Massive happiness premium to marriage

From The Anatomy of Marital Happiness by Sam Peltzman.  

I am usually skeptical of happiness studies owing to definitional inexactness, but this is interesting and suggestive.  From the Abstract:

Since 1972, the General Social Survey has periodically asked whether people are happy with Yes, Maybe or No type answers. Here I use a net "happiness" measure, which is percentage Yes less percentage No with Maybe treated as zero. Average happiness is around +20 on this scale for all respondents from 1972 to the last pre-pandemic survey (2018). However, there is a wide gap of around 30 points between married and unmarried respondents. This "marital premium" is this paper's subject. I describe how this premium varies across and within population groups. These include standard socio demographics (age, sex, race education, income) and more. I find little variety and thereby surface a notable regularity in US socio demography: there is a substantial marital premium for every group and subgroup I analyze, and this premium is usually close to the overall 30-point average. This holds not just for standard characteristics but also for those directly related to marriage like children and sex (and sex preference). I also find a "cohabitation premium", but it is much smaller (10 points) than the marital premium. The analysis is mainly visual, and there is inevitably some interesting variety across seventeen figures, such as a 5-point increase in recent years.

Interesting that the phenomenon is so steady and persistent across so many variables.  Further, it is interesting that there is a cohabitation premium which "is much smaller (10 points) than the marital premium."  This is evidenced in other metrics.  We think of cohabitation and functionally equivalent to marriage but the metrics always reveal rather material shortfalls.  

It is also interesting that the effect size of the marriage premium is so dramatically large.  

Politicians, sociologists, and economists would kill for an effect size of 30 points above the mean.  They are usually lucky to achieve an effect size of zero (most policies fail and many of them are destructive.) 

Brings to mind Donald Kingsbury's observation:

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.

At a societal level, we began discounting the importance of marriage sometime in the 1960s, when the sexual freedom of the pill, combined with feminism, and a more general desire to remake a freer, more accommodating society led to a range of new norms.  Most of which have turned out to be less desirable than the old norms.

Marriage is clearly a solution to a host of worldly concerns, and clearly there has to be a capacity to escape from wretched marriages, but if you want to raise societal function, productivity, and happiness, then traditional solutions, such as marriage, still have a lot of octane.

Charles Murray pointed out, in his book Coming Apart, that post-1960s, it was the well to do and highly educated who espoused the abandonment of traditions and were also the social group who most closely adhered to those traditions.  And since the 1960s, the tradition-adhering upper income, educated have done very well in terms on virtually socio-econometric measures, while those who abandoned those traditions, including marriage, have done much, much worse.