Thomas Sowell makes a startling allegation in his new column:

“The fact that there may be half as many divorces in a given year as there are marriages in that year does not mean that half of all marriages end in divorce.

“It is completely misleading to compare all the divorces in one year — from marriages begun years and even decades earlier — with the number of marriages begun in that one year.”

My initial response was, fine. But if 100 years in a row have divorce rates half the marriage rates, half of all marriages will indeed end in divorce.

I did some research and came across a Time magazine article from 1987 (boy, is that statistic old). It says:

“As [one demographer] sees it, even if there is one divorce for every two marriages in any given year, that trend would have to continue for 30 years before it could accurately be said that half of all unions end in divorce. [His] survey, which indicated considerable contentment among family members, convinces him that this will not happen.”

The problem is, it’s been 20 years (while not 30), and that trend is indeed continuing. In 2003, 2004 and 2005, the marriage:divorce ratio has hovered just a little above 2:1, according to the National Vital Statistics Report.

People did indeed jump to the 50 percent figure too soon. But the trends are making it a reality.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com.

UPDATE: Doug Payton has an interesting point over at Blogger News Network. If you look at “marriagers” (if that’s a word) instead of marriages, the situation is probably somewhat less dire:

“Another thing that skews the numbers are ’serial divorcers.’”

For example, say one person gets married and divorced three times. This creates a marriage:divorce ratio of 3:3. You’d need three people in stable first-time marriages to offset that to 6:3. In this scenario, half of all marriages ended in divorce (as the age-old statistic holds), but only one-quarter of the individuals ever divorced.