Michelle Goldberg: Marriage Does Not Alleviate Poverty Michelle Goldberg, senior contributing writer at The Nation, joined Princeton professor Yolanda Pierce, Newsweek editor David Cay Johnson and political strategist Joe Watkins on MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry show to discuss the links between marriage and economic security. Though many prominent Republican politicians are now advocating marriage as a means of eradicating poverty, Goldberg insists that the opposite is actually true: economic instability causes people to get divorced or avoid getting married altogether. "What's dissolved is not the moral underpinning of marriage but the financial underpinning," Goldberg said. - Allegra Kirkland