Opinion | Liberals Do Not Want to Destroy the Family

A December 2015 Pew study found that the probability of a first marriage lasting at least 20 years was 78 percent for a college-educated woman, 49 percent for a woman with some college but no degree and 40 percent for a woman with a high school degree or less. In the 1980s, at the height of the divorce revolution, there was virtually no difference in the divorce rates of women and men by level of education.

There is a complex set of interlocking factors that produce social and economic disruption, destabilizing to communities, individuals and families. Technological innovation, from the contraceptive pill to the global transmission of capital and goods; deunionization and automation; rising standards of living freeing human beings to seek self-expression and individual fulfillment; and hyperintensive international competition — are only some of factors underlying the turbulence, even the disintegration, of traditional norms and practices.

I asked a range of scholars — left, right and center — about Barr’s attempt to link social breakdown to liberal values.

David Autor, an economist at M.I.T. and the author of “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men” and “Family Disadvantage and the Gender Gap in Behavioral and Educational Outcomes,” wrote me that the arguments attributing social disorder and family dysfunction to cultural liberalism and the sexual revolution can neither be proven nor disproved, but “the lack of objective evidence to validate or refute these assertions appears only to embolden their advocates.”

There is clear evidence, however, Autor writes,

that sharp declines in the availability of middle class jobs for non-college workers (esp. men) — for example, when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and U.S. manufacturing employment fell by 20 percent in seven years — causes exactly these maladies on which these commentators are focused: a drop in labor force participation, a decline in marriage rates, a rise in the fraction of children born out of wedlock, an increase in mother-headed households, a rise in child poverty, and a spike in ‘deaths of despair’ among young adults, particularly men, stemming from drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, and other arguably self-inflicted causes.

It is possible, Autor acknowledged

that the growth of the social safety net has had the effect of disincentivizing work and marriage and encouraged out of wedlock childbirth. But we have no good evidence demonstrating this claim; we can neither rule it in nor out.

Autor made the case that:

It is critical to bear in mind that the U.S. has a less generous social safety net than almost all of the other advanced countries to which we compare ourselves: Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. And yet we have higher rates of nonwork among prime-age men and women, and much worse socio-demographic outcomes: family stability, investment in children, educational attainment, life expectancy, rates of violent death, etc. It defies logic to assert that the relatively stingy U.S. social safety net has somehow lured the U.S. public into licentiousness and social decline whereas the much more comprehensive social safety nets in other wealthy democracies has failed to do so.

Melissa S. Kearney, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, has developed a thought provoking argument on the interaction of economics and culture in rising dysfunction among working class men. In an email, she wrote:

My read of the evidence is that the declining economic position of less educated men (both in a relative and absolute sense) has probably been a key driver of the breakdown of the two-parent family among less educated populations for many decades.

But, she continued,

now we are in a new social paradigm that has normalized nonmarital childbearing and child rearing among certain segments of the population, and it will take more than economic improvement to restore the stable two-parent family in the communities it which that norm has been steadily eroding.

In a case study, “Male Earnings, Marriageable Men, and Nonmarital Fertility: Evidence from the Fracking Boom,” Kearney and Riley Wilson, an economist at Brigham Young, compared nonmarital birth patterns among 18-34 year old men in two regions experiencing sudden economic gains: Appalachia during the coal boom of the 1970s (before the full extent of the sexual and broader cultural revolutions had taken hold) and those sections of the country where fracking took off from 1997 to 2012 (when those revolutions had become firmly entrenched).

They found striking differences on the key measure of births to unwed mothers:

In Appalachia four decades ago, “a 10 percent increase in earnings associated with the coal boom led to a 25.5 percent reduction in the nonmarital birthrate.” In contrast, in the sections of the country where fracking boosted the economy, “a 10 percent increase in earnings associated with fracking production led to a 12.4 percent increase in nonmarital births.”

While not conclusive, Kearney and Wilson write,

these patterns of responses are consistent with the notion that social context partially determines the family formation response to a positive income or earnings shock.

Autor, Kearney and others whose work I will go on to discuss offer analyses and explanations of contemporary social dislocation that serve to reveal the oversimplification and the striking omissions in the work of social conservatives, who often fail, to give one crucial example, to account for the impact of mass incarceration.