Why marriage doesn't pull people out of poverty

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Nicole Sussner Rodgers challenges the idea that marriage protects people from poverty.

Rodgers, founder of the online magazine, "Role Reboot," joined MPR News' Kerri Miller to explain what role marriage plays in economic inequality.

The decline of marriage over the past 50 years is not the cause of our current economic insecurity and inequality, but really more the result of it, Rodgers said:

I think what happens when you focus on marriage is that you turn poverty and you turn economic inequality back to an individual problem. You say, 'well if people don't want to live in poverty well then they shouldn't have children when they're not married.' It becomes a boot-strapping mentality and you put the onus back on poor people to do something different as though they're not making the choices that for a variety of reasons work best for them. You take of course the onus off of government to say what kinds of policies, what kinds of social safety nets do we need given what families today look like? That does concern me because getting married in order to secure financial security sounds like a great idea until you realize a lot of the communities where marriage has declined most don't have a lot of people that women consider a marriageable partner for a variety of reasons.