The Terrifying Impact Of Single-Parent Households - Melissa Kearney

1. 0:00 – 2:27

   Response to Melissa’s Book

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      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?

   2. MKMelissa Kearney0:11

      It's, a lot of it is, "Wow, you're brave," and I 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.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:05

      So has it been mostly plain sailing then?

   4. MKMelissa Kearney1:09

      Not plain sailing. There, you know, I, so far, the sort of vitriolic responses I've gotten have been entirely anticipated to the extent that there's a knee-jerk reaction from people who simply read the title, who haven't even read the book, who simply read the title, who say things like, "Oh my goodness, this again, 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.

   5. CWChris Williamson2:17

      If you expect an absolute shit storm and just get a small amount of shit-

   6. MKMelissa Kearney2:21

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson2:21

      ... I guess that, or, or an okay amount of shit, that proportionately, that should be fine. All right. So-

   8. MKMelissa Kearney2:26

      (laughs)

   9. CWChris Williamson2:26

      ... for people

2. 2:27 – 7:46

   What Has Been Happening to Marriage Rates?

   1. CWChris Williamson2:27

      who don't know, what's been happening with marriage rates?

   2. MKMelissa Kearney2:31

      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 from marriage. And really, we saw outside the college-educated class really increasing incidents of single-parent households, non-marital childbearing, and the rise in kids living in a one-parent household.

   3. CWChris Williamson3:30

      Right. What's been driving this decline? What's changed?

   4. MKMelissa Kearney3:34

      So mechanically, this is driven by a reduction in marriage and an increase in non-marital childbearing. And the way I think about it is really what's happened is there's been a decoupling of marriage from that act of having and raising kids. And that's important because the two things that aren't driving it that sometimes people will think, the two things that aren't driving it are divorce. Divorce is actually down conditional on marriage. So it's not that more people are getting divorced, it's that fewer people are getting married even when they're having kids. And the other thing that's not driving this is a rise in births among young or teen women. So sort of the, one of the really surprising things here is teen childbearing is down like over 70% from the mid '90s. I mean, that is just an amazing sort of social demographic trend. If you just looked at the decline in birth to teen and young women back... If, if I told you or if you told me in the '80s or '90s that, "Hey, the teen birth rate is gonna plummet over the next 30 years," I would have thought the share of kids living in a single-parent home, single mother home, would've also plummeted. And so all of this is happening basically despite the decline in birth and despite the decline in divorce.

   5. CWChris Williamson4:44

      Right. So you would've 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?

   6. MKMelissa Kearney4:56

      Yeah. And that basically was the story in the '70s and '80s when, when scholars first started paying attention to this. You know, people, there were people who sort of called attention to the fact that, "Hey, there's a pretty high share of kids in the US living in single-parent households." It was less than, you know, less... It, it was much lower than it is now. It was really predominantly among teen moms, very disadvantaged groups. What's happened is that that's sort of spread across the socioeconomic distribution. So now e- 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, it's a really wide class divide in family structure between the college-educated and everybody else.... is what's particularly noteworthy, and I think not quite appreciated.

   7. CWChris Williamson6:15

      Yeah, so what are the cohorts that are most likely to be single parent or two parent?

   8. MKMelissa Kearney6:21

      So m- moms with a four-year college degree, only 12% of their births are outside of marriage as compared to more than half of births to women without a four-year college degree. This is true, actually, this college gap holds within race, major race groups and ethnic groups in the US too, with one notable exception, which I'll mention. 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% of the kids whose moms have a college degree live in a two-parent household as compared to a little bit more than 60%. If you look within black, the children of Black moms, the levels are higher for both. So 60% of kids who have, you know, moms who identify as Black in the census and have a four-year college degree live in a married parent home as compared to only 30% of kids whose moms are Black and don't have a college degree. So, so there's these differences var- these differences exist both across and within race and ethnic groups, except for Asian-Americans who have exceptionally high rates of two-parent households regardless of education or income. Like, you know, more than 80% of those kids, even if their parents are, have low levels of education, are living in two-parent households.

   9. CWChris Williamson7:40

      Goddamn Asian privilege all over again. Um, so

3. 7:46 – 14:52

   How College Degrees Are Influencing Childbirth & Marriage Rates

   1. CWChris Williamson7:46

      (laughs) 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.

   2. MKMelissa Kearney7:57

      Yeah. This-

   3. CWChris Williamson7:59

      You know?

   4. MKMelissa Kearney7:59

      ... is a, yeah, it's a really good question. So, um, my read of all of the evidence a- 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 th- the norms around having kids and marriage shifted. But then there was a di- And that, again, affected st- almost everyone sort of equally across the education distribution.

   5. CWChris Williamson8:32

      Just be specific there for me. When you say the norms around having kids and marriage changed, what do you actually mean?

   6. MKMelissa Kearney8:37

      I mean, everybody became less likely to get married in the '60s and '70s. Let's stipulate that, okay? And ev-

   7. CWChris Williamson8:43

      Because of relationships, cohabitation, and children outside of wedlock were more socially acceptable.

   8. MKMelissa Kearney8:48

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson8:48

      Is that what you mean?

   10. MKMelissa Kearney8:48

       Right, right, right. But then what happened in the '80s and '90s was a divergence in economic situations and realities, okay? So over the past 40 years, college-educated folks have continued to work at high rates, their earnings have continued to grow. They've done really well economically. A whole bunch of different economic shocks, technological developments, globalization, those have all been to the benefits of college-educated adults. In both America and, by the way, in other high-income countries, we see similar things happening. Outside the college-educated class, a lot of economic shocks came and hurt non-college-educated adults, men in particular. Increased import competition from China really sort of, you know, led to the elimination of lots 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 the s- over the same decades, there's been technological developments, adoption of industrial robots eliminated a lot of, again, middle s- 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 i- outside married parent homes. So I think what's gone on is basically you've had this interaction of economic shocks that have made the value proposition of marriage weaker for non-college-educated adults. So here's where people are like, "Are you saying people get married for economics instead of love?" Like, I get all that. (laughs) 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 who 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 e- sort of in and out of work 'cause these economic struggles, doesn't make as much as she does, whether, you know, that man sees himself as like, "Yeah, I totally wanna get married and have a family to take care of. I have a sta- you know, uh, uh, my employment situation is weak," you just see marriage has, you know, lost its... Fewer people in that class, outside the college-educated, again, outside the college-educated class are getting married. Here's another really interesting thing though. In survey evidence and ethnog- ethnographic evidence, you know, sociologists interview people who are unmarried couples, what are they saying? They're not saying that they don't want to be married, right? So it's not that we don't see survey evidence or anecdotal evidence suggesting that college-educated people continue to like the institution more as an institution. What we see is that...... a lot of people with lower levels of education, limited income say, "Yeah, I, I, I wanna, I want a good marriage. I want a stable, healthy relationship, but there's a lot of barriers. It's hard to achieve. Um, I wanna wait until, you know, I'm in a good place. I wanna 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 that women are putting having kids before getting married, um, because the economics aren't all in order.

   11. CWChris Williamson12:49

       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.

   12. MKMelissa Kearney13:05

       I agree, and this gets to the point of why I think it's important that we surface this issue and talk about it honestly, because having a kid and raising a kid and setting up a household is expensive, it's costly, takes a lot of time. So I, I am with you. The idea of doing this by myself being easier than doing it by somebody else, you really have to not think that that marriage or having that, you know, the dad of your child living in the house, that really has to be a not-a-great proposition. And so it raises the following question in my mind. 40% of kids in this country are born outside marriage, right? Outside the college-educated class, that's more than 50%. Among black moms, that's 70%. Is it really possible that 40% of dads overall, 50% of dads, you know, who have had a child with a woman who doesn't have a college degree, 70% of dads who have had a child with a black m- mother, is it really possible that they wouldn't be net contributors, positive contributors to the household? It feels far-fetched to me that it's that high, and this is why I think it's both reflecting... Economics might have gotten us to this situation, but now in a lot of these communities for a lot of these groups, these norms have been broken, and so people maybe have a higher bar for marriage than having a child with somebody. Maybe they're like, "Yeah, you know, this is an acceptable thing for us not to be married, for us to be living apart, for us to have this kid." Um, if it's anywhere near the case that this many dads just wouldn't be positive contributors if they lived in the house or were married to the mom, then we have a remarkable crisis of men in this country, right?

   13. CWChris Williamson14:51

       So what if,

4. 14:52 – 25:30

   Are Women Misjudging What Men Want?

   1. CWChris Williamson14:52

      if... Presuming that that's not the case, 'cause that sounds insane, what do you think it is that women are misjudging about the men that are around them?

   2. MKMelissa Kearney15:02

      So let me be clear. I can only see in the data, I'm gonna use an economic term for a second, the equilibrium outcome. I can only see whether this couple lives together. Whether that's the man deciding, "I don't wanna commit to that," or the woman deciding, "I don't want him living in this house"-

   3. CWChris Williamson15:18

      Mm-hmm.

   4. MKMelissa Kearney15:18

      ... "I can't tell." So it's some combination of the two. So I don't wanna describe this as i- 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 anecdotal evidence from interviews, a lot of these women, they're not saying, "I really wanna do this by myself." They're saying, "I want, you know, I want a partner. This is hard. This is lonely." And so figuring out what's, what's breaking down in those communities. Are men not feeling as socially on the hook, right? Are they not feeling like... I mean, clearly, it's much more acceptable for t- today for somebody to say, "Yeah, that's my child, and I don't live with them, but you know, I help out." That's not the same thing. And so where it's breaking down I think is important to look at, but the other thing that we have to be really clear-eyed about is there are, again, this certainly wouldn't be true for every situation or every dad we're talking about because the numbers are so shockingly high, but for a lot of dads, again, when you look at just sort of the data on who's participating in these fatherhood programs or these healthy marriage initiatives or strengthening families initiatives in these communities with high levels of unmarried parents, there are a lot of barriers, meaning a lot of the dads have unstable employment. A lot of the dads have criminal histories. A lot of the dads struggle with alcohol and drug abuse. All of those societal challenge, societ- 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 are like, "Oh, judgy married lady telling people they should be married." When you look at what's happening in those communities and how hard it is for them, it is really counterproductive and actually not at all helpful or empathetic to deny that, "Hey, it's hard to, it's hard to parent alone."... and more people should be able to achieve a two-parent household for themselves and their kids.

   5. CWChris Williamson17:46

      I have an article that I want to quote to you. Uh, you may know this, uh, Nicole Rogers wrote something a little while ago.

   6. MKMelissa Kearney17:54

      No, tell me.

   7. CWChris Williamson17:55

      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 s- circumstantial infertility, and it describes a person who is physically capable of having a child and desires one, but hasn't become a parent yet because of social work or financial constraints. Rogers cites research that found 42% of women aged 40 to 44 said they want a tile, a child, but fewer than half say they intended to have one. She quotes another study saying that nearly half of so-called PANKs, professional aunt no kids, said they wanted a child, but most said they would not consider becoming a single parent. 'If society would only let go of the quaint notion that families headed by two married parents is best for raising children,' Rogers said, 'we could solve a host of problems to include ill-advised marriages, the plummeting fertility rate, and the yearnings of PANKs.' It's time to let go of outdated and inaccurate ideas about how families should form and create a culture and policy landscape that helps all women have the children they want,' she concludes. To her credit, 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 at the fact that she wasn't going to have a family. So she thought, "I'm now single, I've been in this relationship for so long, and oh my God, I'm not gonna have a family. Hang on a second, why do I need to not have a family just because I don't have a partner anymore?" Then at 37, she got married again, and at 40 she had a kid, happily married with her partner. So, the stated and revealed preferences perhaps don't fully align. But what do you think? What do you think about this little quote, the ideological bias-

   8. MKMelissa Kearney19:39

      I think this is, this is-

   9. CWChris Williamson19:39

      ... that favors nuclear families?

   10. MKMelissa Kearney19:40

       No, this is a pretty typical quote from a highly educated progressive woman who doesn't want to feel like her choices are restricted or judged in any way. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a quote like that from a woman who is making $27,000, $27,000 a year, working two jobs, has two kids at home, doesn't get a check from her child's father. I think you're more likely to find a quote, and you are if you look at, you know, the eth- again, the sort of ethnographic evidence, or just go talk to some of these women and, who are in programs, you know, aimed at helping single moms get by. They're more likely to say, "Yeah, I actually, this is really hard, and I would prefer to have somebody committed to me and my child helping pay the bills." Uh, and so I, I think, again, I, I think it's phenomenally... I'm 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 beneficial. Look at the data. Kids do much better when they come from two-parent homes." And it's not surprising and it's not rocket science. And the mechanisms, you can see them in the data, but also anyone who looks around and has common sense can observe them. Two parents have more earnings capacity than one. If one person, you know, loses their job, there's a second person who could pick up hours. Two parents have more time than one. We see in the data kids who live with married parents get more time from their parents. Two parents have more collective bandwidth. We see in the data that moms who are single, who don't have another, you know, a spouse or a co-parent in the house, they're much more likely to engage in, you know, parenting that you'd expect you'd engage in if you don't have the time or the bandwidth to sit down and read to your kid, to patiently talk to them. So, we see in the data all these differences, it's not rocket science, and it's just, it's just a lie, frankly, to suggest that any parent, any household structure is equally likely to be able to deliver a high level of resources to kids. It's just a lie. And so we should be able to say that without it sounding like a judgment that anyone is, you know, not doing their best. Where I'm coming from is I think we should ask, why is it that college-educated women, women like Nicole Rogers who are probably the best positioned actually to financially maintain a household by themselves, why are they the ones least likely to be doing it by themselves? Right? How come all these other women who don't have the same earnings potential, who don't come from the same types of backgrounds, how come they're so much more likely to be doing this really hard job without somebody in the house helping them?

   11. CWChris Williamson22:52

       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 to... It's the same, it's the exact same as Alex Cooper, you know, from Call Her Daddy?

   12. MKMelissa Kearney23:12

       No.

   13. CWChris Williamson23:13

       Right. So Call Her Daddy is, uh, Call Her Daddy is like a chick podcast on Spotify. She got bought by Spotify the same time that Joe Rogan did, so she's like super, super, mega time podcaster. And, 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, uh, uh, very, very open about her sex life, how casual it was, how she didn't need to be tied down, how commitment was kind of a waste of time.... and then for the last three and a half years, she'd been secretly having a relationship with someone, then got engaged, this beautiful engagement. He got down on one knee in a rose garden and, uh, proposed to her, and now she's so, so happy and she can't wait. Meanwhile, she has this wake, this cultural sort of fucking 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-

   14. MKMelissa Kearney24:32

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson24:33

       ... I think, I think that's-

   16. MKMelissa Kearney24:33

       You know, I hear, I get this... Look, I get this from men too, right? Plenty of economist men, 'cause I happen to talk to more economist men than economist women 'cause there are more of them, when they're like, "Oh my gosh, are you sure you wanna say this? Like, you sound so socially conservative writing this book," and I'm like, "Every time I talk to you, you're talking about, oh my god, I just had to help my kid with their history homework. Oh, I have to go coach my kid's little league team. How many hours do you put into 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 wanna judge other wom- 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.

   17. CWChris Williamson25:28

       Let's roll the, the clock forward. I wanna

5. 25:30 – 30:20

   Why Are Declining Marriages a Bad Thing?

   1. CWChris Williamson25:30

      talk about kids, but what are the other reasons why declining marriage is a bad thing, before we talk about outcomes for children?

   2. MKMelissa Kearney25:39

      So again, I think (laughs) 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 gonna tell you about it because it's certainly a suggestion and a very plausible one. It's also, you know, likely... We already talked about it's hard for the moms, but it's not necessarily great for the dads too. And so if you just look at what happens, what's happened to men as they've sort of been pushed outside, like, their economic status has decreased, but they've also been pushed to the sidelines of family life. And again, we know descriptively that the 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, e- engage in criminal activity, right? There is suggestions, both for men and women, that when you have a kid, it sort of forces you to be more responsible as an adult. So I think a lot of these societal changes and struggles that we're seeing, of people doing less well economically, their health is not in good condition, their, 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.

   3. CWChris Williamson27:54

      There is a trend on the internet at the moment of, uh, marriages are a bad deal for men because of, uh-

   4. MKMelissa Kearney28:00

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson28:00

      ... 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-onset dementia. They have later-onset Alzheimer's.

   6. MKMelissa Kearney28:20

      (laughs)

   7. CWChris Williamson28:20

      Uh, women tend to live around about the same amount of time-

   8. MKMelissa Kearney28:23

      (laughs)

   9. CWChris Williamson28:23

      ... uh, it seems, um, but-

   10. MKMelissa Kearney28:25

       We can speculate on that. I mean, I could spin a thousand stories.

   11. CWChris Williamson28:27

       Yeah, I think they gain a little bit, but probably lose a little bit in some regards. Um, but you know, the single biggest determinant of the, uh, y- your lifespan and your healthspan as well are the number of close relationships you have. This is more than smoking.

   12. MKMelissa Kearney28:41

       Right.

   13. CWChris Williamson28:41

       It's more than going to the gym. It's more than stopping alcohol. It's more than getting a good night's sleep. It's more than losing weight. It is the most important thing. This is from the, uh, that r- Dr. Robert Waldinger, 80-year study longevi- uh, uh, longi- longitudinal study that he's been doing. Your partner, a committed partner of any kind, is a huge buttress against all of these problems. They are the breakwater that, that the vicissitudes of life can smash up against. So I think from the most solipsistic, individual, atomized, fuck-the-world situation, like, just get another person, right?

   14. MKMelissa Kearney29:18

       Yeah, right.

   15. CWChris Williamson29:18

       Forget, even if you don't intend on having kids or the rest of it. So I do think that the, the case for marriage... And Brad Wilcox from the Institute of Family Studies-

   16. MKMelissa Kearney29:25

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson29:25

       ... has got a book coming out, I think on Valentine's Day.

   18. MKMelissa Kearney29:28

       That's right.

   19. CWChris Williamson29:28

       It's like, The Case for Marriage, um, and I think that that'll be a lovely one-two with what you've done as well.

   20. MKMelissa Kearney29:35

       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 wellbeing and happiness if you're married. Um, and so they are complementary in that, in that sense.

   21. CWChris Williamson30:19

       Okay,

6. 30:20 – 41:35

   Differences in Kids Raised in Two-Parent & One-Parent Homes

   1. CWChris Williamson30:20

      let's get into the kids.

   2. MKMelissa Kearney30:22

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson30:22

      What are the differences in outcomes for kids growing up in a single parent versus a two-parent household?

   4. MKMelissa Kearney30:29

      So we can, we can start by seeing that in the immediate term... Let me, let me emphasize some, like, basic things. If a kid only lives in a household with, you know, h- uh, uh, 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 in enriching activities and educational activities. They basically have more opportunities. You can see this in the most, you know, simple way, like it's really expensive to play for cup, 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, 'cause 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 (laughs) internally they're more likely to act out, in what psychologists refer to as externalizing behavior. Girls are more likely to internalize it. So I don't want to say that girls are necessarily not struggling as much, but boys are more likely to act out, which means they're more likely to get in trouble in school, and they're more likely to get suspended. And that cascades. Then we also see that they're more likely to be involved with the criminal justice system. So it's just, again, getting back to, like, the idea of, oh, let's stop pretending like two parents are beneficial, there is no way to look at the data and the studies and not feel like, oh wow, kids from two parent homes are much less likely to get in trouble in school, they're much less likely to get suspended, they're much more likely to be engaged in crime, they're more likely to graduate high school, they're more likely to graduate college, they're more likely to have higher earnings as an adult, they're more likely to be married as an adult, less likely to be a single parent themselves. This is, again, why this is so crucial for us to address, because we are, by allowing this class divide in family structure to continue, it's accentuating inequality. It's undermining soc- 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.

   5. CWChris Williamson33:22

      Have you been able to analyze whether the children of single parent households are more likely to become the parents of single parent households?

   6. MKMelissa Kearney33:29

      That is something that lots of people have documented. That's well-established.

   7. CWChris Williamson33:35

      So you also, you almost have this kind of recursive feedback loop that makes it evermore common?

   8. MKMelissa Kearney33:41

      100%. And also, to get back to the conversation we were having about, like, what's up with men that so many of 'em 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, um, the economists Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan 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. And 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, if they're not in-

   9. CWChris Williamson34:46

      Especially if it's a boisterous boy.

   10. MKMelissa Kearney34:48

       Especially if it's a boisterous boy and you don't have someone else to be like, "Could you, could you take over? I need a break." Right? So we just see, they see in the data, in these data sets that record, like, do you spank your kid, what, how connected do you feel with your kid, how much time do you spend with your kid, you see that boys from single mother homes get less of that. But what's really interesting is that boys are particularly responsive to that. So let's say the differences in the parental inputs or investments are small, how they respond to that is large, right? Another way to think about this is, I have a daughter and a son. If I, you know, sort of ignore my daughter, whatever, she's probably not gonna go to school and get in trouble. If I am, like, harsh with my son, if I don't put as much time into him, if he's really struggling, he's more likely to go to school and get in trouble. Right? Like-

   11. CWChris Williamson35:40

       Mm-hmm.

   12. MKMelissa Kearney35:40

       ... 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 Insights Lab at Harvard. This is the lab run by Raj Chetty and colleagues that has, you know, access to millions of tax records, so they know exactly where kids grew up and then they follow them into adulthood. The single biggest predictor of whether a Black boy sort of climbs the economic ladder into adulthood at a neighborhood level, so what neighborhood characteristics are most predictive of economically good outcomes for Black boys-

   13. CWChris Williamson36:32

       Can I guess?

   14. MKMelissa Kearney36:33

       ... go ahead.

   15. CWChris Williamson36:34

       The proportion of single fathers.

   16. MKMelissa Kearney36:36

       The presence of Black dads in the neighborhood.

   17. CWChris Williamson36:39

       Yeah.

   18. MKMelissa Kearney36:39

       So beyond just having a dad in your house, if you have, if there's a bunch of, you know, if the households around you, Black households around you also have dads, single biggest predictor of whether you do well economically in adulthood. And, and so there, again, who's being helped by, by us denying that Black boys in particular, as if like all of the discrimination we know they face, all of these other barriers, like those boys are, are being harmed by not having dads around. And so this gets back to the intergenerational nature of this. The more boys we have growing up without dads in the house, the less likely they are to sort of thrive and be their best selves when they grow up, which means the less capable they're gonna be to be supportive, reliable-

   19. CWChris Williamson37:28

       Yeah.

   20. MKMelissa Kearney37:28

       ... married dads. And again, this is just, like we've gotta break this cycle.

   21. CWChris Williamson37:33

       Yeah, it's this, uh, ouroboros of like ineligibility and irresponsibility and that then creates another generation, that creates another generation, that creates another generation. So have you read Anna Machen's The Life of Dad?

   22. MKMelissa Kearney37:52

       No.

   23. CWChris Williamson37:53

       This is something-

   24. MKMelissa Kearney37:54

       I did.

   25. CWChris Williamson37:54

       ... something that you should absolutely read. So she's an evolutionary anthropologist. She came out of Robin Dunbar's lab at Oxford. And, um, I just had her on the show. I'll send you the episode, you can listen to it.

   26. MKMelissa Kearney38:03

       Okay, great.

   27. CWChris Williamson38:03

       Um, uh, and she talks about the importance of fatherhood.

   28. MKMelissa Kearney38:07

       Yeah.

   29. CWChris Williamson38:07

       Um, uh, from a, from a, a developmental perspective and she looks at it through an anthropological lens, she looks at it 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, uh, 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, 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, uh, allowing of risk taking behavior a little bit more is good. Now the interesting thing, the really interesting thing I learned from her that I think you would love to fold into some of your work is what happens to adolescent girls without a father.

   30. MKMelissa Kearney38:54

       Yeah.
7. 41:35 – 50:25

   Cohabiting Vs Marriage

   1. CWChris Williamson41:35

      couple just stick together? Why is marriage, the institution which is so crucial to make this work?

   2. MKMelissa Kearney41:41

      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, 'cause they're like, "Stop like with the old-fashioned obsession with marriage, people could be cohabiting." At a prac- as a practical matter, in the US.... cohabitation is not the same relationship that marriage is. And 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, as a practical matter, cohabitation is not making up for it. So, you know, 30% of kids outside the college-educated class in the US are living with just their mom. Okay? Just their mom. Only like, you know, 8% more are living with their mom and her partner, in the majority, but a lar- you know, not all of them. That might be the kid's, uh, 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.

   3. CWChris Williamson43:17

      What about step-parents?

   4. MKMelissa Kearney43:19

      So step-parent is complicated in the following sense. So to be clear, in my, in my book I just put step-parents with married parents, 'cause I'm just... And b- and by the way, I put same-sex parents with married, with mar-

   5. CWChris Williamson43:33

      That's, that's-

   6. MKMelissa Kearney43:34

      ... parents.

   7. CWChris Williamson43:34

      ... married step-parents though, right? So a-

   8. MKMelissa Kearney43:36

      Yeah. Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson43:36

      ... mother, mother typically mother gives birth to-

   10. MKMelissa Kearney43:38

       So with the married step-parent... Yeah, so... And the reason why, like... Because I'm taking this resource perspective, but when you look at the studies, like sociologists are more likely to sort of really dig into the nitty-gritty of, what about this arrangement, what about that parent arrangement? You know, basically, re-married parents' kids outcomes s- are somewhere between the outcomes of married parents and single parents. Step-parents are complicated because a lot of step-parent situations you're not getting a good relationship for the kid. Um, and so that, that just, you know... It's a, it's a, it's... Step-parents are not the same as two married biological parents. We just, again, we see that in the data. It's not as protective or beneficial for kids. Um, the reason why I don't-

   11. CWChris Williamson44:24

       Oh, there's a what, 100, 100X increase in mortality risk if you have one non-biological-

   12. MKMelissa Kearney44:30

       Oh-

   13. CWChris Williamson44:30

       ... parent in the household?

   14. MKMelissa Kearney44:32

       It... That could be, but remember, we're talking about really small numbers. (laughs)

   15. CWChris Williamson44:35

       I know.

   16. MKMelissa Kearney44:36

       Like the mortality risk is really small, so 100 times-

   17. CWChris Williamson44:39

       But the point, my, my, my, my-

   18. MKMelissa Kearney44:39

       ... 100 is, is plausible but yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson44:40

       My point being that it's hard to raise a child.

   20. MKMelissa Kearney44:43

       Yes.

   21. CWChris Williamson44:43

       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.

   22. MKMelissa Kearney44:50

       Yeah.

   23. CWChris Williamson44:50

       Right? Like it's-

   24. MKMelissa Kearney44:51

       Totally.

   25. CWChris Williamson44:51

       ... raw sort of Darwinian logic, but it's the truth. Like it's-

   26. MKMelissa Kearney44:55

       Yeah.

   27. CWChris Williamson44:55

       It, it's hard and you're tired and it's crying and it won't stop crying-

   28. MKMelissa Kearney44:57

       Yeah.

   29. CWChris Williamson44:57

       ... and it's the third time that it's pooped a diaper, and this isn't even my kid.

   30. MKMelissa Kearney45:01

       And this... So you could, you could... You know, y- these things run the gamut. So you can also say that like, yes, kids living with step-parents are more likely to die, they're more likely to be sexually abused, but at a less sort of, uh, you know, drastic or tragic level. Kids living with step-moms are less likely to go to the doctor regularly, as compared to their moms, right? So we do see in the data that biological parents invest more in their kids, spend more time with their kids, you know, 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 two... You know, a household with two parents, married parents, biological parents, step-parents, what's happening at a societal level is not that so many biological parents are getting divorced and they're remarrying and step-parents aren't making as many investments. What's happened is, there's been an unbelievable increase in the share of parents who are never getting married. Right? So again, more... You know, m- m- slightly more than half of births to moms who don't have a four-year college degree, those moms aren't married. And so... And, and actually like the majority of unpartnered moms now were never married. And so that's, again, coming at it as an economist rather than somebody who focuses on relationships, but I'm focused on resources. Those families are just really under-resourced.
8. 50:25 – 58:30

   The Lack of Substitute Father Figures for Boys

   1. CWChris Williamson50:25

      Richard Reeves is a fan of your work. I think you guys have worked together at the Brookings Institute, right?

   2. MKMelissa Kearney50:29

      Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, the, the writ- mutual, uh, admiration there.

   3. CWChris Williamson50:34

      So in his book, he talks about there are four times as many female fighter pilots in the US Air Force by percentage than there are kindergarten teachers that are male in the US. So, you know, you just have a massive dearth of father and male, uh, substitute father, right? Surrogate father, even if it's only for five or six hours during the day, replacement in a child's life.

   4. MKMelissa Kearney50:59

      Yeah, that's right.

   5. CWChris Williamson50:59

      You have a boisterous, you have a boisterous boy. He's high in extroversion, he's high in openness, he's low in conscientiousness, right? High neuroticism. He's gonna 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, uh, uh-

   6. MKMelissa Kearney51:13

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson51:13

      ... excluded from school for the same transgression that a girl does-

   8. MKMelissa Kearney51:17

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson51:17

      ... because it's mostly women that are dealing with this boy and they can't understand and use the theory of mind. We've gone from a brawn-based to a brain-based economy. Most of the jobs and education that gets you the jobs, and most of the criteria by which people are being selected skew toward a personality profile that is mostly female.

   10. MKMelissa Kearney51:35

       Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, all of these 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 th- this like amazed me when my kid, my boy went to school, um, and he was like, "We're..." What did he say? Th- 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 can throw a football." The football got confiscated by the principal. He wasn't allowed to throw a football. And you're just like, "What? What are boys supposed to do to get out their energy?" 'Cause 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, uh, you know, I'm very much a fan of what Richard's doing, which is bringing attention to this issue.

   11. CWChris Williamson53:08

       Mm-hmm.

   12. MKMelissa Kearney53:08

       Like, "Hey, isn't this great? Girls are really doing well." But some, but boys aren't doing so well. They're less, they're more likely to get in trouble at school, they're more likely to get in trouble with the law, they're less likely to go to college, they're, you know, young adults now... Richard says this in his book, and you see this in, you know, our national statistics, young adults, girls are much more likely to be getting a bachelor's degree.

   13. CWChris Williamson53:33

       Two to one.

   14. MKMelissa Kearney53:34

       Huh.

   15. CWChris Williamson53:34

       Two to one.

   16. MKMelissa Kearney53:35

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson53:35

       By 2030, it'll be women earn 1,111 pounds more than men between the 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.

   18. MKMelissa Kearney53:51

       Yeah. Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson53:51

       Even if you've already-

   20. MKMelissa Kearney53:52

       Yep.

   21. CWChris Williamson53:53

       ... 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?

   22. MKMelissa Kearney54:02

       Yeah, 100%.

   23. CWChris Williamson54:02

       Like, 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 fucking, like, policy wonk bourgeois tits.

   24. MKMelissa Kearney54:33

       (laughs)

   25. CWChris Williamson54:33

       Like, they- they can't bear to be able to point the finger at anything which might have a disproportionate ethnic group or a disproportionate class-based group, because it makes them sound like the secret racists that everybody thinks that they are in the first place.

   26. MKMelissa Kearney54:46

       Right. Right.

   27. CWChris Williamson54:47

       And you go, okay, okay, this is the exact same logic as telling Black kids that turning up on time is a sign-

   28. MKMelissa Kearney54:54

       Yeah, yeah.

   29. CWChris Williamson54:54

       ... of white supremacy.

   30. MKMelissa Kearney54:55

       Right.
9. 58:30 – 1:08:24

   Consequences of Eroding Chivalrous Norms

   1. CWChris Williamson58:30

      a very good, that's a very good point. I do think... there's- there's a great story from Mary Harrington. Did you read, uh-

   2. MKMelissa Kearney58:37

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson58:37

      ... the, the, uh... fucking, what was it called?

   4. MKMelissa Kearney58:40

      (laughs)

   5. CWChris Williamson58:40

      Uh, Feminism Against Progress. Thank God. Uh, so in that, she told me a story that when the introduction of the pill came in, there was a decrease, there was an increase in single motherhood when the pill came in.

   6. MKMelissa Kearney58:54

      Yep.

   7. CWChris Williamson58:54

      And you're nod- you're nodding like you know the story already.

   8. MKMelissa Kearney58:55

      This is an economics paper. This is, like, published in a top economics journal, and I remember seeing the authors present it when I was in grad school a million years ago. Yes.

   9. CWChris Williamson59:03

      So it's a perfect example.

   10. MKMelissa Kearney59:05

       Yes.

   11. CWChris Williamson59:05

       And for- for the, for the people that don't know, it- it, 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.

   12. MKMelissa Kearney59:24

       Yep.

   13. CWChris Williamson59:24

       You coulda, woulda, shoulda taken the pill, you didn't, it's your choice. Therefore, the shotgun wedding that I would have done 10 years ago, before the pill existed, is off.

   14. MKMelissa Kearney59:31

       And it- and also, it was 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.

   15. CWChris Williamson59:37

       Yeah, so I have no-

   16. MKMelissa Kearney59:38

       And- and, yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson59:38

       ... I'm not obliged to stick about. The other one, the second story that she told 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 a 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-

   18. MKMelissa Kearney1:00:09

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson1:00:09

       ... very surface-level fragile, but a- a version of female empowerment, right? Of- of you being able to take control and not need a man as much, and it was this sort of independence movement. But what Mary brought up was, that was fine for the upper strata of women who were dating men who had been educated on how to treat a woman in any case. But-... "You should hold the door open for a woman and make sure that she gets home safe when she gets in a taxi" is one just slippery slope spectrum all the way down to, "You shouldn't hit your wife."

   20. MKMelissa Kearney1:00:42

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson1:00:42

       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, 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 LARP about how they, they split the check on the first date with their husband that they were now with, with three kids and- a- and 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.

   22. MKMelissa Kearney1:01:25

       Yeah, so, uh, have you... Do you know Rob Henderson's work? So-

   23. CWChris Williamson1:01:29

       Of course I know Rob Henderson.

   24. MKMelissa Kearney1:01:30

       Yeah. So he re- refers to this as luxury beliefs, right?

   25. CWChris Williamson1:01:33

       Correct, yeah.

   26. MKMelissa Kearney1:01:33

       Um, so-

   27. CWChris Williamson1:01:33

       Defund the police.

   28. MKMelissa Kearney1:01:35

       So two things on this. You know, I do, uh, emphasize in, in my book the role of economic forces in sort of pushing down rates of marriage and increasing rates of single-parent households outside the social edu- 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 childcare responsibilities in the house?"

   29. CWChris Williamson1:02:54

       Said the person who's never read any evolutionary psychology.

   30. MKMelissa Kearney1:02:58

       Or, 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 ser- you know, evidence now, be whatever vision you have for gender equality in terms of these expectations in the home, we are very far from a place where that's going to be widespread desired across couples, right? Like, we just even see in the data that when a wife makes more than her husband, divorce rates increase. I'm not saying that's a good thing. I'm just saying we're very far from that norm. But the other place it takes me is, is that really the liberation we're going for? That, like, now we work, and by the way, women are still gonna do housework and childcare.
10. 1:08:24 – 1:10:10

    How Many of Societal Problems Are Due to Single-Parent Households?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:08:24

       do you think are downstream from single parent upbringings? You know, criminality, uh-

    2. MKMelissa Kearney1:08:30

       (laughs)

    3. CWChris Williamson1:08:31

       ... uh, mental health problems-

    4. MKMelissa Kearney1:08:32

       Yeah.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:08:32

       ... physical health problems, mood disorders?

    6. MKMelissa Kearney1:08:36

       Okay. I- I don't even know how to try and put a percentage on it. This is the kind of thing that I feel like Larry Summers would say, "It is between this much and this much." I have no idea how to put a number on it, so I will punt, but still get myself in trouble by saying a non-negligible amount. Like I- I do, you know, this- this is not to be ignored. That's, right? That's sort of the point as to why I'm highlighting this. Like we just know that these kids are at an elevated risk of all of those antisocial behaviors, um, and which is why it's so important to- to again, really just like address the decline in the two parent household.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:09:21

       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?

    8. MKMelissa Kearney1:09:29

       I know that- that I don't have it off the top of my head, but I have seen that and it is, uh, it is quite striking. Uh-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:09:36

       I want to say 70%.

    10. MKMelissa Kearney1:09:37

        It's a lot. It's a lot. And of course it's, you know, there's a lot, um-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:09:42

        Disproportionate racial groups-

    12. MKMelissa Kearney1:09:44

        ... tied up, yeah.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:09:44

        ... represented, blah, blah, blah, blah.

    14. MKMelissa Kearney1:09:45

        Disproportionate 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.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:09:56

        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?

    16. MKMelissa Kearney1:10:09

        Yeah. So

11. 1:10:10 – 1:20:25

    The Connection Between Marriage Rates & Birth Rates

    1. MKMelissa Kearney1:10:10

       birth rates are way down and- and part of that reflects the fact that there's been a large reduction in the share of women of childbearing age who are married. And so given everything I've said and how, you know, how many more births now are non-marital, this might sound contradictory, but it's not. Unmarried women have fewer kids and are less likely to have kids than married women. So if you just, you know, accept that married fertility is higher than unmarried fertility, moving so many women of childbearing age from marriage to the unmarried status means we have a reduction in fertility. Um, but there are other things, and again, these things are sort of endogenous, like, "Do I wanna get married? Do I wanna have kids? How important is sort of having a family to my adult life?" There's been a lot of shifts across recent cohorts and how much they prioritize that. So there's some other trends happening, forces changing that are driving down both birth rates and marriage in tandem. But in general, birth rates are way down among everybody, right? (laughs) So young women, e- basically every age group under the age of 30 is having fewer kids than they used to. Above age 30, we're seeing higher birth rates than in the past. But again, despite what you might think, because so many college educated women and the women who, you know, write in newspapers and stuff are themselves having kids above 30, I had all my kids above 30, very- the number of births to moms under 30 is pretty small in the aggregate. And so despite the increase in births over the age of 30, um, women are ha- just having many fewer births over their life cycle, and so birth rate-

    2. CWChris Williamson1:11:57

       In the UK in 2021 or 2020, '19, uh, more women had children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20.

    3. MKMelissa Kearney1:12:07

       Yeah. But- but, and again, but it's not making up for it.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:12:11

       I know.

    5. MKMelissa Kearney1:12:11

       Right? It's not making up for it.

    6. NANarrator1:12:13

       It- it-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:12:13

       But if you have, if you have a child at 41, that's your, that's maybe your one child.

    8. MKMelissa Kearney1:12:17

       Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:12:18

       If you have a child at 19, that's the first of five.

    10. MKMelissa Kearney1:12:21

        Yeah. Or at least three.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:12:22

        Yeah.

    12. MKMelissa Kearney1:12:22

        Yeah. No, that's right. That's right. So- so births are, births are way down. None of the simple explanations that people speculate about like, "Oh, well, childcare has become too expensive. The rent's become too high."

    13. CWChris Williamson1:12:35

        Everyone's worried about the climate.

    14. MKMelissa Kearney1:12:37

        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 US in 2007 and all of a sudden changed in the UK, you know, in the 1990s. Um-... my read, again, of what's going on, both looking in the US and the similarities across other high income countries, kids who grew up in the 80s and 90s are much less interested in becoming parents or having more than one kid, even if they are parents, than people who grew up in the 60s and 70s early 80s. Like, you just see this shift-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:13:18

        Why do you think that is?

    16. MKMelissa Kearney1:13:19

        ... I only can speculate, and again, this isn't 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, well, 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, k- 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 i- this is an economic demographic challenge for high income countries, um, that we're not... Uh, you know, our po- our working age population is rapidly gonna be shrinking. There are going to be more childless people in old age. We're not gonna be able to sustain our social insurance programs. Um, our economic productivity is gonna go down. There are economic and demographic challenges that are gonna 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.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:15:27

        Did you see the Pew data that came out on Valentine's Day this year?

    18. MKMelissa Kearney1:15:32

        The Pew data's been amazing on all of these topics.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:15:35

        These guys are... So, I'm writing a book with David Buss at the moment, so this is-

    20. MKMelissa Kearney1:15:39

        Fabulous.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:15:39

        ... just like, like, it, it's a, a dream for me. Uh, about 3 in 10 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% of people said that a major reason is just like being single. Second to that was 42% with have more important priorities right now, 20% with too busy, uh, 17 feel like no one 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-

    22. MKMelissa Kearney1:16:26

        Yeah.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:16:26

        ... um, you know, very isolated. They were coming out the back of COVID, I think that was maybe 2020 when the data came from, but yeah, there's, um, this mating crisis that we're seeing at the moment and, and the culture around not only having kids, not only the optimal setup for having children in a, a household, but just the anti-mating culture that we see at the moment. You know, like, the Alex Coopers of the world or articles from Cosmopolitan saying, like, how to sleep with him and not catch feels. Like, okay, like, how to disembody yourself just, just in case any emotions of attachment decided to sneak in. Like, here's, here's the neurolinguistic programming to de-hack yourself from ever feeling feelings again. Um, it's a real... I- if, if I was more conspiratorially minded, which I'm not, I would almost say that it is so all-encompassing that it would have to be coordinated. Like-

    24. MKMelissa Kearney1:17:19

        Mm-hmm.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:17:20

        ... it's so all over the place.

    26. MKMelissa Kearney1:17:22

        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 TikTok 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, and I was like, "This is horrifying." And so then I was like, looking at what they're saying, I was like, "Wow, this really is a thing on social media, this promoting this idea that you don't want to have kids," and I said (laughs) to... 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."

    27. CWChris Williamson1:18:28

        Well, it's gonna 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 brunch 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? They're-

    28. MKMelissa Kearney1:18:42

        Oh, that is true.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:18:43

        They're beyond fucked.

    30. MKMelissa Kearney1:18:44

        Yeah.
12. 1:20:25 – 1:28:30

    Melissa’s Interventions to Increase Marriage Rates

    1. CWChris Williamson1:20:25

       how can we fix this?

    2. MKMelissa Kearney1:20:27

       So, okay. I have already mentioned, I think part of this has to be, you know, economics, in the sense that marriage, because, I mean, s- I'm, I, I view ... Here we go. I view marriage as a long-term economic contract between two people, right, to share and pool resources. And so, and again, I put love and mutual respect and fun and all that on top of it. But to increase rates of marriage, we really d- do need to improve the economic lives 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 coauthor, 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 aroun- uh, all of these counties around the country that had these, like, localized fracking booms. And we saw 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, it's a very similar coal boom. All marriage went up. S- 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. Um, how do we change norms? I mean, some of that, I think is just being honest about the benefits of a two-parent household. Um, I am confident that we can both acknowledge the benefits of a two-parent household, work to promote a higher share of kids having the benefit of a two-parent household, the h- 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? Um, so there is a middle ground, and I think we've just f- ... 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 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, and there's a lot of programs around the country that work with, let's say, families who have a parent who's incarcerated or returning from prison, right? That's a pretty hard situation for families. Um, but they are families, and so they need supports and they're expensive and they're under-resourced. Uh, you know, programs helping unmarried parents who want to have a good relationship, who want to co-parent. How many high-income people do you know will 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 of Children and Families, only 1% goes to programs to promote stable and safe families, 15% goes to, um, foster care, 6% goes to child support. So in terms of federal dollars, we spend way more trying to address, like, the reality that we're pulling kids out of houses 'cause 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.

Episode duration: 1:29:06