I spent the past two hours looking for correlations between the bumps in this marriage map. Incidentally I found something interesting - Remember when some random dude used your own graph to show you War has a DIRECT correlation to the drop in marriage rates in the US?
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
Grey - Actual period of U.S. involvement in WW2. Notice HUGE drop during war and HUGE bump after the troops came home.
Green - Korean war - nearly a full 1 person per 1000 people stopped getting married (wow)
Purple - Sustained U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. No time to recover from Korea, Marriage again dropped another 1 person per 1000 (0.1% wow big numbers)
Red - Nixon's War on Drugs and new drug law implementation. Just as US recovered back to Marriage rates of pre-Korean War Again a big drop from tossing a huge percentage of the US population in prison - likely much larger than the (0.1% drop in marriage rate) nearly 2% of the U.S population is incarcerated at this point in time, most because of laws implemented by Nixon era drug laws. This probably also explains the continued rise of divorce at this time (which is also around 0.1% to 0.2% increase over the post ww2 norm).
Brown - Gulf War - Sustained drop in marriage rates over the next 20 years begin.
Lime - War on Terror (afganistan) - Significant drop in divorce rates just before this war, continued falling of marriage rates.
Cyan - Iraq War - Can wrap this up with Afganistan war as the involvement was simultaneous until 2011.
I want to say even after this that we're talking fairly small numbers. Your graph varies marriage rates between 1.6% at the ww2 apex and to .6% current day and for divorce rates the variance is even smaller from .05% to .55%. If this graph was actually to scale you would see that this problem is actually affecting a very small percentage of the U.S. from the numbers that you gave on this graph.
On another note - where yo see a rise in Marriage rates, you also see a rise in divorce rates. Look at the WW2 bump and the concurrent Vietnam pullout bump.
So rick - what we see here is that this little strawman of 1% variance you have presented to prove that the world is a horrible place because people in the 80's lost their complete respect for the sanctity of marriage is actually directly the result of large scale military and police interventions. CoOL!