The surprising story of how declining marriage rates are driving many of the country’s biggest economic problems. In The Two-Parent Privilege, Melissa S. Kearney makes a provocative, data-driven case for marriage by showing how the institution’s decline has led to a host of economic woes—problems that have fractured American society and rendered vulnerable populations even more vulnerable. Eschewing the religious and values-based arguments that have long dominated this conversation, Kearney shows how the greatest impacts of marriage are, in fact, economic: when two adults marry, their economic and household lives improve, offering a host of benefits not only for the married adults but for their children. Studies show that these effects are today starker, and more unevenly distributed, than ever before. Kearney examines the underlying causes of the marriage decline in the US and draws lessons for how the US can reverse this trend to ensure the country’s future prosperity. Based on more than a decade of economic research, including her original work, Kearney shows that a household that includes two married parents—holding steady among upper-class adults, increasingly rare among most everyone else—functions as an economic vehicle that advantages some children over others. As these trends of marriage and class continue, the compounding effects on inequality and opportunity grow increasingly dire. Their effects include not just children’s behavioral and educational outcomes, but a surprisingly devastating effect on adult men, whose role in the workforce and society appears intractably damaged by the emerging economics of America’s new social norms. For many, the two-parent home may be an old-fashioned symbol of the idyllic American dream. But The Two-Parent Privilege makes it clear that marriage, for all its challenges and faults, may be our best path to a more equitable future. By confronting the critical role that family makeup plays in shaping children’s lives and futures, Kearney offers a critical assessment of what a decline in marriage means for an economy and a society—and what we must do to change course.
Melissa S. Kearney is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, Director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Read an Excerpt
Some years ago, I was at a small two- day conference that brought together people from the academic and policy communities to talk about income inequality, economic mobility, and other related challenges facing the country. As is the case for many professions, being an academic economist involves going to lots of these types of conferences: traveling to a different city, attending a day of presentations and panels (often in windowless rooms), having a group dinner with other conference participants, and waking up early the next day to participate in another full day of sessions focused on a particular topic. People share their most recent research, discuss and debate ideas and evidence, make plans for additional research, and (in the best cases) inform the decisions of policy leaders with the kind of real- world evidence that economic data can provide. Then we go home, think about the new results we saw and the conversations we had, work some more, follow up with people we talked with, and repeat the process over again. During this particular conference, we talked about the decline in US employment and widening income inequality. We talked about how the growing economic gap between America’s wealthy and poor was making it harder for Americans to achieve upward mobility— to live a life better than their parents did, economically speaking, and achieve the proverbial American dream. Over the course of the conference, the conversations focused on the usual topics that come up when economists talk about such things. We talked about gaps in pay between workers with and without college degrees. We talked about how technology and import competition disadvantaged certain groups of workers. We talked about the decline in union representation and the rise of CEO pay. We talked about the need for improved educational institutions and discussed ways to strengthen the safety net and reform the tax code. During one of the later conference sessions, I raised my hand and asked a question that I’d been thinking about for a while: how should we think about the role of family and home environment in all this? If we are talking about how people perform in school and the labor market, isn’t the kind of household they grew up in an important determinant of that performance? There was quiet. After a few beats I continued talking, rattling off a few statistics and facts about class gaps in marriage and family structure, then suggesting that these class gaps should probably be part of our conversations about inequality and mobility. I pointed out that college- educated adults are more likely than non- college- educated adults to get married and to raise kids in two- parent homes. The resources of these homes (including money, but also time and energy in the challenging work of parenting) separated them from less educated adults and their children, who lacked such resource luxuries. The data suggest that these difference across households produce large economic differences in the lives of children. Don’t we need to contend with these facts? What should we make of them and what, if anything, should policy makers do about them? This was not the first time I’d raised this issue of family structure among peers, but this was one of the largest audiences for it, and the group assembled extended beyond the usual group of scholars who study poverty, children, and families. My questions were received about as I expected them to be. As in earlier instances, this set of questions elicited a muted reaction— uncomfortable shifting in seats and facial expressions that conveyed reservations with this line of inquiry. The apparent consensus I took from the room, expressed through limited language and unencouraging gestures, was that family and marriage were personal matters and somewhat out of bounds for this type of discussion. While my colleagues were willing to grant the point that an increasing share of US children were living in single- parent homes and that this was much more common among less educated families— and that outcomes of children from single- parent homes tend to be worse than those of children from two- parent homes, for a variety of reasons— the implication was that we don’t really know what to do about it as a matter of policy. In my experience, people in these types of scholarly, policy- oriented settings are much more comfortable talking about the need to improve schools, expand college access, and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit than they are talking about family structure and how kids are raised. Don’t get me wrong; I think those other issues are important and I’m always up for talking about them. My point was simply that the absence of a discussion of family seemed conspicuous and counterproductive.
Preface Chapter 1: The Elephant in the Room Chapter 2: Mother-Only Households Chapter 3: 2 > 1 Chapter 4: Marriageable Men (or Not) Chapter 5: Parenting Is Hard Chapter 6: Boys and Dads Chapter 7: Declining Births Chapter 8: Family Matters Acknowledgments Notes References Index
