and i going to yield to the people in charge. jonathan, i agree this has been an absolute pleasure. i will also be in the line to buy some more of the books so that we can ask why you can only quote so manyto to risk a to on.

we're going to be discussing metro fares with how in andrew's and how we can come to a record unfair something. now on a serious note a great panel today we're discussing family policy. the family social conservatism,

and how often these like economic related debates have played out throughout the realignment discourse over the past year or so have brad wilcox. thank you for joining us. i'm you have a book coming out see it was delayed i'm guessing that was the supply chain. i wish no, september. september. so it was going be june. so keep an eye out for that. how i hope you're working on something like boomers is a. on the material sense to children are obviously as targets they are very very important so let's let's just start here brad i'd love to and as much as you could preview your book and what you're thinking about if i were to ever articulate an issue that sort of defines why there's like this real dynamic happening, i think would always come back to this idea of family policy, superficial or serious, that would just be the first one. what's kind of your response to why that happened, how that's kind of gone down over the past

three or four years? what to start there? so i think one of the striking things and one of the sort of disturbing things about the work that i've been doing lately is just sort seeing kind of how much the family is really a working class story when it comes to american. and so we've seen kind of the biggest declines, for instance, in terms of marriage and families among working class americans from 1980 to the present. so kind of thinking about why working class is the way that it is, you sort of have to understand and appreciate that there's obviously a lot of pain and pathos and a lot of that sort of revolving what's happening in american working class families. so, no, not the poor, not the middle class, certainly not the upper class seen kind of the the dramatic declines in marriage and parenthood from 1982 to the present. so part of what sort of bringing people in, i think new political directions, obviously, there's a lot of pain, too. that's driving all this as well. and quick social science up, how would you distinguish a poor and a working class family in this

class? i'm just saying, if you kind of look at how households are divided by basically by quintile, what you can see is that unfortunately kind, of marriage has already kind of in a pretty precarious, you know, by the seventies, the poor and in that bottom quintile. but from 1980 to the present, we see about, you know, the share of kids living in married parent families going from about 75% in that working class, you know, quintile to around 55% currently. and no group in american life in terms of those different quintiles saw as much of a decline in marriage as did you know this working class demographic since 19. and so that's certainly part and parcel of what's driving these conversation shifts and concerns. what are your thoughts? how in. well, first, let me make sure i'm audible this is working great. well, thanks for having me especially my current state. i think it was sam hammond of the niskanen center who made me aware of a study that said,

quite relevantly to our topic today that unfortunately, most of the policy levers that you can pull to try and increase the fertility rate have don't move the needle very much. they're just their effects are not that large. but the one exception is peer effects. if somebody in your social circle has a baby, you are much more likely in the coming 12 months to become pregnant. so that's my purpose on the panel here today. i'm here to make you all presentations social contagion and then all of your friends are having babies. so that's that's no, i think the problem of the decline of the family is so much bigger even than most policy. family policy wonks appreciate because there it's no secret that there's a decline in fertility. but there are kind of two different types of fertility decline. one is women who are married, who are having one kid when really before they would have had two or three or they would

prefer to have two or three. and then there's women are just not getting married, not having kids at all. so they're there at the zero. and i think when you look at the millennial generation, the problem is in that latter category and that's a lot more intractable if the problem were women, you know, getting women who are married and in families to have more kids or to as many kids as they want to have, that's maybe you could tweak with a tax credit or a baby bonus or something like that. but if people are not forming families in the first place, then you're talking about a social problem rather than just a financial problem. i'm really glad that you put it that way. helen, because brad, this is some of your work resonated the most i can tell you, some of the most viral, most popular content that i will do is on lack of male wages opportunity. listen, business, marriage, ability and the dating market. it resonates at one of the deepest cultural levels that i have seen, and i don't see anybody the mainstream touching on it.

so i'd love for you both to expand a little bit more on that because, you know, there's one way some people often do this blame the women. but, you know, in terms of what women find desirable within men is also downstream of an economic structure or of opportunity of expected action that go back for quite a long time. and the way that we're structured right now is not creating the conditions for that to even occur, where you can even have the choice, have one child or not. so i'd like to hear from both of you about the political and government aside that have created this mess that we're in right now. brad, you can go first. sure. so i think certainly one of the things that that i've heard from women both at uva and just more generally is kind of a frustration with the quality of men that they're encountering. obviously, you know, every guy, but many of the men that they're encountering and there are questions about kind of a capacity to commit, you know, drive agency, pay and their success in the labor force. and we have seen a pretty dramatic increase in the share of men who are not working full

time. it's been a you know, about doubled since 1970. so you know this means that particularly in class and poor communities, you often have couples where she's actually working more hours than he is. she's earning more money than he is. and even despite that, you know, that reality she's doing more housework. and if they have kids, you know, childcare than he has. so it just creates a lot resentment and an unwillingness to think about marriage. you know, for many so many women, particularly in working class and poor communities across the country, and then thinking about what is it about our current social context that sort of made more likely to sort of be either idle or not fully engaged in the labor force? there's a lot one could say about that, but i think certainly technology is one factor. the way in which sort of there's just so much good high, cheap entertainment there to kind of keep men just sort of distract it from kind of fully engaging in high school and fully

engaging in technical schools and also full engagement. but we're also seeing, too, in some new data that family studies just published last week that the guys are the most likely not to be working are also reporting physical and mental health problems. and those are in turn related to family instability or family dysfunction growing up. so it brings us back to the family again. so if families are not kind of their boys, well, if there's not, you know, a decent father on seeing and then it looks like the boys more likely to be experiencing both physical maladies emotional distress. they're just not really prepared to fully engage the working world as well. so that's, you know, part of the sort of the larger landscape that helps to inform some of our current challenges. why of two answers to your question. the first is on the sort of political factors that have helped to create this problem. as soon as you said that i had an impish thought about the most

election and one of the most notable things to to come out of it and the analysis of the various demographic breakdowns of which party won one which group was the gender gap is really a marriage gap that you know you think of republicans doing better among men and democrats doing better women. but actually republicans married women. it's that since well, women love the democratic party and they love it a lot. you know, the gap there is massive and it sounds cynical to it but if you think those don't affect democratic politicians and the things they choose to prioritize, you're crazy. it's it's depressing, but it's simply true. and quick question, though, if we're starting with, you know, technocratic, wonky what not, but we're starting off a study that says that there's very little government can do to turn, you know, the thing it's unclear what thing are democrats not incentivized to do but also like if people aren't getting

married also like, you know, the liberalization divorce laws were also a factor in either. so what what would be thought on that that is a perfect lead in to point number two, which is actually an example of thing we could do tomorrow, a policy lever we could pull that i think would make a a really difference. and it has to do with theme you raised of and that brad raised about disappointment in men which is also you know something that we've all heard from from ladies out there today. but as the woman on the panel, i feel like i am well positioned to criticize the women little bit right now, one of the biggest reasons for the decline in marriage is the college gap. we are approaching a point where there are what college educated women who are unmarried for every three college educated males and women earning more bachelor's degrees and advanced degrees just at every level of higher education. and that's only recently true. so the gap is only going to get bigger and it is simply an

observable fact that women are not willing to pair off with men who have less education than they have know. if you're a woman with a college degree, you have closed off to yourself from the marriage market all men out there without college degrees and that's an instance where those women may be saying men are living up to my standards. but first of all, the fact that a man doesn't have a college degree, definitely does not mean he's not up to your standard. tony. he could be great. and of all, if your degree is in like early childhood education, you're not so hot yourself. you know? so in other words, i guess that that that was a joke. but i mean is that we could stop minting all of these unknown, necessary college degrees and not lose very much as a society. i think college is just a key part of this story. and brad, you know, we've talked about this before, but i mean, with the male dropout surge of 20, 20, 21, we are now at 6040. and with elite institutions in

particular for women and men and, you know, you you're like you said, elon, if if that's going to be and remain static. well, it's not just about what we've seen this like you guys to touch on. it's not even just about willing to date somebody or be with somebody who has the same education. a lot of it comes down to wages and, the wage, the lack of wage increase for class men in particular appears to be deeply tied to story of lack of family, of lack marriage ability. and brad, you can touch on this, too, of a lot of downstream health problems, which are really surprising not even we're not talking about mental health. i'm talking like physical ailments. they get injured at a much higher degree, much more likely to drop out of the workforce because of a workplace injury. they die much earlier, actually, than their married counterparts, like the level of despair that this reaches in one's life, it can't difficult to describe

unless really take a hard look at the data here. yeah, i mean, i think we're seeing, you know, as as we saw in jeff's last week is just a big spike in the number of young adults who are reporting these problems health wise. but i think part of the issue here, too, in terms of thinking about how do we address the problem, is looking at obviously schooling, not just sort of at college, but really doing better in our middle schools or high schools to kind of create classroom contexts that are much more male friendly. and richard reeves of brookings, obviously in talking about this in the last couple of months. but, you know, we just need to do a lot more to get more men in the classroom. but beyond that, to sort of think about curriculum, pedagogy, more recess, obviously, but just sort of different ways to sort of make boys feel like they've got a place in our schools. i think also doing more to kind of revive single sex education as well. and then in terms of high school beyond doing a lot more to promote was classically called vocational education and doing more like what germany and japan do to kind of give men an on

road into trades that will give them a decent middle income that would make them more attractive even to college educated women who might be willing to down educationally. what's striking on that particular point is there's relatively new research indicating that when women are marrying down educationally, they're still married up financially. so they find the guy who is, you know, working an emt and making a good salary. they find a guy who's committed to pushing in the trades and that's the guy who they marry. so the point is that we have to continue to think about to sort of strengthen especially working class man's opportunities to flourish when it comes to providing because that's good for them and it's good their marriage ability as well. absolutely. i'm i don't i think this is a great opportunity to recognize that many people on the left like richard reeves, are thinking about this issue seriously and about improving economic opportunities for working class men.

but there's an idea that is very prevalent on the left in that strain of the left that would be extremely for us to embrace. that's kind of a primrose path down it down in a bad direction. and so i want to just raise it so we can all reject it and know not to go there. one thing that richard reeves observes in his book on the decline of men is that the gender integration of various professions and jobs has really only gone one way since the 1970s, formally male dominated professions now, lots and lots of female representation, formerly female dominated jobs and professions are still extremely female dominated. they're still not that many male elementary school teachers or librarians or things like that. and this is a problem because. does given the changes in the economy in the last 20 years, the biggest job growth has been in the caring professions and home health aides and things like that in the sort of pink

collar female work so faced that array of facts, many people on the left have said what we need to do is make more men willing to go be nurses and preschool teachers and whatever. tell men that there's nothing unmanned about joining a helping profession. i really don't think the thing keeping men out of these helping professions in these pink collar jobs is i think it's just natural differences between men and women. women are more interested in caring, touchy, helping jobs, doing all day, and men are more interested building things with their hands or things are analytical, whatever. so would be a mistake to try to push more men into female jobs and to solve the decline in the male working class. that way it fixing this problem will require fire bringing back or fortifying the male dominated

because i don't think them in to female jobs is going to work right so yeah there's a political economy piece that is flowing from your comments and i'm assuming think about how, you know, our policies do or do not tend to reinforce excessive employment in american higher education. you know, there's tons and tons of administrators doing work that doesn't need to get done, as we all know. and there are women and many of them are women. and the same thing is true, obviously, in health care as well. so we can think about to kind of steering, you know, our economy in directions that are more favorable towards, you know, obviously manufacturing, you know, natural gas, all that kind of stuff that would an unmentioned infrastructure. i mean, not sure how much real kind of progress we made spending this infrastructure money that's been passed in in good ways. there are ways we could kind of like shift the political economy that would be more conducive maximizing working class men's engagement in the rural economy as well for your a marie curious here starting if you've read to what degree should we conceive of marriage and fertility issues

moving forward as primarily like economic or cultural ones especially because it seems it feels like with both options now that we've progressed into the discourse. so to your point, how an insight, sam, we know that you can't turn on the technocratic policy. you know, valve which would appeal to the center left spaces and then on the cultural end, we are kind of left with this at best frustrating kind of robert putnam in our institutions have to come back together and once we so figure out how to do that after 40 years not knowing how to do that will fix the thing. so where are we so where are we left considering both those factors you. yeah, i think it's a i mean it's a, it's a both challenge. i was just talking to a scholar today at uva, was visiting and she's studying japan and and family life in japan and they've been throwing like every policy thing that they can you know at japanese adults and it's just not the dial, you know.

so just passing a child allowance, testing a family allowance, you know, adding, you know, some kind of daycare policy to the sort of menu is not going to is not going to do it. on the one hand. but i think conservatives have sort of had this idea that all we need to do is just kind of change the culture, you know, capture the the commanding heights of the new york times and early colleges and sort of engineer different messages. i think that would be really helpful. but we also have to make sure that there's a political economy being acknowledged, too, so that we're kind of, on the one hand, telling people the which is as far as can tell, the number one predictor of global life satisfaction that i've been able to run across and all my data analysis is marital quality, the quality of your marriage, the beats, job satisfaction. you it beats money. it beats a lot of things. and so kind of giving people like a true portrait of of the world as it really is underlying. we are social animals. we thrive when we have good family relationships, good

friendships, etc. and we're not doing so well in those on those fronts. that's sort of the classic conservative perspective. it needs to be better articulated and better communicated and better disseminated. but we've also got to make sure when it comes to kind of giving people the economic resources they need to build flourishing families that they have those resources. so that's where, you know, a child allowance helpful. that's we're kind of rethinking the kind of money that we're spending on higher education. you know, vocational education is helpful and that's where to in terms of something we haven't talked about, you know, is sort of educational is helpful too in terms of giving ordinary families more resource is to steer their kids away from, failing public schools towards schools that are more aligned with, you know, their own values commitments would be also helpful, you know, so there's both an economic piece to do here and there's a piece to do here. and we need some, you know, creative institutions, ngos, actors to kind of also, you know, make this case for marriage and family more exciting to young adults today. i think as well.

no, i completely understand your frustration. you you come to the conclusion that there's a huge economic piece to this. and so you're left with how do we solve the marriage crisis, bring back manufacturing. okay. no sweat. but i started on that. right. the first person to have that thought. right. but but i think there's actually lot of value as as is often the case, one of the big lessons of conservatism is that sometimes the best thing you can do is just not screw up, don't introduce any new, horrible factors, pushing things in the wrong direction. and we have seen, for example, a massive push in the united states and across the western world in the last decade, subsidized childcare because the dual earner family is a very difficult model to make work. and a lot of families are finding that they're spending as much on childcare as the woman is bringing in. and it's just the numbers aren't adding up. and so elizabeth warren is out there now saying universal free childcare from that would be

doubling down on the two earner family model to the structural disadvantage age of people who want to pursue the one earner model, the one that made so many people so happy for, so many centuries. and so the one of the biggest things we could do for families in the next ten years is just make the left does not bring in universal subsidized childcare, it's going to come up in every presidential election and, you know, with enough momentum, it could actually happen. so there will be enormous in just stopping that from because that would that would make our family problem even worse. and i think one thing that sort of underline in connection with helen's point is this this idea of family policy as it sort of kind of rolled out over there in capitol hill and other contexts, is often about basically making better workers. it's not about kind of parents

to their kids. so from my perspective, perspective, it's true for family studies. we're talking about family policies that actually re functionalized the family give parents more time, more more opportunities to be with their children. that's in part because when i've been looking actually at marriage equality, what surprised me in some of my recent analyzes is that, yes, doing fun things as a family was of happier husbands and wives in my data. but doing chores together as a family. and this really kind of blew my mind. it made me rethink some priorities in my own household and even better predict, more of marital quality than doing fun as a family. but i think if you send me that study, i'm going to tell my kids it points to kind of a deeper reality. and that is that kind of when we're doing productive, work together as husbands and wives and children in the household for one another year i think it tends to engender a sense of solidarity that's often lacking in households today that are much more basically consumption and about, you know, getting the

kids to excel in school and in sports. but again, the idea here is we're trying to re functionally samuel have so people can really invest practically in one another and in the home a whole. i think it's very easy to go into doom and gloom on this subject. so there anything on this that you're optimistic about when looking at this at a sociocultural level? helen, i was going to ask for a minute to. okay. brad. well, you know, i think, you know, one of the sort of mysteries is that, you know, when you look at the research on marriage and child well-being, it just kind of keeps coming in and in. so it's like, you know, maybe at some point it's just going to like break out into the public, you know, that there is this sort of like, you know, so but i mean, it's good news in the sense that like, the research continues to kind of like reinforce the importance of stable married families for kids and adults in my my newer thought is that marriage matters more than ever in a world that's more secular, in a world where people are less engaged local communities and a world of we spend too much time on our devices like being a halfway

decent spouse, halfway decent parent forces you to kind of have in-person community in a very local way. and then also, if you're a parent sending your kids to school soccer, maybe if you're religious, you know, sunday school, you're just out and about you're more social and we're social animals. we thrive, you know, when you have these opportunities. so think since the good news that i would at least convey to folks is that look like this thing, you know, this fundamental institution and is super good for you on average, it can be obviously extremely tough and hard, but on average is good for you. and like it's it's getting relatively that much more beneficial and it was ever before because other institutions are not doing so well today. so that's sort of the good news. i'd say i did think of, all right, the lockdown baby boomlet we a little uptick in the u.s. fertility rate and it's going to take a while to break down numbers on why exactly that happened and among whom it happened. but my sense is that it is because women stuck at home from

lockdowns and discovered they really liked spending time with their kids and baking bread and doing the housewife thing. and a lot of them are not going back into the workforce or they're going back in the workforce part time and continuing to and they're realizing, yeah, family's pretty great. i ate it. all it takes is just stepping off, you know, the rat race for one second and you realize the things that actually make happy. so i think that's i think that's a national trend. i think that's a real, real thing. absolutely. and i think to be clear, we're not looking looking back to 1955 as the model that is before us. but i think the point about this little baby boomlet is that what happened, too, is that a lot of families were able to kind of work in some new ways from home, kind of reintroduce the home economy, too. so as we kind of look forward, you know, we can think about ways in which husbands and wives can be working from home. in some cases, some professions, obviously. and that will kind of facilitate a more family centric way of life that looks like for a lot of people, you know, is is conducive to more happiness and

maybe even more kids to. well said i'm thank you so much brad and how i brought especially you driving up from india today we really appreciate that this has been really great. i'm going to pass the mic to zach graves, but this was a great closing panel. thank thanks, guys. all right. okay, everyone i'm zach graves, executive director of lincoln network. and we thank you for joining us today for this great series panels. it's the second live realignment conference we've done. the first one was in miami and we're really excited to bring this to d.c. so please join me and thanking marshall and sager, a marathon of interviews today.