politics to his removal in congress with his book "the fabulous." watch book tv every sunday on c- span two and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch anytime online on booktb.org. a healthy democracy

doesn't just look like status. it looks like this, where americans can see democracy at work. it informed straight from the source on c-span. unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. from nation's capital to wherever you are. the opinion that matters the most is your own. this is what democracy looks like. c-span powered by cable. . >> it is a pleasure to have this conversation with you. >> good to be with you, scott. >> we are here to discuss your brand-new book. how americans stopped getting married and started falling behind. excellent book. when we start off by having you tell our viewers about your professional background and interest and what led you to writing the book. >> i'm an economist.

i have been on the economic faculty at the university of maryland for 17 years now. before that, i trained at mit. i have long been interested in these types of issues related to inequality and poverty and the economics of families and child well-being in the u.s. how i came to write the book is that i have been studying these issues for 20 years and it has become abundantly clear to me that what has happened to family structure in the u.s., the dramatic change in the way kids are being raised in the u.s. in terms of the increase of kids with one parent. more than any other country in the world, what out of five kids in the u.s., it is clear to me that it is really a part of what is driving cost differences in the u.s. it has not been good for kid's well- being and their economic trajectories. and it has not been good for the single parents bearing the burden by themselves.

and so as an economist, i think about resources and households. ultimately, i decided to write the book because it feels like the conversations that we have been having and you and i have been in many together, about all the sources and policy ways that we can address child poverty and growing inequality, they were all focused on basically everything but family structure. improving schools. drawing of the safety net. improving labor market institutions. all these things that i am all for but i felt like we weren't really talking about one of the key drivers which is basically what happened to family structure in the u.s. that is how i came to write the book. >> i will just say some stats from the book. one out of five kids said they live at the single mother. meaning no husband, no spouse, know a live in partner present. if you add children with single fathers, that is one out of four. it looks like about two thirds of kids live two married

parents and not necessarily their biological parents. less than two thirds live with biological parents, whether they are married or not. have things always been like this? >> no. it has really been a dramatic change in the last 40 years. most of the change happened in the 1980s, 90s and 2000's. things have stabilized somewhat in the last 10 years but this is really a dramatic decline. in 1980, it was closer to does more than 80% of kids living with married parents. and now it is down to just about 60%. a dramatic drop just in 40 years. >> has it occurred among all segments of society? >> no. and this is a big theme running throughout my book. it is really -- what has really emerged over the last 40

years is this quite shocking and dramatic education class cap. and kids and their family structure. in particular, what has happened is college educated parents, and already advantaged group in our society, parents already bringing in high levels of income, they continue to get married and have kids and raise kids and married two parent homes. a share of nonmarital births among college-educated mothers really hasn't increased much. there has been a very small decline in the share of kids born to college-educated mothers living with married parents over the 40 years. that has dropped six percentage points from 90%, to 84%. what happened is outside the college-educated class, there has been a dramatic decline in the share of kids living with two parents. the largest decline has been in the middle of the education

distribution. i'm speaking about moms with a high school degree or some college. they comprise now of 52% of kids now with moms in what we call a middle education group. high school graduates. not the most disadvantaged. 19 moms either. the share of their kids living with two parents is 20 percentage points over the 30 year period. interestingly, the share of kids in the middle or high school educated moms group living with married parents, that is up from 80% to close to 60%. so now, the wide gap is really between college-educated and everyone else. were back in the 1980s, people started to call attention to the fact that among the most disadvantaged groups, teen moms moms out of high school, agreed there was a high share of

single mothers among that group. and now you have had a huge increase in the share of those kids living with single mothers. and the middle group has converged downwards. we have this really big difference between college- educated moms and students of college-educated moms and everybody else. and that is what i'm -- what they are calling attention to. this divergence in family structure is another way the college-educated class is pulling away from everyone else. but i would say in a good way. the shame here is that more kids are finding themselves without access to two parents in the home and all the resources that that converses. >> you sort of alluded to it earlier. it was an outlier in terms of the experience. >> is as an outlier.

one out of five kids live within unpartnered mom or one out of four kids live with and unpartnered parents if you includes included the dad. the uk is a close second behind us. the european union, 13% of kids live with one parent. it is a little bit of a misconception that some people have which is, when you have moving away from marriage but more european parents are more likely to cohabit. the fact of the matter is that cohabitation rates are quite low in the u.s. among parents. and even among mom and her cohabiting partner or dad in his cohabiting partner. many of those are not the child of both biological parents. so cohabitation is largely

unstable among parents. very few cohabiting parents stay together throughout childhood. the cohabiting partner is in about 25% cases, not the child's second parent. all of this is very different from the situation with cohabitation among parents in europe. even with that, it is way more kids in the u.s. living with one parent than anywhere else. >> we can talk in a moment about what the evidence says about this. before we get there, why might it matter whether a child grows up with one or two parents? what are the reasons why one situation on average might be better or worse? >> let me stipulate before i get into the reasons why. it is abundantly clear in the data that kids from two parent homes or married parent homes have better outcomes. i keep going back and forth between this. in the u.s., it is tightly

linked. married parents often means you have two parents and unmarried parents typically means you don't. i'm using those a bit interchangeably. the data is abundantly clear that kids from married parent homes do better. and the question is, how much of that is just because married parents are more likely to be an advantage group anyway and highly educated or with higher incomes? obviously, the first thing we want to do is compare -- let's just look at the outcome for kids whether they have a married or unmarried mother. let's look across moms are the same education level in the same age, et cetera and same race. and we see these big differences in kid's outcomes. researchers have done a lot of other, more sophisticated things to try to really narrow down the parents and their marital status or the number of parents in the household.

so the evidence is pretty overwhelming. we know that kids do better. the question is to and what do i mean by do better? they are less likely to live in poverty. they are more likely to graduate high school. they are more likely to graduate college. they are more likely to have higher earnings and be merry themselves in adulthood. they are less likely to get in trouble in school and less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. a whole host of outcomes. then the question is why. a big part of it, unsurprisingly, is income difference. and so one of the things that a married parent or two parent home tends to do is have a second parent in a household with earnings capacity. and so just a matter of simple math, two parents tend to bring in more income than one parent alone. if you look at the median income of single mother households versus married, it is about 2-1. remember that the majority of moms work now

so it is not surprising that the two parent household tends to have twice as much income. and income is really protective to kids. it affords a lot of opportunities. we know this. we know this. we have a lot of evidence on this. income is a big part of the story but it is not the whole story. a second parent in the household, i see this in the data. you and i both know this as parents and anyone who has kids would tell you that kids also take a lot of time and we see that kids that live in two parents are married parent households have more parental time. and so the extent we think that parental time with kids is an investment, and investment in human capital. developments and colleges talk about the way parents spend time with kids and ways that foster their development and service their needs at different ages. we just see that kids with married parent homes are more likely to get the parental

times. and a third sort of mechanism that i think is really important and that there is evidence in favor of, is we see that kids who live in married parent homes are more likely to get exposure to the type of parenting that development psychologists would say is developmentally appropriate and nurturing and beneficial. and again, i think it is important to say that i don't see evidence suggesting to me -- some people would say this. i don't see evidence in favor of this line of argument being strong at all. i don't see evidence suggesting that parents across different age groups or marital status necessarily want to parent differently or have strongly different ideas about parenting or have different views about weather time with their kids or reading to their kids is more or less beneficial. there is a survey or suggestive evidence that parents all sort of want to do the same things.

read to their kids. and best and spend time with their kids. but if you have two parents in a household, it is easier to do it. i refer to this in the book. and others refer to this in literature as bandwidth for less stress in the household. if you look at the family, there are nuanced differences between emotional bandwidth and toxic stress. and we can stipulate i think that single- parent households have higher levels of stress and less emotional bandwidth. again, i'm thinking here of compelling evidence, studies and surveys. as parents, i think most of us would relate to that you come home from the work day. you are stressed out. he might be stressed about something in your head, whether you can pay a bill or et cetera. it is hard to be patient with your kid and sit down and read with your kid. and people who have a second parent in the house to share those burdens with are more

readily able to do that. i think it encapsulates -- i think there are three key buckets of mechanisms we can think about as to why two parent or married parent homes deliver benefits and advantages home environment. there is more income and more time and more emotional bandwidth. >> that makes a lot of since. i was thinking that as i was reading it. i have had shared custody with a daughter who is entering the teenage years. and other factors having two sets of eyes on kids rather than one set of eyes.'s basic things like that that kind of intuitively are important. so you would say to folks who might argue that these resources you focus on, aren't as important as you say and it is sort of intrinsic traits of more resource parents and kids.

you don't see that in the research you have done? >> this is really interesting. a lot of social scientists are really reluctant to concede that it is actually married parents or having a second parent in the house that is particularly beneficial. and i'm not sure why. i think this isn't doing exactly what they intend to be doing. i think the intention of a lot of social scientists who don't want to concede this is to not suggest -- people don't want to judge other people's choices. people don't want to say, it is marriage or something else.'s are left with, if you reject that, and you reject the preponderance of descriptive and observational studies, because of what is going on in social science, we don't have a randomized trial we never will where we assigned some kids to live with married parents and others not. so when we don't have that

randomized control trial, we cannot perfectly nail the causal identification that this is marriage or this is having two parents as opposed to something else. we can see that kids from married parents do better and we can see that when we account for the other things, the gaps go away. we can see the mechanisms through which marriage or having two parents would confer these benefits. but still, to the extent that we make those things go away or we adjust for them and there are still remaining gaps, people want to say, it's probably not the second parent but something unobserved about the second parent that -- such that even if they had another contributing person in the house, the kids would still be disadvantaged. not only do i not see evidence for that but i'm not really -- basically write off the single parents and say, even if they had all these are the resources, they just can't

intrinsically deliver the type of parenting conducive to child success the way these unobserved higher quality people are who get married. so leaning hard on the observance that it is strikes me as an odd thing to be doing and one that is not supported in the data. and i think it is the opposite of what most of us are inclined to do which is acknowledged the difficulty of the circumstances of single parents rather than stated something intrinsic about them. but the other reason why some people are reluctant to say that, is the fact of being married that is really helpful. and this gives us an important point. even if some of those single parents, married or partnered with the father of the children, you wouldn't see the average boost that you would expect from an average

marriage because that dad would not be contributing so much to the house. because this is a really important point. on average, we know that basically married parents are able to confer a lot of benefits to their kid. but that doesn't tell us about what would happen in any individual case. it really depends on any individual case on what the second. would bring to the house. so i have a paper that we wrote in 2017 in the annual review of economics. we write about the marriage premium for kids and we acknowledge this underlying -- the economist term is heterogeneity but it is like a variation in what we would expect the marriage premium would be for kids, given three different contextual factors. how many resources the mom has by herself, what the second parent would bring and what

outcome we are talking about. let me be very specific if i can. for example, if we are talking about two teenage parents and neither graduated from high school and neither one of them has a very good job prospect, even if they were to be married, they might still struggle to be able to get their kid their high school. there still might be a lot of resource deficits in their household. if we are talking about a 35- year-old mom with an mba and she were to have a child on her own, she probably could keep the child out of poverty and get the child through high school. but because her partner is descriptively like on average, probably highly educated, because we know there is a lot of restorative needing. the extra income and extra

resources that he would bring into the household might be enough to get the kid through college because they actually see, is not until you get to kids with two highly educated married parents, that we have a large share of them graduating from college. and so the benefit to the kid from having the additional income in the household really depends on the mom's baseline, what the partner would bring and what outcome we are talking about. interestingly, the largest -- going back to what we said earlier, the largest decrease in married parents has been in the middle group. among parents with a high school education. and this is actually where the gap in kid outcomes outside of poverty and college, seem to be the largest. we see this in the data and it fits the model. it also does think about high school educated moms. would say she is making $35,000 a year on her own and she has a

child and a dad with a high school level education making $35,000. she can probably keep the kid out of child poverty by herself but household with two working parents bringing in a combined 70,000 is a different situation than a household with one parent bringing in 35,000. that is where we see almost the largest gap and whether a kid graduates from high school. what earnings they have in adulthood. i think it is important to think about, averages matter a lot. and your individual circumstances that would determine whether an individual situation would be beneficial to the kid. if we look at the pattern, it is very consistent with the research framework. and to explain it away by saying that it is something underlying and unobserved about a single parent, when you recognize the patterns, you

have to tell a pretty convoluted story to tell a story that it is something other than the benefit a second parent brings into the household. >> i thought the study was very clever. a great example of starting with a theoretical framework in figuring out a research design that will let you see whether it is true or not and then taking the evidence that comes. i think there are a couple of interesting studies that i like a lot. that maybe get a little bit outside of the resource framework. i will just mention a quick one. it was done i think in sweden. it looked at kids of divorce where the divorce happened because the dad was in an office that was a little more imbalanced in favor of women than of men. and therefore, there were more opportunities for an extramarital affair to happen. >> clever design. so terrible. >> come on, guys.

>> for those kids, the study found that the effects of divorce were really negative which you can imagine. maybe they are kids who -- who as far as they know, their parents are doing fine and this is sort of a big disruption and shock to what was a stable childhood. the other study that is kind of an interesting opposite to that was done by kiersten leigh and david newmark. they find that kids who end of being raised only by their mom, because they live in a state where conditional on their dad being convicted of a crime, he goes to prison, those kids end of not being worse off growing up with a single mom then if they had grown up with their dad in the picture too. and that makes sense too in some regard. a lot of the guys on average that were convicted of a crime and went to prison, might not

have been the greatest dads as well. i think that goes a little beyond sort of your resource argument. >> well. i try to use the term resource very broadly in the sense that i don't mean just income. and i actually think the two studies are right on point for some of the stuff i talk about in the book. i talk about two different studies where parents are convicted of crimes to make the point what you said. if a second parent would be harmful, then that is a situation where, think about, what are the resources the parent would bring into the house? in my case, it would be instability and conflict and negative things and that child, again, data shows -- really clever studies show -- let's just take -- two parents are convicted of the same crime. one happens to be randomly

assigned to a judge with a higher propensity to send someone convicted of that crime took prison. two different does that actually helps make the point clearly that it is not in all cases that kids would be better off. and we certainly don't want to go back to the situation where we are stigmatizing single parenthood so severely that people feel like they have no choice but to leave abusive or harmful marriages or partnerships. so that is an important point. i didn't know about the study, about the divorce but it is important thinking about the marginal versus average. so what is happening in the study where you just mentioned? they are the ones where the divorce seems to have been instigated by an extramarital affair as opposed to obvious conflict in the house. and one of the lines of pushback that i get often is,

it is terrible that you are openly lamenting the decline in marriage. a lot of marriages are unhappy. and i think this raises an uncomfortable question. and this is beyond the scope of what i'm an expert on or what i write about. it raises an important question about, when is it better for the kid? we have gone so far in the direction of couples not being together that have kids together , i mean 40% of kids in the country are born outside of the marital union. and in 40% of those cases, it is not that the partner is violent or abusive. we are so far beyond extreme cases that we have to ask the question, have we gone so far that maybe these partnerships would not have been gloriously happy or the parents wouldn't be phenomenally and obediently in love every day but maybe the stability and resources would

be beneficial to kids. nobody likes to question individual freedom and pursuit of happiness. and 70 has to be thinking about the kids, right and in some sense, we see that kids do better when they have two parents stably together. except in these situations where it is very clearly a harmful or extreme case and then the kids do better when the second parent is not in the household. >> i fully agree that 40% of my biological sets are not terrible parents. >> probably somewhere between 0-40. and there would be wide disagreement about which end it is closer to. >> this brings us a little bit to the question of men and of boys. i think your book is well- positioned to be maybe the most important policy book of this fall and probably of last fall.

a book by richard reeves who we both no and are friends with cold poison men where he chronicles way that boys and men are falling behind in girls and women interestingly, he skirted over that it is a possibility that single parenthood could affect boys differently then girls. but you tackle that in a chapter of your book. say more about the differential impact of growing up with a single mother for boys and girls. >> let me say, i love richard's book and i think he has done a really important thing here by highlighting the struggles of boys. and he does this in a very, definitely making sure to not lament the wonderful advances that women and girls have made. and so he is right to say, we

have done all of this. women are doing better and are going to college at higher rates and this is great. but hold on and let's look at what is happening to boys. they are getting in trouble more at school. they are less likely to go to college than young women are graduating high school. they are all sorts of ways that boys are falling behind. you are exactly right. i actually link this very explicitly to the fact that so many of them are growing up without dads and their house. and i think that breaking the cycle of fatherless homes is actually really a critical thing that we have to do to improve the situation for boys in this country. and so again, i think this will feel like common sense to most people, that having a role model, a loving role model, a loving male role model in the house, is pretty good for most boys. we see this in the data.

there has been some really compelling, recent work on this. let me highlight two such studies. one by mary bertrand and jessica pond. they have a lot of administrator records on kids that they pulled together. they look at kids in their school performance, their home environment, neighborhood characteristics, and what they are focused on is trying to explain the gender gap. the gender gap now in school favoring girls, meaning that boys are much more likely to get suspended in school. let's just start with that. they are more likely to go to school and lash out in ways that get them in trouble. and by the way, getting in trouble in school, getting suspended, those kinds of things spiral into you being less likely to finish school or to be involved in the criminal justice system. so it is a meaningful metric and outcome. what they find is that the gender gap by which boys are extra likely to get in trouble at school, that is larger among

kids growing up in mother only households compared to married households. so what does that say? it says boys are more likely to get in trouble. there is an additional boost of likelihood that they get in trouble compared to girls and similar home environments. including their sisters. if you look at sisters and brothers, they are more likely to get in trouble than girls extra so if they don't have a dad in their house. then the researchers go further than just documenting that really striking finding showing the impact of family structure on boys and girls and they tried to get into the mechanisms of what is going on. you and i spoke earlier this hour about, what are some of the differences and parental resources and input. we see across households that are married or single parents, they do find that there are differences that boys growing up in single parent homes get

less time from their mom. they are less likely to get harsh parenting from their mom as compared to boys and two parent homes, but the real driver of gender difference is that boys are particularly sensitive to the input. i found this incredibly interesting. the way i think about this is, i have two daughters and a son. if i ignore my son or if i'm really harz harsh with my son, if i reduce my time spent with both my son and daughter were more harsh, it will have a better or bigger impact on whether my son will lash out at school. they are more sensitive to that and put. and i want to be careful in the way -- i think we should be very careful to not say that girls aren't struggling. we know that from the development psychology

literature, we know on average, when girls are struggling, they are more likely to internalize their unhappiness or their anxiety. the fact that boys are more likely to engage in externalizing behavior, that means they are more likely to get in trouble at school and that has all sorts of negative consequences. even though it might be more consequential in the educational system and ultimately on the economic trajectory for boys, i want to be careful not to make it sound like we are suggesting girls are not struggling. they might just be struggling in different ways with different consequences but don't derail their educational performance as much. >> and there was a second study about boys. this one is the aggregate level study and the opportunity and sites team out of harvard. this is at a neighborhood level. the study and you probably know which one i'm speaking of, i'm looking at the one that looks at racial gaps and outcomes

between black and white boys when they grow up into adulthood and the single biggest predictor of a smaller gap in adulthood between black and white boys when they are adults, is the share of homes with a black dad present in their neighborhood. and at this is super interesting. this is beyond the benefit an individual child gets from having a child in their house, having more black family homes with black dads is particularly helpful for black boys in the neighborhood. and the tragedy here in the statistical sense is they show what is small share of black boys in the u.s. are growing up in low poverty neighborhoods with the majority of black dads in the neighborhood. but the study i think also revealed the important part of

having dads around for boys, trajectories. >> yes. i think the neat thing about that study does a lot of studies like that, you see some correlation between the neighborhood and kid outcomes and it is a causal effect. to better or worse. and sometimes it is not clear if that is the case. and having more resident black fathers helps -- if a member does remembering right, black boys and not black girls and having more white fathers at home does not help black boys. it is very specific, to see the impact and it seems more

plausible than just a little claim about neighborhood composition. >> i think it is hard. my recollection is, having white dads is helpful but not as helpful for black dads which fits this idea you are getting out which seems like it is tightly linked. it is still the issue of that you can never get around this. people don't want to lean into dads mattering. maybe it is another thing in neighborhoods where black dads are around. it is not one of the other 20 things they thought of but some other unobservable thing. this is just one of many studies in my mind that is very suggestive and at some point, we have to stop ignoring all the suggestions and coming up with other stories that we can't name that are probably a bigger factor. >> absolutely. >> i want to get to policy

before we wrap up. but also, let's look at the causes of the increase with single parenthood. first of all, many viewers might assume this is either because of rising divorce or rising teen pregnancy for instance. true? >> no. in a very mechanical sense, what is driving this is a reduction in marriage and specifically the reduction in marriage among parents. the way i describe it is, we experience, outside the college- educated class in america, a deep bundling of marriage from having and raising kids. so this is driven by an increase in the share of kids who are not born to married parents and the parents don't go on to get married. this is how we get in this situation of so many kids living with one parent.

divorce as well. if you look at the share of kids living with unpartnered mothers, a small majority of them got there through never being married. in 1980, that was not the case. in 1980, unpartnered mothers were more likely to have gotten in that position from a divorce. now, especially outside the college-educated class, they are more likely to have gotten in that situation by never being married. and the other remarkable thing is teen birth is way down. 70% since the mid- 1990s. if you told me in 1990 that teenage birth would plummet by as much as it did and that birth to women in their young 20s would fall buy as much as they did, i would have predicted a decrease in the share of kids living in single- parent homes. these were the groups where we have to concentrate on the single mother homes. but births among those groups have decreased and it has been

more than offset by an increase in nonmarital childbearing and single mother homes outside of those groups. like all groups. that is really what is driving this. i think it is important again to say -- it doesn't get to the underlying causes but mechanically knowing what we are talking about is really important because making divorce harder is not going to turn this around. putting more emphasis on expanded access to contraception for teenagers is not going to turn it around. because it was also a driving factor. >> and we will get to the root causes now which i think will lead into policy as well. as you are well aware of, academic debates about inequality often turn on issues like economics, pop culture and policy. you lean heavily in economics. what is your argument in the book for why economic changes

led to changes in the family? >> i think it is really an interaction of economics and a shift in social norms. let me explain why. let's take a step back. we have focused on the fact that what i'm talking about tends to have happened in the 80s, 90s or two thousands and have stabilized but they are not reversing. in the 60s and 70s, we had massive social and cultural changes. and emphasis on marriage and gender norms and so during the 60s and 70s, what we saw was that a marriage decreased across the board for everybody a bit. college-educated, high school educated or less than high school educated. what happened in the 80s is that the decline in marriage really stabilized among the college-educated class and it kept falling for everybody else. and so now, college-educated women are the most likely to be married and college-educated mothers are by far the most

likely mothers to be married. and so, this is where i lean into economics to explain, why did things keep changing outside the college-educated class? the diversion in the 80s and 90s was really the economic situation between college- educated adults and everyone else even though we have had many conversations about this. in broad strokes, college- educated workers continue to do quite well in the labor market and earnings continue to rise steadily. meanwhile, non- college- educated workers, we have seen employment rates over the last 30 years, fall on non- college- educated men. we have seen wages stagnate. they fell relative to women. and so i lean into the economic view of marriage pier. the economic proposition of marriage for adults outside the

college-educated class someone eroded from the changing economic circumstances where men became less reliable economic contributors and less financially important, relative to what women could bring on their own. and there are a number of studies that lead me to the conclusion. and there is a reduction of earnings for college-educated men and then in a causal sense, and places donated by industries where the national trends say men did less well in those places and women. i think there is a causal effect happening there. but i think there is a give and take with the social norms. so more of the social norms

tying together marriage and childbearing is eroded and the economic worsening of the marriage proposition in those affected populations, you sort of get stuck in the spiral. and now, i think it is going to be different from 10 years ago. it is going to take both economic changes in a shift in social norms to reverse the trends outside the college- educated class. part of what has changed my mind on this is that -- i was pretty suede by the idea that the reduction in the marriage of a man from an economic framework led me to the conclusion of that we really have to build up the economic security -- and the ability to be financial providers of men and more communities and that would lead to a turnaround and marriage rates. and there was a study with my colleague riley wilson where we exploited this reverse marriage of men possibility which is the

fracking boom which -- let's set aside any environmental concerns. the localized fracking booms across the country outside of north dakota and south dakota where it was like a migrant situation, throughout the rest of the country, these really led to localized income booms and they were good for the local economy in a way that particularly was beneficial to non- college-educated men. we show that in places where they just happen to be located over the right geology and that they could take advantage of the new technology and they have this local fracking boom and earnings and employment among non- college-educated men went up. both in absolute terms and in relativity to women. we run the analysis. i'm expecting to see a reduction in the non- marriageable share and you don't get that at all. you just get that there are more kids because we actually have a bunch of evidence showing that when people get that surprised shock, people use

that to have more kids. because kids are expensive. we do the same thing on the likelihood of having a kid between married and unmarried folks and no reduction in the nonmarital share. because this was surprising, we start speculating. maybe this is about the social norms and the environment. we do see that the increase in birth among nonmarried parents is larger and places that already have more nonmarital birth at the baseline. we look back at the 70s and 80s and what happened. there, you find only an increase in married births. you see the increase in marriage and a reduction in the nonmarital birth share. this is suggested to me that how people respond to their economic situation is dependent on the social paradigm and so that is why i think it is both social and economic. >> great. i want to push back a couple

areas. the earliest new income measures include measures of earnings. and median men's earnings, by the sense of numbers, are 12% higher last year then they were in 1979. so don't and i think your own numbers in the book show that it is a stagnation may be among those lowest educated folks. a small decline in earnings, certainly not a decline of the same magnitude of the changes in the family. do we think that -- and it matters of politics. do think declining marriage ability is about men doing worse, a call for a different set of policies and if we think it is not that men are doing worse but that women are doing much better? you have thoughts on the difference between either of those being true or how you think about policy? >> two things.

a lot of the decrease in nonmarital childbearing really started in the two thousands installed out. admin are doing better in a relative sense over the past 10 years, that would be consistent with sort of stopping of the bottom falling out here. stopping of the downward trend. it is really hard to tease out how much of this is men doing worse in a relative sense and i can't tease that out. the other thing i really can't say anything about is how much this is being driven by men versus women's decisions. we see this equilibrium. what do we see in the real world. partnerships. how much of that is because women decide that the men don't contribute enough and she is better off doing this on her own. or the men deciding, i don't want that responsibility.

i don't feel secure enough. and with the pressure. i cannot say which one is driving it. but i think the value proposition of marriage, from both sides is reduced if men are either viewed as or view themselves as less able or willing to be financial providers. and i don't think any improvement in men circumstances over the past five or 10 years is consistent with this idea that these economic changes in the 80s, 90s and two thousands, sort of got the ball rolling or cap the ball rolling in this direction. you didn't push back in this direction, scott brothers would push back on me with this old fashion notion, including richard reeves, but the old- fashioned notion that men have to be breadwinners. >> right. you will not hear me push back on that. however, i would push back on

what others are probably anticipating. i think you make a strong point that the gains of marriage to women depend on the outside option. and so, since women can -- are and more occupations or higher paid these days, they are able to support themselves on their own and that affects kind of how the decision to marry or get not get married looks. another thing that changed over time is the safety net has gotten quite a bit more generous and not so much with cash welfare benefits like we talked about in the book, but with everything else. there has been a big expansion over 40-50 years. you were dismissive of the idea that the generosity of the safety net could have played a role in some of these declines in marriage over time. what would you say to those arguments? >> for any viewers that are as

a stooped and this is you and i are, i think we agree with what happens with the safety net. cash welfare has become much less generous and harder to access. and we see that just in terms of, what share of single moms are getting any cash benefit? like 6% have cash benefits. we need to move away from the stereotype harmful characterization from the 80s and that single moms are running around relying on cash welfare. that is just not the case. 80% on average, 80% of income coming into a single mother's home is from her own earnings. 6%. so tear point,

a majority on medicaid. so child health insurance has become much easier to access. >> and food stamps. >> and i think food stamps are at 40% coming into the house. my view on this is that there have been dozens or hundreds of studies on the link between the generosity of the programs of safety net and family formation. i have written some of those papers. my read is that there is a lincoln the direction we hypothesize which is that this welfare is more generous. there is a small increase in the likelihood that someone is a single mom. in terms of magnitude, it is very small. i don't deny a link there. but the magnitude is so small and that is what is driving the trends over time. cash welfare certainly has become much less generous and harder to access. and at the same time, single motherhood is more common. more common among populations.

and they are less reliant on welfare. that is why i reject the idea that, this is all reflective of a generous welfare system. let me concede some points to the other side. if we didn't have well for -- welfare and 96, making it harder to access cash benefits, really emphasizing requirements for work, would we have had an even larger increase in single motherhood childbearing? i think that is possible. i will grant that. am also very convinced that taking health insurance away from millions of you as children, will not turn around rates of marriage among parents and this is why i reject these calls to, if the safety net is even less generous, then we solve the problem. and so even if i'm willing to grant that some people in the margin might be more inclined

to have a nonmarital birth or be a single mom, because there is some measure of basic support out there, i don't think it is a major driver and i don't think making the safety net more stingy will meaningfully turnaround things. >> okay. we have just a few minutes left. tell us what you think would make a difference in terms of policy to either reverse the trend or stabilize the ones getting worse? >> what i am hoping will come with this book and what i feel strongly about is that we need to consider the issue of gaps and family structure and a high share of kids in the u.s. living with one parent. we need to take this is a policy matter with policy urgency and that is actually a pretty strong statement to be making even if it might not sound like that because i think the fact that we have been collectively, as a group of people talking about policy, we have been collectively too reluctant to take on family and the policy domain.

it means it has just gotten short trip to. and we spend very little on programs and on research trying to figure out how to help friends and families. i do think that establishing this is a policy urgency is important. when we do that, i think we should have much more dedicated attention. public dollars are private dollars or community innovation and programs aimed at strengthening families. i also think that -- this is a position that many will disagree with. i think we need to reestablish

we are looking at the economic changes. we are looking at this idea. we need to be recognizing the challenges that have many men facing them in the labor market. we have too many kids growing up without a doubt in their home. >> this is two parent privilege. this is how they have fallen behind. it thank you very much. that is a great conversation. i learned a lot from reading the book. i think they will do every bit of well this fall.

we are here in a special place. this is the role that she has continued to play. this is the missouri destination. east kennedy boulevard, originally, is a part of the road system. this is all across the highway. she was born in 1891. died in 1960. her parents bought her

basically when they were a toddler. early 1900s, this roadway, now called east kennedy boulevard, is all across the highway. this is northeast orange county. this includes northwest orange county. the road itself, is historic. we are in another space that looks a lot different from modern cities from the day. have back. we are standing in a place where they have known to be doing some writing. she came back and forth. at times when she did stay here, we call this tuxedo

junction. this is located right on the shores of the lake. this is a place where she has been known to do some of her writing. >> matilda mosby, and the moseley house, looking at the foundation and the porch. it was a social gathering place for families and friends. here, we ask in our station, that you look at this. what you see here, is the

essence of this space. she was a writer. this is a university classic. what you see in this photograph, she is actually collecting folklore material. this home, represents a tying of the boat. you have a founding family, and the connection between childhood friendships that they had. they had that and maintained it throughout adulthood. they had that social interaction, combined with the establishment. they have the incorporated municipality. they have been doing this within the united states. they had that genius that makes

and establishes them as literary destinations for reasons around the globe. >> cspan, partners with the library of congress, and has a profound impact on our country. tonight, we will hear another 1937 novel. our guest is tiffany patterson, a professor from vanderbilt university. this is the cspan encore presentation. books that have shaped america. 9:00 eastern on cspan. cspan .org/shape america.