A few days later, Census Director Robert Groves, who had a long career as a social scientist before taking over the agency in 2009, contributed his thoughts. On his director's blog, he noted that some news coverage had stated that the declining number of marriages in the US was directly related to the economic downturn. That inference may not be valid, Groves said, and more information may be needed to make the assertion.

Many factors can affect the number of marriages, he said, and pointed out, as did the PRB report, that the share of Americans who are currently married has been dropping for decades. (So did this blog posting on the Cincinnati Enquirer website, written by Janet Harrah of Northern Kentucky University. Its title: "Statistics: A Cautionary Tale.")

"The impact of an external event, such as an economic recession, can't easily be teased out of the change over time," Groves wrote. "It would be useful to such inference to see whether persons considering marriage before and after the recession were making different decisions. It would be useful to know whether those couples most affected by the recession (e.g., losing a job, having a home foreclosed), were more prone to put off marriage relative to those unaffected by the recession. But these estimates were not part of the ACS report.

Statistical estimates are critical to understanding our nation, who we are and how we live. We just need to take care that we understand what they can and cannot tell us about our country."

Economist Justin Wolfers added his views last week, with an op-ed in The New York Times, a posting on the paper's Freakonomics blog and an essay on the Brookings Institution website.

He wrote: "You've probably heard the latest marriage narrative: With the recession upon us, young lovers can't afford to marry. As appealing as this story is, it has one problem: It's not true." There is no systematic pattern to marriage rates and the economy, he argues: "In fact, the marriage rate appears amazingly insensitive to the business cycle."

Wolfers employed different statistics than PRB did: He looked at the number of new marriage certificates per 1,000 people for different time periods, including during economic recessions. He argued that the decline in marriage among 25-to-34-year-olds is due more to another trend-Americans are getting married for the first time at older ages than they once did-than to the economy. There is a rise in cohabitation that could well be related to the Great Recession, he said, because couples are trying to save money by living together. Many of them, he added, eventually will marry.

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