this author, david riber, goes through all those other reasons and in the end concludes that all of them have some evidence of making a difference for childrens lives and if we wanted to replace, marriage, for example, with government programs that made up for the lost income of the second parent, or other things of that sort, we could do that but it wouldn't fully replace the benefits that children now derive from marriage itself. we had a lot of debate around the production of the volume and amongst the authors about whether or not, or why there has been this decline. everybody agreed there was a decline. the issue is why? and these are the usual factors that get debated and talked about. women's new opportunities have made them clearly less dependent on marriage. no longer something they need for their economic well-being and then there is the argument that men especially less-educated men are not doing well in the labor market, less earnings and made them less marriageable. this lack of marriageable men is a factor in the contributing decline of marriage. there are arguments whether