professor, dan sinykin shares his book, "big fiction," where he examines how monopolies have changed the art of writing profession. at 12:00 a.m. eastern, journalism mark chiusano looks at george santos' rise in politics. to raise removal from congress with his book, "the fabulousist." watch book tv every sunday on c-span 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online any time at booktv.org. a healthy democracy doesn't just look like this. it looks like this, where americans can see democracy at work. when citizens are truly reformed or our public thrives. get informed straight from the source. a hello, melissa. it's a pleasure to have this

conversation with you. yeah, it's good to be with scott. we're here to discuss your great new book, the two parent privilege how hello melissa, it's a pleasure to have this conversation with you. >> yeah, it's good to be with you, scott. >> we're here to discuss your great new book, "the two-parent privilege." how americans stopped getting married and started falling behind. excellent book. why don't we start off by having you tell our viewers about your professional background and interests and what led you to write the book? >> sure. so i am an economist. i have been on the economic faculty at the university of maryland for 17 years now. before that i trained at m.i.t. the economics of families and child well being in the u.s. how i came to write this book was i've 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 in the share of kids living with only one parent that's, you know, more than one in five kids in the u.s. now. more than any other country in the world. it has become so clear to me that this is really a part of what's driving class differences in the u.s. it has not been good for kids well being and their economic trajectory. it has not been good for the single parents who are baring the burden by themselves. so i come at issue, very much as an economist. thinking about resources in the household. but ultimately i decided to write this book because it felt like the conversations that we have been having. you and i have been in many of them together and about all sorts of policy ways that we could address child poverty and

undermining the associate ability and improving schools, shoring up the safety net, improving the labor market institutions. all these things that i'm all for. but i felt like we were not really talking about one of the key drivers, which is basically what has happened to the family structure in the u.s. that's how i came to write that book. >> yeah. i will just cite some stats from the book. meaning no husbands, no spouse, no live-in partner present. if you add the children's single fathers in there, that will put the share in one out of four. it looks like about two-thirds of kids that will live with two married parents. they are not necessarily the biological parents. less than two-thirds of the kids that will live with their biological parents, whether married or not. have things always been like this? >> no, this is really a dramatic change in the past 40 years. most of the change honestly would happen in the 1980s, 90s in the 2000s.

things have stabilized somewhat in the past ten years. but this is really a dramatic decline. so in 1980, it was closer to 80% of kids that lived with married parents. now that's just down to 60%. it's a dramatic drop in 40 years. >> has it occurred among all segments of society? >> no. and this is a big theme running throughout my book. this is really, there's been what's really emerged over the past 40 years is this quite shocking, dramatic education class gap in kids, family structure. in particular what's happened is that college educated parents, an already advantaged group in our society. parents that are already bringing in high levels of income. they have continued to get married and have their kids in, you know, raise their kids and

marry in two-parent homes. the share of non-marital births really has not increased much. so there is only a small decline in this share of kids born to college educated mothers living with married parents over these 40 years. that has dropped about six percentage points from 90% to 84%. and what has happened is that outside the college educated class there is a dramatic decline in the share of kids. the largest decline has been in the middle of the education distribution. so i'm speaking here about moms with a high school degree or some college. and they comprise now of 52% of kids now that have moms in that middle education group, right? and so high school grads, not the most disadvantage or the teen moms either. the share of their kids living with two parents, that's more than 20 percentage points over

the 40-year period. interestingly the share of kids in that sort of middle high school educated mom group that is living with married parents. that fell from 80% to close to 60%. and so now the wide gap is really between college educated and everybody else, where it is back in the 1980s, people started to call attention to the fact that among the most disadvantaged groups, teen moms, moms without the high school degree, there's a high share of single parents among the single mothers in that group. now you've had huge increase in the share of those kids that are living with single mothers. the middle grown has converged downward. so we've got a real big bifurcation between college educated moms or the moms of college educated moms and everybody else. and that is really what i'm calling attention to in the

book. this divergence in family structure is yet another way that the college educated class is pulling away from everyone else. but you know, 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 confers. >> it's really striking, yeah, having two parents in a sense is really a privilege as your title eludes to at this point. the u.s. is an outlier in terms of the experience it sounds like? >> yeah. the u.s. is an outlier. like you said, we have one in five kids that hiv with just an unpartnerred mom. one in four kids that will live with the unpartnerred parent if we include the dads. this is really just dramatically higher than that 7% average around the world. you know, the u.k. is a close

second behind us. the european union, 13% of kids that live with the parent. it's a little misconception that some people have oh in the u.s., we're moving away from marriage, but we are more european. and parents are more likely to cohabit. the fact of the matter is that rates are quite low in the u.s. among parents. even among a mom and her partner or a dad in his cohabiting partner as you mentioned. many of those are not actually the child's biological parents. so it's largely unstable among parents. very few will stay together. they are often in about 25 to 40% of the cases. all of this is very different than the situation with cohabitation among parents in europe. even with that, it's way more kids that will live with one

parent more than anywhere else. >> we can talk in a moment about kind of what the evidence will say about this. before we will get there, why might it matter whether a child will grow up with one or two parents? what are sort of the reasons why one situation on average might be better or worse? >> yeah. let me stipulate before i get into the reasons why. it's abundantly clear in the data that kids from married parent or two-parent homes have better outcomes. and also just a language thing. i keep going back and forth because as we were just saying in the u.s., those are really tightly linked, right? and so married parents, they often mean that you have two parents and unmarried parents, it typically means you don't. so i'm using those as a bit interchangeably. the data is abundantly clear that kids from married homes do better. how much of that is because married parents are likely to be an advantaged group any way that

they are likely to be educated higher income? and so obviously the first thing that we want to do is to compare a cross. let's just look at the outcome for kids and whether they have a married or unmarried mother. let's make sure we see the same age and the same race. we see these big outcomes. they have done more sophisticated things to try to really narrow down the parents' marital status or the number of parents in the households. the evidence is pretty overwhelming. we know kids do better. then the question is and what do i mean do better? they are less likely to live in poverty, more likely to graduate from high school. more likely to graduate there college. more likely to have higher earnings and be married themselves in adulthood. they are less likely to get in trouble in school. they are less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. a whole host of outcomes.

so then the question is why? and a big part of it surprisingly is income differences, right? and so one of the things that a married parent or two-parent home tends to do is to have a second parent in the household with earnings capacity. and so as a matter of simple math, two parents brings in more income than one parent alone. if you look at the median income of single mother households verses married, it's about two to one, right? and so majority of moms will work now and they have twice as much income. income is really protective to kids. it affords a lot of opportunities. we know this, right? we know this. we have a lot of evidence on this. income is a big part of the story, but not the whole story. a second parent in the household, i mean, i see this in the data. but you and i both know as parents, anyone with kids that will tell you.

kids also take a hot of time. we see that kids who live in two-parent or married parents household, they will have more parental time. the extent that we think that parental time with kids is an investment and it is an investment in their human capital and they will talk about the way that parents spend their time with kids and in ways that will foster their development and service their needs in different ages. we just see that kids from married parent homes are more likely to get those inputs. and a third sort of mechanism that i think is really important and that there is evidence in favor of is that we see that kids who live in married parent homes, they are more likely to get exposure to the type of parenting that development psychologists would say it is developmentally appropriate and nurturing and beneficial. and you know, again, i want to think that it is really important to think

that i don't see evidence suggesting to me some people will say this. but i don't see the evidence that is strong at all. i don't see evidence that is 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 whether time with their kids or reading their kids is more or less beneficial. there is a lot of survey of an evidence that parents, you know, they sort of want to do the same things, read to their kids, spend time with their kids. and it is easier to do this and i refer to it in this book and in the literature as bandwidth or less stress. there is nuance differences between emotional up and down

width and toxic stress. but speaking, we could speculate that single parent households, they have higher level of stress and the bandwidth. again, i'm thinking here of really compelling evidence in studies and surveys. but as parents, most of us would relate to this that you would come home from the work day. you're stressed out. you might be stressed out about something in your head, whether you could pay a bill, etc. it's hard to be patient with your kid and to sit down and read with your kid and people who have a second parent in the house to share all of those burdens with are more readily able to do that. so to just sort of incapsulate this, i think there is three key buckets that we could think about as to why two-parent married homes deliver benefits and advantageous home environment to kids. there is more income, there is more time, and there is more elijah muhammad notional band quidth. >> yes, that makes a lot of

sense as i was reading it. i had shared custody with a daughter now who is entering the teenage years and another factor, just having two sets of eyes on kids, rather than one set of eyes. basic things like that, intuitively seem really important. so you would say to folks who might argue that these resources aren't as important as you would say that it is sort of intrinsic traits of more resource in parents and kids? you don't see that in the research that you've 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's beneficial. and i'm not sure why. i think this is not 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, you know, people don't want to judge other peoples choices, right? people don't want to say oh, well, it's marriage or something else. so then you're left with no, it's, if you reject that and you reject the preponderance that we never will or we will randomly assign some kids to live with married parents and others not. so once we don't have that randomized control trial, we can't perfectly nail the causal identification that this is marriage or this is having two parents as opposed to something else, right? now we can see that kids from married parents do better. we can see that once we sort of account for all these other things, those gaps go away, so we can see they would confer

these benefits. but still, you know, to the extent that we make those things go away or we adjust for them, and there are still remaining gaps. it is probably not the second parent. it's something that's unobserved about the single parent. such that even if they had another contributing person in the house, their kids would still be disadvantaged. and not only do i see evidence for that, i'm not willing to basically write off the single parents and say that oh gosh, even if they would have all these other resources in the second person, that they just can't intrinsically deliver the type of parenting that is conducive to childhood success the way that these higher quality of people are who get married. so leaning hard into the unobserved differences, you know, strikes me as an odd thing to be doing and one that's not supported in the data. and i think in some sense, it's the opposite of what most of us are inclined to do, which is

acknowledge the difficulty of the circumstances of single parents rather than say it is something intrinsic about them. but the other reason why, you know, some people are reluctant to say oh, well it is the fact of being married that is really helpful. i think this is an important point. even if some of those single parents married or partnered with the father of their children, you wouldn't see the average boost that you would expect from that average marriage because that dad would not be contributing so much to the house, right? and so this is an important part. on average, we know that basically married parents are able to confer to that kid and that won't tell us what will happen in any individual case. so it really depends on any individual case, on what the

second parent would bring into the house. and so i have a paper with cellophane that we wrote in 2017 and it is in the annual review of economics and we write about this marriage premium for kids and we acknowledge this underlying economy term for this and that it is at variation and what we would expect the marriage premium would be for kids given three different factors. how many resources that the mom has by herself. what the second parent would bring and then what outcome we're talking about. for example if we are talking about two teenage parents, neither one of them graduated high school. neither one of them have good job prospects. even if they were to be married, they might struggle to get their kid out through high school,

right? there might be a lot of deficit in their households. if we're talking about a 35-year-old mom with an mba. she probably could keep that child out of poverty, could get that child through high school. because her partner is, you know, descriptively on average, probably highly educated mail pause we know that there is a lot of meeting. that the extra resources that he would bring into that household might be enough to get that kid think college. because we actually see that it is not until you would get to kids with two highly educated parents that we have a large share graduating college. and so the benefits of 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're talking about. wu the largest, going back to something that we said earlier. the largest decrease in married parents has been in the middle group. among parents with the high school education. and this is where that gap outside of poverty and college seem to be largest. and that we would see this in the data and it makes some sense. so think about the high school educated mom, you know, let's say she's making $35,000 a year on her own. and she has a child with a dad with a high school level of education, making $35,000. she could probably keep that kid out of child poverty by herself. but the household with two working parents, bringing in a combined $70,000. that's a very different situation than the household with one parent bringing in $35,000. that's where we would see the

largest gaps and whether they would graduate high school. and so i think that it is just important to think about, you know, averages will mask a lot. and there are individual circumstances that would determine whether the individual situation would be beneficial for kids. but if we would look at the patterns, they are very consistent with the resource framework and to explain it in a way by saying that it is something underlining and about the single parent once you recognize these patterns, that you will have to tell those stories to say that it is something other than the benefits of the second parent that they will bring into the household. >> yeah. i thought the study was clever. it is a great example of starting with the framework and figuring out whether or not it is true and then taking evidence as it comes. i do think there's a couple of interesting studies that i like a lot that

might get outside your resource framework. and just mention the quick one. it was done, oh, i think in sweden. and it would look at the kids of divorce where the divorce would happen because their dad was in an office that was a little bit more imbalanced. there was more opportunity for an extramarital affair to happen. >> clever design is so terrible. >> yeah, right. it's an awful thing. >> come on, guys. they were really negative, which you could imagine that they were maybe kids that were in a marriage as far as they know, they were doing fine and that is a big disruption and shock to a

stable childhood. the other thing that was done, they would find that kids who end up being raised only by their mom because they live in a state being convicted of a crime that he goes to prison. and then if, you know, the count of growing up with their dad too and a lot of these guys on average that were convicted of a crime and went to prison might not have been the greatest dads as well. so i think that goes a little bit beyond sort of your resource argument. >> well -- i try to use the term resource very broadly in a sense that i don't mean just income. i actually think these two studies are right on point to some of the stuff that i talk about in the book.

i talk about two different studies of parents convicted of crime to make this point exactly what you just said. if the second parent would be harmful, right? and that is a situation. well in that case, it would be instability and conflict and negative things and that child again, data shows clever studies. they show that like let's just take two parents convicted of the same crime. one happens to be assigned to a judge to send them to prison and to find that it is beneficial to the kids. and that actually helps make the point really clearly a that it is not in all cases that kids would be better off. we certainly don't want to go back to the situation where we are stigmatizing them severely that they feel they

have no choice, but to leave the marriages or partnerships. so that's the important point. i didn't know about that study about the divorce, but it is actually also, you know, really important to thinking about the marginal verses average and so what is happening in that study that you just mentioned. the divorce would seem to have been instigated by an extramarital affair as opposed to obvious conflict in the house. in one of the lines of the push back that i get often is of course, this is terrible that you are openly seeing the decline in marriage because they are unhappy. i think this will raise the uncomfortable question and this is beyond the scope of what i'm an expert on it. this is an important question of when is it actually better for the kid, you know? and that we have gone so far in the direction of

couples not being together that they will have direction, right? 40% of these kids in the country are born outside the marital union. it is not that in 40% of those cases that the partner would be violent or abusive, right? and that we are so far beyond the extreme cases that we will have to ask that question, have we gone so far that maybe these partnerships, they wouldn't have been gloriously happy. maybe that stability, it would be beneficial to kids and that it is a difficult decision to have. nobody would like to question the individual freedom and the choices in the pursuit of happiness. i would just, somebody has to be thinking about the kids, right? and that in some sense, we will see that they will do better when they have two parents,

stabilizing together, then the kids will do better when they are not in that household. >> absolutely. and i fully agree that 40% of my biological sectors are not terrible parents. open to debate what the right percentage is. >> yeah right? it is probably somewhere between zero to 40 and wide disagreements on which end they are closer to. >> right. this will bring us the question. i think that your book is well positioned to be maybe the best important policy book this fall and probably the most important policy of last fall. >> thanks, scott. >> and absolutely. it was a book by richard reese who we both know and are friends with called the boys of men where he chronicles the sort of ways that boys and men are falling behind girls and women. interestingly i think he sort of skirted over the possibility that single parenthood could affect boys

differently than girls. but you see a look of your book and say more about the differential impacts of growing up with a single mother for boys and girls? >> yeah, let me say that i love richard's book. and i think he has done a real important thing here by highlighting the struggles of the boys. and he does this in making sure to not lament the wonderful advances that women and girls have made, right? and so he is right to say that hey, we have done all this. they are doing better. they are going to college in higher rates. this is good. but hold on, let's look at what's happening to the boys. they're getting in trouble more at school. they are now less likely to go to college than young women are graduating high school. you're actually right though. i link this to the fact that so

many of them are growing up without dads in their house. i think breaking the cycle of fatherless homes is actually really a critical thing that we would have to do to improve the situation for boys in this country. that it will mactans sense. having a role model, in the house, it is probably pretty good for most boys. we've seen it in the data with the compelling work on this and let me highlight the such studies. and they have, you know, a lot of administrative records on the kids that they have pulled together. they would look at kids, the school performance in their home environment, controlling for the neighborhood and the characteristics. what they are focused on, trying to explain

the gender gap. the gender gap now in schools, they are favoring girls, meaning they are much more likely to get suspended in school. let's just start with that, right? they are more likely to go to cal and lash out in ways that will get them in trouble. and by the way, getting in trouble in school and getting suspended, those kinds of things, they will spiral that you're less likely to wind up in the criminal justice system. it's a meaningful metric. that's larger among kids growing up in mother only households compared to the married households. what does that say? you know boys, they're more likely to get in trouble with the additional boost to the likelihood that they will get in trouble, including their sisters. so if you look at the sisters and the brothers, they are more likely to get in trouble than

girls, if they don't have a dad in their house. then they will go further than just documenting, that striking and finding, you know, showing desperate impacts of the family structures on the boys and the girls. they would try to get into the mechanism of what's going on. you and i, we spoke earlier in this hour about some of the differences that we see. they do find that there are some differences that boys growing up, they would get the last time from their mom and they are more likely to get the harsh parenting from their mom. i find this incredibly interesting. i have two daughters and a son.

you know, that same thing, if i sort of, you know, reduce my time spent with my son and daughter and more harsh with both of them, it will have a bigger impact on whether my son will lash out, right? whether he would get in trouble at school. i want to be careful because in a way that i don't, i think we should be very careful to not say that girls aren't struggling, but we know from the developments, the psychology, the literature. we know on average when girls are struggling, they're more likely to internalize their unhappiness or anxiety. the fact they're more likely to engage in this behavior that they are likely to get in trouble in school. so even though it might be consequential and the

educational system and ultimately their economic trajectory for boys, i want to be careful. that they might just be struggling in different ways with the different consequences, but they don't derail their educational performances as much. >> yes. >> sorry, there is a second study about boys. this is the level study by, you know, the opportunity insights team. and this is in a neighborhood level. that you probably know which one i'm thinking of. and i'm thinking about the one that looks at racial gaps and the outcomes between, you know, let's say black and white boys when they grow up into the adulthood. and the single biggest predictor of the smaller gap in adulthood between black and white boys when they are adults. the share of homes with a black

dad present in their neighborhood. this is super interesting. this is beyond the benefits of individual child that they would get from having their trouble in the house. having more homes, black family homes with black dads is particularly helpful for black boys in the neighborhood. and then the tragedy here in the statistical sense is that they would show what a small share of black boys in the u.s. are growing up in low poverty neighborhoods for the majority of black dads in the neighborhood. but their study really also reveals the importance of having dads around for boys and their trajectories. >> yeah. i think the real neat thing about that study, you know, a lot of studies like that, you'll see some correlation between something about the neighborhood and kids outcomes, people saying that it's the thing that we're

looking at to cause them to look better or do worse and a lot of the times, it is not clear that it is the case. the interesting thing is having more black fathers will help black boys. and having more white fathers at home doesn't help. and it is very specific it seems impact that seems more plausible than sort of the general claim about neighborhood composition that sometimes folks will make. >> i mean i still think that it is hard and you're right if my recollection is having white dads is helpful, which will fit with the idea that you're getting at, which seems like it is tightly linked, right? i mean there is still the issue of you could

never get around this. maybe it's something else, one of the other 20, it is not one of the 20 things they would think about. it is something we can't think of. at some point we will need to stop with the suggests and coming up with the other stories that we can't name and it is probably a bigger factor. >> yes, absolutely. and well i want to get to policy before we wrap up, but let's look at the causes of this increase in single parenthood. i think first of all many of our viewers, you know, kind of might assume that this is either due to rising divorce or to rising teen pregnancy for instance. true? >> no. and in a very

mechanical sense of what's driving this is the reduction in marriage and specifically the reduction in marriage among parents and the way i describe it is we've experienced, again, outside the college educated class in america, a debundling of marriage from having and raising kids, right? and so this is driven by an increase in the share of kids who are not born to married parents and their parents don't go on to get married. that is how we have gotten in this situation of so many kids that are living with one parent. divorce on marriages are down. and actually now you would even see if you just look at the share of kids that are living with the unpartnerred mothers, a small majority of them would get there through never being married. in the 1980s, that was not the case. unpartnered mothers were much more likely to have gotten in that position through divorce

now and especially outside the college educated class, they are more likely to have gotten in that situation without getting married. that they are way down and since the mid-1990s. so if you told me in 1990 that teen births were going to plummet by as much as they did and that women in their young 20s were going to fall by as much as they did, i would have predicted a decrease in the share of kids that were living in the single parent homes. those are the groups. but birth among those groups, they have decreased. and that is more than offset by an increase in non-marital child baring and single mother homes outside of those groups like all groups. and so that is really what's driving this. that's really what's important, again, that it does not get to the underlining root causes, but mechanically knowing what we're talking about is really important because making divorce harder, it is not really going to turn this around and putting

more emphasis on expanded access to the contraception for the teenagers that's not really going to turn it around because they are not the driving factors. >> yeah, that we will sort of get to the root causes now, which will lead into the policy as well. often sort of turn on three possible product explanation, economics, kind of culture, and there is policy. you lean heavily on economics. what's your argument here in the book for why economic changes have led to changes in the family? >> yeah, i think it's really an interaction of economics and a shift in social norms. so let me explain why. so let's take a step back. we focus on the fact that what i'm talking about these trends have really happened in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and they sort of stabilized, but they are not reversing. in the 60s and 70s, we had

massive social cultural changes, you know, shifted emphasis on marriage and gender norms. and so during the 60s and 70s, what we saw was marriage decreased across the board, right, for everybody a bit. college educated, high school educated, less than high school educated. and then 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 actually the most likely to be married. college educated mothers are by far the most likely mothers to be married. and so, you know, this is where i lean into economics to explain why did things keep changing outside the college educated class? what diversion in the 80s and the 90s is really the economic situation between college educated adults and everyone else. i mean you and i have had many conversations about this. in broad strokes,

college educated workers will continue to do quite well in the labor market. their earnings will continue to rise steadily. meanwhile non-college educated workers, we've seen employment rates over the past, you know, 30 years fall among the non-college educated men. we've seen their wages, stagnant, let's say. i know people depate on exactly what happened, but they stagnated and they fell relative to women. so i lean into the economic view of marriage here and stipulate that. the economic proposition of marriage for adults outside the college educated class, somewhat eroded from the changing economic circumstances where men became less reliable economic contributors and les financially important relative to what women could bring on their own. and there are a number of studies that lead me to this conclusion that there is a causal chain there and that

places experienced reductions in earnings for non-college educated men and in that sense that saw reduction in the increase of the kids living in single parent households. in maces that were dominated by the industries that, you know, where the national trends were such that men did less and we see a reduction in marriage and a rise of kids living in the single parent households. there is a causal affect happening there. but then there is also a give and take with the social norms. so the more of the social norm time together marriage and child baring is eroded. and then the economic worsening of the marriage proposition in those affected populations, you sort of get stuck in this spiral. and now i think it is different than what i said about this topic, it's going to take both economic changes and a shift of

social norms to reverse these trends. and a part of what has changed my mind on this is that, you know, i was pretty swayed by the idea that the reduction and the marriage of a man from an economic framework led me to the conclusion that we really have to build up the economic security and opportunities, and the ability to be financial providers of men and in more communities and that will sort of naturally lead to a turnaround. and that i wrote a study with my colleague, where we exploited this reverse marge among men possibility, which is the fracking boom. let's set aside any environmental concerns. these fracking booms around the country outside of north and south dakota where it was a migrant situation. throughout the rest of the country, these really led to localized income booms and they are really good for the local economy in a way

that particularly was beneficial to non-college educated men, so we showed that in places where they happen to be located over the right geology that they could take advantage of the new technology, and they have a local fracking boom. earnings and employment among the non-college educated men went up. rerun our analysis. i'm expecting to see a reduction in the non-marital birth share, and you don't get that at all. you just get that there are more to kids because we actually have a bunch of evidence showing that when people get this, you know, surprised shock, more income, people use some of that to have more kids because kids are expensive. they have more kids. we see the same size affect on the likelihood of having a kid among married and unmarried folks. no increase in marriage, no reduction in the non-marital birth share. so then because this was surprising, we start speculating maybe this is about the social norms in this environment. we do see the increase in births

among non-married parents is larger in places that already have more non-marital births at the baseline. we look back in the 70s and the 80s, what happened during the very similar cold bloom shock. there you find only an increase in married births. you'll see the increase in marriage. you see a reduction of the non-marriage birth share. that's suggestive to me that how people respond is dependent on the social paradigm. that's why i think it is both social and economic. >> yep. great. so i want to push back a couple of areas in terms of your causal story. yesterday the census bureau released new income measures, those included measures of earnings. and median men's earnings, by the census bureaus numbers are 12% higher than last year than they were in 1979. i think your own numbers in the book show as you

said, stagnation, you know, maybe among the lowest educated folks, small decline in earnings, but certainly not a decline that's kind of the same magnitude of the changes in the family. do we think that -- and it matters for policy, right? the decline of marriage ability is about men doing worse that it is a different call for a different set of policies, and that it is just women are doing much better. do you have sort of thoughts on the difference between either those being true to the affects or how you think about policy? >> yeah. so two things, remember a lot of this decrease in marriage increase really happened in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, and has stalled out. and so if men are doing better, both in a relative absolute sense over the past ten years, that would be consistent with sort of, you know, a stopping of the bottom falling out here, right?

a stopping of this downward trend? it's really hard to tease out how much of this is men doing worse than an absolute first relative sense. 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 verses women's decision, right? so we see an ebb an equilibrium. and the man is deciding, you know what, i like i don't want that responsibility. i don't feel secure enough, i don't want that pressure. i can't say which one is driving it. but you know, i think the value proposition of marriage from both sides is reduced if men are either viewed as or view themselves as less able. you know, these economic changes in the eighties and nineties and

2000 sort of got the whole ball rolling or five or 10 years is inconsistent with this economic changes of the 80s, 90s and 2000, that got the ball rolling and kept it rolling in this direction. you did not push in this direction but others have pushed back on me with this old- fashioned notion including what you read, the old-fashioned notion that men have to be the breadwinners. >> you will not hear me push back on that. i will push back on one other thing that you might be anticipating, you make us drunk point that the game of marriage for women depends on an outside option. since women are in more occupations that are higher- paying, they are able to support more on their own and that affects their decision to

marry or not very mary. the other thing that has changed is the safety net has gotten generous, not cash well benefit, but with everything else. there has been a big expansion over 40, 50 years, you are 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? >> yes, yes. for any of you who are in this as much as you and i are, i think we agree on, it has become much harder to access. we see that in terms of what

share of single moms are getting in a cash benefit, 6% have cash benefits. we need to move away from this stereotype, harmful characterization from the 80s that single moms are running around relying on cash welfare. this is not the case. 80%, on average, 80% of the income in a single mother's home is from her own earnings. another single-digit gets ssi, cash is less common and hard to access. the majority are on medicaid. child health insurance has become much easier to access periods >> and food stamps. >> yes, 40% have food stamps coming into the house. my view on this, there are dozens of studies of the link between the generosity of phasing out programs and family formation. i have written some of those papers.

my read is there is a link in the direction that is more generous and there is a small increase that, in terms of magnitude, i read that as the magnitude is very small. i do not deny the link, the magnitudes are so small that they are not what is driving the trend. the cash flow becomes harder to access but at the same time single motherhood has become more common. it is also more common on populations that are less reliant on welfare. that is why i reject the idea that this is reflective of a generous welfare system. let me concede some points to the other side. if we did not have welfare reform in 96 making it harder to access cash benefits, really emphasizing requirements for work, would we

have had a larger increase in single motherhood nonmarital childbearing? it is possible. i will grant that. i am also very convinced that taking health insurance away from millions of u.s. children will not meaningfully turn around marriage among parents. this is why i reject the calls that if the, in the u.s. was less generous than we solve this problem. even if i am willing to grant that some people on the margin might be more inclined to have a nonmarital birth or be a single mom because there some measure of basic support out to there, i do not think it is a major driver and i do not think making the safety net more since he will turn it around. >> we have a few minutes left tell us what you think would make a difference in terms of policy to reverse the trend or stabilize the ones that are

getting worse. >> what i am hoping to hi accomplish with this book and what i feel strongly about is we need to consider the issue, class gaps and family structure . we need to take this as a policy matter with policy urgency. that actually is not -- it is ae pretty strong statement to be making even if it may not sound like it. the fact that we have been collectively as a group of people who talk about policy and write about it, we have been reluctant to take on family and the policy domain and it means it has gotten a short trip. we spend very little on programs and research trying to figure out how to strengthen friends and families. i think establishing this as a policy is important. once we do that i think we ai should have much more dedicated

attention, public dollars, private dollars, community innovation in programs aimed at strengthening families. i also think, this is a decision that many will disagree with, we need to reestablish the social norms acknowledging that two parent is a beneficial. had we reestablish those social norms? we move further from the things in the economist policy toolkit, social much choosing messaging matters, what leader safe matters, the messages that come from media and entertainment media matter. and we need to get to the root causes, social changes being among them but also the economic route changes. because you and i have not rejected o this idea that men and fathers should still be breadwinners, i do think that recognizing that the challenges that have faced

many men in the labor market have spilled into the family sphere leaving too many kids growing up without a dad in their home, it really emphasizes the urgency of all of the policy things that we talk about to improve the insecurity among college- educated men. >> the book is the two parent privilege. thank you very much for this was a great conversation. i learned a lot from reading the book and i think it will do very well. >> thank you so much. >> if you are enjoying book tv, sign up for our newsletter using the qr code on the screen . to see upcoming programs, discussions and more. book tv every sunday on c-span2 or online at book tv.org. traveling over the

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