I was reading an essay (Auren Hoffman) about fertility and AI, because everything these days is about AI (except this essay), when one of the statistics stopped me cold.

College-educated women have an almost eight-in-ten chance of their marriage lasting 20+ years. for women with a high school education or less, the share is only 40%.

The gap is enormous. And I had no idea it existed.

I’ve heard the story of declining birth rates for as long as I can remember. So you can imagine my surprise when the same essay offered a second piece of data:

The birth rate among married women has been in the range of 80 to 90 births per 1,000 married women since the early 1990s

Thirty years. No movement. The birth rate isn’t falling because married women stopped having children. It’s falling because fewer women are getting married in the first place. And who gets married is heavily correlated with education:

In 2015:

• 65% with a four-year college degree were married
• 55% with some college education were married
• 50% with no education beyond high school were married

This isn’t really about fertility. Or at least not just about it. It’s a tell for the chasm between these two groups. We’re living different lives.

None of this is part of the conversation I’m in or read about. My bubble, and I’d argue most public conversations, centers almost entirely on the college educated. It’s not intentional. It’s a ramification of what neighborhoods we live in, what schools our kids go to, what stores we shop at. The exceptions are transactional: the contractor, grocery checkout, the barista. We use the internet differently. Our paths don’t cross in the ways that build a real picture of the other.

We’re content to walk away with a flawed mental model of “how Americans live” that is actually a model of how one class lives.

The decline of the family gets a lot of ink. But those conversations are mostly happening among the group for whom the data looks fine. The people writing about it, reading about it, and worrying about it are largely the group the data says are doing well.

I don’t think the other group is unaware of us. They encounter our outputs constantly in policy, media, even in language. I fear the insulation runs in one direction only.

It’s one thing to recognize coastal/urban elitism, a vague term confined to its own geographic limits. It’s another to learn the specifics of how our family lives are fundamentally different.