How to make people marry?

I suppose the "yes to SSM" people will say this is an irony:   that social conservatives who don't care for SSM nonetheless keep pointing to the association of no marriage to poor economic outcomes in the US in particular (and I would guess, to a lesser degree, in Australia too), and wish that more people would marry for that reason.    But, it's hardly a valid point - the percentage of gay marriages out of the total number of weddings appears to be around 2% in the UK, for example, and I have the distinct impression that gay marriage anywhere is primarily a middle class and up thing in any event.

I'm talking about this because of this article in The Atlantic, talking about research looking into the question of how much difference good quality education really does make to poverty and economic mobility in the US.  The result was a bit surprising (if it holds up, I guess):

Using data from several national surveys, Rothstein sought to scrutinize Chetty’s team’s work—looking to further test their  hypothesis that the quality of a child’s education has a significant impact on her ability to advance out of the social class into which she was born.

Rothstein, however, found little evidence to support that premise. Instead, he found that differences in local labor markets—for example, how similar industries can vary across different communities—and marriage patterns, such as higher concentrations of single-parent households, seemed to make much more of a difference than school quality. He concludes that factors like higher minimum wages, the presence and strength of labor unions, and clear career pathways within local industries are likely to play more important roles in facilitating a poor child’s ability to rise up the economic ladder when they reach adulthood.

For Rothstein, there’s no reason to assume that improving schools will be necessary or sufficient for improving someone’s economic prospects. “We can’t educate people out of this problem,” he says.

His work, like Chetty’s, is not causal—meaning Rothstein is not able to identify exactly what explains the underlying variation in his economic model. Nevertheless, his work helps to provide researchers and policymakers with a new set of background facts to investigate, and signals that perhaps they should be reconsidering some of their existing ideas. (Both Raj Chetty and his co-author Nathaniel Hendren declined to comment for this story.)

Jose Vilson, a New York City math teacher, says educators have known for years that out-of-school factors like access to food and healthcare are usually bigger determinants for societal success than in-school factors. He adds that while he tries his best to adhere to his various professional duties and expectations, he also recognizes that “maybe not everyone agrees on what it means to be successful” in life.

The article goes on to note that this is goes against the grain of what politicians (of both sides) like to claim, but at least those on the Left (who probably tend to make the biggest claims on the importance of education) can point to other things that they support as being helpful:

As a stronger explanation, Steinbaum points to the rise of  “interfirm inequality,” a phenomenon in which even workers with very similar education histories, ages, and industries make very different amounts of money depending on which firms they work for.

Meanwhile, other studies have suggested that differences in local labor markets can affect economic outcomes and upward mobility. For example, in 2015, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, in conjunction with the economists Richard Freeman and Eunice Han, published a report building on Chetty’s work and found that union membership seems to be another critical factor helping poor people escape poverty. The researchers went beyond Chetty’s regional-level analysis to compare outcomes between individual union and nonunion households. They found that low-income children who grew up with parents in unions earned more as adults than the children of nonunion parents. They concluded that making it easier for individuals to collectively bargain would likely help boost economic mobility.

Anyway, the marriage point:   I guess the problem is a bit chicken and egg as to whether there is any causal relationship between it and poverty.  But everyone does feel in their gut, don't they?, that less single parenthood and fathers having the motivation of providing for a family they live with every day must be a healthy thing for how well off a family does, and the economy more broadly.  But how do you make it happen?