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 um 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 they're you know

I so far this 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 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 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 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 [ __ ] storm 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 rights so they're way down uh 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 have 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 um but everybody else continued The Retreat for marriage and really we saw outside the college educated class really increasing incidents of single-parent households non-marital childbearing and the ryzen 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 condition 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 birth to teen and young women back 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 birth 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 U.S living in single-parent households it was less than you know less it was much lower than it is now it was really predominantly among Teen Moms very disadvantaged groups what's happened is that that 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 and 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 birth 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 um and so for example if you look at just the children of white moms you know there's it's like more than 80 percent of the kids whose moms have a college degree live and uh two parent household is compared to a

little bit more than 60 percent 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 percent of kids whose moms are black and don't have a college degree so so there's these differences very these differences exist both across and within race and ethnic groups except for Asian Americans who have exceptionally High rates of cheap 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 goddamn Asian privilege all over again um so talk to me about why this is uh 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 in marriage shifted but then there was a day 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 in marriage changed what do you actually mean I 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 right right right but then what happened in the 80s and 90s was a Divergence and 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 and 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 outside marriage 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's 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 because these economic struggles doesn't make as much as she does whether you know that man sees himself is like yeah I totally want to get married and have a family to take care of I have a state 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 of class are getting married here's another really interesting thing though in survey evidence and not ethnographic evidence you know sociologists interview people or 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 a good marriage I want to 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 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 a

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 percent among black moms that's 70 is it really possible that forty percent of dads overall fifty percent 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 households 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 well if presuming that that's not the case because that sounds insane what do you think it is that women are misjudging about the men that are around them so clear I on the data turn for a second be 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 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 only 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 it'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 of unstable employment a lot of the deaths have criminal histories a lot of the dads struggle with alcohol and drug abuse all of those societal challenge Society 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 judgey 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 a two-parent household for themselves and their kids I have an article that I want to quote to you uh you may know this Nicole Rogers 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 apparent yet because of social worker Financial constraints Rogers cites research that found 42 of

women aged 40 to 44 said they want to tile a child but fewer than half say they intended to have one she quotes another study saying that nearly half of so-called Banks 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 Rogers said we could solve a host of problems to include 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 Rogers 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 to 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 reveals 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 twenty seven thousand dollars twenty seven thousand dollars 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 and 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 think again I I think it's phenomenally I'm gonna 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 a 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 bandwidths 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've seen 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 highfaluting about somebody who proselytizes about how people don't need it's the same it's the exact same as Alex Cooper you know from call her daddy no right so Cole hadadi is uh call her daddy's like a chick podcast on Spotify she got bought by Spotify at the same time that Joe Rogan did so she's like super super mega time podcaster and uh she spent an entire

career uh 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 her 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 a proposed to her and now she's so so happy and she can't wait meanwhile she

has this wake this cultural sort of [ __ ] cast off 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 no idea I get this look I get this from men too right plenty of Economist men because I happen to talk to more Economist men than Economist women because 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 we 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 kids 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 with 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 on 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 engaged 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 uh marriage is a bad deal for men because of a 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 on set dementia they have later on set

Alzheimer's women tend to live around about the same amount of time it's same as we can speculate on that I mean 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 uh 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 uh that Dr Robert waldinger 80 uh study longevity uh longitude 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 the vicissitudes of Life can smash up against so I think from the most solipsistic individual atomized [ __ ] 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 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 too with what you've done as well 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 complementary 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 complementary in that in that sense okay let's get into the kids what are the differences and outcomes for kids growing up in the single parent versus a two-parent household so we can we can start by

seeing that in the immediate term what is 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 low 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 in better neighborhoods they get access to better schools we see that you know these parents spend more on their kids and 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 play for 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 because that's a really interesting one 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 development 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 see 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 really could 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 G Baron homes are much less likely to get in trouble in school they're much less

likely to getting 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 a hundred percent 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 Economist Miriam Bertrand and Jessica Pond tries to get at why that is like what what's driving that in the household 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 the boister's weight 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 CAD 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 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 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 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 hills 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 their 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 uh oroboros of like ineligibility and irresponsibility and that then creates another generation that creates another generation that creates another generation so have you read animations 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 okay great um 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 Mum would have not let them go up the tree at all and this uh understanding allowing a 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 than the it seems like the 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 sociosexual 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 from okay and uh from very rigorous analytic work with data but

this was really sort of salient and top of Mind recently because of course they 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 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-pooed the Bush initiatives that like healthy marriage initiatives because like it 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 because they're like stop like with the old-fashioned obsession with marriage people could be

cohabiting at a practice as a practical matter in the US cohabitation is not the same relationship that marriage is the reason why I say it's like such a good question I also mean it's like an open question so I can one is 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 eight percent more are living with their mom and her partner in the majority but a lot 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 the 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 because I'm just and and by the way I put same-sex parents with Mary that's married step parents though right so yeah typically 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 Arrangement you know basically remarried parents kids outcomes are somewhere between the outcomes of married parents and single parents step parents are complicated because a lot of step parents 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 hundreds 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 charity risk is really small so 100. 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 the diaper and this isn't even my kid and this so you could 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 stepmoms 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 well I think it's very important to think about how kids do if they're in to 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 this share of parents who are never getting married right so again more you know slightly more than half of birth to moms who don't have a four-year college degree those moms aren't married and so 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 oh no no questions 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 there how median household earnings of a household headed by a college-educated Mom that's gone up by um like 60 percent over the past 40 years uh it's basically gone up by like eight percent for Mom's 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 and having two parents the sort of middle class moms moms of the high school degree there are median household income has gone down why because basically they're stagnant earnings in the middle 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 don't have the same income as they did before but 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 their class a little bit more and you have this sort of Mathieu

principle thing with the Haves and the have-nots yes and that the water line for Where Have Not is continues to rise up and up and yeah yeah exactly exactly and then we talk about the having a class conversations and 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 uh 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 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 really so much you could do by hiring more school counselors well I know this by the way 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 mutual uh admiration there so in his book he talks about there are four times as many female fighter pilots in the U.S Air Force by percentage than there are kindergarten teachers at a male in the U.S 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 have a boyfriend you have a boisterous boy he's high in extraversion he's high in openness he's low in conscientiousness right high neuroticism is 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 broad base 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 skewed 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 you're we say they're not allowed to like play tag at recess anymore so it was very boring right because 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 could draw football the football got confiscated by the principal it wasn't a lot to

throw a football and you're just like what what are boys supposed to do to get out their energy because like you know you just see them getting sort of in trouble and on the nerves of all 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 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 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 it'll be women earned 111 pounds 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 who is it who is it that you want her to be able to get into a relationship with given the fact especially for single mums 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 racist 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 upon time is a sign of a white supremacy like you are you are so scared and

cowardly of actually saying what's good for these people that 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 less worried like in the past six 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 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 two 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 one of these people get married and when you talk to again these men who work with these fathers and 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 it's 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 that 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 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 your 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 man above and across women Retreat into Boss [ __ ] culture that percolates a little bit more that encourages women to maybe think about single herd and sperm donors and IVF and you can wait that sort of kind of folds all of this stuff yeah but again those are yeah 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 for Mary Harrington did you read uh the uh [ __ ] what was it called uh feminism against progress thank God so in that she taught 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 this is an economics paper it was like probably the top economics journal and I remember to present it when I when I'm grad school it's a perfect example and for

the people that don't know the 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 should have taken the pill you didn't it's your choice therefore the shotgun wedding that I would have done 10 years ago 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 uh sort of sex difference denialism coming through and they're saying things like you know why 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 it was kind of this sort of very surface level fragile but a version of female empowerment right 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 uh 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 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 are now subject to more domestic violence yeah so uh have you do you know Rob hand so two things on this you know I do uh emphasize in in my book the role of economic forces and sort of pushing down

rates of marriage and increasing rates of single parent households outside the social Edge you know the college educated class the economics of it and and then like emphasize and 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 sir 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 desire to cross 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 yeah and we're just gonna have husbands or co-resident parents or 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 and

so so 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 our ultimate form which is Xbox stay at home that's that's the part 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 men 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 uh social norms stuff in did you read Christine Embers article in the Washington Post yeah 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 um

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 look but 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

Luke like the whole problem here is that now women have achieved economic independence and I will not be mode female economic empowerment right so 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 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 one 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 uh 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 uh stat that you didn't mention earlier on uh is that when women are the primary Breadwinner in a household men are 50 more likely to need to use erectile dysfunction medication no I didn't know that so it goes from

The Boardroom to the bedroom all the way down where did you get that stat I will send you to study I'm fully cited I've got I've 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 punch 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 anti-social behaviors um and which is why it's so important to to again really

just like address the decline in the two 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 to have 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 racial groups 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 on to 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 or 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's 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 about 30. very the number of births to Mom's under 30 is pretty small in the Aggregate and so despite the increase in burst over the age of 30 um women are just having many fewer births over their life cycle and so UK in 2021 or 2020 19 uh more women had children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20. yeah but but again but it's not right you have a child at 41 that's your that's maybe your one child yeah exactly if you have a child at 19 that's the first

of five yeah or at least three yeah no that's right that's right so so Bursar bursts are way down none of the simple explanations that people speculate about like oh well child care has become too expensive the rents become too high everyone's worried about the climate 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 um and by the way none of that all of a sudden changed in the U.S 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 those looking in the U.S 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 then people who grew up in the 60s and 70s and early 80s I only can speculate and again this is 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 an economic demographic challenge for high income countries um that we're not and you know our

pot 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 Puget has 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 like like it's a dream for me about three in ten single adults who are not looking for a relationship or dates say that covid-19 concerns are at least a minor reason why they're not dating but it is nowhere near the biggest so

44 percent of people said that a major reason is just like being single second to that was 42 percent with have more important priorities right now 20 with too busy uh 17 feel like no one will 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 individualistic very sort of atomized um you know very isolated they were coming out the back of covert 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 household but just the anti-mating culture that we see at the moment you know like the Alex Coopers of the world are 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 neuro-linguistic programming to

de-hack yourself from ever feeling feelings again um it's a real if if I was more conspiratory 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 because I'm trying to figure out if I want to have kids and I was on Tick Tock and I learned from these conversations that there's widespread on Tick Tock 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 that's promoting this idea that you don't want to have kids and I said 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 have kids because it is not in the US's economic interest right to sort of have a shrinking population well it's going to take no matter how many tick tocks of a girl with a list that's eight pages long saying that you can't wear cute heels to brunch if she gets pregnant there

is no amount of tick tocks that the Chinese can throw at this side of the world to catch up to their Birthright right there they're beyond [ __ ] they're beyond [ __ ] the only the only people more [ __ ] in them are Korea yeah 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 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 because you you have all these really fun facts at the top of your head but it was basically this [ __ ] like the share of the people who will ever live in the world who have already been born hmm it's like discomforting what does

a I'm actually away for it but you should try and get yourself down to Austin for the pronatalist uh Forum that's happening that's happening in November or December this year um I think it's pronatalism.org or pronatelist.org 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 [Applause] I have already mentioned I think part of this has to be 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 pull 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 and sort of viability 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 the 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 how 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 was basically and if you looked at what happened in the 70s and 80s with a very similar coal boom Oh marriage went up the non-marital brochure 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 household 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 higher share of kids having the benefit of two parent household the benefit of you know more adults having the benefit of the marriage partner um without retreating to the terrible stigmatization that our country used to have about single mothers right 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 a family is of 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 our 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 extensive 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 and children and families only one

percent goes to programs to promote stable and safe families 15 percent goes to foster care six percent close 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 because 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 [Music] 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 consequences the wrong word but effective all this is sort of restoring the norm of like 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 uh 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 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 think 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 whatever 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 Stephen Shaw who did birth Gap no 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 ten 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 this is child this is specifically childlessness yeah that they inadvertently round up childless yes yeah life circumstances so not finding your 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 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 go to D in stats uh at school at school so I just as well that I went on to do it

you should try again if you have a good stats Professor it makes sense and it all feels like awesome magic but 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 um I absolutely love your work I I think that yeah that's so nice of you thank you so much well thank you thanks for having me on this is my pleasure to start with you where can people go 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 and Noble University 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 then press here for a selection of the best clips from the

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