While I agree with your takeaway, I think you have to be careful which of those points you bucket under the same influence. Take Marriage, for instance. There

While I agree with your takeaway, I think you have to be careful which of those points you bucket under the same influence. Take Marriage, for instance. There's a lot that suggests that the newer generations simply put less stead in traditional institutions; not as a sign of wealth. Anecdotally, I was "half engaged" ('we're going to get married eventually, right?' 'yup.') but sans the ring/formality part for nearly a decade before we started settling things down. It just doesn't have the same meaning to us as to my parents, and although I can say my financial future seems a lot less stable than my parents's at my age, despite a _better_ employment position, that's not why I've avoided the ring song and dance. That turned into a bit of a ramble, but you get my gist, I hope. I think we'd agree that having a broader sampling of metrics (including more hand wavy sociological ones) that might try and explain not only the statistics but whether we should be trying to correlate them at all would be valuable.