The Dispatch Podcast - Worried About Inequality? Fix Marriage.

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Melissa Kearney, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland joins Assistant Editor Luis Parrales to talk about her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. The two discuss the decline in married households over the past decades, how that decline has exacerbated inequality and negatively impacted parents and children, and why it’s so controversial to talk about marriage as a policy matter in the first place. Show notes: -Melissa’s profile at the University of Maryland -Melissa’s profile at Brookings -A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking About -Male Earnings, Marriageable Men, and Nonmarital Fertility: Evidence from the Fracking Boom -The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates Since the Great Recession -Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. www.ca slash yamex Did you lock the front door?

Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web.

Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Luis Perales, assistant editor here at The Dispatch.

And my guest today is Melissa Carney. Melissa is an economist at the University of Maryland. She is a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. And she's the author of a new book, The Two-Parent Privilege, How Americans Stop Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. We talk all things related to marriage, two-parent families, and how the rise of single-parenthood is still something I should all take seriously. Hope you enjoy it.

Melissa Carney, welcome to the Dispatch podcast. Thanks so much for having me. And really at the outset, congratulations on the book. It is incredibly insightful. It's super readable. That's not something that you normally say about economics research. I appreciate that. No offense intended.

No, it's really a compliment. and I think it's really gotten a conversation about marriage and family formation going, and that's what we're going to be talking about today. For our listeners to kind of set a bit of an agenda, I'm hoping that we can talk about the meat of the book, just the research that you've put together and compiled on the importance of marriage and the kind of what two-parent family really does for children for couples, then talk a little bit about the response that you've gotten to the book

since its release a couple of weeks ago. But kind of to get started, can you tell us a little bit about before even talking about who's getting married, the broad sweep of marriage, how that's changed in the U.S. over the past couple of decades, how many people are getting married? How likely is it that a child will be born into a two-parent family versus single-parent family now as supposed to say the 90s or the early 2000s? Yeah, sure. So the major change in the marriage landscape that I'm focused on is a very crude one.

and it's simply the decline in marriage among parents in particular. But as I show in the book and hopefully we'll unpack a little bit, the reason why the decline in parents has happened is really because of a broader decline in marriage overall. Right.

Especially outside college educated adults, there's been a massive decline in the share of sort of prime age adults, you know, adults 22 to 54 who are married. And that has been steadily declining among adults who don't have college degrees through the 80s, 90s, through 2020. And what has happened is that that has led to an increase in the share of children being born outside a marital union, such that now 40% of babies in the U.S. are born to unmarried

parents as compared to 18% in 1980. So really a massive sort of separation of marriage from having and raising kids in this country. You alerted to this and that response, that's a sort of top line figure, but it varies when you're looking at different groups. In the book, you tell a story about race and ethnicity. You also tell a story about age, but the main story that you talk about is a story about class. How does marriage look differently from, say, college educated adults versus those who don't have a college education?

This is precisely why I've come to this topic. and want to situate the topic of family structure into our conversations about income inequality and social mobility in the U.S. is because there's now a major class dimension, and I define class simply based on education, a major class dimension in who is and isn't getting married and raising their kids in married parent homes. 12% of kids born to moms with a college degree live in, with an unpartnered mother. Okay?

So that's college educated mothers, 12% of their kids. are in unpartnered mother's homes as compared to 30% of kids whose moms don't have a college degree. And so this is like a major difference. And we see this, by the way, this comes directly from what's happening in marriage. The share of college educated women who are married has basically hovered around 70% through the past 40 years. And it's straight line down among moms with only a high school degree. So there's this really major inequality element at play, both cause and effect. But this is why, I mean, anyone who sort of cares about class gaps and the ways in which the

college educated class is pulling away from everyone else in society to their advantage, the idea that college educated couples, college educated adults, the most successful adults in society are still the ones getting married at high rates. Their rates of marriage really haven't declined in 40 years. They're still the ones finding. marriage to be an appealing, attractive, feasible institution is really compounding the advantage of that class to the detriment of everyone else, frankly, since everyone else is pulling away from marriage and their kids are much less likely now to be raised in a two-parent home than 40 years ago.

Yeah, that's something that I want to get back to because I think it's pretty central to some of the more progressive critiques of the books since it's come out. But before that, one thing I'd love to just get you to talk about quickly as age. As we're painting this picture of marriage, marriage hasn't just become more common among people with college degrees. It's also been delayed, right? Yeah, that's true. So I don't focus so much on this in my book, but this is true that people are getting married later. I think, actually, to be frank, this relates more directly to another issue I've been working on in the past couple of years separate from this book, which is the decline in the birth rate in the U.S., right? And so the fact that you have-

And it does get a chapter in the book. There's a fertility chapter that's fascinating and important. Yeah, I couldn't help myself. Yeah. But right, the fact that people are getting married later and married fertility still is much higher than unmarried fertility, that's sort of mechanically part of the explanation for why birth rates are down is because people are getting married later. I think it's not unrelated to the fact actually that divorce rates conditional on marriage are down. So in a lot of ways, like marriages now are, they're more selective or they're more of a capstone.

People wait until they're older. They're really more sure. And so marriage rates overall are down, but also divorce rates are down. Yeah, those are two really fascinating points in the book. On the one hand, maybe this is something that some listeners who are paying attention to these sorts of conversation in the 90s

would recognize that, you know, back then we talked about very high teen pregnancy rate that was kind of front and center of the policy conversation. And you mentioned this in the book that you would have expected that if your average teen mom was someone without a college education, that this teen pregnancy declined, taking overall fertility rates down as well, that whoever was having kids would probably have been married. But that doesn't seem to have been the case, right?

Exactly. So I set the stage with just really what are the sort of mechanical drivers of what we're seeing in terms of the rise of kids being born outside of marriage and being raised in one parent households. And basically all of this has happened despite the decrease in divorce and despite the decrease in birth rates. And this is really important because it's important to figure out, you know, where is this coming from? What's happening and what's happening very clearly is that fewer adults who are having children together are getting married. The point about the teens is really interesting because teens in the 80s, let's say, the study of single motherhood and its link with poverty, that was all very tightly wound up with teen childbearing, the most disadvantaged moms, moms without a high school degree. And so the fact that teen childbearing has decreased by over 70% since the early 90s, which is really quite stunning and remarkable, that in itself. And you wouldn't have predicted that at the time, right? No, no.

And it's, I mean, and honestly, as somebody who's researched the causes and consequences of teen childbearing, it's really hard to explain in a statistical sense this really dramatic decline over time. I mean, there's lots of reasons for it, but it really, the sort of bottom line is it looks like teens, not just in the U.S., but in other high-income countries, are making different decisions for themselves now than in the past. And then this is all related, which is why it's hard to tease out causality, but it's all related to teen girls being much more likely now to graduate high school, to go to college. They have more opportunities. They're just doing

better economically in an education sense. But nonetheless, so teen births are way down. Burst to young women, women in their 20s, are way down. I mean, essentially births, to everyone under the age of 30 in an aggregate sense are down, right? Birth rates are down in the U.S. But just given the shift in childbearing to older women, to more educated women, all of that would have led to the prediction that we would have seen a decrease in the non-marital birth share. Because older women, you know, if you look back in the 80s and early 90s,

older women, more educated women, they were much more likely to be married. But so if you held everything constant and just looked at the changing composition, of mothers saw that they were much they were older they were more educated you would have said oh well single motherhood is going to decline and so it's really quite striking that single motherhood shares of kids living in single mother households has actually increased or at least not fallen by as much as we would have expected it's really because all else was not held constant and so even among moms with a high school degree the share of them whose births are outside of marriage has doubled in this, in this 40-year period.

So now it's like 52% of birth to moms with a high school degree are outside of marriage. So that's really the story here. Again, like it's, you know, everyone, folk, like people's minds go to sort of whatever preconceived notions they have. This isn't about an increase in divorce. It's not about all of these unintended pregnancies among teen girls or women who've dropped out of high school. it's really now just a different phenomenon where having kids outside of marriage has become

quite commonplace for a fairly wide swath of the population. Yeah, and I just want to echo that since we primarily when talking about birth rates and fertility, that as it relates to what you would have expected marriage to look like, just to highlight that the decline in marriage isn't a divorce story. It's that people are a substantial number of people aren't getting married in the first place. Now, I think that's an important part of the story that you tell in the book. Can I just say, Louise, like this goes back to sort of the class divide too. Even looking at just unpartnered mothers, college educated mothers in some sense are more

advantaged because college educated mothers are more likely to be divorced. So it's something like 60 something percent of unpartnered college educated mothers are divorced. And it flips. If you look at moms without a college degree, a small majority of them have never been married. And the reason that that actually matters is because the children of divorced parents are more likely to have had two parents in their household at some point with the resources of two parents. And then they're also more likely sort of across the education spectrum, moms who are divorced are twice as likely to be receiving child support payments as moms who were never married. And those children whose parents are divorce are more likely to be in touch and have contact with the second parent, typically a father.

And so even among moms who are unpartnered, you know, raising their kids in a house without another adult in the house, even among them, college-educated moms have a resource advantage from the fact that they were divorced rather than never married. I mean, essentially, basically, as a descriptive matter, what we see in the data, kids whose parents are never married, they're very unlikely to have meaningful contact and support coming in from their second parent throughout their childhood. There's two very different single parenthood stories between generally upper class single parenthood that still retains some of the benefits and resources of marriage and one where marriage never happened in the first place. That's a really interesting conversation. From an economist's perspective, how is marriage key to other forms of flourishing?

The lens I take on this is very much driven as it's very much reflective of an economic perspective and it's really a resource-based perspective on marriage. Viewing marriage as a contract between two adults, when I'm talking about marital, parental marriage, it's marriage between two parents to pool their resources, their energy, and in a long-term contract to basically share the responsibility and commitment to running a household and taking care of kids. So the three sort of sets of resources that I really sort of describe

and draw on evidence and data in favor of are money, time, and emotional bandwidth. And so income, we know that basically what happens is in a married parent households, you're much more likely to have two adults in the house. I mean, that's, again, this is why marriage winds up being a critical part of this story is because unmarried parents,

just very small percentage of them actually live together and have two parents in the household. So I'm going to use sort of marriage and two parents a little bit interchangeably. So married-parent households, you're more likely to have two adults, which, again, quite descriptively, tends to mean more income coming into the household. Most moms work now, and so it probably isn't surprising that if you look at the median income of a married parent versus single-parent house, it's about twice as high, right, even like looking across different groups.

So there's more income coming into the house, and we know in a statistical, sense from studies that try to explain why do we see better outcomes for kids from married parent homes as compared to single mother homes? And when I say better outcomes, they mean they're more likely to graduate high school, graduate college, you know, have higher earnings as adults. A lot of that comes from having higher income. And there's a ton of studies, not just looking at this marriage difference, but just in general, having income, more income in a household is very protective to kids, it's beneficial. And so, you know, it depends on exactly what context you're looking at, what outcome. But let's just say, as a heuristic, about half of the gap in kids' outcomes

perhaps is explained by simple income differences. But income isn't all of it. And again, in a statistical sense, you can't explain away the gaps by controlling for income. So what else is it? Well, we also see very clearly in time use data that- And those are surveys that track sort of what people are doing on their day-to-day, right? What they're spending their time on, and then there's other supplements that look at how kids are spending their time. Basically, what we see is kids from two-parent, married-parent homes, have more time with parents, parental time.

And this is both, if you look at married mothers and married fathers, compared to unmarried mothers and unmarried fathers, married parents spend more time individually with their kids. Why? You know, I reject the idea that it's because married parents like being with their kids more, or maybe you think it's. more beneficial, they just have more bandwidth, right? They have more time. First of all, if there's somebody else in the house who is working, who can do some of the cooking,

mow the lawn, do some of the household production, then I have more time to sit and read to my kid or drive my kid around to their activities. And so we just see that kids from married parent homes get more parental time investment. Again, not surprisingly, at the end of the day, all of this makes a lot of common sense. But then I also, you know, I also draw on a literature mostly from outside economics, that talks about the role of stress and parenting approaches in households. And there are a lot of studies, again, from outside economics, that look at the role that stress plays primarily in, you know, lower income single mother homes. And again, like, it's common sense, but we have studies showing this that, like, there's a lot of stress in

households that are under-resourced. And that makes it really hard for parents to parent the way they want a parent. And so I sort of call this like emotional bandwidth, but there are very specific theories and different people will refer to sort of different elements of this as toxic stress in some sense or there's behavioral economists refer to, you know, cognitive bandwidth. These are all a little bit different in their conceptualization, but I think it's sort of a practical conceptual idea. It's useful to just recognize that single parent homes where there's only one parent responsible for doing everything on a day-to-day basis, there's more likely to be stress, there's less likely to be the emotional bandwidth to do the kinds of things that

development psychologists say is beneficial for kids, like patiently talking to them instead of being authoritarian or reading to them. And so you just see that kids from married parent homes also benefit from nurturing parenting more often. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters.

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dot com slash dispatch application times may vary rates may vary one of the things that I think is important to mention in context of what single parenthood looks like that you go into detail in the book and just to have it here so wrap up painting this image of where marriage is and our single parenthood is single parenthood doesn't just mean the absence of a second parent one it's usually single mothers that's one of the things that you emphasize in the book And two, it's usually single mothers who don't have another adult around. So not just not having a spouse, but not having another adult, not having a grandmother, not a sibling, you know, another family member, a lack of community support. I just want to point out, we're focusing on single mothers not because single fathers aren't important and also generally under-resourced.

I mean, just to put a very fine point on this, you know, adjusting for nothing just as a descriptive. matter, the rate of poverty among single mother households is five times as high as it is among married parent households and among single dads, it's like three times as high. Right. Yeah. Much more ubiquitous. The single dads are also, those homes are also under resource compared to two parent homes. Again, because two parents tend to have more resources than one. The reason I think I'm, you know, sort of talking so much about single motherhood is because it is much more common among one parent households. So 21% of kids now live with a mom without a spouse or an unmarried partner present. And between four and a half or five percent of kids live with an unpartnered dad.

But to your point, what I see in the census data is 67 percent of kids who live with an unpartnered mom. There was no other adults in the house, meaning, you know, unpartnered means there's no other, the mom doesn't have a partner in the house. But it also means there's not another, there's not a grandparent or an aunt and uncle or someone else who might be filling in the gaps for a second parent. And that's important because single parents can make up for the absence of a second parent in a lot of different ways. And again, just sort of what we see in the data is that the majority of them are not, you know, sort of making up for the absence of a second parent by either living with their parents or having one of their parents or siblings in the house

helping them, you know, on a day-to-day matter, having another adult in the house. I've come to see family structure and the class divergence in family structure, as we've been talking about, as the elephant in the room in so many of the policy-focused conversations that I've been a part of over the past 10, 15 years, focused on income inequality, child poverty, threats to social mobility. And so what I mean is you gather a whole bunch of of policy-oriented social scientists, economists, policymakers, talking about what do we have to do to address income inequality in this country?

What do we have to do to improve child's well-being? And we talk at great lengths, in my experience, in these kinds of convenings of very smart, committed people. We talk a lot about the need to strengthen the safety net, the role of the EITC, what didn't happen from welfare reform, the need to improve schools, what we know about what works in improving schools, what kind of government programs we know works,

the need for stronger labor market institutions, criminal justice reform. And then this idea of family structure is sort of lurking in the background because anybody who's worked in this research area is well familiar with the main statistics and facts I'm showing in this book, which is, hey, outcomes are really different for kids from one-and-two-parent homes. We have amounts of data showing that. And then also increasingly, these studies that look at mobility at the neighborhood level are showing that the share of kids growing up in two-parent homes is a very strong predictor of

upward mobility for kids from that neighborhood. This is beyond... Even if they don't live in a two-parent home themselves, that's an interesting thing in the data. This is beyond the benefit of having, of all of the studies showing the benefit of having a, you know, two-parent home for an individual. kids at a neighborhood level. It's like this is, you know, I'm referring to some of the work coming out of the Opportunity Insights Lab at Harvard.

I mean, it's really quite shocking. You see that, oh my gosh, all of the stuff that we talk about, like tax progressivity, access to affordable college, none of those are as predictive of upward mobility rates as the share of kids in two-parent homes. So, you know, I kept starting to bring this up and say, well, what about, what do we do about the class divide in two-parent homes. Clearly, this is both a reflection of an amplifier of income inequality in this country.

And the response you got was... You know, the response ranged is... Nobody, in my experience, people, especially scholars who know the data, they don't deny it. We're just sort of a little bit hamstrung because we're uncomfortable talking about that. It's like, well, what do we as economists

or policy folks have to say about marriage or the family that feels like outside of our domain, and let's go back to talking about tax policy or the design of transfer programs. It's a safer space for us. We know, we know what to say about it. And then also, you know, it's harder to know what to do about it. It's an uncomfortable topic.

Everyone has an immediate gut reaction because they have a family. They might have grown up in a single parent family. They might be divorced. They might be a single mom. Their friends are single moms. No one wants to sound like we're blaming the victim, which is what happened when people tried to have.

have these conversations in the 80s. And so really what got me to the point where I felt like I had to write this book was we can't talk about everything other than, you know, this critical factor that shapes kids lives and outcomes at a micro level, but we're also seeing at an aggregate level have an important family structure is. We can't talk about everything else, many of which sort of relates to or stems from what's happening to kids' home life. And there has to be a way where we could just do this that's honest about the data

that draws on the evidence and ideally moves us beyond some of the unfortunate miring that's happened when this conversation came up in the late 60s and then again in the 80s, you know, that sort of it just got lost because it sort of devolved into either people explicitly blaming single moms or the other side accusing people of sounding like they were blaming single moms. And so I've gotten some pushback, but I knew it was coming because this is a conversation that's been very hard to have for many decades now. Yeah. And it's really interesting that, you know, after reading the book, I think you're pretty careful about framing the conversation in a way that stresses the importance of marriage but

doesn't discount the challenges that single mom's face or, you know, one of the most outrageous things that's come out on Twitter recently since the book was released is something like, okay, Melissa Carney, you're saying that if there's an abusive husband that mom should stay with him because of marriage. And that's not the argument that you're making. Rather, you're saying that you can hold those two thoughts at the same time, that the situation that I just described as terrible and bad and you shouldn't want to keep someone in an abusive relationship,

but also that that doesn't discount the wealth of data that shows that marriage is predictive of a lot of positive outcomes. I mean, of course, and right, like I anticipated all of this, right? In the book, I think even in the preface and I say quite explicitly, like nobody, nothing I say in this book should be misconstrued

to suggest that anybody should be staying in an abusive relationship. And in fact, you know, beyond just abusive relationships, there are other situations where having a second parent in the home would not be beneficial for children. And I talk about two recent studies that finds that, in fact, when there's a parent, I mean, this is sad, but when there's a parent who's been convicted of a crime and they happen to get assigned to a judge who's more likely to put them in prison for that crime, you see that actually it's beneficial for kids.

And that just speaks to the point that, like, getting a parent who might be harmful or disruptive to family life, getting them out of the family is actually beneficial for kids. But, you know, my point is we need to be able to acknowledge that. And at the same time, also acknowledge that it shouldn't just be kids whose parents are college educated that have the benefit of healthy two-parent homes in large numbers. So my view on this is that anyone who cares about equity and, you know, social mobility, should be deeply disturbed by the fact that it's the most advantaged in society are the ones disproportionately likely to be, to have the benefit or the privilege to refer to my

title of, you know, women, let's just start with moms. You know, I'm exceptionally lucky. I graduated college. I have a good job. I have decent earnings. And I have a partner doing this with me every day, right? Helping me with parenting. It should bother us. that millions of women who are not as resource advantage find themselves in the position of doing this by themselves. I mean, we talk about health equity, right? We want everyone to have access to good health care. We want everyone to have access to good colleges. I also want everyone, mothers, fathers, kids alike, to have access to a healthy, stable, two-parent family. And so I think we should be challenging ourselves to say, why is that becoming

so hard for so many people outside the most advantage groups in society to achieve. Like, what are the barriers? Why is there so much intimate partner violence, right, in America? And shouldn't we be throwing tons of resources and research and figuring out ways to prevent it? So it's really about what I reject is this defeatist attitude that, hey, Outside the college educated class, there's just a lot of really crappy men who would be terrible partners and harmful dads. And so let's stop talking about marriage and instead just improve the safety net. We should improve the safety net 100%. And I am on record for 20 years advocating for a stronger safety net for kids and families in this country. But I also want to say, hey,

we can't really just give up on all of these dads. We can't give up, frankly, on all these moms and just say, hey, you're stuck doing this by yourself. We'll try to get an extra $2,000 at the child tax credit. That's not enough. That doesn't close class gaps. That's not, you know, giving equal access to this really protective institution. And so I'm trying to be more bold than I think what a lot of the progressive pushback I'm getting, which just in my mind feels really defeatist. And frankly, surprising to the extent that people are just, I don't know, I guess so willing to sort of right off 40% of kids' dads, right? 40% of kids in the U.S. are born to unmarried parents.

If anywhere close to that share of dads would be harmful dads, I mean, why are we not, like, throwing all our efforts into addressing that problem? Like, that's just not okay. And that's a story that you go into in the book and just to put a more fine point on it, because I think there's a gender dynamic at play here, that the question is sort of, okay, why are people not getting married? And part of the answer seems to be that men through, you know, different sorts of scholarly lenses have become less, quote, unquote, marriageable, right?

I try to be, so I do tell this story. I have a chapter called marriageable men or not. And I, you know, part of trying to explain or figure out what's happened, given there were these social changes in the 60s and 70s that led to a reduction in marriage and a change in gender roles sort of across. society. What happened that changed things in the 80s and 90s, such that there was a divergence, whereas like the decline in marriage stalled out among the college educated and continue to fall among everyone else. And the story I tell that I read in the data and from all

the studies on this is, well, you have this new social norm that sort of makes it more acceptable than in the past to not be married, to have kids outside marriage. And you combine that with economic changes that hurt the relative position of economic men. And so there's both, you know, again, the arrows run both ways between how people respond to economic changes and then you establish the social norm. And there's been a bit of a cycle, again, primarily outside the college educated class, where men have become less reliable as breadwinners. And also women, again, across the board, but have become better able to financially take care

of themselves. And of course, I celebrate that and don't lament that. But that has made the economic imperative or attractiveness of marriage weaker among non-college educated adults, whether it is the women saying, you know what, I rather do this by myself because you're like in and out of work and you're another child I have to take care of and it's not worse that I'll do this by myself or the men saying, you know, and by the way, being socially condoned to say, to some extent you know what like I don't want the commitment of a family like I don't then I have to you know my economic situation is unstable or I'm not up for that I'm going to pull out from a commitment to the kids and the family and do my own thing maybe I'll send a check now and then maybe I'll visit the kids

on occasional Saturday I can't tell you in the data which you know how much of this is driven by men or women certainly there are stories you know certainly anecdotally we know that there are dads who just don't commit to the family and the mom has no real choice there. And then we also know anecdotally, and I say anecdotally, but I also mean from like ethnographic studies of unmarried populations, that there are moms who reject the dad, who the dad wants to be involved. And the mom is sort of, you know, they're referred to in some of these studies that's the gatekeeper. Don't let the dad come around or they find a new boyfriend and they're not interested in the, in the former, you know, the older kid's dad. And so I'm not pointing fingers.

I never use the word deadbeat dad. I'm not, you know, I'm not putting fingers, but my point is there is a situation at hand that is not beneficial to millions of kids. And we need to address that situation, right? We cannot just keep hoping that reforms to schools or more schools counselors are going to make up for the deficits that kids are experiencing from this, you know,

from these under-resourced home situation. But there's a cultural story. going on here. And I think that's really interesting. You mentioned in the book, in a separate study on the question of marriageability, not just being an income story, there's this fantastic study about fracking booms that I think surprised you a little bit. So maybe as we're being to wrap up the conversation, can you tell us a little bit about what you thought would happen versus what actually happened? Yeah. So I know, you know, there are studies that have shown this causal link between the decrease in men's economic position, both absolute relative and an increase

in the share of kids being born outside marriage. And so I wanted to test the reverse marriageable male story. And the context in which I was able to do that with my co-author Riley Wilson was these localized fracking booms. So outside of North Dakota and South Dakota, which was a different situation, you had a bunch of migrant workers, but in counties all throughout the country in the early 2000s, if they just happened to be sitting on the right geological, you know, shale kind of producing area at a time when this fracking technology became prevalent and cheap and fracking boomed, these local communities experienced booms in jobs and earnings for non-college educated men in particular. A lot of it was in the oil and gas extraction industries, but just there were

more like other industries as well. It was localized booms. And so we're like, this is great. Non-college educated men did better. They did better relative to women. Like, let's study what happens. It turns out that there was no reduction in the share of kids born outside of marriage at all. And that surprised me. What happened was in these communities when there was this positive shock to males employment and earnings, you do see an increase in fertility. And economists have found this before that one of the things people do when they get for money is they use it to like have kids. right so but what was surprising was the increase in births went up in equal proportion for unmarried and married people and and so and there was no increase in marriage and no reduction in the non-marital

birth share and so we thought it might maybe it's the case that now that there's a social paradigm where non-marital childbearing is sort of common the way people respond to this increase in income and employment and that marriage ability men is actually not on the marriage margin but on the having kids margin. And if you look across counties, counties that at baseline already had a higher share of kids being born outside marriage, that is where you saw the non-married birth increase the most. So then we, for comparison sake, looked at what happened to the coal boom and bust in Appalachian communities in the 70s and 80s. So it was a very similar economic shock in very similar communities in the sense that they're mostly rural communities. And there what you find is when coal prices went up and

men in those communities earned more, there was an increase in marriage and a reduction in the non-marital birth share. And so you have a very similar economic shock, you know, 25 years apart, and you get a different family formation response. And this suggests to me it would be consistent with an interaction of how economic, how people respond to economic situations given a prevailing social paradigm. And so I've really sort of changed my thinking on this. over the past five to 10 years, I used to think, gosh, what we really need to do is improve the economic situation of men outside the college of a gay class and then marriage will look attractive again.

But, you know, I do, and I say this explicitly in the book, I think we need to sort of reaffirm a social norm and an honesty about the fact that two-parent households are beneficial for kids. And so that is hand in hand. And this is why it's going to be such a hard thing to reverse. We need both major economic changes and I think pretty major social changes at this point. There's a cultural story here as well. And I think that thinking about what modifications will come to the prevailing social paradigm is kind of where the conversation goes on from here.

I could keep talking, but we're out of time. The book is The Two-Parent Privilege, How America Can Stop Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, Really Think This Step Forward in Our Conversation. about marriage. And Melissa, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. You know,