TRIGGERnometry - The True Cost of Family Breakdown - Melissa Kearney

Episode Date: August 4, 2024

Melissa Kearney is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. A research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), she is also director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Dr Kearney's research focuses on issues related to social policy, poverty, and inequality and she has published numerous academic studies related to the economics of families and childbearing. She is the author of, ‘The Two-Parent Privilege: How the decline in marriage has increased inequality and lowered social mobility, and what we can do about it’ - available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0C76N6NN1/ Follow Melissa on X: https://x.com/kearney_melissa Sponsor: Start earning A Yield on Silver, Paid in Silver with Monetary Metals. Click here to find out more: https://bit.ly/3Rs8Rv2 Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You talking to me? Kayak, got that right. Kids we were growing up in a single mother home. in the US, they are five times more likely to live in poverty than kids growing up in a married parent home. Kids growing up with a single dad are three times more likely. And why is it that this is controversial, that this is suddenly taboo to talk about? Because it sounds like you're saying the one parent is the problem, when in most cases

that one parent is the kid's greatest asset. Can we just talk about this the way we talk about other gaps in society, just with data, just with evidence, coming it from empathy. You can't pretend that this is a feminist success story. This is not a feminist success story. Melissa, welcome to the show. It's great to have you on. You wrote a book called The Two-Parent Privilege.

Very controversial idea. The two parents are better than one. Welcome to the show. You're actually an economist, obviously, and you did a lot of research. And the data behind what you're talking about would be fascinating for us to talk about. Before we get into that, just tell us a little bit about, you know, what is the state of the family? in the U.S.? Yeah, well, first, thanks for having me on the show.

It's great to be with you both. So the state of the family in the U.S. has not been great for the past four decades, but a real part of the story is that it's been very uneven across the socioeconomic distribution, and that's really a main story I'm telling in the book. The big sort of headline numbers,

I know we're not supposed to get to number yet, but the big numbers that motivated me to write the book are now the share of kids in the U.S. being raised in America, parent home is down to 63%, which is sort of shockingly low compared to other countries, recent history in the U.S. And- What are the numbers in other countries just for comparison? So let me do it this way, because the way the numbers have been collected across about 130 countries

are the number of kids living in single-parent homes. And by this consistent methodology, it's 23% in the U.S. The only country that's even close to us is the U.K. with 21%, but otherwise it's an average of 7% in 130 countries for 1%. which there's this kind of data. Wow. So the U.S. and U.K. really stand apart and having a really high share of kids being raised

with only one parent in their home. But really the big story is that what's happened in the U.S. in the past four decades is that the decline in share of kids living with married parents, living in a two-parent home, has happened outside the college-educated class. So kids living, kids whose moms have a four-year college degree, they're still living in married-parent homes in roughly similar shares to 40-year.

years ago, it's the middle group, like the middle class, kids whose parents have a high school degree or some college. In a four-decade period, we went from 80% to like 83% to 60% of them living with married parents. So that's a big decline. And why is that? Is it religion? Is it that there used to be a social stigma? Why is it that we've now seen the rise of single-parent families. So I will try to similarize sort of the big narrative that I tell, which will feel incomplete, but I'm just looking at what are the really big drivers of this? And so here's the, here's the big story I tell, which is in the 60s and 70s, you know, cultural, social revolution, lots of changes, changing expectations about how tightly having kids has to be within marriage,

changing thoughts about gender roles, more economic opportunities for women, a whole bunch of things that let me be clear, I think, are good, right? And in those decades, what do we see? We saw a decline in marriage roughly across the board, like across the socioeconomic spectrum. But then you go into the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, and something really interesting happens, which is that the decline in marriage among college-educated adults stalls out. It's like they worked through the cultural social stuff in the 60s and 70s, And those rates stabilized outside the college educated class, straight line down for those with a high school degree. Right. Like sort of, again, the bulk of adults, the middle class, straight line down in marriage rates.

And of course, it's always been lower and continues to fall out for even less educated adults. In the 80s, 90s, early 2000s, as we know, and there's lots of talk about this, there were a whole bunch of economic shocks that were pretty punishing to men in particular without college degrees. And this happened in the U.S. and, you know, in the U.K. as well. And the way I read the situation drawing on mountains of data and lots of studies is that the economic attractiveness of marriage as an institution, especially for a man and a woman, that decreased outside the economic, the college educated class. Why? Because men were, their employment rates fell, their earnings were falling at the same time. that women could bring in more money on their own. And so both in an absolute sense and in a relative sense, non-college educated men became less desirable as marriage partners. Again, in an economic sense, there's a whole bunch of other social things that go along with that.

But once you're living in a world where it has become socially acceptable and even commonplace for people to have kids outside marriage and the economic attractiveness of the institution has decreased, then what you see very clearly is that in certain communities, in certain places, in particular, where they were hit with these kinds of economic shocks, a decrease in marriage, an increase in the share of kids born outside marriage, and ultimately an increase in the share of kids living with only one parent. And to what extent is this kind of vicious cycle where parents passing this way of thinking down to their kids? It's not even just passing on the way of thinking, it's passing on an economic reality. And so this is a key reason why I wrote this

book is because we are in a vicious cycle where this family structure is a key mechanism through which advantage or disadvantaged is passed along through the generations. And if we, so my, you know, very strong view on this is if we don't figure out how to break this cycle, we are cementing class and racial and ethnic inequality in this country. We shouldn't be surprised to see huge class gaps in kids' opportunities, outcomes, preparedness for kindergarten through college. This is a really big vicious cycle. And let me be clear, this sort of economic inequality is both cause and effect of what has happened to the family and then the disadvantages, those kids experience, et cetera, et cetera. And by the way, research shows growing up without a dad in the home is particularly bad

for boys in the ways that we as economists can track. And so if you've got this sort of decline in the pool of attractive, marriageable men, again, outside the class of adults with college degrees primarily. And then those boys are growing up without dads in their homes, which make them more likely to act out in school, more likely to get in trouble with crime, less likely to go to college. The pool of attractive marriage partners in that segment of the population is going to shrink even further. And we get this terrible vicious cycle. I was just going to say, we had a woman called Mary Eberstadt on the show a long time ago. Now she wrote a book called Primal Screams, which was about the idea that the breakdown of the family partly leads to identity politics

because people look for something to belong to when they don't feel like they have a complete experience at home. What are some of the other ways that this is affecting us in our society? Because you talk about this a lot in the book that so many of the problems our societies are grappling with today are partly caused by the breakdown of the family. Yeah, so I come at this from like a pretty basic, maybe some would even say boring, economic lens, which is there's, and I'm trying, and I want to separate myself from, just to be clear, I'm not an expert on the kind of psychological harms or losses that happen when kids don't grow up with two loving parents. What I can see very clearly in the nationally representative

data sets is kids who don't grow up with two parents, they have far fewer resources coming into their households, right? And so again, it's like, there's nothing value laden about that. There's nothing moralistic, there's nothing even deeply psychological. Those kids are much more likely to live in poverty. It's not just about poverty, but let's be clear in the poverty numbers. Kids who are growing up in a single mother home in the U.S. have a five, they are five times more likely to live in poverty than kids growing up in a married parent home. Kids growing up with a single dad are three times more likely. If you just look at median household income, kids growing up with one parent, their median household income, is unsurprisingly about how,

as high, right? Because now most moms work, and so you've got two incomes versus one. Income is pretty predictive of the kind of neighborhood you live in, the kind of schools you go through, the kind of extra-curricular activities you have. It's a really important determinant, right? So kids with only one parent, have less income, have less resources. We also know when we can get into this later, but they get less parental time, their parents have less bandwidth. But what we see, again, in the data in a, like, just very evidence-based way, those kids are then less likely to graduate high school. They're more likely to get involved in the criminal justice system. They're more likely to have an early non-marital birth. They're less likely to have high earnings

and be married themselves as adults. And so all of the psychological sadness, loneliness, identity, crisis, all of that, is on top of the very irrefutable, he screams out at the data. If you want to talk about primal scream, it screams out in the data and dozens of studies. These kids are just at a disadvantage when it comes to hitting all these sort of educational economic markers. And why is it that this is controversial, that this is suddenly taboo to talk about? Because as somebody who was working in teaching for a long time, well over a day, decade, it was pretty obvious. It was pretty obvious. So kids who were struggling when it came to

behavior, when it came to following instructions, a vast majority of them is because they didn't have a father at home. Mom was working two jobs, maybe even three jobs, exhausted, barely there, trying to put food on the table, a roof over the home. She had two or three kids who pretty much raised themselves. It was obvious unless you were a very, very special type of kid that you were going to stray from the straight and narrow as it is. Yeah. So there's so much about what you just said to unpack. And I love the, you know, the image you set, which is one of a struggling single moms. So one of the real reasons this is controversial to talk about and people don't want to talk about it is because as soon as you say kids benefit from two parents, there's an initial reaction of

you're blaming single moms. I'm not blaming single moms. You're not blaming single moms. Like, what I just heard from you is the way I come at this, which is let's be empathetic. Of course, it's freaking hard to do this by yourself, right? And so we're not helping anybody by pretending it's not hard for single parents to do it by themselves. We have a two-year-old at home for our first child. It's so hard with two people. I'm starting to think the nuclear family is a bad idea. We need like the whole grandparents, aunts, uncles to actually do it properly. Yeah. So for a single person to do that while also trying to provide. Yeah. That's impossible. It's impossible. Exactly. So I'll get to. There's a variety of reasons.

actually why it's controversial to talk about, especially in the U.S., but on this point, to your point, like, I'm fully aware that I come to this topic from a position of privilege, right? I'm raising my kids in a two-parent home with a lot of resources. We both have well-paying jobs. Still really hard, right? Really hard. I was raised in a two-parent home, which is probably why the issue feels it's less uncomfortable for me to talk about, right? If I grew up in a home where I saw my parents fighting all the time, maybe I'd just sort of be less comfortable highlighting with the data show, right? And so I'm acknowledging both of those things.

This is actually why I wound up calling the book the two-parent privilege. Initially, I was calling the book the Family Gap, because the whole theme in the book, right, there's gaps between the college educated and not on all sorts of things. There's this family gap. It leads to gaps in outcomes. And then when it got time for the book to come out, the marketing team at the University of Chicago Press was like,

that's a terrible title. Nobody knows what the family gap is. We're going to call it the one-parent problem. I was like, I will not put out the book called the one-parent problem because this is why no one will talk about the issue because it sounds like you're saying the one parent is the problem. When in most cases that one parent is the kid's greatest asset, right? Like they are doing all they can to raise their kid to the best of their ability

without the committed help of a resident partner, second parent. And so then I was like, no, no, no. How about we flip this and call this the due parent privilege and just acknowledge because it's silly not to and counterproductive not to, that raising kids in a two-parent setting is a privileged position for those of us who have the committed help of the second parent.

It's a privileged position for the kids who are lucky enough to be born into a household where they have two parents investing their resources. into them. And now it's the most educated high-income group in society, the privileged group, that's largely getting the benefit of these healthy, strong, advantageous family situations. So, you know, let's get back to your initial question. Why is it so controversial? I do think because a lot of people hear it as you're blaming the victim. And we don't want to do that. Okay. The second issue, this has been interesting to me. I didn't anticipate that this would be the greatest

backlash I got. The greatest, like, sort of onslaught right away when I put out the book, writers who in the first 48 hours had essays, you know, saying what a ridiculous old-fashioned scold I was, there was an immediate backlash from the feminist writers. When they hear this message, they hear it as, you're saying women can't do this just as well as men or just as well, they need a man to do this, right? You're saying a woman can't do this on her own, which, again, to your point. I don't know. I'm pretty like, I think it's pretty helpful to sometimes have my husband around to help out, right? And I don't think that makes me less of a feminist, um, to admit that. But that was interesting. And also, before the book came out, I presented a bunch of the research at an

academic conference in London, where it drew on, it was hosted by UCL and there was a bunch of European demographers, sociologists, and economists. And people came up to me afterwards. And they were like, I can't believe you're saying this. This is. so anti-feminist. And they were like, we would never write this in Europe. And one researcher said, I just did a whole report on poverty. I won't name her country for my government. And I didn't even mention family structure. And I was like, well, take note from what's happened in the U.S. Because you can't pretend that this is a feminist success story. This is not a feminist success story. The third reason why it's been controversial to talk about in the U.S., basically since the late 60s,

And the thing I was most nervous was about was because in the U.S., there remains today, but there's been, for the past four decades, a black-white divide. And so when Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1968 first called attention to the rise in the share of urban black children in the U.S. being born to single moms or unmarried moms and then being raised in single mother households, he was men. with a huge backlash that he was blaming the victim. He wasn't sufficiently acknowledging racism, structural discrimination. And there was a huge backlash on the topic itself being perceived as having like a racist undertone to it. And that, I think that episode silenced the conversation

for a long time among those of us in the social policy world. That's really unfortunate because I'm aware of that gap, But there are also other ethnic and racial gaps that go very much in the opposite direction. And that kind of opens up the reality of it, which isn't just a black-white thing. It's there's a lot of things going on. Asians, for example, you talk about this, irrespective of education, are way more likely to raise their kids in a two-parents' household. So it's so unhelpful, isn't it, to think about this issue through that very simple prison? It's so unhelpful.

I will say to my great relief, I have not gotten that line of pushback as much. And I, you know, when I've reflected on why that might be, I think perhaps for two reasons. One, it's really hard for anybody to deny in a well-meaning, honest way that the decline in two-parent families, the decline in marriage isn't particularly challenging for the black community. Right. And to say that is not to suggest that there's not a whole terrible history of structural discrimination that has led to weakened labor market opportunities, high levels of incarceration, exclusion from neighborhoods that has led to that position. But let's be clear that we need to get out of this. And more black children would benefit by having two parents in their home. And more black moms would benefit by having the

help of a committed, employed partner. And more black men, you know, at least in ethnographic, serve evidence would like to be positive forces in their kids' lives. And so denying that reality is not helpful to anybody. It's also the case that now the share of kids being raised in one-parent homes is quite high

outside the college educated class for white and Hispanic families as well. So we can talk about this as a class-based issue as as a racial, ethnic divide issue. The sort of exception of ethnic Asians in the U.S. I think is fascinating, that that group, and again,

I'm drawing on census data. Can you give us the data on all of this? So based on children whose moms in the 2019 U.S. Census of all households identify, according to these, you know, identifies these in these four largest racial ethnic groups in the census. Here's what we see. Eighty-eight percent of kids whose moms identify as ethnically Asian are living in married parent households. Sorry to interrupt you there because there is a slight difference in the way the UK see Asian and the way in the way the U.S. see it. So when we hear Asian, we think Pakistani, Indian, Bangladesh.

In the U.S., it's, you know, Korean, Chinese. So what do we mean by Japanese? What do we mean by Asian? So what I'm going by is in the census, how a mom identifies herself. And there's a huge list of countries. Ah, okay. I got you. Yeah. And so that's 88% of kids. 77% of kids whose moms identify as white, and then 64% of kids whose mom identifies Hispanic, and 38% of kids whose moms identifies

racially black. 328. 38. So, so... Versus 88. Versus 88. And so again, like, if we actually really are committed to helping kids, and we say, oh, my goodness, you know, kids coming from households identifying as Asian do so much better in school, shouldn't we ask how much of this is because they have two parents versus one, right? How much is driven by family structure? In the U.S., we don't actually report

or collect education data by family structure, which is not helpful. No. Not helpful. So that's a big thing. But also, even within, again, with the exception of Asians, within groups,

there are big education divides, specifically a college gap. So when you look at kids whose moms identify as racially black, if their mom has a four-year college degree, 60% of them are living in married parent homes versus 30%. Wow. Not loving your AT&T or T Mobile Bill? Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news. Bring your AT&T or T mobile bill to Verizon and we'll give you a better deal.

So get away from that unfortunate phone bill and get to Verizon. Run, ride, canoe. Whatever it takes, we'll be here. Bring your AT&T or T mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. on the best network. A better deal. No surprises. That's Verizon. Best network based on root metrics, best overall mobile network performance U.S. second half 2025, all rights reserved. It must provide a recent consumer mobile bill in the name of the person who gave me the deal. Additional terms, conditions, and restrictions apply. You know, I think the problem here is that with a lot of these

issues, not just this one, we're afraid to be honest and talk about things fully and frankly. And if we are not going to be talking about issues honestly, then what we're not going to be doing is talking about every facet of this particular issue, which means you were never going to solve the problem. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. That's exactly why I decided to write this book, which, you know, depending on your inclination, you need to read this book and you're like, I didn't really need a professor to tell me that two parents were helpful, right? Like, how many years of data did I have to look at to come to that really intuitive conclusion?

On the other hand, I've been for two decades now engaged in policy conversations about inequality threats to social mobility. And we don't talk about this. We don't talk about this. And we have study after study after study showing that family structure is super predictive, both at an individual level and at a neighborhood level for how kids do. And their educational attainment and their college attainment, right? So we know that that's the case.

And then when we get to the conversations, we decide, that's out of bounds. Let's not talk about that. Let's keep talking about schools and what schools can do. Let's keep talking about the need to have early childhood education to strengthen the safety net. All things that I'm all in favor of. And I've written essays and policy essays and papers on the need to do those things. But we're swimming upstream, right? We are fighting against what's been happening in the home. And at some point, we have to say, wait a minute, while we're doing all these things to make sure that there's more school counselors in school to make sure that kids who go to school can get fed in school because they don't have sufficient resources at home. Why don't we think about how to strengthen the family?

And I agree entirely. It got to the point, in my view, we're never going to have an honest, productive conversation about closing gaps, improving kids' well-being, addressing a whole bunch of social ills that we're not seeing if we don't have that conversation about what's been going on in kids' homes and families? Because I've seen it with my own eyes. The boy gets to a certain age in a one-parent household. They hit puberty. Mom can't control them. They can't control them physically because a boy is bigger and stronger. He will do whatever he wants. He will be defiant and he will go looking for a father figure. And when he goes looking for a father figure in a community which has a dearth of father-figures, where is he going to end up? Most likely a gang.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, actually one of, one summer in college, and this is, you know, maybe this was the moment where I really got committed to this topic, which 25 years later I'm still writing about. I worked as an intern at a welfare to work center in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was one of those things that, like, there was this great program in my college. If you did an internship for a group that worked for social change, you could get funding to go do that internship, right? you're like, okay, I'm going to do that. And so I worked at this center and was all with single moms, many of whom were my age, because I'm a junior in college and many of these women were my age. One of the women on the staff who was a single mom, her son was about to go into high school. And her biggest worry was he basically was going to have no choice but to join a gang. And I was just like really, you know, eye-opening and heartbreaking as a junior in college. She's like, this mom is doing everything she can. Why is she in this position and I'm not, right?

Like, what is it about the environments we grew up in? That she is having such a different life. And now her son, to your point, like, what else is he supposed to do? And what she's supposed to do? You know, she was researching options for him to go to different schools. It didn't really seem like she, you know, he was going to get a scholarship or she had those. And so it is, again, no one, I'm not pointing fingers. I never use the word deadbeat dads. I'm not pointing figures at moms saying, why did you get pregnant in this

situation? It's just a bad situation for everybody, especially the kids. The interesting thing you've mentioned being a teacher, I've gotten so many emails since the books come out from teachers and from pediatricians who have said, this is what I've seen in my classroom and my practice for the past 25 years. These kids no longer have two parents in the household, and they have all, you know, sorts of deficits. and disadvantages that come along with it, and I'm not allowed to say it. Like, if I try bringing this up to my principal or whatever, this is not something we're supposed to be talking about. And so, like, maybe what my book has done is said, hey, can we just talk about this the way

we talk about other gaps in society, just with data, just with evidence, come in it from empathy. And let's be honest about what a lot of people who work with kids have been seeing and know is true, let's bring that into the public conversation. And this is why it's so important, because I remember one boy who I used to teach, he got expelled from his high school. And I was his primary school teacher and he came back to see us. And I knew he was in a game. And I said to him, how is it going in school? He was like, not well, been expelled. They want me to go to another school. And I said, well, Darren, what's wrong with that? You school. New start. You'll be able to you know, make a, you know, it's a clean slate. You have a bright lad. You can get on now.

And he goes, I can't go there, sir, because they'll murder me. Oh, we're at. And then, and then you look at his mom who had other kids, couldn't control them. This kid went completely off the rails. Dad was nowhere to be seen. And you go, that's, by refusing to have an honest conversation about these issues, that is the inevitable consequence. That is the inevitable consequence. And I get really frustrated with, you know, feminists who go, oh, it's sexist to say this, or you're being done. No, you know, I'm not. What I'm trying to do is what we're trying to do is show the realities of this situation.

And the fact that it's not pleasant and it's not nice isn't anti-feminist. Yeah. So her was like a, you know, like that reality moment where he's like, I can't go to that school, right? Like, what don't you get? I had a conversation recently with someone who works with these responsible fatherhood programs. So there are programs around, you know, in communities across the country. They're not very well funded because this isn't a funding priority. But there are communities, community groups working with mostly non-resident dads to say,

how can you be more engaged in your kids' life? Let's do healthy fatherhood classes. Let me teach you about appropriate parenting. And I was saying to this gentleman who, you know, runs one of these programs, he's a black man and most of his, he's running it in a neighborhood that's pretty long. You know, he's working with black dads. And I was like, yeah, because even the ones if they have unstable employment, surely they can offer something positive to their kid, right? Like they can go to their basketball game or they can go to the parent teacher conference. And he looks at me, he goes, no, they can't.

So they can't. He goes, no, they have drug charges. they can't go anywhere near their kids' school. I was like, oh, it's hard. It's hard, right? There's a lot of barriers. Now, let me just step back a moment. 40% of kids in the U.S. are born to unmarried parents.

It is not the case that 40% of kids have dads who have drug charges or who are out of work. Okay, so I want to remind us that there is a continuum here. There's a continuum. There are kids whose parents are stably employed, have high school, school degrees just sort of decided that, you know, they're not the love of a life and decided not to be married. There are kids who are in really bad situations who, you know, do have a parent with a criminal history, deep poverty, et cetera. There's a continuum. And I think the way to address this as a society is to realize that there are different, you know, sort of different

innovations and ways of help strengthening those families across the board. Melissa, one of the things I've been thinking about from the beginning of this is whether the economic explanation is sufficient. And the reason I say this is if what we're talking about is the shocks, the loss of manufacturing jobs, et cetera, made men without a college degree less attractive as a marriage partner. That doesn't explain why women are still having kids from those men and then not having them in the home, right? So what I don't help me work this out. Why would, why would somebody have a child with somebody and then not marry them even though they still would be contributing resources and time and parenting time or whatever?

What's gone on there? Maybe I'm a misunderstanding. No, you're not misunderstanding. So the economic argument is definitely not sufficient. It's part of it. And I'll, let me be specific about that. And then we can, try and think about why people are making these choices. So for a long time, I did think a bit to, you know, glibly as an economist, like, look, I know the studies. There are causal arrows. Manufacturing jobs go away in this community. Men lose their jobs. Decline in marriage, share of kids living outside a two-parent home. We know this. What we need to do is improve the economic position of these men. And so then we did have this exogenous shock happen in the U.S.

where in a whole bunch of communities around the country, there was an increase in job opportunities and earnings specifically for men. And these were the localized fracking booms. Okay, so I'm not looking at North Dakota and South Dakota where you had a whole bunch of men going to take those jobs. But all throughout the country, I mean, there's, you know, hundreds of communities throughout the country

outside of North, South Dakota, where the fracking technology became, you know, less expensive, accessible. They just happened to be sitting on the geological, requirements to do this, and there was an increase in jobs, not just in oil and gas extraction, but they were local booms, okay? And what we can see in the data, this is work I did with Riley Wilson, we can see in the data that, in fact, male employment went up, male earnings went up, both in an absolute sense and relative to women. And then, as a social scientist, you're all excited, you run the regression. Okay, non-marital birth share, what happened? It didn't

fall, like, zero. I was like, well, that's not what I was expecting. Turned. out, though, bursts went up. So in the, in the, you know, language of economists, kids are normal goods. When people get, like, an inflow of income, one of the things they do is consuming on having kids, because kids are expensive. So burst went up in equal proportion to married and unmarried people. So unmarried people and married people both had more kids. Yeah, and this gets to your question. Like, wait a minute, if he was good enough to have a kid with, why didn't you marry him? Okay, we'll come back to that. I don't have a great answer to that. Or cohabit or whatever. But stay together, right?

So, yes, actually, let's sidebar on that for a minute. In the U.S., cohabitation, even among parents, is a very fragile arrangement. So the reason I focus so much on marriage in my book is because it turns out that in the U.S., that's the institution that basically delivers two parents, to kids for their childhood. Cohabitation, even among parents who at the time of the kid's birth say, yes, we want to stay together. In survey data, it's not nationally representative, but in survey data of those parents, a majority of them will not stay together. So it's a very unreliable arrangement.

It's an unreliable arrangement. Less reliable than in Europe, where you're more likely to have long-term cohabitation among parents. Okay. So anyway, but so that was a surprise. And then we went back and looked at what happened in the 70s and 80s in the U.S. We're in similar communities. The price of coal went up.

And that increased male earnings in these coal-producing towns. And what you saw there was an increase in marriage, an increase in births only to married adults and a reduction in the non-marital birth share. And so this was super interesting because you've got a very similar economic shock in very similar communities in the 80s and early 2000s

and a very different family formation response. And I think one interpretation of this is that how people respond to economic situations depends on the social context they live in. And so now when you're in a position in the U.S. in the early 2000s where socially childbearing and raising kids in marriage have already somewhat been decoupled, you don't get the same response of, well, I'm going to, this is great, he has a job now, we're going to get married and have kids.

You get the response, but he's a job, he has some extra earnings, we'll have a kid. Maybe we'll get married, maybe we won't. And so I do think the social norms are really important here. And in fact, we do see sort of a larger increase in burst outside marriage in the communities in the 2000s in the fracking boom in communities that already had baseline higher rates of kids being born outside married parent homes. So

why do people make this decision? You know, we've talked about the fact that I want to acknowledge it in some cases there are real barriers, right? There's not just unstable employment, there's untreated mental health challenges, there's addiction, there's intimate

partner violence, there's real reasons why people don't get married. I think it's also hard to not conclude from the large numbers of people we're talking about, that there is among large segments of the population, basically agnosticism. Like, eh, I like him well enough. I'm not sure I like them enough to be married to him. The relationship isn't perfect. And so maybe we won't do this together. And this is where I think it's decidedly unhelpful that we're not honest about, this is going to be hard for you. This is going to be so hard. This is going to be hard. Like as a new

parent, this is going to be so hard. You're going to be hard. You're going to be hard. You're going to need all the help that you can get. So if this guy is not a bad guy, you might want to think about that a little bit more carefully. Yeah, I think we should be able to say that. We should be able to say that. We should be able to say that. And maybe more people will start to say that now that it's like abundantly clear that it's not honest. And by the way, this thing about like, well, women don't need a, like as a dad, I definitely couldn't do it by myself. My wife is a hero, she probably would manage. Do you see what I'm saying? It's like it's not a one person job. Yeah. It's just not. Look at the.

animal world. Birds that have like offspring, one person's, one bird's doing one thing, the male is doing something like they work together. That's how we evolved. That's how, that's how human society has existed. The fact that we're having to explain this now is really kind of worrying. That sounds pretty sexist to me. You know, but it's so interesting. I mean, this is where the agnosticism comes in. You know, I tell this this story in my, in my book and someone, a reviewer is even like, you should take this out because you're not an ethnographer, you're not doing real interviews the way ethnographers do. I'm like, no, but I talk to people. And what people say is valuable, right?

So the little anecdote I tell in the book, but I think, you know, we've all had these conversations with lots of people across different places. So I was in the cab and I was driving with the guy and he had a picture of a little girl on his dashboard. And I was like, oh, is that your daughter? He's like, yes. She's four. Do you want to see more pictures? I'm like, yes. And he gives me his phone and I'm scrolling through. And then, of course, because I study this stuff, I was like, do you live with her? And he was like, no. I was like, can I ask why not just because I study these kinds of questions and I'm interested? And he says, you know, her mom and I talk about it. If I get more money, maybe we'll get married. And I, you know, now I'm like pushing it. But I'm like,

you know, if you and her mom get along, I'm just saying from a research point of view, it's probably beneficial for her if you guys were like tried to be together. Is there a reason why you don't try to get married? And he literally tries. He's like, did my mom send you? Did my mom say? Right. He was right. He wasn't even mad. He was just like, who is this lady? But it was just so revealing. And I've had so many conversations like this with people since where there's just a like, maybe, but why not? One thing I don't get into in the book, but I think is really interesting is that level of agnosticism, again, I don't get into in the book. But I don't get into in the book, book because in the book, I write the book as an economist and I have a really, really high bar of,

can I cite a study that I know gets this right? So now I'm just speculating, right? We know that in Asian American families, they're together much more. So the only real explanation there has to be a stronger social norm because even in families where there's similar economic position issues, right? So there has to be a social, stronger norm towards it. In college, Do we really think that college-educated parents just like each other day-to-day more than everybody else? No. I think they have a lot of resources that make it possible for them to get help if they're struggling, right? They have resources that make it less likely there's going to be frictions over money. So maybe there's some of that. But they're also, again, if you just talk to

college-educated people, I mean, like how many of us have had the conversation where it's like, you know, we're not getting along, but we're trying to make it work, we'll at least stay together until the kids go to college. There's this deep idea that people have to stay together for the sake of the kids that, again, just extracting from what we call revealed preference, what we see, outside the college-educated class, people don't seem to have that level of awareness. And then you've got the college-educated being like, well, I don't want to tell anyone how to raise their kids. But I sure is how I'm going to raise my kids in a two-parent home and do everything I can to make it work. Right. And so this is what Rob Henderson calls luxury beliefs.

Yes. Exactly. Look, I hesitate to drag you into values related conversations. But from my perspective, I have to ask, people would argue or have argued that over the last 60, 70 years, we've become much more focused on the individual, much more focused on ourselves, let's say. There's got to be part of it, surely, Melissa. Yeah, sure. And again, it's got to be part of it. 100%. I don't write about this in the book because I am in the book. I'm all like, here, here are the data and here are the studies.

Well, you're in a connoisse. That nobody can refute. So can we at least agree that this family divergence has added to inequality and it's bad for kids? Okay. Then, and I know that economics is a part of the story. Now, let's talk about the individualism. For sure, that is part of it. and this is where when we get to like, well, what do we have to do about it?

I mean, this takes humility for me as an economist to say, this isn't going to take, like, tinkering with the tax code. I don't have an economic policy lever that I can pull that's going to change this, which is precisely why I feel like as economic policy folks, we've been spinning ourselves in circles for the past 20 years, talking about everything but this, right? So in some sense of what I'm doing is there's an economic reason. This has been a disaster.

Now, let's be honest about it as a system. and figure out what to do about it. So I was on a panel discussing my book with folks from the University of Chicago. Super smart, right? And so one of the things they push back on me is, well, you say we need to reestablish a social norm of two parent families for kids.

And this very accomplished, very smart scholar from the University of Chicago says to me, I'm not comfortable saying that we should have social norms because social norms restrict people's individual freedom to your point. I'm like, yes, that is exactly. what they do. And once I have a child, I have given up some of my individual freedom. I owe that child something. I have to take care of them. Right. And I said, are you not comfortable establishing a

social norm of if you have a kid? You can't walk away. If you have, if you father a child with somebody, you owe that child and that woman something. You can't just walk away. He's like, I guess I'm comfortable with that social norm. I'm like, well, now we're just talking about what social norms were comfortable with. That's right. The idea that we're not comfortable restricting people's freedoms? Like, we're well past that. Well, they restricted their own freedoms. They're restricted. It's not that we are coming in from the outside. No, we're not saying you have to have this kid and then you have to take care of them. But once you create this other person, you have a duty to raise them to the point where they're self-sufficient. That's what being a parent

means, surely. Yeah. When you buy LG, you get so much more than just an appliance. You get more done. More cost savings, more peace of mind, and more control, because LG appliances are designed to do more, like washers and dryers with AI tech to take out the guesswork, refrigerators that fit in tight spaces, and keep food fresher longer, or ranges with precise induction cooking and easy cleanup built in, all with the style you want and reliability you can count on, so you can get more from your home every day. LG appliances. So much more. Make life easier with LG. See the latest models and savings now at LG.com. This episode sponsored by Forkfull. Most meal delivery services promise healthy food, but look closer,

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And she left it at home with three little kids. And there was definitely, you know, despite what I just said about college-educated communities, like having a stronger. There was a, you know, I hope you find yourself. And I was like, how about, like, this is where it is judgy, right? But like, I'm willing to judge it. So you have children and you had children with this person. And but if we're not willing to say that.

Especially with three kids. If you had one by accident, you sort of go, well, I'm like, whatever. If you've had three kids, that's a conscious choice at this point. That's why I say we need to bring back Shane. So I've actually, I get really nervous when I do that. when I hear that. So I don't want to bring next change. We're just, we're messing. I know, but, okay, but actually, but it is a, I know you're joking, but it is a serious point

because once I say we need to establish a social norm, then you could understand that some people would get skittish. So it's probably worth being explicit. I certainly don't ever want to go back to a situation where single moms and their kids were so ostracized from the community that women had no choice but to stay in terrible abusive relationships. Yes. Okay, so let's not do that. But, but, but, and, and yes, I'm not being a Pollyanna, but I'm being optimistic here where I feel like we should be able to walk this line of promoting a positive social norm without severely stigmatizing people, especially the one person who's left behind taking care of the kids. Let's not stigmatize that person, right? Am I okay shaming the,

parent that leaves? Probably I am. I mean, that's a normative statement, but, but I am. Me too. And, and a big part of what. what motivates me to say all this and write this book and other things I've written is, we're just so selfish when it comes to children in our society across the board. In the way we now don't prioritize kids when it comes to family formation, in the way kids are all but like completely ignored in our federal budget spending, somebody's got to advocate for the kids. And if that means parents have to be less focused on their individual happiness,

then I, you know, and here's where, you know, feminists don't, like me, I think that that's a trade-off that I will push for the kids. But the shame, like, okay, so here's a positive norm. In D.C., if you spend time here and you drive up into D.C., in a bunch of bus stops, there's an ad take time to be a dad today. Super hokey. I love it. It's like dad sitting, like having a tea party with his daughter, throwing a ball to his son. That's a positive message. You're not shaming anybody. We're being honest, hey, dads, take time to be a dad today. Does it work? I don't know. I haven't seen a good study of those, that kind of campaign, but we have lots of

good studies showing that media messages matter. Celebrity endorsements matter. Do you know I have this paper on MTV 16 and pregnant? This is crazy. And this is, I'm talking about like here's just one study and other people have also written great studies making the point that media images matter. So teen births in the U.S., by the way, they're down over 70% from the mid-90s. It's amazing. that's worth actually noting as a statistical fact because the fact that teen births are down so much, it makes it even more surprising that non-marital births are up, right? Because teen births were almost all non-marital. That's not where the rise in non-marital childbearing has come from. Teens, good for teens, non-marital births are down, I mean, births are down among teens. But they were falling 2.5%,

2.5%, 2.5%, and one year they dropped 7.5%. And I was getting all these calls from journalists because I studied the economic causes and consequences of teen childbearing. They're like, what was it? I was like, I have no idea what it was. But I can tell you this. What other people are going to tell you it is, it's not that. It's not sex ed. It's not access to contraception. It's not the unemployment rate. None of that changed so much in this year that that's the story. So then I had lunch with Sarah Brown, who ran the national campaign to prevent teen and unplanned pregnancy. And I was like, what do you think it is? She goes, we think it's the MTV effect. I was like, what? She's like the 16 and pregnant show. I was like, no way. Because I was one of those.

people who would see the tabloids at the grocery store and was inclined to think, oh, we're glamorizing teen childering. So my colleague, Phil Levine, and I were like, we're going to investigate this. So we bought ratings data from Nielsen ratings to see how many people were watching MTV in different things, in different areas. And then we do fancy econometric stuff, which I won't bore you with. But basically what we found is when the show came on the air, in places where more people were watching MTV before. So basically you have a whole bunch of people watching MTV, more in some places than in others.

Then the content changes and you start showing this show about how hard it is to be a teen mom, teen birth fell, like nine months later. Statistically significant. Wow. So then we got all of the Twitter and Google data to just sort of confirm what's happening. And you can see that when an episode airs,

there was a spike in people searching for how to get birth control. there was a spike in tweets mentioning birth control. And so the show seemed to, this is about like being honest. Like, who thought it would be easy to be a teen parent? I'm not sure. But this show made it very clear and salient

that this is hard. Your boyfriend's probably not going to help that much. You're going to gain a lot of weight. Your friends are going to party without you. Things that were super salient to like young people. Yeah. And it had an effect. And there's, by the way, there's other examples

like when soap operas spread to certain areas in Brazil and they showed smaller families, fewer kids, less marriage or more divorce, then in those communities that got access to those soap operas, their family formation decisions started to reflect them. So we know media messaging matters, right? That's really interesting. In John Ronson's book, The Butterfly Effect, he links the spread of hardcore pornography and kids consuming it

to the fact that team pregnancies went down. So I don't know how... So this is... He's not advocating for this problem. He's not like, this is how you solve this problem. No. No, but this is actually so interesting. In the majority of college campuses that I've given talks about my book on,

some college student will come up to me, sometimes they even raise their hand, and they say, how come you don't want to talk about porn? And I was like, because it wasn't on my radar as an economist. Again, I came to this study like inequality. And now this comes up all, all the time. And when I'm talking to people who work on healthy relationship programs with vulnerable families, porn comes up all the time.

The idea being there are so many young men who are watching porn all day long on their phones, and that is making it even harder for them to form healthy relationships. And then, so it's making it harder for them to form healthy relationships, and therefore they're less likely to get married, they're less likely to do all of those things. So again, I don't talk about this in the book. I don't know the causal evidence. Anecdotally, this has come up to a degree that has shocked me. Wow.

It's very interesting. And moving on, Melissa, how much of this is to do with the fact that we're now living in an ever more secular society, the fact that people are not religious, the fact that it's not just Christianity, by the way. It's all religions. Because I would presume that the more religious you are, the more likely you are to want to get married and then bring up kids in a stable home with two parents. Yeah, it's really, so certainly over time, religious observance, attendance at, you know, religious institutions, has declined along with the decline in marriage, the rise in one

parent homes, also, by the way, the decline in fertility. How much the arrow runs in one direction versus the other, it's hard for me to say. I mean, so much of this is it's back to an early observation. So much of this is circular, right? So you've got fewer people committed participating in religious institutions. They are sort of norm-shaping institutions. And then you have people falling out of family life, which is also something that reinforces your involvement with community institutions. So I can't put a number on it as to how much is due to that. But certainly these things amplify one another. And by the way, on the point of messaging, it's hard for me to

think that, you know, we will get out of this. We will change our social attitudes if trusted community leaders don't promote the message. But there are fewer and fewer trusted community leaders. And so, you know, 30 years ago, we might have said, this is something that trusted rabbis, pastors, priests need to talk about. But now fewer people actually are involved with those institutions. And again, anecdotally, what I've heard is that some pastors and some communities, where many dads are absent, they are nervous about bringing it up because they don't want to alienate

the moms who are in their congregation. Talk about vicious cycle. Yes. That's a very good example of that, which is why we tried to have these conversations on the show, but I think one of the things we really should talk about is, what can we do about this,

what can be done about this? And that's, I think, the most important bit of this conversation. Yeah. So I, you know, the most controversial thing I say in the book, which is a normative statement, and we've talked a little bit about this is, I think we need to reestablish a norm

of two-parent households for kids. And how we do that, that's leaders being willing to say it, policy leaders, trusted leaders being willing to say it. In 2008, President Obama gave a beautiful speech on Father's Day about the absence of too many dads from homes. He never gave it again.

And I don't, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a national democratic leader raising this issue since that's a problem. So I think, you know, we've done a lot of social messaging around teen childbearing, around anti-smoking, social messaging, and it doesn't have to come from like media or leaders. It's just also the way people honestly talk about it with other, you know, family members, people in their community, I think has to be part of the story. Two, we, I think improving the economic position of non-college educated men in particular, making sure they have the skills to obtain family-sustaining wages and stability and employment, making sure they're

able to, you know, overcome criminal backgrounds, address untreated mental health challenges. That's necessary. It won't be sufficient, but I do think that's a necessary position. Three, I think we need much more innovation, funding, and research into programs that are aimed at strengthening families. Right. So this is not a policy priority. If you look at the U.S. administration for children and families budget,

less than 1% goes to programs to support strong and stable families. We spend 6% of that budget on collecting child support, 15% on the foster care system. Both of those things are underfunded. But those are all, again, like treating the symptoms. And then we don't invest in families. We don't help parents achieve stable, healthy relationships. I think because of this sort of allergy to over. we don't want to get involved in families. Let's just hire school counselors, right? Or let's subsidize

child care. And so we need a lot more of that. And then the skeptic will say, well, we don't know what works. And I'm like, right, because we haven't funded a whole bunch of programs and studied them and expanded them to see what it's going to take. So that, that I think we also need to do. The fourth thing, and this gets back to something you said about, you know, the boys in particular needing father figures and then finding them in the gangs. I do. This is really, really important. This is a long-term challenge. and we're going to have to comment it at all sorts of ways. In the meantime, we just can't allow kids to continue to suffer the deficits from a disadvantaged family life. And so programs that we can scale up to help those kids to try and break the cycle are critically important. Mentoring of at-risk youth, at-risk boys in particular, job opportunities for at-risk youth, boys in particular, those can have an outsized effect. And they're not that expect. And they're not that

expensive, like especially because a lot of these mentoring programs, you rely on volunteers, getting father figures into the lives of those boys. It's not as good as having their own father who's there as a loving presence, but these things can help. And so, you know, this is a, there's not one silver bullet here, but like we need to get at this in a thousand different ways. And I'm, I'm optimistic. We can break this terrible cycle. Melissa, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for coming on the show before we go over to locals where our supporters get to ask their questions to you. Our final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

Okay. So what I'm going to raise is tangentially related to this breakdown of the family, but it's got its own actually existential crisis, which is the low birth rates around the globe, you know, I think all high and middle income countries are now below replacement level of fertility. So it feels a little bit weird because I'm like, there's all these kids being born outside marriage, but we actually don't have enough kids to keep societies going. And this is going to have tremendous pressures on fiscal situations, economic growth in not too long. And then, you know, in generations or down the road, it's going to have actually existence.

potential threats to humanity. So that's, it's weird to me that that's not a bigger topic of conversation broadly. Well, it is on this show. Make sure you check out our episode with Stephen Shaw, who filmed a movie about it, actually. But when you do that, also head on over to locals now for your questions to Melissa. How do we support single moms and their children without incentivizing women to divorce unnecessarily or to have children by themselves?