlottesville recently). It also reminds me of this Simpsons clip below, but I digress...



The reason I raise the issue is that this weekend, I came across an NPR news item that I think shows a particularly intriguing instance of a government policy with unintended consequences. Citing a report from the U.S. Census Bureau, NPR reported that:

In the U.S., fewer and fewer young people are getting married... Among 25-to-34 year olds, 45 percent are married. (By comparison, in 2000, 55 percent of Americans in that age group were married; in the 1960s, more than 80 percent were.)

In an interview with NPR's Melissa Block, Andrew J. Cherlin... said that, "for college-educated young adults, this is a story of postponing marriage."

They want to finish graduate school, maybe have a couple of years as a law firm associate, and then get married. So, they're waiting longer and longer until they have the rest of their lives in order before they get married.

For people without a college degree, some of them are postponing too, but some of them will never make it to the altar. We really will see probably a decline in the lifetime percentages of ever marrying for them.

According to Cherlin, increasingly, many Americans get married when it makes sense financially.

Essentially, debt-ridden college graduates rarely feel like they are financially prepared to enter into a marriage and start a family, buy a house, etc. This explosion of debt comes largely as a result of government initiatives aimed at encouraging higher education, which in many ways worked. More and more Americans have college degrees, which seems like a policy success. But in the process, it increased a debt load on those graduates (which I've written about before), and also increased the necessity of a graduate degree...and more debt.

The end result is more college graduates, but fewer married couples, and most troubling of all, more children born out of wedlock--41% of all U.S. births in 2008 were to unwed mothers. I'm fairly certain that "slash marriage rates among 25-34 year-olds in half" and "increase percentage of children born out of wedlock" weren't among the stated purposes of Lyndon Johnson's Higher Education Act back in 1965, but they're clearly among the results, at least indirectly.

I just hope that our inevitable policy response to those problems doesn't create more problems than it solves. Either way, we need to recognize that when making policy decisions, the unintended consequences are just as important and formative as the intended consequences. More of our debate needs to focus not on the initial impact of policy, but on trying to determine what the actual long-term responses of the society might be to those policies. It's tough stuff to predict, but it's what our government can and must be doing.

[NPR]