The Terrifying Impact Of Single-Parent Households - Melissa Kearney

What has the response been like to you writing a book called the two parent advantage how Americans stopped getting married and started falling behind? It's a lot of it is wow, you're brave and it really shouldn't be that brave. And then sort of more quietly people are like this makes a lot of sense and I'm glad you're talking about this. So I've been actually really encouraged by the response I'm getting. And the other sort of set of responses that have been particularly validating or bolstering to me are from people who work in the communities really impacted by the decline in the two parent family groups that work with single moms unmarried parents. When I talk to them, there's no there's no sense that this is sort of the third rail topic that it is among academics. For them, when I talk to them, it just sounds like I'm I'm describing their situation and I'm putting it in a broader social context which is something they generally don't have the luxury to do because this is their reality difficult single parenting. So has it been mostly plain sailing then? Not plain sailing. There you know, I so far the sort of vitriolic responses I've gotten have been entirely anticipated to the extent that there's a knee-jerk reaction from people who simply read the title who haven't even read the book who simply read the title who say things like oh my goodness this again and I just went out to the you know, outside and screamed into the void. I can't believe and and then people do that annoying thing where they're like in the year of 2023 of our Lord people are still decrying the decline of marriage. So there's definitely a set of people um who think it's very old-fashioned and not productive to sort of lament the decline in marriage and the rise in the single parent households. Um but again, what's been sort of bolstering for me is that those are all reactions that I was fully expecting. The things I was really worrying about like did I miss something? Did I not connect the dots in in some particular way that I'm missing and and I haven't gotten any negative reactions that's made me question anything I've written in the book. If you expect an absolute shitstorm and just get a small amount of [ __ ] I guess that or an okay amount of [ __ ] that proportionally that should be fine. All right, so for people who don't know, what's been happening with marriage rates? So they're way down in the US and basically in other high-income countries, but the really sort of noteworthy story that I think a lot of people don't realize is that they're down outside the college educated class. So a little bit of historical context here, everyone knows in the 60s and 70s we had these major social cultural revolution and over those decades marriage declined in sort of rough proportion over the sort of education income distribution. But then what happened in the subsequent four decades, 40 years, 1980 to now, what happened is sort of the college educated class kept getting married, kept raising their kids in two parent homes, but everybody else continued the retreat from marriage and really we saw outside the college educated class really increasing incidence of single parent households, non-marital childbearing and the rise in kids living in a one parent household. Right. What's been driving this decline? What's changed? So mechanically this is driven by a reduction in marriage and an increase in non-marital childbearing and the way I think about it is really what's happened is there's been a decoupling of marriage from that act of having and raising kids and that's important because the two things that aren't driving it that sometimes people will think the two things that aren't driving it are divorce. Divorce is actually down conditional on marriage. So it's not that more people are getting divorced. It's that fewer people are getting married even when they're having kids. And the other thing that's not driving this is a rise in births among young or teen women. So sort of the one of the really surprising things here is teen childbearing is down like over 70% from the mid-90s. I mean that is just an amazing sort of social demographic trend. If you just looked at the decline in births to teen and young women back if if I told you or if you told me in the 80s or 90s that hey the teen birth rate is going to plummet over the next 30 years, I would have thought the share of kids living in a single parent home, single mother home would have also plummeted. And so all of this is happening basically despite the decline in births and despite the decline in divorce. Right. So you would have presumed that teenager has child, teenager is in relatively fragile unmature relationship or marriage doesn't stick together very well, therefore more children in single parent households. Yeah, and that basically was the story in the 70s and 80s when when scholars first started paying attention to this. You know, people there were people who sort of called attention to the fact that hey there's a pretty high share of kids in the US living in single parent households. It was less than you know, less than it was much lower than it is now. It was really predominantly among teen moms, very disadvantaged groups. What's happened is that that's sort of spread across the socioeconomic distribution. So now even if you just look at parents who have a high school degree or some college, the likelihood that they are having births outside of marriage and raising their kids in a one parent home is the same as it is among people with less than a high school degree. So it's really now whereas like in the 70s and 80s we worried about the really vulnerable groups, now the group that's standing apart are the college educated folks and that's why I refer to this phenomenon as the two parent privilege because really having a two parent household has become yet another advantage of this highly educated high-income highly resourced class. So that sort of really wide class divide in family structure between the college educated and everybody else is what's particularly noteworthy and I think not quite appreciated. Yeah, so what are the cohorts that are most likely to be single parent or two parent? So moms with a four-year college degree, only 12% of their births are outside of marriage as compared to more than half of births to women without a four-year college degree. This is true actually this college gap holds within race major race groups and ethnic groups in the US too with one notable exception which I'll mention. And so for example, if you look at just the children of white moms, you know, there's it's like more than 80% of the kids whose moms have a college degree live in two parent household as compared to a little bit more than 60%. If you look within black, the children of black moms, the levels are higher for both. So 60% of kids who have you know, moms who identify as black in the census and have a four-year college degree live in a married parent home as compared to only 30% of kids whose moms are black and don't have a college degree. So so that's these differences vary these differences exist both across and within race and ethnic groups except for Asian Americans who have exceptionally high rates of two parent households regardless of education or income. Like you know, more than 80% of those kids even if their parents are have low levels of education are living in two parent households. God damn Asian privilege all over again. Um so talk to me about why this is a stratified phenomena. Like what is it that is causing you know, it's not like someone goes to college and gets the marriage 101 class. Yeah, this is a yeah, it's a really good question. So um my read of all of the evidence on this both looking at the data and reading the evidence from economics and sociology and ethnography is is gives me leads me to the following explanation and narrative. As I mentioned in the 60s and 70s we had this big social cultural revolution, right? We all know about that and so it became the the norms around having kids and marriage shifted. But then there was a and that again affected almost everyone sort of equally across the education distribution. Just be specific there for me. When you say the norms around having kids and marriage changed, what do you actually mean? I mean everybody became less likely to get married in the 60s and 70s. Let's stipulate that, okay? Because of relationships, cohabitation and children outside of wedlock were more socially acceptable. Is that what you're right right right. But then what happened in the 80s and 90s was a divergence in economic situations and realities, okay? So over the past 40 years college educated folks have continued to work at high rates, their earnings have continued to grow, they've done really well economically. A whole bunch of different economic shocks, technological developments, globalization, those have all been to the benefits of college educated adults in both America and by the way in other high-income countries we see similar things happening. Outside the college educated class a lot of economic shocks came and hurt non-college educated adults, men in particular. Increased import competition from China really sort of you know, led to the elimination in a lot of sort of well-paying middle-class manufacturing jobs. In those affected communities, we see a decrease in marriage and a rise in the share of kids living in single parent homes. At the same in this over the same decades, there's been technological developments, adoption of industrial robots, eliminated a lot of, again, middle middle-class, well-paying jobs to non-college educated men in particular in things like production and operations in communities hit by these economic shocks, we see a decrease in marriage and an increase in the share of kids living in outside married parent homes. So, I think what's gone on is basically you've had this interaction of economic shocks that have made the value proposition of marriage weaker for non-college educated adults. So, here is where people are like, are you saying people get married for economics instead of love? Like, I get all that. So, to your point, I don't think people go to college and take marriage 101 classes. I also don't think people go to college and that makes them more likely to fall in love, but I do think people go to college, they're more likely to have stable jobs, they're more likely to men in particular see themselves as well-providing husbands, women are more likely to see them as a husband who's a reliable financial partner. They marry, they pool their resources. Having resources makes it easier in some sense to sort of get along, get through struggles. Outside the college educated class, you've got people partnering up, you have more men in and out of work, you have men who bring in less money than the women. The value proposition of marriage both to the woman looking at a man who's like sort of in and out of work, has these economic struggles, doesn't make as much as she does, whether, you know, that man sees himself as like, yeah, I totally want to get married and have a family to take care of. I have a sta- you know, at my employment situation is weak. You just see marriage has, you know, lost its fewer people in that class outside the college educated, again, outside the college educated class are getting married. Here's another really interesting thing though. In survey evidence and ethnographic evidence, you know, sociologists interview people who are unmarried couples, what are they saying? They're not saying that they don't want to be married, right? So, it's not that we don't see survey evidence or anecdotal evidence suggesting that college educated people continue to like the institution more as an institution. What we see is that a lot of people with lower levels of education, limited income, say, yeah, I I want to I want to good marriage. I want a stable, healthy relationship. But there's a lot of barriers. It's hard to achieve. Um, I want to wait until you know, I'm in a good place. I want to wait until I find a guy who's in a good place that I could depend on. And we've seen in a lot of those communities, the women are putting having kids before getting married, um, because the economics aren't all in order. Strange to think that somehow in the eyes of potential young mothers, staring down the barrel of a kid is somehow seen as being less of a financial burden than staring down the barrel of marriage. I agree, and this gets to the point of why I think it's important that we surface this issue and talk about it honestly because having a kid and raising a kid and setting up a household is expensive, it's costly, takes a lot of time. So, I'm with you. The idea of doing this by myself being easier than doing it by somebody else, you really have to not think that that marriage or having that, you know, the dad of your child living in the house, that really has to be a not a great proposition. So, it raises the following question in my mind. 40% of kids in this country are born outside marriage, right? Outside the college educated class, that's more than 50%. Among black moms, that's 70%. Is it really possible that 40% of dads overall, 50% of dads, you know, who have had a child with a woman who doesn't have a college degree, 70% of dads who have had a child with a black mother, is it really possible that they wouldn't be net contributors, positive contributors to the household? It feels far-fetched to me that it's that high, and this is why I think it's both reflecting economics might have gotten us to this situation, but now in a lot of these communities, for a lot of these groups, these norms have been broken. And so, people maybe have a higher bar for marriage than having a child with somebody. Maybe they're like, yeah, you know, this is an acceptable thing for us not to be married, for us to be living apart, for us to have this kid. Um, if it's anywhere near the case that this many dads just wouldn't be positive contributors if they lived in the house or were married to the mom, then we have a remarkable crisis of men in this country, right? So, what if if presuming that that's not the case cuz that sounds insane, what do you think it is that women are misjudging about the men that are around them? So, let me be clear. I can only see in the data, I'm going to use an economic term for a second, the equilibrium outcome. I can only see whether this couple lives together. Whether that's the man deciding, I don't want to commit to that, or the woman deciding, I don't want him living in this house, I can't tell. So, it's some combination of the two. So, I don't want to describe this as if as if this is all the mom's choice. I think again what's instructive and cautionary to me when I look at survey evidence and ethnographic evidence and the anecdotal evidence from interviews, a lot of these women they're not saying, I really want to do this by myself. They're saying, I want, you know, I want a partner. This is hard. This is lonely. And so, figuring out what's what's breaking down in those communities, are men not feeling as socially on the hook, right? Are they not feeling like, I mean, clearly it's much more acceptable for today for somebody to say, yeah, that's my child and I don't live with them, but, you know, I help out. That's not the same thing. And so, where it's breaking down, I think is important to look at. But the other thing that we have to be really clear-eyed about is there are, again, this certainly wouldn't be true for every situation or every dad we're talking about because the numbers are so shockingly high, but for a lot of dads, again, when you look at just sort of the data on who's participating in these fatherhood programs or these healthy marriage initiatives or strengthening families initiatives in these communities with high levels of unmarried parents, there are a lot of barriers, meaning a lot of the dads have unstable employment, a lot of the dads have criminal histories, a lot of the dads struggle with alcohol and drug abuse. All of those societal challenge societal societal challenges that we're seeing for non-college educated Americans have spilled over to the sphere of family formation with really huge consequences for kids. And this is why to get back to your initial question, what's the reaction to the book, you know, I'm not surprised and and frankly, I'm not deterred by the reaction from academics or think tankers or journalists who were like, oh, judgy married lady telling people they should be married. When you look at what's happening in those communities and how hard it is for them, it is really counterproductive and actually not at all helpful or empathetic to deny that, hey, it's hard to it's hard to parent alone and more people should be able to achieve achieve parent household for themselves and their kids. I have an article that I want to quote to you. Uh, you may know this. Nicole Rodgers wrote something a little while ago. No, tell me. Okay. Motherhood isn't contingent on a romantic relationship, so why do we still treat it that way? This predicament is often called social or circumstantial infertility, and it describes a person who is physically capable of having a child and desires one, but hasn't become a parent yet because of social, work, or financial constraints. Rodgers cites research that found 42% of women aged 40 to 44 said they wanted a child, but fewer than half said they intended to have one. She quotes another study saying that nearly half of so-called panks, professional aunt no kids, said they wanted a child, but most said they would not consider becoming a single parent. If society would only let go of the quaint notion that families headed by two married parents is best for raising children, Rodgers said, we could solve a host of problems to include ill-advised marriages, the plummeting fertility rate, and the yearnings of panks. It's time to let go of outdated and inaccurate ideas about how families should form and create a culture and policy landscape that helps all women have the children they want, she concludes. To her credit, Rodgers acknowledges that life can be quite hard for solo moms, but she says that's because of an ideological bias that favors nuclear families. Also did a little bit more research, turns out that she was in a long-term relationship until 34, split up, was very heartbroken, very, very despondent at the fact that she wasn't going to have a family. So, she thought, I'm now single, I've been in this relationship for so long, and oh my god, I'm not going to have a family. Hang on a second. Why do I need to not have a family just because I don't have a partner anymore? Then, at 37, she got married again, and at 40, she had a kid, happily married with her partner. So, the stated and revealed preferences perhaps don't fully align. But what do you think? What do you think about this little quote, the ideological bias that favors nuclear families? No, this is a pretty typical quote from a highly educated, progressive woman who doesn't want to feel like her choices are restricted or judged in any way. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a quote like that from a woman who is making $27,000 $27,000 a year, working two jobs, has two kids at home, doesn't get a check from her child's father. I think you're more likely to find a quote than you are if you look at, you know, the again, the sort of ethnographic evidence or just go talk to some of these women and who are in programs, you know, aimed at helping single moms get by. They're more likely to say, "Yeah, I actually this is really hard and I would prefer to have somebody committed to me and my child helping pay the bills." Uh and so I I think again, I I think it's phenomenally I'm going to turn the tables. I think it's phenomenally privileged to sort of say, "Hey, stop. Stop with this idea that a two-parent household is a necessity or beneficial. Look at the data. Kids do much better when they come from two-parent homes." And it's not surprising and it's not rocket science and the mechanisms, you can see them in the data, but also anyone who looks around and has common sense can observe them. Two parents have more earnings capacity than one. If one person, you know, loses their job, there's a second person who could pick up hours. Two parents have more time than one. We see in the data kids who live with married parents get more time from their parents. Two parents have more collective bandwidth. We see in the data that moms who are single, who don't have another, you know, a spouse or a co-parent in the house, they're much more likely to engage in you know, parenting that you'd expect you'd engaged in if you don't have the time or the bandwidth to sit down and read to your kid, to patiently talk to them. So, we see in the data all these differences. It's not rocket science and it's just it's just a lie, frankly, to suggest that any parent any household structure is equally likely to be able to deliver a high level of resources to kids. It's just a lie and so we should be able to say that without it sounding like a judgment that anyone is, you know, not doing their best. Where I'm coming from is I think we should ask, "Why is it that college-educated women, women like Nicole Rogers, who are probably the best positioned actually to financially maintain a household by themselves, why are they the ones least likely to be doing it by themselves?" Right? How come all these other women who don't have the same earnings potential, who don't come from the same types of backgrounds, how come they're so much more likely to be doing this really hard job without somebody in the house helping them? Rules for thee, but not for me. Stated and revealed preferences sort of smash up against each other. Yeah, there's something very like wanky and bourgeois and highfalutin about somebody who proselytizes about how people don't need to the same it's the exact same as Alex Cooper, you know, from Call Her Daddy? No. Right. So, Call Her Daddy is Call Her Daddy is like a chick podcast on Spotify. She got bought by Spotify the same time that Joe Rogan did. So, she's like super super mega time podcaster and she spent an entire career extolling the virtues of one-night stands, teaching girls how to have sex without catching feels. She would say like very very open about her sex life, how casual it was, how she didn't need to be tied down, how commitment was kind of a waste of time. And then for the last three and a half years, she'd been secretly having a relationship with someone, then got engaged, this beautiful engagement. He got down on one knee in a rose garden and proposed to her and now she's so so happy and she can't wait. Meanwhile, she has this wake, this cultural sort of [ __ ] castoff, this afterburn effect of all of the millions and millions of girls that she said, "No, don't bother about your commitment. You don't really need that." And it's this this desire to state things that you think will make you sound moral or cool or empathetic or progressive. Meanwhile, when you actually look and scrutinize what these people are doing in their own lives, they're not doing it. I'm all for you living whatever kind of a life it is that you want to live, but at least have the gumption to be able to stand behind what it is that you're doing. So, yeah, I think I think that's that's it. I get this Look, I get this from men, too, right? Plenty of economists men cuz I happen to talk to more economists men than economists women cuz there are more of them. When they're like, "Oh my gosh, are you sure you want to say this? Like you sound so socially conservative writing this book." And I'm like, "Every time I talk to you, you're talking about, 'Oh my god, I just had to help my kid with their history homework. Oh, I have to go coach my kid's Little League team.' How many hours do you put in to your kid? Why do you think other kids wouldn't also benefit from having a dad spending all this time with them? Right? So, so you get this not just from women who don't want to judge other women sounds like they're judging other women. You get this from men, too, who are equally skittish about suggesting that it might not be great for kids not to have a dad in their house and yet they spend inordinate amounts of time and money on their kids. Let's roll the the clock forward. I want to talk about kids, but what are the other reasons why declining marriage is a bad thing before we talk about outcomes for children? So, again, I think it's you see it's really hard in this area to separate out correlation from causation, right? So, it's, you know, it's pretty clear to me that in the data from the studies, this is not good for kids. Um there's also suggestion, which and I'm putting a footnote on this because it's less clear that it's causal, but I'm going to tell you about it because it's certainly a suggestion and a very plausible one. It's also, you know, likely We already talked about it's hard for the moms, but it's not necessarily great for the dads, too. And so if you just look at what happens what's happened to men as they've sort of been pushed outside like their economic status has decreased. But they've also been pushed to the sidelines of family life. And again, we know descriptively that dads who are married, who are with their kids, they're more likely to be stably employed. I'm inclined to believe that some of that does reflect a causal impact of I have a family to take care of. I sort of have to get my act together. And there are some studies showing that like when someone has a kid, for example, they're less likely to engage in, you know, get in engage in criminal activity, right? There is suggestions both for men and women that when you have a kid, it sort of forces you to be more responsible as an adult. So, I think a lot of these societal changes and struggles that we're seeing of people doing less well economically, their health is not in good condition, they're, you know, substance abuse is high, marriage is low. There is sort of a lot of causal cause and effect running a lot of ways there. And so, you know, the breakdown of the family again, the evidence on kids is eminently clear to me, but I'm also inclined to the view and there's a there's plenty of reason to think and believe based on data that the breakdown of the family, the breakdown of marriage has not only been bad for kids and the single moms who are raising kids by themselves, but also the men who are now really on the sideline and missing a purpose in their life. There is a trend on the internet at the moment of marriage is a bad deal for men because of bias in family court, because of post-divorce financial settlements, all sorts of stuff. Any guy who values his health should look at marriage as probably the single best investment that he could make. Married men Married men live longer. They have later-onset dementia. They have later-onset Alzheimer's. Uh women tend to live around about the same amount of time, it seems. Um We can speculate on that. I mean, you could speculate on that. Yeah, I think they gain a little bit, but probably lose a little bit in some regards. Um but, you know, the single biggest determinant of the your lifespan and your health span as well are the number of close relationships you have. This is more than smoking. It's more than going to the gym. It's more than stopping alcohol. It's more than getting good night's sleep. It's more than losing weight. It is the most important thing. This is from the that Dr. Robert Waldinger 80-year study longi- longi- longitudinal study that he's been doing. Your partner, a committed partner of any kind, is a huge buttress against all of these problems. They are the breakwater that the the vicissitudes of life can smash up against. So, I think from the most solipsistic individual atomized fuck-the-world situation, like just get another person, right? Forget even if you don't intend on having kids all the rest of it. So, I do think that that the case for marriage and Brad Wilcox from the Institute of Family Studies has got a book coming out, I think on Valentine's Day. It's like the case for marriage. Um and I think that that'll be a lovely one two with what you've done Yeah, I actually I think our books are very complementary because my book is all it's really all data-driven and it's really focusing on what's what's the cause of the decline in marriage in terms of what role has economics played, what's the impact for kids, and what are the impacts for you know, I show very clearly that this has exacerbated inequality, it's impeded social mobility. Brad's book is really complimentary in the sense that it draws on a lot more of this research that's saying hey for you as an individual, like she's talking about these societal problems, for you as an individual, you're actually most likely to achieve high levels of well-being and happiness if you're married. Um and so they are complimentary in that in that sense. Okay, let's get into the kids. What are the differences in outcomes for kids growing up in a single parent versus a two-parent household? So we can we can start by seeing that in the immediate term. Let me Let me emphasize some like basic things. If a kid only lives in a household with, you know, a one parent or an unmarried mother, which is mostly the case, there's a five, you know, their chance of living in poverty are five times higher. Part of that reflects the fact that, you know, moms from lower income backgrounds are more likely to become single moms, but even if you just look across moms of the same level of education, same background characteristics, it's not surprising that kids from married parent households live in households with more income, okay? Income is a big part of the reason why these kids do better. Why? Because their parents can spend more on housing and better neighborhoods, they get access to better schools. We see that, you know, these parents spend more on their kids in enriching activities and educational activities. They basically have more opportunities. You can see this in the most, you know, simple way, like it's really expensive to pay for club pay for club sports or music lessons. So kids from married parent homes have different opportunities. It translates into better outcomes. They are less likely to get in trouble in school, and let's come back to that finding cuz that's a really They're less likely to get in trouble in school. For boys in particular, they're less likely to get suspended. Part of this comes from the fact that you know, here I'm drawing on developmental psychology. When when boys are sort of suffering internally, they're more likely to act out in what psychologists refer to as externalizing behavior. Girls are more likely to internalize it. So I don't want to say that girls are necessarily not struggling as much, but boys are more likely to act out, which means they're more likely to get in trouble in school. And then more likely to get suspended, and that cascades. Then we also see that they're more likely to be involved with the criminal justice system. So it's just, again, getting back to like the idea of oh, let's stop pretending like two parents are beneficial, there's no way to look at the data and the studies and not feel like oh wow, kids from two-parent homes are much less likely to get in trouble in school, they're much less likely to get suspended, they're much more likely to be engaged in crime, they're more likely to graduate high school, they're more likely to graduate college, they're more likely to have higher earnings as an adult, they're more likely to be married as an adult, less likely to be a single parent themselves. This is again why this is so crucial for us to address because we are by allowing this class divide in family structure to continue, it's accentuating inequality, it's undermining so it's undermining social mobility because there are both short and immediate term effects in childhood, they have lasting effects on sort of someone's lifetime trajectory, and then these compound across the generations. Have you been able to analyze whether the children of single parent households are more likely to become the parents of single parent households? That is something that lots of people have documented. That's well established. So you also you almost have this kind of recursive feedback loop that makes it ever more common. 100% and also to get back to the conversation we were having about like what's up with men that so many of them either don't view themselves as somebody who should commit to a family or the women don't view them as somebody who's worth committing to as a family. We actually there's a there's a there's a lot of really well done studies from the past 10 years showing that boys are particularly disadvantaged by the absence of a dad from their home. Okay? Some careful work done by the economists Maryanne Bertrand and Jessica Pan tries to get at why that is. Like what what's driving that in households? The interesting thing that their research uncovers, and again this is using really large scale nationally representative data sets, is that boys get less investment, parental input, nurturing parenting. They're more likely to, you know, have their mom spank them or be harsh to them. Again, that's not me judging single moms. It's really tiring to parent, it's really hard to maintain your temper when a kid is misbehaving. Especially if it's a boisterous boy. Especially if it's a boisterous boy and you don't have someone else to be like could you could you take over, I need a break, right? So we just see they see in the data in these data sets that record like do you spank your kid, what how connected do you feel with your kid, how much time do you spend with your kid. You see that boys from single mother homes get less of that, but what's really interesting is that boys are particularly responsive to that. So let's say the differences in the parental inputs or investments are small, how they respond to that is large. Right? Another way to think about this is I have a daughter and a son. If I, you know, sort of ignore my daughter whatever, she's probably not going to go to school and get in trouble. If I am like harsh with my son, if I don't put in as much time in him, if he's really struggling, he's more likely to go to school and get in trouble. Right? Like that's sort of what he's missing in parenting is more likely to lead him to act out in a way that gets him suspended and then all the snowball effects. So boys are particularly disadvantaged by not having a dad in the home and you know, how that affects them. There's another study that came out of the Opportunity Insights Lab at Harvard. This is the lab run by Raj Chetty and colleagues that has, you know, access to millions of tax records so they know exactly where kids grew up and then they follow them into adulthood. The single biggest predictor of whether a black boy sort of climbs the economic ladder into adulthood at a neighborhood level. So what neighborhood characteristics are most predictive of economically good outcomes for black boys? Can I guess? Go ahead. The proportion of single fathers. The presence of black dads in the neighborhood. Yeah. So beyond just having a dad in your house, if you have if there's a bunch of, you know, if the households around you, black households around you also have dads, single biggest predictor of whether you do well economically in adulthood. And and so there again, who's being helped by us denying that black boys in particular, as if like all of the discrimination we know they face, all of these other barriers, like those boys are are being harmed by not having dads around. And so this gets back to the intergenerational nature of this. The more boys we have growing up without dads in the house, the less likely they are to sort of thrive and be their best selves when they grow up, which means the less capable they're going to be to be supportive, reliable, married dads. And again, this is just like we've got to break this cycle. Yeah, it's this uh ouroboros of like ineligibility and irresponsibility and that then creates another generation that creates another generation that creates another generation. So have you read Anna Machin's the the life of dad? No. This is something something that you should absolutely read. So she's an evolutionary anthropologist, she came out of Robin Dunbar's lab at Oxford. And um I just had her on the show. I'll send you the episode, you can listen to it. Um Uh and she talks about the importance of fatherhood um from from a developmental perspective and she looks at it through an anthropological lens, she looks at evolutionarily, does some evolutionary psychology. One of the really interesting things that she folded in, and you're right, um rough and tumble play especially for boys, especially in early uh childhood, is very important because it teaches them the role of fathers is largely to both play but to set rules um that you can climb that tree, but you know, you can't you like go don't go higher than that as opposed to mom would have not let them go up the tree at all. And this uh understanding, allowing of risk-taking behavior a little bit more is good. Now the interesting thing, the really interesting thing I learned from her that I think you would love to fold into some of your work is what happens to adolescent girls without a father. Yeah. Now when you get into teenage years, it is absolutely crucial that a adolescent girl has father around. When the boys are there a little bit more that that it seems like they're acting out behavior, it's more crucial for the boys earlier on, but for the girls it seems to be during that that later period. And you get like all sorts of weird socio-sexual uh nudges Yeah. here and there. You get all sorts of strange behaviors. I know like daddy issues is kind of a meme, but it it almost seems to have arisen in the data. You know, this is like a really sappy thing for me to say and I again like to be clear, all of the conclusions I draw in the book are from very rigorous analytic work with data, but this was really sort of salient and top of mind recently because of course I think about all this and I'm thinking all the time about the class gaps in this and how how can we not be honest about this? And I was at a graduation dinner. My son just graduated high school and so there were a bunch of families there. And almost every dad that got up to toast his boy also toasted his wife. Everyone in this room was married, okay? And and would say things like, "And these boys are great boys because they have strong moms." And there was And I was like what an example this sets to both our teenage boys and our girls, right? This is what you should expect. When you grow up, you you like celebrate your wife and you treat her well. And girls, this is what you should expect, right? And so again, it's just sappy, but it I was like this is such a perfect microcosm of this privileged class of kids getting exposed to this positive example. Um which is just not nearly as widespread or prevalent. And also, by the way, when you read the interviews with like these unmarried couples who go to some of these, you know, not well-funded um programs in the communities that work for strengthening families. And so you know, social scientists and I used to be one of them sort of pooh-poohed the Bush initiatives that like healthy marriage initiatives cuz you're like doesn't even increase marriage. But then when you read the interviews with the folks, they keep showing up to these relationship classes and they say things like you know, I didn't come from a two-parent family. I don't really might you know, I don't really know that many married people. They don't have an example of how to make it work, right? Um So it's it's again this these anecdotes all sort of confirm what we see as trends in the data. Why can't a cohabiting couple just stick together? Why is marriage the institution which is so crucial to make this work? Okay, this is such a good question. Not that all your questions haven't been good, but this is one that I feel like this gets people's like hackles up cuz they're like stop like with the old-fashioned obsession with marriage. People could be cohabiting. At a prac- as a practical matter in the US cohabitation is not the same relationship that marriage is. The reason I say it's like such a good question, I also mean it's like an open question. So I can one as a practical matter, cohabitation is not making up for it. So, you know, 30% of kids outside the college-educated class in the US are living with just their mom, okay? Just their mom. Only like, you know, 8% more are living with their mom and her partner. And the majority, but a large you know, not all of them, that might be the kids' second biological parent, but those relationships, first of all, they're not as widespread as you might think that there's cohabiting parents. They're very fragile. So they just they chance that a cohabiting couple is still married by the time or still cohabiting by the time the kid turns five is really small. By the time they're 14, it's really small. So they're just not stable relationships. If you had two parents who were cohabiting, sharing all their resources, stayed together for the kids' life and acted like married parents in everything but name then there's no reason to think kids would have different outcomes. But the fact is we see these huge differences in kids' outcomes precisely because that's not what unmarried parents are doing. What about step-parents? So step-parents is complicated in the following sense. So to be clear, in my in my book I just put step-parents with married parents cuz I'm just and and by the way, I put same-sex parents with married with married That's that's married step-parents though, right? So mother mother typically mother gets birth to Yeah, so and the reason why like because I'm taking this resource perspective, but when you look at the studies, like sociologists are more likely to sort of really dig into the nitty-gritty of what about this arrangement, what about that parent arrangement. You know basically remarried parents' kids' outcomes are somewhere between the outcomes of married parents and single parents. Step-parents are complicated a lot of step-parent situations, you're not getting a good relationship for the kid. Um and so that that just, you know it's it's a it's step-parents are not the same as two married biological parents. We just again, we see that in the data. It's not as protective or beneficial for kids. Um The reason why I don't 100x increase in mortality risk if you have one non-biological parent in the household? It that could be, but remember we're talking about really small numbers. Like the mortality risk is really small. So 100x is still small. Yeah. My point being that it's hard to raise a child. It takes an awful lot of patience. One of the best ways to ensure that you remain patient is to see your genetics in front of you. Yeah. Right? Like it's raw sort of Darwinian logic, but it's the truth. Like it's it it's hard and you're tired and it's crying and it won't stop crying and it's the third time that it's pooped a diaper and this isn't even my kid. And this is So you could you could you know, you these things run the gamut. So you can also say that like yes, kids living with step-parents are more likely to die. They're more likely to be sexually abused, but at a less sort of uh you know, drastic or tragic level, kids living with step-moms are less likely to go to the doctor regularly as compared to their moms, right? So we do see in the data that biological parents invest more in their kids, spend more time with their kids, you know, etc. I think, you know thinking about what's driving these huge social trends I just think it's worth keeping in mind. It's not about all of these interesting, complicated family relationships. The big thing is just this huge separation of married parents versus one parent. And so while I think it's very important to think about how kids do if they're in two, you know, a household with two parents, married parents, biological parents, step-parents what's happening at a societal level is not that so many biological parents are getting divorced and they're remarrying and step-parents aren't making as many investments. What's happened is there's been an unbelievable increase in the share of parents who are never getting married, right? So again, more you know, slightly more than half of births to moms who don't have a four-year college degree those moms aren't married. And so and and actually like the majority of unpartnered moms now were never married. And so that's again, coming at it as an economist rather than somebody who focuses on relationships, but I'm focused on resources, those families are just really under-resourced. What are the compounding effects of this on inequality between groups over time? So we all know it's been widely documented. It's discussed all the time in policy situations that earnings have increased among college-educated workers, right? And so if I just look at what's happened to earnings inequality among two-parent households over time, then I see that, you know, the how median household earnings of households headed by a college-educated mom, that's gone up by um like 60% over the past 40 years. Uh it's basically gone up by like 8% for moms with a high school degree. It's gone down by a little bit for moms with less than a high school degree. But the big story is that outside the college-educated class, those moms are much more likely to be in a household by themselves. And so in fact, when you look at inequality across households without conditioning on having two parents the sort of middle-class moms, moms with a high school degree, their median household income has gone down. Why? Because basically there's stagnant earnings in them at all and then you're more likely to only have one adult in the household. So again, at a very mechanical, practical level, we see that this divergent trend in family structure and the likelihood of setting up a household with one or two people has eroded some of the economic security of the middle class. So when we hear the middle class feeling like, "Oh, it's harder. It's harder. They they don't have the same income as they did before." Well, they're much less likely to have a second adult in the house and that's a big part of it that I think again is really just under-discussed or acknowledged. So that's like at a practical level how this has widened inequality. And then then we get back into all the other things we were talking about before because we know that kids who only have the resources of one parent in their household are less likely to have a lot of opportunities, less likely to have parents investing in them, less likely to go to college. We see social mobility eroded. And so that's why this has sort of ingrained class inequality across the generations. Yeah. Yeah, so people are getting locked into that class a little bit more and you have this sort of Matthew principle thing with the haves and the have-nots. And the the waterline for where have-not is continues to rise up and up and up. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And then but think about how many times we talk about the haves and have-nots and class gaps. I mean, I'm in these conversations in conferences and policy discussions all the time. Nobody ever wants to talk about family structure. And when you bring it up, it's like, "That's weird. Let's go back to talking about schools and the safety net and the labor market." And I you know, there's got to be a point where we're like, how much are we going to expect schools to do to make up for these differences in of family. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, we we hear worries about the teacher burnout. Add this on top, right? You're getting these kids showing up at school bringing the burdens from an under-resourced and unstable home life. There's only so much you could do by hiring more school counselors. We know that. kids spend way more time at home over their childhood than they do at school. You know, I think the pandemic gave us a good window into this. You just saw how impactful families were because we basically shut down the moderating influence of schools. Well, you also have I know that Richard Reeves is a fan of your work. I think you guys have worked together at the Brookings Institute, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The the the mutual admiration there. So, in his book, he talks about there are four times as many female fighter pilots in the US Air Force by percentage than there are kindergarten teachers that are male in the US. So, you know, you just have a massive dearth of father and male substitute father, right? Surrogate father, even if it's only for five or six hours during the day, replacement in a child's life. You know, you have a boisterous You have a boisterous boy. He's high in extraversion. He's high in openness. He's low in conscientiousness, right? High in neuroticism. He's going to be a little bit of a nightmare to deal with. He's more likely to be sent to the principal's office or expelled or excluded from school for the same transgression that a girl does because it's mostly women that are dealing with this boy, and they can't understand and use the theory of mind. We've gone from a brawn-based to a brain-based economy. Most of the jobs and education that gets you the jobs and most of the criteria by which people are being selected skew toward a personality profile that is mostly female. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, all of this compounds. Our schools are definitely set up to you know, basically for girls to get in less trouble, right? And so, even I mean, to all Richard's point, and I I agree with his sort of exposition of the challenge, um you know, I I this like amazed me when my kid, my boy, went to school, um and he was like, we're What do you say? They They're not allowed to like play tag at recess anymore. So, it was very boring, right? Cuz you take like a 10-year-old boy, and they are supposed to sit in a chair all day, and then they get like 20 minutes to run around, and they're not allowed to play tag because kids fell. So, I was like, why don't you take a football to school? And maybe you can throw a football. The football got confiscated by the principal. He wasn't allowed to throw a football. And you're just like, what what are boys supposed to do to get out their energy? Cuz like, you know, you just see them getting sort of in trouble and on the nerves of all of the girl the female teachers to your to your point. Um That's why like there's a lot of these trends where boys are more likely to get in trouble at school, but then we also see over the same time period sort of schools have become less tolerant of this kind of boisterousness. But, one of the things that has been documented, too, is and boys are more likely to grow up without dads in their home and neighborhoods. So, it all compounds to the detriment of boys. And so, I, you know, very much uh you know, I'm very much a fan of what Richard's doing, which is bringing attention to this issue. Like, hey, isn't this great? Girls are really doing well. But, some but boys aren't doing so well. They're less They're more likely to get in trouble at school. They're more likely to get in trouble with the law. They're less likely to go to college. They're, you know, young adults now. Richard says this in his book, and you see this in, you know, our national statistics. Young adults, girls are much more likely to be getting a bachelor's degree. Two to one. Two to one. By 2030, it'll be women earn £1,111 more than men between ages of 21 and 29. And, you know, when we're talking about the challenges for women of finding an eligible partner, that is why the problems of boys and men are the problems of women, too. Even if you've already paired up, or even if you are divorced and have decided that you're going to leave it for you and your daughter to to crack on with life, and you don't need men, okay, who do you want her to marry? Yeah, 100%. it who is it that you want her to be able to get into a relationship with given the fact, especially for single moms, if you've been through the trials and tribulations and difficulties of a relationship, marriage, and divorce failure, is that really something that you want to roll forward again? Like, do you not want to try and be the breakwater for this? And the other point that you made about people, like when you they sort of turn their nose up and get all icky, these [ __ ] like policy wonk bourgeois tits. Like, they they can't bear to be able to point the finger at anything which might have a disproportionate ethnic group or a disproportionate class-based group because it makes them sound like the secret racists that everybody thinks that they are in the first place. And you go, okay, okay. This is the exact same logic as telling black kids that turning up on time is a sign of white supremacy. Like, you are you are so scared and cowardly of actually saying what's good for these people, but what you're doing is you're you're making their lives worse, and your morality stands on the shoulders of their future failure. Yeah. I I again, I've become less worried about talking about my book in the past 6 months because I've been talking about it more outside of academic and think tank audiences with people who are in these affected communities, who work with them, and I was recently sort of in a session with a bunch of um men. Almost all of them were black men from DC and Baltimore who run fatherhood programs. Right? And they're not skittish about talking about this, right? They, you know, they're trying to help the the boys in their community be there and and know what it means to be a good dad. They know that this is to the detriment of their communities, and they have a lot of barriers. And again, you know, we I I think there's sort of we could blame both sides for not engaging in this discussion productively because as much as I don't think it's productive for, you know, well-meaning progressives to deny that there's a benefit to deep-parent families or to, you know, take this on because of the racial element, I also don't think it's helpful to just say, why don't more of these people get married? And when you talk to, again, these men who work with these fathers in these fatherhood programs, um I'll give an example. He's like, look, a lot of a lot of my dads, they don't have stable employment. They do have a lot of barriers. They have a lot of trauma that they've lived with in their life. They have, you know, anxiety that prevents them from keeping a job. They still want to be a good dad. And I said, do you think that they still have something to offer their kid, right? And he's like, of course they do. They can love their kid. I'm like, yeah, and they can like go to their basketball games and go to their parent-teacher conferences. And he's like, oh no, they can't. I was like, they can't? He's like, no, because like most of them have drug or gun charges in their records, so they can't go near the kids' schools. So, again, this doesn't describe the majority of these dads, but when you sort of get down to it and you realize, gosh, there are a lot of barriers. This isn't This isn't that easy a problem to address. It's such a hydra head, right? And it's so recursive and and and sort of like a spaghetti junction. You have these structural issues that kind of create a uh a foundation, or at least they start the penny rolling. That's facilitated by the changes in norms, which was brought around by the sexual revolution. Then, they kind of become captured and become their own meme of female empowerment, which teaches women that true freedom is having sex like a brother and working like your father. Then, you know, as you have this sort of hypergamous seesaw begin to tilt a little bit. There's a dearth of men above and across. Women retreat into boss [ __ ] culture. That percolates a little bit more. That encourages women to maybe think about single hood and sperm donors and IVF and you can wait. That sort of kind of folds all of this stuff in. but again, those are like those are the women with MBAs, right? Those are the women who are actually not really single moms in large numbers. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's that's a that's a very good that's a very good point. I do think there's there's a great story from Mary Harrington. Did you read uh the the [ __ ] what was it called? Uh feminism against progress. Thank god. So, in that, she told me a story that when the introduction of the pill came in, there was a decrease There was an increase in single motherhood when the pill came in. And you're not You're nodding like you know the story already. an economics paper. This is like published in a top economics journal, and I remember seeing the authors present it when I was in grad school a million years ago. Yes. So, it's a perfect example. And for the people that don't know, the reason it happens, it's a second-order effect that probably couldn't have been foreseen in advance, which is if you put reproductive power into the hands of the woman, an accidental pregnancy seems a lot less like the man's obligation and a lot more like the woman's choice. Yep. You coulda woulda shoulda taken the pill. You didn't. It's your choice. Therefore, the shotgun wedding that I would have done 10 years ago before the pill existed and now you have the choice to abort the child. So if you don't want to, that's on you. Yeah, so I have no I'm not obliged to stick about the other one. The second story that she taught me about was this um sort of erosion of chivalrous norms and this sort of second wave like second into third wave feminism kind of wanted to have it was when you begin to get sort of sex difference denialism coming through and they're saying things like you know what why is it that men need to hold the door open for women? Why is it that men need to pay for the check on the first date? Maybe you should maybe you should split the check on all of the dates. You it's kind of this sort of very surface level fragile but a a version of female empowerment right of of you being able to take control and not need a man as much and it was this sort of independence movement but what Mary brought up was that was fine for the upper strata of women who were dating men who had been educated on how to treat a woman in any case. But you should hold the door open for a woman and make sure that she gets home safe when she gets in a taxi is one just slippery slope spectrum all the way down to you shouldn't hit your wife. Yeah. Like it is the exact same energy of women are inherently more fragile and they require protection from you and it is not only not only something noble but it is something responsible that you can and should do and this is a good idea. And when you look at these rules were made or the the the erosion of these chivalrous norms happened at the top but most of the negative effects happened actually down at the bottom. So the fact that upper and middle class women got to laugh about how they they split the check on the first date with their husband that they were now with with three kids and in a nice house somewhere. They didn't see this massive swath of working class and underclass women who were now subject to more domestic violence. Yeah, so have you do you know Rob Henderson's work? Of course I know Rob So we read first this is luxury beliefs, right? Defund the police. So two things on this you know, I do emphasize in in my book the role of economic forces in sort of pushing down rates of marriage and increasing rates of single parent households outside the social you know the college educated class the economics of it and and then like emphasizing again I lean on research to show that this is the case that it interacts with these social norms. Like you're talking about these social norms like sort of drift down from the high end of the socioeconomic distribution but then they interact with the economic realities at the bottom in a way that's really damaging to those families. And one of the things I say needs to happen in order to reverse these trends is an increase in the economic desirability of men, right? So we do need to sort of expand opportunities, increase skills so that more men are earning a family sustaining wage. One negative reaction I've gotten to this is why do you have to be so old fashioned and heteronormative? Right? One of the reviewers who didn't like my book wrote this. Like why isn't the answer that it's time for new gender norms and men can take on more of the child care responsibilities in the house? Said the person who's never read any evolutionary psychology. Or like I mean I love my husband but like really I'm going to turn that all over to him and like decide so you know on the one hand I'm like oh come on like that's never going to happen and even if you look at you know evidence now be whatever vision you have for gender equality in terms of these expectations in the home, we are very far from a place where that's going to be widespread desired across couples, right? Like we just even see in the data that when a wife makes more than her husband divorce rates increase. I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm just saying we're very far from that norm. But the other place it takes me is is that really the liberation we're going for that like now we work and by the way women are still going to do housework and child care Yep. and we're just going to have husbands or co-resident parents where the dads stay home. It it also if you again if you just look at labor force participation rates the majority of moms are working. So moms are doing both. Listen what you don't what you don't understand and I will explain this to you because you're a woman. The patriarchy is so powerful and all encompassing that we somehow managed to convince women that they should start working too so that we could finally achieve our ultimate form which is Xbox stay at home dad. Well, that's that's the point that's sort of the point is like when people are like oh is it just that more of these dads are taking care of kids you're like no that's actually not what you see is driving the reduction in male employment, right? So the idea that women should not only should they accept it but that that's actually should be the goal is like okay well actually the man doesn't have to go to work. He can stay home and take care of the kids. But again by the way most moms are going to work. If not in the first two years of their child's life during at some point during the 18 years of their child's life they're also going to work and so I think it's both much more realistic um but also frankly more of a feminist norm to expect out of a partner or the man you're having kids with that they are able to bring in a family sustaining So you also have you know to to kind of fold some more social norm stuff in. Did you read Christine Embers' article in the Washington Post? Yes I I had Christine on a little while ago and I think you know that discussion of kind of the erosion of traditional masculine roles outside of even just work, protector, provider, procreator as some but then even like the the traits and the personality characteristics, you know being a hard worker, looking to have self-mastery, making decisions easily and quickly, standing up under pressure, these kinds of things. It's very it's such a slippery slope to find some ass at a liberal newspaper that wants to say that this is toxic masculinity, right? But look there's I can I again I can point I can point at both sides making this an unproductive discussion because for every you know let's say left-leaning newspaper that says oh let's just change gender norms I can point to someone on the right saying well I told look like the whole problem here is that now women have achieved economic independence and I will not bemoan female economic empowerment, right? The answer to this let's let's stipulate that the answer to this is not that we need to retreat to a situation where women have no choice but to be financially dependent on a husband regardless of whether he's a good husband or not. Correct. And so the answer to this has to be that basically men have to step up and we have to but again I'm saying this sympathetically to men, right? Is there's there's been real economic shocks that have eroded the economic opportunities and wages for men outside the college educated class. There's a lot of barriers you know that have hit men and again like a lot of them didn't grow up with dads in their house and so on the one hand yes my sort of assumption is that in order to restore the promise or value proposition of marriage men need to be able to be good earners. At the same time I accept and celebrate the reality that women are are financially independent. It should not be the case that any woman stays in a relationship that she doesn't want to because she is a she's held to financial ransom by the only person who has any independence or can support her at all. Yeah, I'm not I'm not campaigning for women to become domestic prostitutes again. Like that's that's absolutely not it and I agree. One stat that you didn't mention earlier on is that when women are the primary breadwinner in a household men are 50% more likely to need to use erectile dysfunction medication. I didn't know that. it goes from the boardroom to the bedroom all the way down. Where did you get that stat? I will send you the study. I'm fully cited. I've got I have got my footnotes hiding somewhere. Um so one of the other things that is an interesting or kind of scary implication how many of the problems that we're seeing in the modern world do you think are downstream from single parent upbringings? You know criminality uh mental health problems, physical health problems, mood disorders Okay. I I don't even know how to try and put a percentage on it. This is the kind of thing that I feel like Larry Summers would say it is between this much and this much. I have no idea how to put a number on it. So I will punt but still get myself in trouble by saying a non-negligible amount. Like I I do you know this this is not to be ignored. That's right that's sort of the point as to why I'm highlighting this. Like we just know that these kids are at an elevated risk of all of those antisocial behaviors. Um and which is why it's so important to to again really just like address the decline in the chief parent household. Do you know if there's any truth or what the truth is behind the percentage of the prison population that comes from a single parent household. I know that that I don't have enough off the top of my head, but I have seen that and it is uh it is quite striking. I want to say 70%. It's a lot. It's a lot. And of course it's you know, there's a lot um disproportionate racial groups Yeah, there's more poverty, there's poverty, neighborhoods, exactly. There's a lot, but but again, I think all of these things are really interrelated with the arrows running in both directions. Okay, onto one of my other closet obsession topics and one of yours from the past as well. What do you think is going on with the relationship between the marriage rate and the birth rate? Yeah, so birth rates are way down and and part of that reflects the fact that there's been a large reduction in the share of women of childbearing age who are married. And so given everything I've said and how you know, how many more births now are non-marital, this might sound contradictory, but it's not. Unmarried women have fewer kids and are less likely to have kids than married women. So, if you just, you know, accept that married fertility is higher than unmarried fertility, moving so many women of childbearing age from marriage to the unmarried status means we have a reduction in fertility. Um but there are other things and again, these things are sort of endogenous like do I want to get married? Do I want to have kids? How important is sort of having a family to my adult life? There's been a lot of shifts across recent cohorts and how much they prioritize that. So, there's some other trends happening, forces changing that are driving down both birth rates and marriage in tandem. But in general, birth rates are way down among everybody, right? So, young women basically every age group under the age of 30 is having fewer kids than they used to. Above age 30, we're seeing higher birth rates than in the past, but again, despite what you might think because so many college-educated women and the women who, you know, write in newspapers and stuff are themselves having kids above 30. I had all my kids above 30. Very the number of births to moms under 30 is pretty small in the aggregate. And so despite the increase in births over the age of 30, um women are just having many fewer over their life cycle. And so in 2021 or 2020, 2019, uh more women had children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20. Yeah, but but again, but it's not making up for it, I know. It's not making up for it. Well, if you have if you have a child at 41, that's your that's maybe your one child. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. have a child at 19, that's the first of five. Yeah, or at least three. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's right. That's right. So, so births are births are way down. None of the simple explanations that people speculate about like, oh well, child care's become too expensive, the rent's become too high. Everyone's worried about the climate. None of that explains it. Like it just doesn't. You just don't even see the correlations in the data. And by the way, none of that all of a sudden changed in the US in 2007 and all of a sudden changed in the UK, you know, in the 1990s. Um my read again of what's going on, both looking in the US and the similarities across other high-income countries, kids who grew up in the '80s and '90s are much less interested in becoming parents or having more than one kid even if they are parents than people who grew up in the '60s and '70s and early '80s. Like you just see this I only can speculate and again, this is a the kind of thing that's really hard for me as an economist using my methods to get at causality because we see it across high-income countries. So, that makes it easier for me to reject a bunch of explanations, but when you see it across the country, across groups, across, you know, countries where I can speculate, one, you know, people have a different attitude about how they want to spend their adult time and money, right? So, this idea that, oh well, having kids is really expensive. Yes, it is. Having kids was always pretty expensive and always pretty time-consuming. But people didn't prioritize women didn't prioritize their careers as much, people didn't prioritize leisure time as much. We just see adults sort of much more, you know, prioritizing like you even see this in survey data, but then of course you see it in the way people are living their lives across countries, they're more likely to say and act like they believe work is really important, leisure is really important. And also, any sort of social pressures of like, but this is what you do when you become an adult, those have been relaxed. I'm not saying that's good or bad, right? But again, this this is a economic demographic challenge for high-income countries. Um that we're not and you know, our our working age population is rapidly going to be shrinking. There are going to be more childless people in old age. We're not going to be able to sustain our social insurance programs. Um our economic productivity is going to go down. There are economic and demographic challenges that are going to come from the reduction in fertility. Just like we were talking about earlier, the reduction in marriage, more people entering old age by themselves brings on a host of challenges. This is something that we should acknowledge presents challenges even if at an individual level somebody might be making decisions that are in their own best interest for what makes them happiest. Did you see the Pew data that came out on Valentine's Day this year? The Pew data's been amazing on all of these topics. These guys uh so I'm writing a book with David Buss at the moment, so this is just like like it it's a a dream for me. Uh about three in 10 single adults who are not looking for relationship or dates say that COVID-19 concerns were at least a minor reason why they're not dating, but it is nowhere near the biggest. So, 44% of people said that a major reason is just like being single. Second to that was 42% with have more important priorities right now. 20% with too busy. Uh 17 feel like no one would be interested. 14 feel like uh I'm too old and 10 uh fears about being exposed to the coronavirus. So, you have those top three, just like being single, have more important priorities right now, and too busy. Very yeah, individualistic, very sort of atomized, um you know, very isolated. They were coming out the back of COVID. I think that was maybe 2020 when the data came from. But yeah, there's um this mating crisis that we're seeing at the moment and and the culture around not only having kids, not only the optimal setup for having children in a a household, but just the anti-mating culture that we see at the moment, you know, like the Alex Coopers of the world or articles from Cosmopolitan saying like how to sleep with him and not catch feels. Like, okay, like how to disembody yourself just just in case any emotions of attachment decided to sneak in. Like here's here's the neurolinguistic programming to de-hack yourself from ever feeling feelings again. Um it's a real if if I was more conspiratorially minded, which I'm not, I would almost say that it is so all-encompassing that it would have to be coordinated. Like it's so all over the place. So, it's so interesting you say that because when I you know, a year or two ago I was putting out a bunch of papers about declining fertility in the US and high-income countries and what's behind it and what are the likely consequences. And um I had a lot of sort of young female journalists would call to talk about the research and then at the end they'd say, oh, and can I just ask you a question cuz I'm trying to figure out if I want to have kids. And I was on Tik Tok and I learned from these conversations that there's widespread on Tik Tok like these memes and videos and whatever telling you why it's really you don't want to have kids. And I was like, this is horrifying. And so then I was like looking at what they're saying. I was like, wow, this really is a thing on social media, this promoting this idea that you don't want to have kids. And I said to him, I was like, I am not a conspiratorial person, but if I was, this would be a pretty good thing for the Chinese to try and convince American women not to have kids because it is not in the US's economic interest right, to uh sort of have a shrinking population. Well, it's going to take, no matter how many Tik Toks of a girl with a list that's eight pages long saying that she can't wear cute heels to brunch if she gets pregnant, there is no amount of Tik Toks that the Chinese can throw at this side of the world to catch up to their birth rate, right? They're they're beyond [ __ ] They're beyond [ __ ] The only the only people more [ __ ] than them are Korea and Japan. Yeah, no, South Korea is down to like the total fertility rate is 0.8 kids per woman. This uh I had uh uh what's his name? Malcolm Collins, Okay. uh who is a very interesting guy with regards to this. I had him on the show and he told me that for every 100 Koreans, there will be four great-grandchildren. Oh my gosh. That's wild. Yeah. Yeah, that's wild. I don't remember the stat. I saw something about There's these guys down at UT Austin at this population center and they are doing awesome work on this topic and I wish I could remember it cuz you're you have all these really fun facts at the top of your head. But it was basically the [ __ ] like the share of the people who will ever live in the world who have already been born. It's like discomfortingly Well, there's a I'm actually a way for it, but you should try and get yourself down to Austin for the pronatalist uh forum that's happening. That's happening November or December this year. What's the website for that? I think it's pronatalism.org or pronatalist.org uh and it's all um interventions for improving birth rates, especially in the West, etc. etc. Like how can we how can we balance gender equality with uh economic flourishing and birth rate? Like how can we hold these three seemingly like [ __ ] contradictory Yeah. desires at once? Okay, so final thing, do you have any interventions? Like how can we fix this? So, okay. I already mentioned, I think part of this has to be, you know, economics in the sense that marriage because I mean I I view Here you go. I view marriage as a long-term economic contract between two people, right? To share and pool resources. And so, and again, I put love and mutual respect and fun and all that on top of it. But to increase rates of marriage, we really do need to improve the economic lives and survivability as partners of men outside the college-educated sector, but that has to go hand in hand with a restoration of the norm of a two-parent family, right? Norms matter. Social norms totally matter. Um and so, you know, by the way, like one study we haven't talked about is I looked at what happened with my co-author Riley Wilson when this fracking boom came in because you see an increase in the earnings capacity and employment of non-college-educated men in all of these countries around all of these counties around the country that had these like localized fracking booms and we saw our birth rates go up, but they went up in equal proportion among married and unmarried um parents and there was no effect on marriage rates. So, it's basically and if you look at what happened in the '70s and '80s with a very similar coal boom, oh, marriage went up. The non-marital birth share fell. So, you have a similar economic shock happening now in communities where the social norm has already been broken and it's not enough. So, that's why I'm like, you need to both restore the economic promise of marriage and the social norm of having and raising kids in a two-parent households. Um How do we change norms? I mean, some of that I think is just being honest about the benefits of a two-parent household. Um I am confident that we can both acknowledge the benefits of a two-parent household, work to promote a higher share of kids having the benefit of two-parent household, the benefit of, you know, more adults having the benefit of a marriage partner um without retreating to the terrible stigmatization that our country used to have about single mothers, right? Um so, there is a middle ground and I think we just I think we've veered too far. But I also think we need to in our sort of programming and our policies meet families where they are. And again, once we're willing to acknowledge that the crisis of the family is a policy urgency, then we should be willing and committed to spending more public and philanthropic dollars on programs that aim that are aimed at strengthening families. So, like the kinds of programs I have in mind, I've alluded to some of them. There's a lot of programs around the country that work with, let's say, families who have a parent who's incarcerated or returning from prison, right? That's a pretty hard situation for families. Um But they are families and so they need supports and they're expensive and they're under-resourced. Uh you know, programs helping unmarried parents who want to have a good relationship, who want to co-parent. How many high-income people do you know pay for expensive marriage therapy? But then would never admit that like that would be terrible if the government offered relationship classes to unmarried parents, right? That sounds like something the Bush administration did. If you look at the budget for the administration in children and families, only 1% goes to programs to promote stable and safe families. 15% goes to um foster care. 6% goes to child support. So, in terms of federal dollars, we spend way more trying to address like the reality that we're pulling kids out of houses cuz their family life isn't good and we don't invest in families. So, I am like, you know, I think we need to commit to a policy agenda to strengthen families. Um As we again like then do the bigger things of improving economic opportunities and skills of non-college-educated men and promoting a norm of social of two-parent families. Does this go in tandem with tactics that can improve the birth rate as well? It's a good question. How much sort of if we were to you know, I'm really focused on sort of thinking about marriage between people who already have kids, but to the extent that like a sort of auxiliary related um I don't know if consequence is the wrong word, but effect of all this is sort of restoring the norm of like fair families are important to life, um then you probably will have a knock-on effect of more births. Like we said, married the married birth rate is higher than unmarried birth rate. I think it would take a lot to turn around the I think it's going to take a lot to turn around the birth rate to bring it back to above replacement levels. So, you know, Yeah, what's a what's a In your opinion, which is the more difficult task to try and reinvigorate marriage or reinvigorate children? I hadn't thought about that until you like led me down this line of questioning and then I started thinking about that. I I I think my instinct on that Yeah, I'm like, I might change my mind in a couple hours, but I think the harder task would be to increase the birth rate. And I'll tell so, too. Yeah, I'll tell you why I think that or why that's my initial thought is again because we don't see people rejecting the idea of marriage. We don't we don't see people actively saying they don't want to get married. Um now, I'm an economist, so I look at what they do, right? But that gives me more hope that actually they want to be married and we need to help them sort of achieve what they want to achieve in their life in order to feel like they can be married or to achieve a, you know, a stable relationship. Whereas I think you just see a lot of young women and men again across high-income countries, including those in Scandinavia that have more equal gender norms that have really supportive family programs, we just see people saying they don't they don't want to have kids. So, that's an interesting one. Are you familiar with Steven Shaw? He did birth gap. No, uh I've seen his stuff and I've seen it referenced by like Lyman Stone, I think, where they say people people are not having the number of kids they want. Correct. Yeah, eight out of 10 childless mothers didn't intend to not be childless. Yeah, exactly. Um I never really know what to make of those surveys. A lot of those surveys are like, oh, women say they wanted to have three kids and then they only have two and so it must be that like child care or child This is child This is specifically childlessness. Yeah, that they they inadvertently wound up childless. Yes, yeah, life circumstances. So, not finding a partner sufficiently quickly, you've had longer time in education, then you've got a career because you've done the education thing, then you're 33, you have one relationship, it fails, and now fertility is an issue. It's squeezed that potential fertility window. I don't know. I mean, that Steven's stuff seems to be good. I can't I'm not a statistician at all. I It was the only the only subject GCSE that I managed to get below a C. So, I got a D in stats uh at school at school. So, I just as well that I went on to do a You should try again. If you have a good stats professor, it makes sense and it all feels like awesome magic. Listen, I I very much respect your job, but I have absolutely zero desire to start to start doing that despite how how well you may advertise it to me. I am I absolutely love your work. I I think that you're a fantastic voice. much. Well, thank Thanks for having me on. This is great to talk with you. Where can people go if they want to keep up to date with all of the things that you do and find out more about other stuff? I have to show you my book, right? So, Get it out. Yeah, they can get my book on wherever they buy books. Um Amazon, their local bookstore, Barnes & Noble, University of Chicago Press. And then I'm at the University of Maryland. I have my faculty page at the University of Maryland with all my research and some information about the book. Very cool. Melissa, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe.