The Political Paradox of Marriage Decline

I'm Marshall Teplansky , I'm Joel Kotkin and today we are delighted to have with us two scholars who are both visiting fellows at the American Enterprise Institute Sam Abrams , who focuses on questions related to civic and political culture , and Brad Wilcox , who is focused on the National Marriage Project , which is a really fascinating study that we're gonna be talking

about today . Gentlemen , welcome , thanks for having me . Good to be here , marshall . Joel , you wanna kick us off ?

And this is just record demographic territory that we're seeing unfold in American life . Obviously , plenty of folks also get divorced as well .

So the whole that marriage has over our culture , our society is much weaker today than it was 30 , 40 , 50 years ago and we don't see any immediate prospect of a U-turn , although I'm taking my small part to try to make that happen . But yeah , it's happening .

And why is that a problem , though I think it's obviously the question you're asking us to think about .

And so , from an economic perspective , just to take in some ways , well , one of the things you could sort of look at , we know that kind of the health of marriage and family life is one of the best predictors of economic mobility for poor kids across America , based , obviously , on Raj Chetty's work .

He finds that looking at communities , that when you sort of look at race , you look at economic inequality . Look at school policies . These things all matter when it comes to how to kind of lifting kids fortunes from poor backgrounds .

But the number one factor is the share of single parent families in the community , and so that's kind of gives you some sense of the economic story here . There's obviously a lot of concern on the rise and deaths and despair .

We keep setting records when it comes to suicide , for instance , and other things related to overdoses , to this death of despair phenomenon , and you know that marriage is a big protective factor there and that these deaths of despair are concentrated among never married guys and divorced guys who don't have college degrees .

So that's kind of another example of how this is playing out . And then more recently in the last I think week and a half or so , there was a new study from Chicago . There was a Chicago indicating that declines in happiness are primarily related to declines in the share of American adults who are married .

And of course , if you know anything about kind of marriage and class in America today , you know that those declines have been unfortunately concentrated among working class and poor Americans just a growing happiness divide too .

So that's just kind of a quick response to some of the factors economic and , in a sense , medical and psychologically give you a sense of why we should be concerned about this shift .

We spend a lot of time studying this now at AEI and trying to make sense of what . What's going on here . And marriage and families Are a gateway to managing this crisis , to opening up doors , to being more social .

Another study came out last week that basically talked about levels of happiness and Dislocation are different when you're in a married couple socializing with another married married couple .

There are just incredible benefits here , cognitively , that that we are losing by by seeing this integration of marriage and family that way , in terms of attitudes , things are tracking in a very scary way here . And then , joel , you and I talked about this in our article where we're seeing younger folks say they don't like these institutions .

We see younger folks less connected to old school institutions , whether they're their clubs in New York City , whether they're to to Sporting events and , you know , socializing in , say , a park . We see lower numbers going to church and engaging in church . So it's it .

We see this sort of perfect storm of just the decline of a whole host of institutions , the rise of these horrible black faced although those are my kids , so let me try to get black faced square boxes . And you know , you know dependency on looking at screens and forgetting how to and get age and interact with others .

I , being in liberal arts college , spend a huge amount of time with undergrads and it's pretty tough for me to watch how difficult it is for many of them to socialize . They don't know how to engage . They're very happy to to communicate over tick tock over text , but to just have a conversation at lunch is epic .

It's our Lawrence and again , this is not empirical . So I want to be very careful about that .

And you know I can't speak to you via , although I'm sure you'll see it and I see it all the time here in New York Just what I'm eating on the go by myself , but I can't tell you how many restaurants now you go into and we're not talking about necessarily fast , casual , but sit down restaurants where the person's eating alone and they're looking at their

phone . We're losing the art of socialization or losing the art of intimacy and maintaining intimacy . And then we want to know why we have so much rudeness , why we're so angry , why we can't relate to other people . David Brooks has that piece in the Atlantic that just came out of and it's directly related to this .

We are losing the capacity to negotiate and work with others .

You know one of the senses that I get is that we're moved into a world where time compression has really taken over as a major variable in everybody's lives , and part of that is driven , of course , through technologies , the constant drive for improving productivity , you know that is foisted upon us in the workplace .

To what degree is time compression really driving this ? Or are there other Insidious , more insidious things that are going on that are eroding the level of intimacy and communication that people have ?

I was looking at fertility trends , you know , back in early 2010s and thinking that as the economy rebounded we would see an increase in fertility again . We did not see that and I think part of the reason we didn't see that was that the impact of screens was kind of taking hold . So that's part of the story .

I think the sort of point you make about efficiency is also part of the story , marshall , as well . Obviously , there's just a lot of sort of this kind of it's the perfect storm Like why is marriage and family life fertility ? And obviously we've seen Joel write about these topics as well in his report and post familialism , which is great .

But you know , just have you got individualism culturally ? You have . Secularism culturally you have ? Many men are basically floundering , which makes them less marriageable both in their own eyes and the eyes of their potential partners .

We have in the United States , marriage penalties that basically make marriage less appealing economically to working class couples with kids . You know this is , and then you know our leads are just , you know , really not great on this issue and they talk left oftentimes to kind of minimize , for instance , the importance of marriage and family .

In their public authoritative roles as like school superintendents , as college professors , as journalists , as C-suite executives , and then in their own private lives they tend to be very prudent about getting married and staying married and having kids in that stable married context . So that's a huge problem as well , part of this dynamic playing out .

So that's just a quick sense of , I think , some of the factors , cultural and legal and economic . And then also just there's a failure of elites to really kind of stand up and basically talk in favor of that which they're doing in private .

So I think , and there I think you know and we know , on the sole issue of sort of culture and authority today in America there are many such cases on many , on many issues besides just marriage . So that's a problem with the progressive character of our public culture today .

What we're seeing is just kind of the long tail effect of the drive to include .

strongly here in New York in the ultra-progressive world we have in New York . Think about the last handful of mayors they have not had , or even Donald Trump , which I really don't want to talk too much about . But we're not modeling healthy , really great marriages and really great family life . The Blasio had an unusual marriage .

It's going through a very public divorce now . Our current mayor is very powerfully and proudly a bachelor . Mike Bloomberg had a number of previous spouses . We don't even need to talk about Rudy Giuliani and the situation we have with him . So we're electing leaders who are not necessarily mirroring these sorts of values and projecting these sorts of values .

But on the progressive political side of it I think especially it's a group that is trying to be inclusive with LGBTQA plus communities and so on I think they're afraid to say we like the idea of marriage , even though , quite frankly , anyone can marry almost anybody now legally in this country . So I think it's sort of in political science we call it sorting .

I think these things have just sort of sorted . So you see a lot of folks on the progressive left just not taking up this issue and I think that's a huge mess . I think it would be . You know , I think this is a powerful institution and I don't think there's anything wrong saying marriage is a good thing .

You know much of the Democratic and Republican parties today and we'll see if anyone in the near future has either him or someone else as the capacity to kind of take a more , you know , prudential but also broadly popular approach to these issues . So , yeah , I would agree that's an accurate assessment , marshall .

I mean , yonkin seems to be approaching it in a very sort of constructive way , but I think that you know , whenever you bring up issues I mean just in conversations with you know , with people that you hear all the time is well , but look at the Santas , or look at you know the far right positions which immediately alienate .

You know , if you're worried about gay marriage in , you know , in 2023 , you're kind of behind the curve . Is there something that people who are pro-family can do differently , because it does seem that those who try to identify with family very often alienate almost everybody else . Is there any change of how you can do it Open ?

successful at separating those issues out . I don't know , that's my sense of it . What's your sense , brad and Sam ?

I think one reason he's been more popular is he's been addressing two issues that I think are broadly pro family . One is he's been tackling kind of the high cost of living with some , you know , specific things on taxes .

So if you can recognize that all families basically are struggling today to pay for their basic expenses in terms of things like rent or mortgages or groceries , you know that's part of the solution today , that economic piece .

And then I think most ordinary American parents would like to have some degree of , you know , authority and and buy in and influence and access to what's happening in their kids schools .

And I've spoken to plenty of people who are , you know , pro choice or pro gay marriage , but are just literally appalled by what they're seeing play out in their kids public schools and they're absolutely afraid that their kids are going to be captured by the biological character of a lot of our public school education .

So I think Governor young can has recognized that I'm trying to address as best he can from Richmond you know that that dynamic in his popular for it as well . So that's , I think , the cultural story here is can we kind of just tame the culture and public schools and give parents more influence , access and then choices when the public schools are failing ?

You know to do a good job of educating the kids .

So you know , the young kid is practicing what I would say is old school retail politics and and he's focused on issues that matter to everyone cross , you know , cross cutting a whole bunch of cleavages here . This is hugely important .

He's not fixated on some of the hot button culture issues the way we see in other states , and so I think that's been very , very useful . You know he's being very savvy about it . And then to Brad's point of divided government . I mean divided governments a good thing .

We know for the most part that when you have divided government , as the case in the Commonwealth of Virginia , it does lead to better policy outcomes and think actually more often gets passed because you have to collaborate , you have to work and have to find some sort of more moderated position .

It's hard to argue with some of the things that that Governor young kid is trying to do . Affordability is critical and certainly a big issue here in New York , but you know nothing's going to get through because nothing's going to work with such an extreme progressive group and people are going to always fight to shut it down .

And then one of the most important drivers and this is again clear political science for getting people engaged is schooling . You know , if you look time and time again , what is the ?

What is going to compel people to vote and engage in their communities and this is taking a cue from the work of David Campbell at Notre Dame and my former office made back at Harvard . It's schools and control over your schools and getting involved in your schools and having some say in what's being taught and how it's being taught .

This is something I'm trying to navigate for my kids here in New York and it is a little bit of a challenge trying to figure this out . So young kids playing it beautifully and you know he's wise enough to know and I would tell any politician you have to .

If you want to drive , turn out , if you want to bring more attention to your campaign and your issues . Talk about schools and talk about returning power to what's being taught to the parents and administrators . Hate this . The teachers hate this . The teachers always often say well , we have master's degrees , we know what we're doing .

Most of these masters , agrees , come from , you know , capture to ed schools that are about as liberal and progressive as humanly possible . Parents don't like that and they want to say in their community , they want to say in their schooling .

So , governor , young kids playing this very , very , very smartly and I think other politicians should take note , quite frankly .

I just did an analysis of the American Family Survey and found , particularly for college educated adults , there's about a 60% point difference in their views about the value of marriage for children between conservative college educated adults and self-identified liberal college educated adults . Not surprisingly , less educated Americans are more in the middle right .

But so our elites and obviously they're primarily liberal are really super discounting the value and importance of marriage . Our conservative elites , by contrast , are much more marriage-oriented , and more so than ordinary Americans as well .

So that's a huge problem , I mean , if we don't have the majority of our elites kind of understanding and appreciating how much marriage matters and being willing to articulate that and pursue policies that would be congruent with that reality , or in trouble . But to your question , what can we do in terms of if we have a policy level to pull ?

But I think things like eliminating the marriage penalty and our means of programs . I think things like pushing the success sequence in public schools by the idea of getting at least a high school degree .

Working full time and having kids puts adults at a tremendous economic advantage would be helpful , I think , in terms of affordability issues , thinking about a generous child tax credit , both federal and state levels , one that doesn't kind of allow for a kind of class of people who are simply relying upon the government to rise as an important caveat there .

And , I think , tackling issues of affordability for people in terms of thinking about family information . That goes to everything from college debt to housing reform , those key things in terms of both housing and education and healthcare .

If we can kind of figure out new and innovative ways to bring the cost of those three core goods down , that would make it easier for folks to afford getting married and having kids in today's economy . So those are some ideas about things that would be helpful .

But I think the cultural kind of logic that's unfolding right now , in terms of its individualism and its workism , is making it difficult for people to prioritize marriage and love in ways that lead a lot of them to kind of misuse their 20s and then set them up for difficulty when it comes to getting married and having kids in their 30s .

I know far too many people who have not been able to work things out . The affordability issue is enormous . Paying for childcare is a real drain on most people and it is a problem . The other thing I would do and it's sort of a two-prong thing is I would try to get young people to stop going to therapy as much as they do .

I think therapy is very useful . But if you look at and this is stuff that people write about if you look at so much cognitive behavioral therapy of Lane , it's about finding your authentic self .

I'm a huge believer in finding your authentic self , but finding your authentic self doesn't mean you destroy all the institutions around you , you ignore your friends and your family and you ignore your social obligations and the other sort of things that you are necessarily part of .

But if you look at what the cognitive behavioral therapy work is doing and I'm sure I'm gonna get a lot of hate mail after saying this . It encourages so much individualism , so much I'll even go as far as to say selfishness , and it throws off norms and bonds of reciprocity , community and collaboration . I see this constantly in New York .

I see this constantly . When I tried to hire a couple of babysitters here and there , well , they just didn't feel like working today , it wasn't what they wanted to do . And then you talk to them a little bit more and you realize eventually ah , I see where this is coming from . We see this constantly on campuses , among students who are overwhelmingly in therapy .

And again , figuring out who you are is valuable , but there are limits and you still exist within a social construct . That's old school social 101 , not any more social 101 . And speaking of social 101 , that's the related point which is , at least in the New York City schools , we need faculty who themselves are married and have families .

I can tell you that huge numbers of faculty I know and again this is non-empirical , this is observational , so I enter that caveat are not partnered up . They're encouraged . They discourage marriage , they discourage sort of making those trade-offs .

So if you put that in line with the whole kind of behavioral therapy approach of saying look , you don't have to compromise , you don't have to work with others , it's all about yourself and you can explore . Well , by the time you're 35 and trying to figure this out it's a lot harder to date . People are a lot more set in their ways .

We do have biological clocks I don't care what you want to identify as , but for a lot of people , fertility becomes harder as you age . I'm very aware of that with my own kids and you know .

All of these things collectively yield , especially among our elites who go to college , this feeling that marriage isn't anachronistic old school institution , we don't need it . Why are we bothering doing it ? And , by the way , if you do it , you're not being your authentic self . Who are you to give part of yourself into a marriage and a family ?

This is all about you and you figure it out . And then maybe later you'll get married if you want .

And then , on top of that , by the way , again , thanks to this lovely phone , you know , when you have certain needs sexual and so on the number of students who use the apps to simply hook up and experience those sexual needs outside of an intimate , committed relationship . You know they're fulfilling those through those other channels .

So for a lot of people , why get married ? Why tie yourself down ?

The art of socialization and dating and going back and forth and learning is disappearing and this is why , you know , as we talked about at the start , we have all these other larger social implications about why it's promoting loneliness , why it's promoting more social enemy , because we don't know how to talk and work across difference .

So why is it about defile elites ? Well , the point in the book is that , in part is that , unfortunately , a lot of the messages that our elites are giving are more kind of in the me first spirit rather than the we first spirit .

And of course , it's the we first spirit that's the key to forging a strong marriage in a good family , and so I talk about a variety of ways in the book that couples can have a kind of family first orientation , a kind of we first orientation that ends up being good for their kids and their spouse and them .

In fact , one of the things I see in the research is that generosity in marriage not being the recipient of generosity but being the generous spouse for both women and men is just a fantastic predictor of marital politics . That's part of what's going on in this new book on marriage for Harper .