A new RSF book by Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin, Labor’s Love Lost, provides an in-depth historical assessment of the rise and fall of working-class families in America. While industrial occupations were once plentiful and sustained middle-class families, they have all but vanished over the past forty years. As Cherlin shows, in their absence, ever-growing numbers of young adults now hold precarious, low-paid jobs with few fringe benefits. Facing such insecure economic prospects, less-educated young adults are increasingly forgoing marriage and are having children within unstable cohabiting relationships. This has created a large marriage gap between them and their more affluent, college-educated peers.

In a review of Labor’s Love Lost for TIME, Belinda Luscombe notes, “What Cherlin finds that this is not the first time that there has been a wide disparity between the marital fortunes of the rich and the poor: the situation looked similar during the last Gilded Age. Inequality in bank accounts and in marital status go hand in hand.” As the graph below shows, marriage disparities widen in times of significant income inequality:

Source: New York Times

But what does this marriage gap mean for low-income families? In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Cherlin explains, “College-educated men and women are the privileged players in our transformed economy: They can pool two incomes and provide a solid financial foundation for a marriage. In contrast, we have seen declines in marriage among high school graduates who are stuck in the middle of the labor market, where they can no longer find the kind of steady, decently paying employment that supported their grandparents’ marriages.” As he observes in Labor’s Love Lost, this has serious ramifications for low-income children, who run the risk of underperforming in school, thereby reducing their future employment prospects and perpetuating an intergenerational cycle of economic disadvantage.

A new article by Thomas B. Edsall also explores the impact of economic and cultural changes on the structure of the American family. Citing Labor’s Love Lost, Edsall focuses on the white working class in particular, who do not benefit from the race-based affirmative action policies that may help their non-white counterparts obtain higher education and employment. “At work and at home, their lives are worse than they were a generation ago,” Edsall notes. “Their real incomes have fallen, their employment opportunities have diminished, their families have crumbled and their ties to society are fraying.” He further draws from Cherlin’s research to describe how the rise of single parenting alongside the collapse of industrial jobs has stymied social mobility among low-income whites, and concludes, “The disadvantages of single-parenthood and nonresidential fathers now add to the struggles of the white working class.”

With income inequality continuing to swell and the “would-be working class” still struggling to recover from the recession, Labor’s Love Lost provides a sobering look at the growing number of young adults disconnected from steady, decent-paying jobs and from marriage in today’s new Gilded Age.

Click here to read the press release for Labor’s Love Lost.

Listen to author Andrew Cherlin and commentator Stephanie Coontz discuss the book’s findings.

Click here to purchase a copy of the book.