Presidential Politics & "Fuzzy Math" (Chapter 82): Divorce?

With the growing recognition of the need for statistical literacy among lawyers, law students, and law professors, I feel like we should add another group: politicians.

There are three basic prerequisites that almost guarantee ... that a child won't have a day of poverty. If a person gets married and remains married in a monogamous relationship for life, finishes high school, gets a job, and keeps a job for at least five years, there's a 91 percent likelihood that a ... child in that family will not have poverty.

This from Arkansas Governor (and probable 2008 presidential candidate) Mike Huckabee.

Gov. Huckabee is be venturing far, far beyond what the stats actually prove when he says that because married high school grads (who keep their marriages and jobs intact) rarely find their kids in poverty, those three factors -- marriage, high school, and employment -- "virtually guarantee" non-poverty.  I think any sociologist worth his or her salt would tell you that the correlation between poverty and those other social indicators has a lot to do with other core factors.  Liberals would point to the quality of the local educational system and local job opportunities; conservative would point to pre-existing family structure (i.e., what kind of family you grew up in) and personal behavi0r (e.g., impulse control and violent tendencies); and both side surely are right.

All Huckabee is spotting is that poverty correlates with employment, high school, and marriage.  Come to think of it, isn't some of that pretty darned obvious?  If you have more education, you are less likely to be in poverty; and even more deeply in the "duh" department, if you consistently hold a job, you are less likely to be in poverty.  No word from the Governor as to whether he's also sussed out that "having a big bank account" is a fourth factor that "virtually guarantees" you won't be in poverty.

Yet Huckabee is using his "analysis" to make a serious point about no-fault devorce laws, which brings me to my second qualm about Huckabee Math:

[N]o-fault divorce became the vogue in the early '60s. When states first introduced it, then everybody got on the bandwagon, and the result is now one in two marriages virtually ends in divorce in the country.

Calling all cars: family law folk, three questions:

(1) Has anyone studied whether no-fault divorce has caused an increase in divorce?

(2) Is it really true that "everybody got on the bandwagon"? I'm pretty sure New York, for example, doesn't have no-fault divorce.

(3) Has anyone seriously studied whether the increase in divorce has been, at least in part, a good thing? If we go back to Huckabee's good ol' days (e.g., he said, "The country was better off with Leave it to Beaver than Beavis and Butthead. We were better off when The Gideons gave Bibles to the fifth graders than when school nurses gave condoms to the sixth graders. "), weren't there a lot of couples staying together despite serious spousal abuse that, today, would've resulted in a divorce? Isn't it a good thing that some marriages end in divorce?