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The top cities where people were going online to hire a divorce lawyer were Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago.

As the real estate and employment markets improve, Americans are no longer stuck in houses they've outgrown or jobs they can't stand — and that's not the only baggage they're unloading.

The recovery seems to have sparked an increase in divorces. 

“There’s been an uptick in divorces in general going on over the last several months,” said Alton L. Abramowitz, a New York City divorce lawyer and president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. 

Why? Abramowitz attributed the recovery of the economy, particularly the stock market’s robust run. “People become more secure that they’ll be able to take care of themselves,” he said. “With that security comes the belief that we can have two households and support two households.” 

“Increased mobility — both personal and career —  acts as a pressure valve for backlogged marital discontent,” Richard Komaiko, co-founder of AttorneyFee.com, a site that lets users compare lawyers and how much they charge, said via e-mail. 

More disposable income does more than just provide people with confidence and mobility — it means they can pay for legal representation. 

“Marriages are always going downhill ... but it is expensive to file for divorce,” said Kelly Chang Rickert, a divorce lawyer in Los Angeles. “Now they can afford a good divorce lawyer.” 

After the recession took its toll on Nevada’s labor and housing markets, “People simply couldn’t afford it,” said Gary Silverman, a divorce lawyer in Reno. “They didn’t have enough money to pay lawyers, there was nothing to divide and there was no way to support children and former spouses.” 

Silverman said “pent-up demand” is behind the 25 to 50 percent increase he’s seen in business over the past year. 

Related: Are you having fewer kids, or none at all, because of finances?

Although Census data shows only a tiny rise in the number of people who identified as separated or divorced in between 2008 and 2012, data from legal websites indicates that recent months could mark the leading edge of a trend. 

Avvo.com, a site where people can search for legal advice and representation, saw an 80 percent increase in divorce-related questions asked by users from 2012 to 2013. In the first quarter of this year, divorce searches accounted for nearly 10 percent of traffic on Avvo. During the same time period last year, only 1 percent of searches were about divorce. 

Komaiko reported similar findings when he took monthly housing stats and net job creation and compared them to the number of divorce consultations his site facilitated in April. 

“There’s a remarkable correlation between the housing curve and the divorce curve,” he said. “Job creation also varies positively with divorce. However, the housing market appears to be a more reliable predictor.” 

People seem to want out of their marriages all over the country. On Avvo’s new legal marketplace platform, company spokeswoman Kari Day said the top cities where people were going online to hire a divorce lawyer were Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago. 

“Most divorces come down to money,” Silverman said. “When they feel there are enough resources, they don’t have to live with somebody they don’t want to.”

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Ted S. Warren / AP file

The value of a mother's work has decreased since Jenna Kagan homeschooled her then 6-year-old son Hunter. Taking care of house and family would cost roughly $59,000 to have someone else do, a research group found using government data.

If moms earned wages for the work they do around the house and with the kids, they’d be getting a pay cut this year.

The take-home pay that a mother would earn for everything from cooking to handling the family finances would total at $59,862 if she were paid on the open market, according to Insure.com’s analysis of government data on hourly wages.

That’s down from $60,182 in 2012 and $61,436 in 2011, Insure.com’s annual Mother’s Day Index shows.

The drop is because typical wages for some domestic jobs have fallen, said Amy Danise, a spokeswoman for Insure.com.

The Mother’s Day Index tallies 14 jobs that moms might perform, including cooking, driving, cleaning and taking care of the kids, and then looks at Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data for those tasks. Danise said the website compiled its list by brainstorming about typical mothers’ tasks, and coming up with a typical number of hours she might spend on them.

By Insure.com’s tally, a mom’s average work week would be significantly longer than 40 hours - although most moms would probably also agree that parenting requires far longer hours than your average desk job.

The total does not include the wages that moms earn for paid work they do outside the home. 

The Insure.com data is not meant to be a rigorous analysis of the value of domestic work.

“It’s more like a fun way of looking at serious topic,” Danise said.

But some economists have taken a more serious look at the value of housework. A report released last year by the government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis found that adding “nonmarket household production” to the nation’s gross domestic product would have raised nominal GDP by 39 percent in 1965 and 26 percent in 2010.

That figure would include jobs such as cooking, cleaning and child care that both men and women do around the house.

The decline in the contribution to GDP is because the hours women spent on housework fell from 40 hours per week in 1965 to 26 hours per week in 2010, and more women entered the paid workforce. That more than offset the increase, from 14 hours in 1965 to 17 hours per week in 2010, that men spent on domestic tasks.

This story was originally published on Mon May 6, 2013 7:41 PM EDT

It turns out, rich people are happier than poor people.

A new Brookings Institution paper finds that people who live in rich countries are more satisfied with their lives than those in poor countries, and rich people within individual countries are happier than their poor neighbors.

That old “money can’t buy happiness” chestnut, formally called Easternlin’s paradox by economists after an influential 1974 study that concluded rich nations are no happier than poor ones, is such an enduring myth because it holds a lot of appeal, said Justin Wolfers, one of the paper’s authors, a nonresident fellow at Brookings and professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan.

“I think it’s incredibly comforting to believe in it,” he said. “You can believe that people who live in grinding poverty… are just as happy as you are.”

Previously, some economists predicted that even if greater wealth meant greater happiness, it was only true up to a point. Once you reached a set point of satiation, extra money wouldn’t matter.

“People are good at making the best of what they have. The way we deal with our emotions is quite adaptive,” said Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor of marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business. Even the rich, he pointed out, “are going to have to deal with everyday pleasures and displeasures.”

Last year, Skandia International’s Wealth Sentiment Monitor surveyed 13 countries (not including the United States) and found that the average income people need to feel happy is around $161,000. Research published in 2010 based on surveys of 450,000 Americans said that well-being increased along with income up to $75,000, then day-to-day happiness leveled off, although feelings of success and well-being continued to rise.

But the Brookings researchers found no cutoff point. “There is literally no evidence of satiation in any data set anywhere,” Wolfers said.

In a survey of more than 1,000 Americans conducted by Gallup and analyzed by Wolfers and his co-author Betsey Stevenson, only 1 percent who made more than $75,000 said they were “very dissatisfied” with their lives, and only 4 percent ranked their happiness in the lowest category.

The effect appeared even more pronounced further up the income spectrum. The handful of respondents who earned more than half a million dollars a year all ranked their happiness and satisfaction at the highest levels.

“We still found that the really privileged were happier than the merely privileged,” Wolfers said.

Overall perceptions of satisfaction and happiness might not tell the whole story, though. “What also matters is how people actually *feel* on a day-to-day basis,” Elizabeth Dunn, associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, said via email.

“If you make $250k rather than $90K, you're likely to rate your life as a whole more positively,” she said. “But you're not likely to feel any more enjoyment or happiness on a typical day. You're no more likely to laugh or smile on a typical day.”

That’s because wealth really is a proxy for autonomy. Richer people have greater freedom to decide where they want to live, what jobs they hold and how they want to live their lives. People who live in wealthier countries also don’t bear the stress and fear of threats like starvation or losing a child to a preventable illness. 

“It’s not that it’s literally the greenbacks in your wallet that make you happy, but rather... being able to make choices about your life and making choices that give your life meaning,” Wolfers said.

Today’s teenagers are more materialistic and less interested in working hard than the baby boomers were in their teens, according to a new study. But sorry, boomers, the researchers say it’s probably your fault for creating a culture that breeds narcissism and entitlement.

“You’re taught what’s important and how to act by your parents, the media and those around you,” said Jean Twenge, a co-author of the study and professor of psychology at San Diego State University. “It’s the cultural changes that are really bringing these changes.”

It’s not just millennials who are materialistic, according to the study published Wednesday in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The money-hungriness actually peaked with Generation X and has declined somewhat since then.

Among high school seniors, the need for money was highest around the end of the 1980s. For a cultural reference point, think 1987’s “Wall Street,” which put the phrase “greed is good” into pop culture.

And while GenY is less money-focused than the Gen Xers (but more so than the boomers) they are also the least willing to work hard, according to the research.

In the “don’t want to work hard” category, high schoolers in the mid-1970s agreed 25 percent of the time; in the late-80s that climbed to 30 percent; and by the mid-2000s it was up to 39 percent.

While the teens are now more likely than boomers to want a vacation home, there is a “growing disconnect between their willingness to do the work to pay for these things,” said Twenge, who is also the author of “Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Before.”

The study makes a case for the high schoolers’ attitudes being a product of the times they grew up in. (This is where the blame gets passed to the older generations.) Growing up, the teens' values are influenced by the dominant social ideologies, family structures, economic situations, media, political and business messages, the researchers argue.

The research analyzed by Twenge and psychology professor Tim Kasser has been collected in Monitoring the Future surveys with U.S. high school 12th graders every year since 1976. For this study, the researchers did not examine data past 2007, though data are collected annually.

The study defines baby boomers as those born roughly 1946 to 1964; Generation X as those born 1965 to 1981; and Gen Y (known as the Millennials) as those born 1982 to 1999.

Brian Snyder/Reuters file

Harvard Business School students cheer during their graduation ceremonies in Boston, Mass., in June 2009.

The tap that once led from the nation’s top MBA programs to the skyscrapers on Wall Street isn’t flowing as freely as it used to. That’s leaving many young MBA graduates looking for careers beyond the nation’s Fortune 500 companies.

“They want to be on their own path,” said Kristen Fitzpatrick, senior director of MBA career and professional development at Harvard Business School.

The change is driven largely by necessity, but partly by choice.

The financial crisis of 2008, and the weak economy that followed, has left fewer major investment banks and big corporations offering lavish compensation packages to large crops of young MBA graduates, recruitment officials say.

Meanwhile, many new MBA graduates also aren’t as enamored with the prospect of that path, and are more interested in working for a small startup or going into business for themselves.

 “If the compensation isn’t there anymore like it used to be, students look at that and say, ‘If I’m going to work that hard I’d rather do it for myself than for a big bank,’” said Maryellen Reilly Lamb, director of MBA career management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

A decade ago, Lamb said perhaps 70 percent of Wharton graduate students were landing jobs at big corporations, consultancies and investment banks

These days, around 50 percent of students are getting those types of jobs, and the big companies that do hire on campus may pick just one student, instead of a large group.

A similar shift is going on at Harvard. Fitzpatrick said a decade ago about 60 percent of the students graduating from the MBA program landed a job at a Fortune 500 company, often months before graduation.

These days, perhaps 30 to 40 percent of students are landing those kinds of jobs in that predictable way. Some will even be graduating without a job, something she said used to be much less common.

The fact that more students are taking longer to land jobs, and doing so at smaller companies, has meant big changes at Harvard’s recruitment office, and in the classroom. But Fitzpatrick said the Harvard students themselves seem more willing to hold out for the job they really want.

“Students are way more comfortable waiting for that right opportunity versus just jumping on the (first job offer),” Fitzpatrick said.

Nationally, about 17 percent of students who graduated from full-time U.S. MBA programs in 2012 intended to go into finance or accounting, according to an annual survey done by the Graduate Management Admission Council. That’s down from 28 percent in 2008,

About 60 percent of students who graduated from full-time U.S. MBA program in 2012 had a job offer at the time of graduation, according to GMAC’s survey data. That’s a sharp increase from 2010, when just 37 percent of those students had a job offer at graduation, and about the same level as in 2008.

At UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Lisa Feldman, the executive director of MBA Career Management, said she’s also seeing a lot more interest in finding jobs with startups or other small companies. She thinks that’s partly because millennials are more focused on finding a job where they feel like they can have a big impact.

Even though many of these graduates have come of age amid a difficult economy, Feldman said there’s plenty of appetite for taking a chance on a less established company.

“You would think that after everything they’ve seen perhaps they’d be risk-avoidant, but it may be that they’ve seen that large institutions are not necessarily reliable,” she said.

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My salary? Sure. My weight? Sure. My credit card debt? That's private!

Forget politics and religion. When it comes to talking with people we’ve just met, a new study finds that the most uncomfortable topic of discussion is how much we owe in credit card debt.

About 85 percent of people surveyed on behalf of CreditCards.com said they’d be somewhat or very unlikely to discuss credit card debt with someone they’d just met.

That makes credit card woes more taboo than any other topic the respondents were asked about, including their salaries, mortgage payments, weight, health problems and love life details.

Politics and religion are often considered to be the most taboo topics to bring up with people you don’t know well or don’t want to offend. But the survey found that nearly 50 percent of those surveyed would be somewhat or very likely to bring up their political views with a relative stranger, while nearly 60 percent were likely to bring up their religious views.

By comparison, only about 12 percent said they’d be likely to bring up the amount they owe on their credit cards.

That’s not surprising given the uncomfortable, and often contradictory, relationship many of us have with credit cards, said Lucia Dunn, an economics professor at Ohio State University who has studied Americans’ attitudes about debt extensively.

“Credit card debt, you know, does have a stigma,” Dunn said. “It implies a lack of self-control.”

That’s unlike other types of debt, such as mortgages, which many still see as a good investment despite the recent housing crisis.

We may judge others harshly for having credit card debt, but millions of Americans use credit cards to cover everything from an unexpected car repair to a family vacation.

It wasn’t always so common. Americans come from a long history, going all the way back to the days of Benjamin Franklin, of valuing austerity and staying out of debt.

But especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dunn noted that it became much more acceptable – and easy – to take on credit card debt.

Americans are currently carrying about $848 billion in revolving debt, which is mostly made up of credit card debt, according to the Federal Reserve. That’s down from a high of more than $1 trillion in 2008, as the nation was falling deeply into recession.

The ensuing financial crisis caused some Americans to willingly get a better handle on their credit card debt, while others found their credit lines cut off and were not able to take on as much credit card debt as they had in the past.

Some Americans who were not able to get rid of their credit card debt during that period likely are still struggling with it, according to separate research Dunn has conducted. The weak economy and tight job market also may have left some with little choice but to rely on credit cards to get by.

Another reason people may be reluctant to talk about credit card debt is that it’s one of the most stressful kinds of debt, second only to payday loans according to Dunn’s research.

She suspects that’s partly because of the techniques that debt collectors sometimes use to get people to repay credit card debt.

Unlike car loans or mortgages, credit card debt isn’t secured by a thing that the bank can simply repossess. That means collectors are left trying to persuade people to give them the cash, in some cases through repeated phone calls and other types of contact.

The CreditCards.com survey of 1,000 people was conducted in March by GfK Custom Research. It has a 3 percent margin of error.

Related: One in four Americans have more credit card debt than savings

Americans’ faith in the fairness of their taxes has slipped to its lowest level in more than a decade, according to a new survey released Monday, the deadline for most Americans to file their returns.

Overall, 55 percent of Americans think their taxes are fair, according to the Gallup survey. That’s the lowest rate since 2001, the polling company said.

The bulk of the decline comes from people who identify themselves as conservative Republicans, whose perception of the tax code's fairness has slipped.

Surprisingly, the fairness question is generally consistent among both the rich and poor. The difference comes down to politics, according to Gallup's Economy and Personal Finance poll.

Only 49 percent of Republicans currently think their taxes are fair, compared with 66 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of Independents. Among people who identify themselves as liberals, 70 percent think their taxes are fair, compared with 59 percent of moderates and 45 percent of conservatives.

In the past decade, party parity was closest in 2003, which Gallup pollsters linked to tax cuts signed by President George W. Bush shortly after the start of the Iraq war. In 2003, 64 percent of Americans said their taxes were fair, including 66 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Republicans.

The Gallup pollsters note that taxes haven’t actually gone up for most Americans since then; the survey measures perception. And 64 percent of Americans think their taxes will probably rise in the next 12 months. Gallup has asked that question sporadically over the years and the only time it’s been higher was December 1977.

In 1943 Gallup first asked Americans if they thought their taxes were fair. An average of 87 percent of Americans said their taxes were fair, right up until World War II ended. By 1946, the average dropped to 61 percent. Gallup stopped asking the question until the late 1990s, and then hit the low point in 1999 when only 45 percent of Americans said their taxes were fair.

Charlotte Crane, a professor specializing in tax law at the Northwestern University School of Law, said a lot of factors come into play when considering the perception of fairness. 

One element is whether people feel control over how their taxes are spent and whether those expenditures are popular with the public, Crane said. Another reason for the decline could be with the perceived lack of transparency of who pays what and if everyone’s income is calculated equally. 

And indeed, wartime can lead to fewer complaints. 

“When it’s a popular war, as definitely World War II was, you don’t hear as much grousing,” said Crane, who is not affilited with the Gallup report.

The telephone poll was conducted from April 4 through 7 with a random sample of 1,005 adults in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Respondents were asked a series of questions including “Do you regard the income tax which you will have to pay this year as fair?” The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

As a growing number of men adopt the role of caregiver to their children or elderly parents, they’re fighting outdated gender norms in the workplace — a battle experts say will eventually usher in changes that benefit both male and female employees.

“Men who do take the time as caregivers are more likely to be seen as less committed to work because they’re violating gender norms,” said Kelli K. Garcia, a former fellow at O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and current adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.

“The law does in this country does protect the ability to take leave” for both men and women, said Eileen Appelbaum, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “I think a lot of companies don’t realize that,” she said.

Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California — Hastings, said both men and women can be subject to what she termed a “flexibility stigma.” It can be an issue for women seeking a part-time or flex-time schedule, but for men, “It’s typically triggered if they even try to take leave,” she said.

Demographic factors are behind the increasing number of men taking on the role of caregiver. The recession relegated many men, especially young men, to periods of unemployment or underemployment. At the same time, women have taken on more of their families’ financial obligations. A Prudential Financial study published last year found that 53 percent of women are the primary breadwinner, and 22 percent make more money than their spouse. “Among female breadwinners, nearly a third say they earn more than their spouse as a direct result of the challenging economy,” the report said.

There also has been a shift in cultural norms that’s propelled men into caregiving roles, said Williams. “A group of young men is really drawing a line in the sand and saying ‘I don’t want to do it the way my father’s generation did it,’” she said. “They’re caught between that ideal and workplaces that haven’t caught up.”

“As women have learned, you have to assert the fact that this is not a ‘choice,’” Appelbaum said. It appears that more of them are doing just that: roughly 12 percent of the lawsuits filed alleging family responsibilities discrimination in the workplace are filed by men.

The experts think this number is bound to grow. According to a study published in 2009 by the National Alliance for Caregiving in collaboration with the AARP, nearly 30 percent of Americans perform at least some caregiving tasks for relatives, and about one-third of caregivers are men. “I think it’s clear that the demands on men as well as women are going to increase in terms of family care,” Appelbaum said.

In California, which began mandating paid family leave in 2004, the effect on men’s participation in caregiving is measurable, Appelbaum said. The number of men taking leave to care for a relative rose slightly between 2004 and 2012, from 30 percent to 33 percent, but the number taking time off after the birth of a child nearly doubled, climbing from 17 percent to 29 percent in that same time. “When we talk to HR managers about this... they told us that once the leaves were paid, it became more acceptable,” Appelbaum said.

Advocates for more flexible workplaces say men’s involvement ultimately will have a snowball effect that will lead to positive change. “The real advantage of having men taking leave is that when the issue of leave and the issue of caregiving is not just a women’s issue, you’re more likely to get good policies and not get gender-based judgments,” Garcia said.

“The more that men start taking leave and it becomes normalized and expected, then those judgments are going to change,” she said. “We’re at a moment where... we have this opportunity to change the workplace culture." 

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The number of American workers who belong to a union fell yet again last year, as both government workers and those in private industry saw their ranks shrink.

About 11.3 percent of the workforce, or 14.4 million workers, belonged to a union in 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. That’s down from 11.8 percent of the workforce, or 14.8 million workers, in 2011.

The American union labor movement has struggled for years with declining membership and increasing attacks from those who oppose organized labor. In December, Michigan – once considered a stronghold of American union power - became the 24th state to approve right-to-work legislation. That type of legislation makes it harder for unions to maintain power because union-covered members are no longer required to pay dues.

Many experts say the move in Michigan could embolden more states to pass similar legislation, further threatening the nation’s once-strong labor union movement.

The data released Wednesday also reinforced the changing face of the American labor movement. While most Americans think of union members as manufacturing workers wearing hard hats, these days union membership is actually more common among public-sector workers such as teachers, firefighters and police officers.

Still, both sectors saw their union membership ranks shrink last year.

About 7.3 million public-sector workers belonged to a union in 2012, the BLS reported, down from about 7.6 million in 2011.

About 7.0 million private-sector workers belonged to a union in 2011, down from 7.2 million a year earlier.

Related:

Teachers, other government workers, become growing face of union fights

Michigan's right-to-work laws will ripple across U.S.