#689 - Melissa Kearney - The Terrifying Impact Of Single-Parent Households

30:16And so they are complementary in that sense. Okay, let's get into the kids. What are the differences in outcomes for kids growing up in the single parent versus a two -parent household? So we can start by seeing that immediate term. Let me let me emphasize some 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 chance of living in poverty or five times higher. Part of that reflects the fact that, you know, moms from the Lincoln 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.

31:07Okay. 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 and enriching activities and educational activities. They basically have more opportunities. You can see this in the most simple way, like it's really expensive to play for club sports or music lessons. So kids from Mary 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.

31:46They'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 boys are sort of suffering internally, they're more likely to act out and would 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 they're more likely to get suspended, and that cascades.

32:19then 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 get in 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.

32:54This 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 social mobility because there are both short and immediate term effects and 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.

33:35So 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 lot of really well done studies from the past ten years showing that boys are particularly disadvantaged by the absence of a dad from their home Okay? Some careful work done by the economist Maryam Bertrand and Jessica Pond tries to get it why that is.

34:18Like what's driving that in the household? The interesting thing that their research on covers, and again, this is using really large scale nationally representative datasets, is that boys get less investment, parental input, nurturing parenting. They're more likely to, you know, have their moms 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 boy stress boy. Especially if it's a boy stress boy and you don't have someone else to be like, could you take over, I need a break, right?

34:53So they see in the data and these data sets that record, like, do you spank your kid, 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 and the parental inputs or investments are small how they respond to that is large. Right and another way to think about this is I have a daughter and a son. If I you know sort of ignore my daughter or whatever She's probably not gonna go to school and get in trouble.

35:30If I am like harsh with my son if I don't put it as much time in him if he's really struggling is more likely to go to school and get in trouble, right? Like that 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 in site slab 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.

36:08And 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, it's the households around you black households around you also have dads single biggest predictor, whether you do well economically in adulthood.

36:53And 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 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 a aura borus of like ineligibility and irresponsibility and that then creates another generation that creates another generation that creates another generation.

37:48So have you read Anna Matins the the life of dad? No. This is something something that you should absolutely read. So she's an evolutionary anthropologist. She came out with Robin Dunbar's a little bit Oxford. And I just had her on the show. I'll send you the episode. You can listen to it. Oh, right. And she talks about the importance of fatherhood, from a developmental perspective. And she looks at it through an anthropological lens. She looks at evolutionarily, does some evolution in psychology. One of the really interesting things that she folded in, and you're right, Ruff and Tumble play, especially for boys, especially in early childhood, is very important because it teaches them And the role of fathers is largely to both play, but to set rules.

38:33That you can climb that tree, but you can't, like, don't go high than that, as opposed to mumble, would have not let them go up the tree at all. And this 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 an adolescent girl has farther around. When the boys are there a little bit more, it seems like they're acting out behavior.

39:07It's more crucial for the boys earlier on, but for the girls, it seems to be during that later period. And you get all sorts of weird sociosexual nudges here and there. You get all sorts of strange behaviors. I know like daddy issues is kind of a meme, but 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 on 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 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 every one in this room was married okay and and would say things like and these boys or 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.

40:16Right? This is what you should expect. When you grow up, 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 snappy, but it, I was like, this is such a perfect microcosm of this privileged class of kids getting exposed to this positive example, 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 poo -pooed the Bush initiatives at like healthy marriage initiatives because you're like, it doesn't even increase marriage.

41:06But then when you will 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, you know, I don't really know that many married people. They don't have an example of how to make it work, right? So it's, it's again, 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 all your questions. 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.

41:55At a practical matter in the US, cohabitation is not the same relationship that marriages. The reason I say it's 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 30 % of kids outside the college educated class in the US are living with just their mom, just their mom. Only like 8 % more are living with their mom and her partner in the majority, but 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 co -habiting parents.

42:38They're very fragile. So they just, the chance that a co -habiting couple is still married by the time, or still co -habiting by the time the kid turns five, is really small, by the time they're 14, it's really small, So there's 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.

43:16What about step parents? So, step parents is complicated in the following sense. So, to be clear, in my book, I just put step parents with married parents, because I'm just, and by the way, I put same sex parents with married. That's married step parents, the right? So, typically mother gets birth to... So, and the reason why, like, because I'm taking this resource perspective, but when When you look at the studies, sociologists are more likely to really dig into the nitty -gritty of what about this arrangement, what about that arrangement? Basically, remarried parents, kids' outcomes are somewhere between the outcomes of married parents and single parents.

44:02Step parents are complicated because a lot of step parents' situations, you're not getting a good relationship for the kid. And so that just, you know, it's a step parents are not the same as to married biological parents. We just again, we see that in the data. It's not as protective or beneficial for kids. There was a 100 -100x increase in mortality risk if you have one non -biological parent in the household. That could be, but remember, we're talking about really small numbers. Like a mortality risk is really small. So 100 points is my point. Yeah, my point being that it's hard to raise a child.

44:43Yeah, 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 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 so you could, you know, 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, 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.

45:19Right? So we do see in the data that biological parents invest more in their kids than more time with their kids, you know, et cetera. 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 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 their 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.

46:18Right? So again, slightly more than half of births to moms who don't have a four -year college degree, those moms aren't married. And actually, 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 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?

47:00And so if I just look at what's happened to earnings inequality among two parent households over time, then I see that you know, they're how median household earnings of household hit by a college educated mom that's gone up by like 60 % over the past 40 years. It's basically gone up by like 8 % for moms 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 with a high school degree, their median household income has gone down.

47:51Why? Because basically there's 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 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. 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.

48:30So 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 Matthew principal thing with the Habs and the Havnots.

49:07Yeah. And that the waterline for where have not is continues to rise up and up and yeah yeah exactly exactly and then but think about how many times we talk about the have nots and class gaps I mean I'm in these conversations and conferences and positive 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 in the labor market and I you know there's got to be point where we're like, how much are we going to expect schools to do to make up for these differences? The defensive family.

49:46Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, 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 that kids spend way more time at home over their childhood than they do at school. 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 another Richard Reeves as a fan of your work.

50:27I think you guys have worked together at the Brookings Institute, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 Then there are kindergarten teachers at a male in the US So you know you just have a massive death 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. Yeah, you have a boyster. Yeah, the boyster is boy He's high in extraversion, he's high in openness, he's low in conscientiousness, right?

51:06High 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 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 brown 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 these compounds or schools are definitely set up to, you know, basically for girls to get in less trouble, right?

51:47And so even, I mean, to all Richard's point and I agree with his sort of exposition of the challenge. You know, I this like amazed me when my kid, my boy went to school. And he was like, you're, what do you 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 the chair all day and then they get like 20 minutes to run around. And they're not like tag because kids fell. So I was like, why don't you take a football to school? and maybe you can draw a football. The football got confiscated by the principal.

52:24It was not to draw a football. And you're just like, what are boys supposed to do to get out their energy? Because you just see them getting sort of in trouble and on the nerves of all the female teachers to your point. That's why 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 to do 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.

53:01And 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 trauma 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 pounds more than men between ages of 21 and 29.

53:41And 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 crack on with life and you don't need men. Okay, who do you want her to marry? Yeah, a hundred people. 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?

54:21Like, do you not want to try and be the breakwater for this? And the other point that you made about people, like when you sort of turn their nose up and get at all, Ike, these fucking like, policy wonk bourgeois tits. Like, 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.

54:55like you are so scared and cowardly of actually saying what's good for these people, but what you're doing is you're making their lives worse and your morality stands on the shoulders of their future failure. Yeah, I again, I've become less worried about talking about my book in 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 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 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 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 do parent families or to, you know, take this on because of the racial element.

56:32I 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, 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 within their life. They have 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.

57:04I'm like, yeah, and they go to their basketball games and go to their parent's teacher conferences. And he's like, oh no, they can't. He's like, they can't. drug or gun charges in their records so they can't go near the kid's 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 that easy a problem to address. It's such a hydrohead, right? And it's so recursive and sort of like a spaghetti junction. You have these structural issues that kind of create 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.

58:01Then, 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 bitch 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 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 very good that's a very good point. I do think there's a great story from Mary Harrington.

58:35Did you read the fucking what was it called? 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. Yeah, you're nodding like you know the story. This is an economics paper. This is like published in the top economics journal and I remember seeing the authors present it when I was in grad school a lot more than a million years ago. 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.

59:24You could have would have should have taken the pill. You didn't, it's your choice. Therefore, the shotgun wedding that I would have done ten years ago And also is at the same time, and now you have the choice to abort the child. So if you don't want to, that's on you. Yeah. So I know, I'm not obliged to stick about the other one. The second story that she taught me about was this sort of erosion of chivalrous norms. And this sort of second wave, like second and third wave feminism kind of wanted to have, when you begin to get sort of sex difference denialism coming through. And they're saying things like, you know, why is it that men need to hold the door open for women?

1:00:02Why is it that men need to pay for the check on the first date? 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 of you being able to take control and not need a man as much in 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.

1:00:42Like 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 erosion of these chivalrous norms happened at the top, but most of the negative effect happened actually down at the bottom. So the fact that upper and middle class women got to laugh about how they split the check on the first date with their husband that they were now with with three kids 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.

1:01:25Yeah, so have you, you know, Rob Henderson's work? Of course I know Rob Henderson. We wrote it first of this as luxury beliefs, right? Defund the police. So two things on this, you know, I do emphasize in my book the role of economic forces is 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 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.

1:02:12And one of the things I say needs to happen in order to reverse these trends is an increase in the economic desirability of men. So we do need to 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 childcare responsibilities in the house. Said the person who's never read any evolutionary psychology.

1:02:58Or like, I mean, I love my husband, but like, really, I'm gonna 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 gonna happen. And even if you look at, you know, evidence now, be whatever vision you have for general quality 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.

1:03:40But 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 childcare. And we're just going to have husbands or co -resident parents or the dad stay home. It also, if you again if you just look at labor force participation rates, the majority of moms are working. So moms are doing boats. And so - But you don't understand, and I will explain this to you because you're a woman, that patriarchy is so powerful and all encompassing that we somehow manage to convince women that they should start working too, so that we could finally achieve our ultimate form, which is Xbox stay at home, down.

1:04:24Well, 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? 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.

1:04:58They're also going to work and so I think it's both much more realistic 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. We also have, you know, to kind of fold some more social norms stuff in. Did you read Christine Embers article in The Washington Post? Yeah, exactly. I had Christine 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, protect a provider pro -creator as some, but then even like 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.

1:05:49It's very, it's such a slippery slope to find some ask at a liberal newspaper that wants to say that this is toxic masculinity. Look, but there's, I can, 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 you 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.

1:06:41Correct. 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 that have hit men. And again, 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 financially independent.

1:07:29It 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 campaigning for women to become domestic prostitutes again. Like that's absolutely not it. 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 a rectile dysfunction medication. Yeah, I didn't know that one. It goes from the boardroom to the bedroom all the way down. Where did you get that stat?

1:08:06I will send you to study. I'm fully cited. I've got my footnotes hiding somewhere. So one of the other things that is an interesting, 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 upbringing? You know, criminality, mental health problems, physical health problems, mood disorders. Okay. 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.

1:08:58Like, I do, you know, 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, which is why it's so important to, again, really just like address the decline in the cheaper and 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 time ahead, but I have seen that and it is It is quite striking. I want to say 70 % it's a lot.

1:09:38It's a lot and of course it's You know, there's a lot racial groups Yeah, this was represented in the poverty neighborhoods exactly. There's a lot, 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 part of that reflects the fact that there's been a large reduction in the share of women of childbearing age who are married.

1:10:22And 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. But there are other things, and 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?

1:11:02life, 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. 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 about 30 I hit all my kids about 30 very the number of births to moms under 30 is pretty small in the aggregate and so despite the increase in birth over the age of 30, women are just having many fewer breasts over their life cycle.

1:11:57In the UK in 2021 or 2019, more women had children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20. Yeah, but again, but it's not making up for it. I know. It's not making up for it. If 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 to five. Yeah, or at least three. Yeah. No, that's right. That's right. So, so bursts are bursts away down. None of the simple explanations that people speculate about, like, oh, well, child cars become too expensive. The rents become too high. Everyone's worried about the climate. Everyone's worried about the climate.

1:12:38None 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. 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, then people who grew up in the 60s and 70s and early 80s. Like you just think that it's. 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.

1:13:32So that makes it easier for me to reject a bunch of explanations, but when you see it across the country, cross groups, across countries where I can speculate, one, you know, people have a different attitude about how they want to spend their adult time and money. 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.

1:14:16Across countries, they're more likely to say an 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 is an economic demographic challenge for high -income countries that we're not, you know, 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. Our economic productivity is going to go down.

1:15:02There 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 has been amazing on all of these topics. These guys are so I'm writing a book with David bus at the moment.

1:15:39So this is like like it's a dream for me About three and ten single adults who are not looking for relationship or dates say that COVID -19 concerns We're 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. 17 feel like no one would be interested. 14 feel like I'm too old and 10 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.

1:16:23Very individualistic, very sort of atomized, very isolated. they were coming out the back of COVID, I think that was maybe 2020 when the date it came from. But yeah, there's this mating crisis that we're seeing at the moment 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 Cooper's 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 in case any emotions of attachment decided to sneak in, like here's the neuro -linguistic programming to de -hack yourself from ever -feeling feelings again.

1:17:09It's a real, 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 no interesting you say that because when I, you know, year two ago, I was putting out a bunch of papers about just climbing fertility and the US and high income countries and what's behind it and what are the likely consequences and 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, 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 TikTok, like these memes and videos and whatever, telling you why it's really you don't want to have kids.

1:17:59And 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 sort of have a shrinking population. Well, it's going to take no matter how many TikToks of a girl with a list that's eight pages long saying that she can't wear cute heels to If she gets pregnant, there is no amount of TikToks that the Chinese can throw at this side of the world to catch up to their birth rate, right?

1:18:43They're beyond fucked. They're beyond fucked. The only people more fucked in their career, Japan and Japan. Yeah, no, that career is down to like the total fertility rate is 0 .8 kids per woman. This, I had, what's his name? Malcolm Collins, 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.

1:19:29And I wish I could remember it because you have all these really fun facts at the top of your head. But it was basically the shit, like the share of the people who will ever live in the world who have already been born. It's like discomfortingly. Well, I'm actually a way for it, but you should try and get yourself down to Austin for the pronatilist forum that's happening. That's happening in November or December this year. and I think it's pronatelism .org or pronatelist .org and it's all interventions for improving birth rates, especially in the West, etc, etc. Like how can we balance gender equality with economic flourishing and birth rate?

1:20:16Like how can we hold these three seemingly like fucking contradictory Yeah, designs 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 means I view here you go. I view marriage as a longer economic contract between two people right to share and pull resources and so and again I put love and mutual respect and front 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.

1:21:03But that has to go hand in hand with a restoration of the norm of a two -parent family, norms matter, social norms totally matter. And so, by the way, like one study we haven't talked about 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 at least like localized fracking. And we saw birth rates go up, but they went up in equal proportion among married and unmarried parents.

1:21:39And there was no effect on marriage rates. So it was basically, and if you looked at what happened in the 70s and 80s with the very similar co -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 household. How do we change norms? I mean, some of that I think is just being honest about the benefits of the two parent households.

1:22:17I am confident that we can both acknowledge the benefits of the two parent households, work to promote higher share of kids having the benefit of two parent households, the benefit of more adults, having the benefit of the marriage partner, 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 the family is a policy urgency, then we should be willing and committed to spending more public and philanthropic dollars on programs that are aimed at strengthening families.

1:23:14So 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. But they are families and so they need supports and they're expensive and they're under to have a good relationship who want to co -parent, how many hiring the people do you know pay for extensive marriage therapy? But then we'd never admit that that would be terrible if the government offered relationship glasses to unmarried parents, right?

1:23:52That sounds like something the Bush administration did. If you look at the budget for the administration and children and families, only 1 % goes to programs, to promote stable and safe families. 15 % goes to foster care, 6 % Christachite 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. 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.

1:24:40Does this go in tandem with tactics that can improve the birth rate as well?

1:24:50It'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, 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, 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.

1:25:36So 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, let me down this line of questioning and then I started thinking about that. But I think my instinct on that, yeah, I might change my mind in a couple of hours, but I think the harder task would be to increase the birth rate. 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 see people actively saying they don't want to get married.

1:26:20Now, 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. what does 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 family with Steven Shaw?

1:26:59He did birth gap? No I've seen his stuff and I've seen it referenced by like Lyme and 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. 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. This is child, this is specifically childlessness. Yeah. That they think they can certainly wound up childless. Yes, life circumstances are not finding a partner sufficiently quickly.

1:27:37You'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 squeezed that potential fertility window. I don't know. I mean, that, Stephen's stuff seems to be good. I can't, I'm not a statistician at all. It was the only, the only subject at GCSE that I managed to get below a C. So I got a D in stats 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.

1:28:08But I very much respect your job, but I have absolutely zero desire to start doing that. Despite how well you may advertise it to me, I am, I absolutely love your work. I think that. Oh, I'm so nice of you. Thank you so much. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on. This is great. My pleasure. I'm so happy for 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. Amazon their local book store Barnes & Noble University Chicago Press and then I'm at the University of Maryland.

1:28:47I have my faculty page at the University of Maryland with all my research and some information about the book. Very cool Melissa I appreciate Thank you. Thank you so much.