#933 - Brad Wilcox - Why Are Liberal Women Becoming Unhappy?

Speaker 1 What do you think about the story of the book Eat, Prey, Love?

Speaker 2 You know, Liz Gilbert's book obviously got a lot of attention, a lot of popularity among women, especially. And, you know, it's kind of first glance really attractive and appealing.

Speaker 2 But what's I think striking about the book is that she kind of ends off by, you know, this sort of storybook romance in impossibly romantic Bali in Indonesia.

Speaker 2 She meets what seems like the perfect guy who's a feminist, a great cook, a great lover, et cetera, et cetera. They have this incredible connection.

Speaker 2 But then you learn 10 years later, Chris, what do you think happens?

Speaker 1 Did I already know how this story ends, unfortunately, because I did my research.

Speaker 2 Yeah, she leaves him for

Speaker 2 another soulmate. And so the point I make about this story in my own book is that we have kind of like the soulmate myth out there.

Speaker 2 There's kind of like the perfect person that will complete us, with whom we'll have like really no major problems, and with whom we'll have a kind of this incredible kind of romantic and emotional connection on a pretty regular basis.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I think the Eat Prey Love book and the last kind of, you know, storybook romance that she gives us in that book is kind of emblematic of this whole way of thinking and approaching relationships, love, and marriage.

Speaker 2 And yet. The problem with it, of course, is that by making feelings the foundation of love, feelings the foundation of marriage, you're kind of putting things on a very insecure footing.

Speaker 2 And that's why what we see in the real world is that Liz Gilbert seems to go from one person to the next on a regular basis, including the guy that she meets at the end of, again, eat pretty love.

Speaker 1 I noticed that you de-gendered person because she pivoted from the guy in Bali to a woman for I think about five years. And then really sadly, that person passed away.

Speaker 1 And then she started dating the woman's best friend, who was a guy, and then recently announced that she was happily single at 55 and had broken up with that. So look,

Speaker 1 Elizabeth Gilbert, fantastic book, did very, very well, super successful. But I do think it's fair to say that she makes for a

Speaker 1 tenuous role model for happy marriage and love. I don't think that that's a particularly controversial thing to say.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I think kind of looking at love and marriage is primarily an opportunity to kind of have this strong emotional connection.

Speaker 2 And she talks too in her book about kind of her desire to kind of directly pursue happiness.

Speaker 2 If that's kind of if you've kind of this more romanticized understanding of love, and if you're directly seeking happiness in love or in marriage, I think you're kind of headed for trouble.

Speaker 2 And I think certainly her own life is emblematic of the way in which, at least if kind of like your goal is to have a strong and stable marriage and family, kind of taking the Liz Gilbert soulmate-y approach to love and marriage is not a

Speaker 2 great strategy.

Speaker 1 What's a better foundation or framework to build your marriage on than feelings?

Speaker 2 Well, you know, St. Thomas Aquinas talked about love as kind of pursuing the good of the other.

Speaker 2 And in my book, I kind of talk about this in the sense of sort of having a family-first approach to love and marriage, where you understand and appreciate that you're trying to pursue the good of your spouse.

Speaker 2 and your marriage kind of more broadly, if you will. And then if you have kids, kind of of your kids.

Speaker 2 So there's a kind of way in which I talk about a family-first approach to marriage, which allows you to understand and appreciate that your marriage is about more than just an emotional connection.

Speaker 2 It's about kind of building a sense of solidarity in your relationship. It's about having a strong financial foundation that supports both you and your spouse.

Speaker 2 And then if you have kids, and most people still do today, it's about kind of understanding and appreciating how much your marriage matters for your kids and really your kin more broadly.

Speaker 2 So this is kind of, again, a family-first approach to marriage.

Speaker 2 And it kind of makes the emotional connection a little bit less important and helps you to understand and appreciate that there are really many different goods that you're pursuing in marriage.

Speaker 2 And having kind of that more diverse set of goods, I think, makes you

Speaker 2 less nervous when you do have conflict or when you know things aren't incredibly romantic or wonderful in your emotional side of your relationship because you realize and appreciate that there are other dimensions of your marriage that matter and are worth honoring

Speaker 1 to fight for the other side. Surely,

Speaker 1 part of the job of being married, or a good amount of the job of being married, is not to suffer in silence in a relationship which is unfulfilling.

Speaker 1 You know, you've got a slippery slope down to mistreatment here, where somebody is genuinely being forgotten about by their partner, not treated in the way that they should.

Speaker 1 And, you know, you can go right down to some really sort of nasty, dark, dark corners that women and I guess some men as well get stuck in.

Speaker 1 How do you square the circle of

Speaker 1 knowing when the feelings that you have about your relationship are a signal that this is something really, really not good, that this is a fundamental incompatibility?

Speaker 1 Perhaps this is before children have come along, and you're thinking, Do I really want to bring kids into this? This uh, this is the model of love, of um

Speaker 2 uh

Speaker 1 relational care. Is this really what I want to show them?

Speaker 1 You know, you can, I understand there's more serving the other.

Speaker 2 Right. But I think it's also why we have to think, too, about kind of not just when you're married, Chris, but of course, before you're married, right?

Speaker 2 So the point is, is that you want to try to find someone who shares your commitments to marriage, to love, who is also kind of,

Speaker 2 you know, has those

Speaker 2 virtues that make for a good marriage, you know, loyalty, charity, patience, fortitude, etc.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, the point is that if you're kind of, you know, more discerning about the kinds of things that would make for a good spouse, you're less likely to land in a kind of dark place that you're talking about.

Speaker 2 And I think just it's important to understand and appreciate that the kinds of people who really value marriage as an institution and who kind of have a symmetrical commitment both to one another and to marriage as an institution, kind of heading into marriage, are less likely to get into that that dark place you're talking about.

Speaker 2 But of course, it's certainly the case that people, even with the best of intentions, do land in difficult places, in dark places.

Speaker 2 And so in terms of thinking about divorce, and I'm particularly concerned about how this all plays out, too, for kids.

Speaker 2 What we see in the research about this particular question is that when there is high conflict, when there are dishes going through the kitchen on Friday and Saturday nights, when there's regular screaming, you know, matches, maybe when one spouse is, you know, abusing drugs, for instance.

Speaker 2 In those contexts, yes, it makes eminent sense for

Speaker 2 people to split, separate for the sake of their kids.

Speaker 2 But in lower conflict situations where more like the Liz Gilbert situation, where she left her husband in New York because she just wasn't kind of feeling it, in those kinds of situations, Chris, if your kind of concern is if you have kids in the household, for instance, kind of really for their welfare, then the research is also pretty clear.

Speaker 2 And that is it'd be better for at least your kids in that particular kind of situation to stay together. And I would say also to kind of find a way to get your marriage on a stronger footing as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's this interesting balance, I guess, between kids coming from broken homes where the partners have separated or kids coming from

Speaker 1 breaking homes that just never actually break out. And how I think the last time that we spoke, it was, it's your belief that there's there's not no such thing as a good reason for divorce.

Speaker 1 It's that the barometer that most people are using in order to justify whether that breakup should or should not occur has been brought down to a level of Elizabeth Gilbert sensitization, which is too soon.

Speaker 2 Right. And so again, I want to stress in some cases, I think, you know, separating is the right thing to do for yourself and for your kids.

Speaker 2 But I think, you know, in today's world, we tend to kind of set the bar too low for what kind of counts as a problem that would merit heading towards divorce court. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Okay. What's happening with this conservative happiness premium thing? My Twitter DMs are alight with different studies that you've been sending me over the last couple of weeks.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so we're just kind of seeing and looking at kind of trends in happiness, Chris, today, that conservatives are happier than liberals.

Speaker 2 And we just came out with a recent study showing that among young women aged 18 to 40, liberal men are about three times as likely to be very happy or actually completely satisfied their lives compared to conservative women.

Speaker 2 And a lot of the story is about the way in which they're more likely to be married

Speaker 2 and then other work I've done happily married. And then also they're more likely to be religious.

Speaker 2 So we find in this recent study, for instance, that a majority of young women who are conservative are married and only a minority of young women who are liberal are married.

Speaker 2 We find the majority of conservative women are attending religious services on a regular basis compared to a very small minority of liberal women.

Speaker 2 And so I think the point here in part is that kind of being

Speaker 2 integrated into core institutions of American life, you know, marriage, faith,

Speaker 2 is a big reason why conservative women, for instance, are happier than liberal women.

Speaker 2 And you probably know there's been discussion like John Heights, for instance, talked about kind of like a catastrophizing mindset that explains why liberal men have kind of worse mental health than conservative women.

Speaker 2 Gene Twenkey is kind of weighed in on this as well. And I think that's part of the story.

Speaker 2 But I'm pointing kind of beyond just the mindset and just making the point that, you know, we are social animals, Chris, right?

Speaker 2 And when we are connected to other people, like in the context of marriage or some kind of faith community or other forms of community,

Speaker 2 we tend to be much more likely to flourish.

Speaker 2 And so what we're seeing today is that conservative women at Miss Ny Research are more likely to be connected to these core institutions that give our lives meaning, direction,

Speaker 2 purpose, and a sense of happiness as well.

Speaker 1 Why is this focused on women and not just conservatives versus liberals?

Speaker 2 So this recent research that

Speaker 2 we did was focusing on women, but my book focuses on both men and women. And what we find in the in the broader research too is that conservatives in general, Chris, are more likely to be happy.

Speaker 2 So for instance, kind of in a larger population for men and women, we find that conservatives aged 18 to 55 are 60% more likely to be very happy.

Speaker 2 And for this larger research from my book, what we find in that is that, again, a big part of that story is that conservatives are more likely to be married today, and they're also more likely to be happily married.

Speaker 2 And those two factors account for about a third of this happiness premium we're seeing in comparing conservatives to liberals with

Speaker 2 their lives in general today.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So young liberal women, very unhappy because, or at least in part, because church and marriage accounting for a big chunk of

Speaker 1 this gap.

Speaker 1 Was it only 12% of liberal women said they're completely satisfied with life compared to 37% of conservative women, self-described moderates, are happier than liberals with 28% agreeing that they're fully satisfied.

Speaker 1 And then,

Speaker 1 so that's, I guess, structural. You know, this is something that's happening in their life.
But as you hinted at there, there's this issue that

Speaker 1 maybe liberal women see themselves at the mercy of societal forces and sort of less agentic. Maybe

Speaker 1 they are at...

Speaker 1 the world is happening to them. They're sort of a victim of larger structural realities in that way.

Speaker 2 Yes. This is kind of the point that Jonathan Hyde has made in his research on this, and Gene Twenge as well, and some other psychologists, too.

Speaker 2 So they're just kind of observing that today, liberal women have kind of less of a sense that they're captains of their own, you know, fate and that they're kind of living in a world that, you know, is oppressive and hard, whereas conservative women are less likely to have that view.

Speaker 2 They're more likely to think of themselves as, you know, steering their own ship, captains of their own ship, and they're less worried about kind of the nature and character of the world today that they find themselves in.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 you had this interesting

Speaker 1 parallel that you drew between after the Donald Trump election, where lots of young liberal women were in hysterics

Speaker 1 and saying they were going to shave their heads and swear off having sex with men because they laid Donald Trump's success at the feet of men and this was a way to get back at them.

Speaker 1 But the equivalent thing didn't seem to happen on the right when Joe Biden got elected, despite I imagine people on the right being just as upset.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, I do think there's a way in which, I mean, despite what you might kind of glean from Twitter sometimes, right? And I think there have been critiques, you know, out there.

Speaker 2 For instance, Noah Smith had a big critique lately about kind of saying conservatives are, you know, they're sort of saying in theory they're all about community, family, and faith, but in kind of in reality, they're they're just about kind of, you know, basically tweeting from their their mom's basement.

Speaker 2 And so of course there are some conservative voices online who are kind of living deeply anti-social lives.

Speaker 2 But I think what we do see kind of in the sort of national data is that, generally speaking, conservatives are more likely to be out and about, to be married, to be involved in their communities in meaningful ways, including the religious communities.

Speaker 2 And that, you know, helps to ground and guide them and kind of keep them protected from this more catastrophizing mindset.

Speaker 1 The question that comes to mind is like,

Speaker 1 let's let's say that you're somebody who believes in democratic ideologies

Speaker 1 and you think, huh, this isn't particularly good for maybe my life outcomes in the evidence. You know, that Brad guy, he seems to know what he's talking about.

Speaker 1 He suggested that people that are conservative.

Speaker 1 What do you suggest people do with this information?

Speaker 1 I should change my belief structure and start to believe something else.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, I think one of the things they talk about in my book, Get Married, Chris, is kind of this idea, this sort of reality we see out there today, is that

Speaker 2 of a lot of liberals particularly more educated liberals college educated liberals talk left right but they walk right so kind of you know in terms of how they would sort of talk about family issues for instance marriage for instance they would tend to kind of publicly or even in terms of the world view kind of uh devalue the importance of marriage But in their own private lives, they kind of implicitly understand and appreciate, you know, how much marriage matters for them and for any kids that they have.

Speaker 2 And so I think part of the solution here is for, and there are plenty of, you know, Democratic elites that kind of do this. I'll talk about them in the book.

Speaker 2 But I think, you know, one solution here is to kind of actually

Speaker 2 basically preach what you practice to paraphrase Charles Murray on this score, right?

Speaker 2 So kind of, I think for liberals to understand and appreciate that, look, you know, it is better, generally speaking, to get married, to invest in your kids.

Speaker 2 There's just a tremendous amount of meaning and happiness that, you know, typically flow from this kind of family-oriented life.

Speaker 2 And we should celebrate and help our fellow progressives kind of embrace marriage and family life in larger numbers.

Speaker 2 They're, of course, going to do it in different ways than conservatives might, but we could actually do a better job of kind of making the case for marriage so that more progressives would find their way into the institution on an even earlier basis.

Speaker 2 And we have seen pieces in New York, you know,

Speaker 2 magazine, for instance, kind of reflecting on this. possibility as well.

Speaker 2 So there might be some openness on the part of, I think, liberals and progressives to begin to kind of rethink the distance they've put between themselves and marriage and childbearing

Speaker 2 as a way of, you know, giving their lives greater meaning and purpose.

Speaker 1 What's the incentive to talk left but walk right?

Speaker 1 Why is that the case?

Speaker 2 So I think the incentive here is that partly kind of there are ways in which in the 60s and 70s, you know, it was progressives who are really kind of charting a new path when it came to marriage and family.

Speaker 2 And they came to see kind of marriage as a kind of patriarchal, traditional institution. They wanted to embrace newer family forms.

Speaker 2 They wanted to embrace the possibility of kind of living a larger portion of your life single, free, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And then also kind of there was concerns too about sort of associating marriage with the Moynihan report, which is kind of talking about the intersection between race and marriage and family.

Speaker 2 So just kind of a wide range of reasons why progressives began to code marriage and family as more conservative, you know, issues and institutions and a desire not to be seen as conservative.

Speaker 2 But I think the challenge, though, for liberals now is that while, you know, as I said, many liberal elites actually do

Speaker 2 talk left and walk right. I talked about Reed Hastings, you know, the co-founder of Netflix as a kind of example of this, for instance.

Speaker 2 stable marriage, he had some marital difficulties, worked through them with the help of counselors, two kids, you know, this, kind of probably lives in some ways a pretty conventional family life, right?

Speaker 2 Except he's super rich.

Speaker 2 And yet, you know, is also very progressive on a lot of cultural issues.

Speaker 2 The problem, though, with this kind of dynamic for the left, I would say, is we're now seeing today a majority among age 18 to 55 year old Americans of conservatives are married, but only a minority of liberals are married.

Speaker 2 And so I think partly that's because they're just not prioritizing,

Speaker 2 you know, getting married and having a family in the same way that conservators are.

Speaker 2 And they're not realizing that they're really losing out on one of the most important things that, you know, many of us will do in our lives.

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Speaker 1 Birth rates on the left fell after the last Trump presidency. Do you think that's likely that it's going to happen again?

Speaker 2 It's certainly possible. And we also have seen kind of a stronger relationship between fertility rates and voting patterns regionally that a colleague of mine, these door family studies, did.

Speaker 2 And then we also seen in some new work too at IFS that's in process that when you look at kind of the fertility rate for 40-year-old conservatives is about two kids per woman on average, whereas the fertility rate now for 40-year-old liberals is just one child per woman on average.

Speaker 2 Just a huge difference. A big difference.
A huge difference there. So again, I think

Speaker 2 I actually wish we didn't live in a society where, you know, marriage and family become so polarized.

Speaker 2 But we do. And I think it's one of those ways in which in this particular, not every area, but in this area, I do think it's actually progressives who are losing out.

Speaker 1 I'm going to guess that that that's not only because they're less happy, they're more subject to depression, they're less integrated, but that over a couple of generations, the kids that come along will be the kids of the kid-having type.

Speaker 1 And if on average it's conservatives and religious people as opposed to liberals and secular people, you end up inheriting the civilization of the people that came before.

Speaker 2 Right. And so one reason, I mean, we're already kind of seeing that kind of conservatives are in a better spot than they otherwise would be because they're more likely to have kids

Speaker 2 than liberals are. But there's also, as I think everyone knows, a lot of kind of conversions happening out of conservative households and religious households into more progressive and secular,

Speaker 2 you know, adult communities. So there is kind of a lot of

Speaker 2 migration

Speaker 2 happening. And so it's not the case that just because conservatives have more kids, we're necessarily going to see a society down the road that's becoming more conservative.

Speaker 2 But if we do see, particularly, I think, you know, conservatives having more success in keeping their children kind of in the fold so to speak you could see a kind of development like we've seen in Israel right in the last couple of decades where Israel has migrated culturally politically and religiously more to the right you know as more religious and more conservative Israelis have had more kids and have done a generally you know pretty good job of keeping their kids kind of in the in the fold so to speak as they move into adulthood

Speaker 1 yeah i

Speaker 1 I'd love to speak to somebody that's been able to run the projections for what the next sort of 100 to 300 years looks like.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I mean, there's so much, I think, you know, happening

Speaker 2 in the near future, Chris, as you well know. I mean, I think AI is going to be an incredibly disruptive force when it comes to both employment.

Speaker 2 and when it comes to potentially relationships as well.

Speaker 2 And so one of the things that we're seeing on the relationship front, of course, is that one reason why marriage is down and fertility is down, not just here in the United States, but globally in many places, is just that the technology has become so engaging and so engrossing that people are not socializing as much, they're not dating as much, and of course, they're not mating, marrying, and having kids as much.

Speaker 2 And so, as the technology gets even better and better, I think the question in part is, you know, what does that do to our capacity

Speaker 2 to,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 to find common ground romantically and family-wise?

Speaker 2 And then when it comes to as well, kind of the challenges that AI will pose to the labor market, what does that do to kind of the ability of people to have families and afford families?

Speaker 2 So there's just some major, I think, in part technological

Speaker 2 innovations coming down the pike that are going to

Speaker 2 have a serious impact on contemporary relationships. Although I would say here, it could be the case too, that conservatives or religious communities might be more

Speaker 2 resilient in the face of these new technological challenges, maybe better able to

Speaker 2 protect their kids from spending too much time, for instance, staring at a screen or

Speaker 2 engaging a robot.

Speaker 1 Have you thought about how mimetic marriage and family life is?

Speaker 1 That if you're in the sort of environment or local ecology that that doesn't have many marriages and people having kids, everyone's a solo entrepreneur just tinder swiping their way through a couple of situationships.

Speaker 1 You don't necessarily have someone teaching you or showing you, well, actually, this is a style of life which is really enjoyable. And that means that maybe you could do it too.

Speaker 1 And you end up with this like R0 number that spins down or spins up based on where you are.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a great point, Chris. I mean, what we see in the research is that, you know, basically marriage, childbearing, divorce, for instance, are all incredibly contagious.

Speaker 2 You catch them from your friends and family members, your close family members, right? And so if you're in a network of people who are getting married, you're more likely to get married.

Speaker 2 If you're in a network of people who are having kids, you're more likely to have children. If you're in a network of people who are getting divorced, you're more likely to have.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. So if your partner's best friend gets divorced, you should pay a little bit of close attention.

Speaker 2 Completely. Nicholas Christakis has done work at Yale on this whole question of divorce being

Speaker 2 really heavily networked. And so the point I make is like, you know, you are your friends, Chris, right?

Speaker 2 You are your friends. And so if your friends are, you know, staying single and steering clear of parenthood, your odds of doing the same thing are quite high.

Speaker 2 And by contrast, if your friends are getting married and having kids and doing a, you know, a pretty good bang up job of, you know, being decent husbands and fathers, wives and mothers, you know, your odds of doing the same are, because we are, as you said, mimetic, you know, and so we tend to imitate what we see.

Speaker 2 And that's why it's also important to to be deliberate about choosing friends who are going to be,

Speaker 2 I would say, like, you know, challenging you, you know, to kind of raise your game as maybe a spouse and a parent, but also just kind of giving you a good example and

Speaker 2 standing with you too when times are tough in your marriage or in your family life.

Speaker 1 Sorry, honey. I do love you.
I care about you an awful lot, but Amy, she just got divorced. And I can't help, but I just say it's kind of the new fashion that's in at the moment.
So we're done. Yeah.

Speaker 2 yeah uh

Speaker 1 going back to the sort of talking left walking right thing a lot of the time a lot of the conversations end up discussing education poverty housing issues uh why is what happens in the home never spoken about it's sort of how to actually move people out of poverty and get social mobility going

Speaker 2 yeah it's interesting i mean you you've had rob henderson on your podcast i'm sure.

Speaker 2 And, you know, Rob tells the story of kind of growing up in a very chaotic, you know, home situation, living in a working class community where there was a lot of family instability.

Speaker 2 And then through an amazing turn of events, landing at Yale University. And, you know, mentioned that when he was at Yale, he was in this class on childhood.

Speaker 2 And the teacher asked them, you know, how many of you had kind of been raised in an intact married biological family?

Speaker 2 And astonishingly, 18 out of 20 of the kids at Yale had come in that class had come from an intact married married family.

Speaker 2 He kind of realized, oh, wait a second, you know, a lot of the kind of privileged kids here at Yale are coming from intact married families.

Speaker 2 And yet the irony was, and he was talking to me about this whole experience at Yale, was when he kind of tried to kind of address this issue of family structure or family stability and kind of public conversations at Yale about things like poverty and mobility for poor kids, they were very reluctant to kind of talk about the family structure angle and instead would kind of pivot towards talking about things like poverty or things like economic economic opportunity or things like the availability of good jobs.

Speaker 2 So, there was kind of a an assumption on the part of many of the more progressive-minded both students and professors at Yale, that what really matters when it comes to kind of realizing the American dream in the U.S.

Speaker 2 is factors like, you know, poverty,

Speaker 2 job quality, schooling, et cetera. And they're quite reluctant to sort of reflect on the ways in which family also plays a big role in all of this.

Speaker 1 Why so reluctant?

Speaker 2 Well, again, I think because the sort of public ethos of our universities and our elite culture more generally is quite progressive.

Speaker 2 And because it's progressive, it tends to value things like tolerance, it values individual choice, it values kind of embracing the newest thing, you know, in the sort of whole love and family arena and all those kinds of orientations towards, you know, more choice, more freedom, more individuality.

Speaker 2 And just thinking about family as unfolding in some kind of progressive way, I think makes people very hesitant to really embrace marriage per se or kind of understand and appreciate how many, of course, not all of the kind of traditions that we associate with family life actually

Speaker 2 tend to help people navigate family life rather than serve as a hindrance to doing so.

Speaker 1 We saw this with Melissa Carney's book, The Two Parents Advantage, Two Parent Privilege. And

Speaker 1 before it even came out, Melissa Carney is as sort of policy wonk, DC pilled, probably center-left, I would imagine, a A lovely lady, softly spoken, very well researched, and writes this book saying, Look, there is kind of the freest advantage that you can give your kids.

Speaker 1 What is it? The golden sequence or whatever it's called.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 1 I think maybe even the book cover, I don't even think it was the chapter list, or maybe it was the chapter list too, but at the very least, the book cover got released on Twitter, and she gets absolutely flamed for daring to write a book about this thing, which, as far as I could tell, was coming from a very sort of liberal, we want to raise people up.

Speaker 1 This is where social mobility can actually come from. But yeah,

Speaker 1 not

Speaker 1 breaking up a household has become so right-coded that writing a book that explains the freest way that you can help to give your kids a leg up, i.e., staying together,

Speaker 1 was seen as like, I don't know, Meincamp version two.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, and she talks too at the beginning of her book about the way in which she would kind of raise the sort of marriage issue or the family structure issue and economic, you know, discussions and people kind of pull her aside and sort of say to her,

Speaker 2 Why are you doing this? Kind of like, this isn't something you should be talking about in kind of polite companies. I think the dynamic here.

Speaker 2 Although, I do think, in fairness, there have, I mean, I think her book has really helped the discussion.

Speaker 2 My book has been treated very nicely by the New York Times, you know, five different pieces on my book, you know, multiple pieces on her book, and The Times, The Atlantic as well.

Speaker 2 So, I do think there is a way in which we may be opening up on the part of sort of center-left, you know, intellectuals in, you know in some universities and some you know mainstream media outlets hopefully in some public policy arenas too in the democratic party to the ways in which you know marriage and family are pretty important for kids i just actually wrote a piece on richard reeves you know has written this great book actually of boys and men here and

Speaker 2 the one i think big problem i had though with the book is he kind of argues at the end that we've got to figure out a new way to do fatherhood apart from marriage that kind of marriage is sort of you know receding into the distance

Speaker 2 not really acknowledging that you know kids in married father families just do way better than kids in families where dads don't live you know with mom and that's much more the case for you know unmarried families and then also doesn't i didn't really appreciate too that we've actually seen a slight uptick in the share of kids Chris, who are being raised in intact married families in really the last decade.

Speaker 2 So the sort of idea we're going to head to marriage being completely out of the picture is no longer kind of uh true so i'm just hoping you know he wrote a piece that says that three days ago it was kind of acknowledging more kind of the importance of marriage both for men and for the kids that they raise and so maybe there'll be some you know rethinking about this issue in the kind of center left more elite precincts going forward if fewer people are getting married does that suggest that the people who do get married are more committed to the institution and that explains the reduction in divorces

Speaker 2 yeah so the sort of the the the there's sort of you know good news and bad news here right So the bad news from my perspective for adults is that fewer Americans are marrying.

Speaker 2 We're projecting now that about one in three young adults today will never marry. It's going to be a record low when it comes to permanent bachelors, permanent bachelorettes, right?

Speaker 2 And that's problematic because they're more likely to be floundering on any number of emotional, social, and financial measures, contra Andrew Tate.

Speaker 2 But the good news here for kids, right, is that because marriage and family life, fertility become more selective in this contemporary, what that means is the kinds of people today who are having families, who are getting married, are relatively more advantaged, more affluent, more educated, more religious, and also more conservative.

Speaker 2 And those families, not surprisingly, what we're seeing is they're also more stably married as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So people on the left say poverty and people on the right say genetics.
What can you learn about the heritability of family desire, family stability, stuff like that?

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, and I think it's important to acknowledge that both the left and the right, as you kind of frame, you know, the issue, are correct to argue that, you know, poverty matters.

Speaker 2 Growing up in poverty is very stressful. It really can, you know, it also, it's about networks.

Speaker 2 Too, when you're poor, you don't have as many, you know, good models in your immediate network of marriage and family life.

Speaker 2 At the same time, too, the folks on the right who would talk about genetics are correct to argue that, you know, we know, for instance, having like a gene or genes that would make you vulnerable to depression also makes you more vulnerable to get divorced when you're an adult and then makes your child more likely to be depressed as well and so some of the things that i would say about the importance of marriage and family uh for adult and child well-being would be chalked up by the left to economics and by parts of the right to genetics and they're correct to an extent we also have kind of good evidence as well

Speaker 2 from economists and when it comes to the importance of economics, that that's not the only thing we know from Raj Chetty's work and looking at kind of regional patterns in economic inequality, for instance, and family structure, that family structure is actually a better predictor of poor kids rising that rags to riches mobility story.

Speaker 2 So that kids, for instance, born poor in Salt Lake City are markedly more likely to rise into riches or affluence as adults compared to kids born in Atlanta, where there's a lot more single parenthood.

Speaker 2 So again, it tells us that it's not just money, it's also about family structure and looking at one key outcome, kind of the American dream.

Speaker 2 On the genetic side, we have more and more Chris twin studies that are telling us that, you know, kids who are born to female identical twins, where one twin gets divorced and one twin does not get divorced, the kids who are in the non-divorced household who are being, you know, tracked in these studies do better socially and emotionally.

Speaker 2 We also have a twin study too of men looking at identical twin guys

Speaker 2 in Minnesota and finding there that the identical twin brother who got married earned about 26% more than his identical twin brother who did not marry.

Speaker 2 And we have a whole body of research kind of telling us that men who get married tend to work harder, they work smarter, they make more money.

Speaker 2 They're, for instance, less likely to be fired compared to roughly equivalent people.

Speaker 2 You know, if they're married versus the guy who's who's single in their in the workplace.

Speaker 2 They're also more likely if they're upset with their job, the married guy to kind of look around and get that other job before he quits his current job.

Speaker 2 And by contrast, the unmarried guys who are employed and who don't necessarily like their job are just more likely to quit their job without having first identified another job to kind of move into.

Speaker 2 So, we just have, I think, evidence both from the sociological research kind of on norms and behaviors, but also from economists and now from psychologists studying twins that, again, part of the marriage story is about the power that marriage has in the institution

Speaker 2 in encouraging men and women to be more responsible, more prudent,

Speaker 2 and to enjoy kind of the benefits of having,

Speaker 2 generally speaking, a friend in their corner who's kind of encouraging them, advising them to do like the right thing in any number of contexts.

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Speaker 1 It's interesting about the childhood environment being so impacted because a lot of the stuff that comes out about twin studies kind of says

Speaker 1 there's a lot that you can do in the childhood environment that kind of doesn't really make that much difference. I think when you control for

Speaker 1 socioeconomic factors, even moving your kid from the worst school in the area to the best school in the area is not a huge change.

Speaker 1 It's not this, you know, vast, oh my God, it's all about, we've got to pick up the house and we've got to move to the new catchment area because this is the school.

Speaker 1 And if they don't go there, they're going to be on the street and they're on drugs and all the rest of it.

Speaker 1 And we have something here which seems to be very predictive and very powerful in terms of actually adjusting the outcomes that kids get.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, on the twin study issue, there's certainly some, you know, Judith Harris, for instance, is famous for writing this book, kind of arguing that, you know, because of genetics, there's not much that parents can do to really influence the lives of their kids.

Speaker 2 I think on some, you know, key outcomes in terms of education, income, and, you know, maybe some of the emotional stuff, that's true to an extent.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 my late mentor, Sarah McLennan at Princeton, also kind of reviewed a lot of this sort of more biological research and did find that, well, she found, for instance, in looking at family structure, that on the sort of like, you know,

Speaker 2 the GPA stuff and the, you know, standardized testing stuff that seemed like genetics were much more important than family structure, for instance.

Speaker 2 But on some of the social and emotional outcomes, family structure was a lot more predictive, you know, for young adults.

Speaker 2 But I also want to just kind of remind us too that there's more to life than just, you know, scoring high on the SAT, right?

Speaker 2 And I think it's important to understand and appreciate the sort of networking point we were making earlier in our conversation.

Speaker 2 And that is that one of the most important things that parents do for their kids is help to shape their kids' networks. Right.

Speaker 2 And so it's like what you do on Sunday or don't do on Sunday, what you do, you know, in your free time on the weekends or what kind of families you're having over at your home, right?

Speaker 2 So there are, there are kind of very kind of, I think, subtle but important things that different kinds of parents do differently when it comes to rearing their kids that end up, I think, being pretty consequential for their children's sense of what counts in life and how do they find meaning and purpose in life as well.

Speaker 1 You know what I learned the other day, which I feel embarrassed about having looked at behavioral genetics for ages. Steve Stewart Williams wrote about the biggest meta-analysis that's ever been done.

Speaker 1 It's basically every twin study that was ever, ever, ever done. It's a five million points of data or something like that.
It's every twin pair since 1960. And

Speaker 1 it's kind of commonly touted about that IQ correlates 0.8 by the end of your life-ish. So about 80% of your outcomes in terms of IQ can be explained through your genetics.

Speaker 1 I didn't realize that for almost everything else, psychologically, it goes in the other direction, the direction that you would expect, which is you kind of start off as a genetically predisposed but environmentally blank slate, and that over time

Speaker 1 things happen to benefit and insult you, and then you get toward the end of your life and things change. But that makes it that makes all of this stuff much more explanatory.

Speaker 1 It makes you less kind of genetically robust or genetically predisposed, which actually does suggest, well, be careful what you do with your life.

Speaker 1 Be careful the people that you spend your time around. Be careful the stuff that you put into your eyes and your ears and your mouth.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I'll say it's important.

Speaker 2 Well, so, and we see too, in terms of just kind of this sort of longitudinal Harvard study, kind of looking at, you know, tracking first men and now women as well, kind of over the course of their lives, and then kind of finds this to kind of check in with people who have lived into their 70s and 80s.

Speaker 2 And they're kind of asked, what's most important to you?

Speaker 2 And it turns out, you know, not surprisingly, you know, at this point, that kind of how well they did professionally well important was not nearly as important as their friendships and their their their family relationship especially their marriages as well so um that's certainly one point i would make but i think just also it's important too to understand and appreciate that on the genetic side there's just a lot of evidence too that there's a strong interaction right so it's not like you've got a gene for say depression that just sort of acts upon someone in kind of some kind of straightforward way it's more like there's often these interactions and there's been work done by, again, my late colleague Sarah McClanahan showing that for boys who have some kind of risk for kind of more anti-I think social behavior, like if they get a lot of, you know,

Speaker 2 time with dad, for instance, they're more likely to be, you know, flourishing in exceptional ways.

Speaker 2 But if they're kind of separated from their father, they're more likely to land in trouble, you know, and engage in kind of more risky behavior as well.

Speaker 2 So the point is that I think when we're thinking about kind of genetics and sort of family structure or relationships more generally, it's important to just to kind of bear in mind that there's often an interaction between genetics and

Speaker 2 sort of these profound social experiences that we have or don't have in our lives.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So looking at, you mentioned earlier on about some of the different sex outcomes that we're getting at the moment, read an article from the Center for Social Justice.

Speaker 1 From the day they start primary school to the day they leave higher education, the progress of boys lags behind girls.

Speaker 1 The proportion of young men failing to move from education into employment or training has been steadily growing for 30 years.

Speaker 1 Since the pandemic alone, the number of males aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training meets has increased by 40% compared to just 7% of females.

Speaker 1 For those young men who are in work, the much-avaunted gender pay gap has been reversed. Young men are now out-earned by their female peers, including among the university educated.

Speaker 1 What do you make of that?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I think there are a couple of things happening here.

Speaker 2 And there's obviously a very similar story that's sort of unfolding. It's not quite as bad in the United States as what you're explaining in the UK.

Speaker 2 But the dynamics, I think, are very similar.

Speaker 2 So I think when it comes to education, kind of big education has done kind of profound disservice to our boys, you know, in terms of the curriculum, in terms of the ethos, in terms of the amount of recess that boys get.

Speaker 2 They're just not getting enough kind of stuff happening in their schools that would kind of allow them to focus, engage, and really kind of embrace learning, you know, and so that helps to account for why they're more likely to be kind of dominating the lower ranks of school performance and not kind of doing well when it comes to either vocational education and college, you know, later in life.

Speaker 2 That in turn then sets them up oftentimes for, you know, failing professionally, as this report you just mentioned.

Speaker 2 you know, indicates. I think big tech is also having a big, you know, hand in this.

Speaker 2 We all know from Jonathan Haidt's work, from Gene Twenge's work, that social media is bad for our teenage girls, for our young women as well.

Speaker 2 It kind of makes them more anxious and depressed, among other things.

Speaker 2 We haven't talked as much, Chris, about kind of the way in which I think gaming is really undercutting teenage boys and young men's capacity to do well in high school and then, you know, other forms of education, to develop meaningful hobbies, to socially interact with the opposite sex,

Speaker 2 to date. you know, and then marry later on.
And it's really kind of, I think, degrading young men's capacity to do well in a wide range of spheres,

Speaker 2 including also in the social arena as well. So that's, I think, one, you know, big factor

Speaker 2 that's in play here. And then I think the other major thing I would mention is just the kind of inability of our society to kind of paint a positive portrait of masculinity.

Speaker 2 you know, for our teenage boys and for our young men to kind of give them a sense like, look,

Speaker 2 you're important. You're valuable.
You have a distinctive mission to fulfill. You've got to get off, you know, the gaming device.

Speaker 2 You've got to focus on either college or a vocational, you know, education. Take your 20-something years seriously, job-wise, date,

Speaker 2 marry someone, you know, get on with it because you're important, you're valuable, and you've got a unique contribution to make both to potential family and to your larger community and to our society as a whole.

Speaker 2 And so absent, you know, a clear and compelling vision of masculinity, I think too many of our teenage boys and young men aren't really motivated, don't feel like they have a clear path to walk down.

Speaker 2 And so that helps to account too for the kinds of statistics you just, you know, touched on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a lot happening all at the same time, which I don't think makes very fertile ground for young men to do well.

Speaker 1 It seems like when you take the breaks off women socioeconomically in this new sort of brawn-based economy, they're they're just really good. They're more conscientious on average.

Speaker 1 They're better organized. They do their homework.
They're highlighter girls. They then go into the office.
They turn up. They don't get drunk as much.
They don't do risky behavior.

Speaker 1 Sure, that means there's going to be fewer female CEOs because they're not going to go and do the crazy, ridiculous, obsessive stuff that some of their male counterparts will.

Speaker 1 But I think, you know, the middle roles, the relatively desirable, middle-class, good-earning jobs,

Speaker 1 it already seems to be the case that they're going to be dominated by women, especially ones that have a

Speaker 1 prerequisite that you've got a college degree, because it's two women for every one man completing a four-year US college degree by 2030.

Speaker 1 Then on top of that, you would expect there to be, I guess, one of two things that would happen, either a sort of bottom-up or a top-down solution that would step in.

Speaker 1 If we see any group falling behind in society, typically we don't tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Speaker 1 What we do is we say, here is a government organization and a fund and research that's going to work out what's going on. So that would be sort of the top-down thing, which I don't think is existing.

Speaker 1 And then the bottom-up, which would be,

Speaker 1 young men,

Speaker 1 you can do this. Here is

Speaker 1 a positive image for you. There was this really interesting

Speaker 1 Reddit thread. I think it was in maybe R slash Liberals or something like that.
It's a little old now. And someone had asked,

Speaker 1 who do you think of as being a really great positive role model for men?

Speaker 1 If you've, we don't like Joe Rogan and we don't like Jordan Peterson and we don't like Andrew Tate, I think the top voted comment was like Aragon from Lord of the Rings.

Speaker 1 If we have to go to a fictional fantasy character in order to be able to find someone by design, what are you doing?

Speaker 1 Well, you're being able to imagine a world in which there was a man that you were happy with and did have the balance of whatever it is that you think that guys should have. And

Speaker 1 yeah, if a lot of

Speaker 1 if anything approximating traditional masculinity is vilified and seen as horrible misogynistic right-wing bigotry, or, you know, a return to old traditional patriarchal values that have we not dispensed with this already, you want women to get out of the workforce and back into the kitchen.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you're not going to be able to get away with that. It's not going to go well.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 And so I think, obviously, we're not going to go back to 1955, Chris, but I think we have to figure out, again, a kind of a contemporary model of masculinity that's compelling and that has at least least a substantial purchase in a decent number of the key sectors of our contemporary worlds.

Speaker 2 And absent that, we're just going to continue to see, I think, what I call the closing of the American heart, but it's a closing of the heart more globally now unfolding where women don't find enough of the men in their lives to be

Speaker 2 as compelling and as worthy of commitment as they would have in a previous era. And so they don't date, they don't mate, they don't marry, they don't have kids.
And

Speaker 2 that's not a great scenario. So I think the alternative is to kind of

Speaker 2 acknowledge, look,

Speaker 2 we need to offer men a compelling and distinct division that they can get around and that women can appreciate in them and kind of to form again kind of the basis for some kind of

Speaker 2 agreement,

Speaker 2 where there's kind of some division of labor in the relationship and the family, and also where you kind of understand and appreciate that women and men are, you know, on average, different in important ways.

Speaker 2 And you appreciate that your, you know, your boyfriend, your husband brings different, you know, gifts to the relationship and then later on to the family. And absent that, where,

Speaker 2 you know, we are headed for a kind of catastrophe.

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Speaker 1 That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. What do you make of the medium-term future for dating dating if things don't change?

Speaker 2 Not good right now.

Speaker 2 So there was a recent study done by my colleague Dan Cox at the American Enterprise Institute finding that more than half of both single women and single men are not very optimistic about their prospects for finding a good partner, right?

Speaker 2 So I think there's a lot of reasons for concern right now. But

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 one of the mistakes that many of us make, including me, Chris, is that we tend to think about a lot of our problems like unfolding kind of in a linear fashion, you know, kind of things getting worse in some way or, you know, moving in this direction in some way.

Speaker 2 And yet I think at a certain point, oftentimes, at least the successful societies or the successful subcultures figure out a way to build up a new institution or pattern, you know?

Speaker 2 And so I do think we're going to figure out

Speaker 2 or some subcultures, Chris, are going to figure out how do we get kind of dating on track again? Because

Speaker 2 they recognize either explicitly or implicitly that this is so vital to adult flourishing and to the future of our, you know, of our society as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a,

Speaker 1 it is interesting to me whenever I see

Speaker 1 women, particularly liberal women,

Speaker 1 sort of castigating men for falling behind, sort of, oh, poor whining patriarchy,

Speaker 1 sort of

Speaker 1 almost scolding men for not performing the the way that they should. And, you know, women are doing it.
You can too. Look at all of the advantages you used to have.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, within the next couple of weeks from the same Twitter account or the same publication, asking where are all of the good men at when it comes to dating prospects.

Speaker 1 And you think you do understand that we're seeing cause and effect occur here, that men falling behind and not

Speaker 1 them struggling in this new world in terms of the workforce is creating precisely the dearth of eligible partners that you're going to complain about in future.

Speaker 1 So, you know, it is of benefit to both sexes for both sexes to flourish. And it is of detriment to both sexes for either sex to fall behind.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it is kind of ironic.

Speaker 2 You know, some of the critics of my own book, Get Married, have kind of made the point, well, how can Wilcox, you know, argue for marriage if it's so hard for me as a, you know, a talented or decent young woman to find a good guy.

Speaker 2 And, but they're kind of making this argument from the left.

Speaker 2 And they're not kind of, I think, appreciating how so many of our institutions have gutted, you know, boys and young men's chances of flourishing.

Speaker 2 And they're not attentive to the ways in which, again, in education, in even some ways in the labor force

Speaker 2 today

Speaker 2 and in the larger society, we're kind of not giving our boys and young men the kinds of

Speaker 2 supports and the kinds of challenges and the kind of cultural identity that would allow them to be the kind of man that they would want to date, mate, and marry later on in life.

Speaker 2 And they're often opposed, too, to some kind of distinctive vision of masculinity for fear that that might be, you know, misogynistic or inegalitarian or whatnot.

Speaker 2 Again, I'm not saying we have to go back to the

Speaker 2 1950s or the 1550s, right? But I do think we're not going to make progress, Chris,

Speaker 2 unless and until we can kind of tell young men that, yeah, you have some unique gifts you bring to, you know, to relationships and family life and to the broader society.

Speaker 2 And we want you to cultivate those gifts.

Speaker 2 And we're going to honor you for, you know, making an effort to

Speaker 2 be a good guy.

Speaker 1 Interesting that, you know, when Title IX got introduced about 50 years ago, a lot of what was lauded as the sort of traits that women should take on were

Speaker 1 drive, agency, independence,

Speaker 1 desire for mastery and sort of conquer and upward mobility and all of that stuff. And,

Speaker 1 you know, lo and behold, 50 years comes along, the glass ceiling has been fully fucking blown off and they're now rising up.

Speaker 1 And when you hear a lot of the advice from similar sorts of places now for men, it's the opposite. It's your problem is your masculinity.

Speaker 1 Your problem is your desire for master and conquery and self-agency. And really, if you were able to be more like, look at the girls, look at how nice and placid and

Speaker 1 agreeable, but hardworking and conscientious. Look at them.
Like, if you were just less masculine, your main problem with your masculinity is your masculinity.

Speaker 1 And if you were just a little bit more feminine, if you were a little bit more female with it, despite the fact that that was the road, precisely the roadmap that kind of got women out of the issue that they were in only half a century ago.

Speaker 2 So I want to say something that's sort of, I hope, appropriately nuanced here.

Speaker 2 So on the one hand, one of the things that I find in my book is that women who are married to men, they rate as better providers, Chris, and also as more protective are more happily married.

Speaker 2 And so I think these would kind of, you know, correspond, you know, roughly to what we'd sort of classically associate with

Speaker 2 kind of pro-social masculinity, you know, being a good provider and being protective of your, in this case, your wife.

Speaker 2 And I, for instance, talk in the book about there's one woman, she was, she was in a subway.

Speaker 2 It was late at night.

Speaker 2 They'd been out, you know, dating and on a date and um the subway was emptying out and finally there was just this couple and then some sketchy guy and as this the subway moves from one station to the next this guy approaches and you know demands their money and her boyfriend at that point stood up and put himself between the sketchy guy and the woman and you know protected her thankfully the next you know station was pretty crowded they just darted out and they were fine but she said that was kind of a bookmark moment for her that you know this guy was willing to kind of put his own, you know, his own body between her and this guy and was clearly kind of protective in the right kind of way.

Speaker 2 So again, kind of having a husband or a boyfriend who's protective and is capable of providing financially in meaningful ways is still very much valued in the 21st century.

Speaker 2 But I also find in my chapter on gender that having what I call a husband who pays attention, so it's three P's, it's about providing, protecting, and paying attention,

Speaker 2 both emotionally and practically, you know, to you as a woman and to your kids when you have kids, was also super, you know, predictive of her flourishing, you know, intermarriage, be she on the left or on the right.

Speaker 2 And so I think we have to sort of realize that there are some ways in which this contemporary moment, I think, is better.

Speaker 2 We do expect men to do more in contemporary families than was the case for our grandfathers. That's good.
But I think the challenge today is we don't have a kind of

Speaker 2 enough regard for the ways in which,

Speaker 2 you know, even women themselves, when they're kind of asked questions about what makes them happy in their marriage, are kind of revealing that having a guy who's in some ways more classically masculine is still, you know,

Speaker 2 a benefit for them.

Speaker 1 I remember reading a study about

Speaker 1 maybe it was women who imagined their partner

Speaker 1 there being some sort of altercation like the one that you spoke about, and them imagining them not standing up and not protecting them. and it is I think it was more

Speaker 1 destructive to attraction than infidelity so you're actually better off cheating on your partner than you are not standing up for her when somebody comes up to to try and take her purse

Speaker 2 right and obviously my my point is like yeah be faithful but also

Speaker 1 that's another justification to be like hey um i'm gonna sleep with your best friend but i did stop that guy from stealing your purse yesterday Exactly.

Speaker 2 But again, I think, and the problem here, right, is that we don't do enough, you know, of basically encouraging like, so I was raised by a single mom, Chris, right?

Speaker 2 And so I didn't have a father kind of like giving me like the, you know, you know, all that sort of wisdom about how to treat a woman or treat a girl, right?

Speaker 2 And one of the things that kind of surprised me in talking to women for my book was that I can't tell you how many women said that they really appreciate it when a guy would, when they're, you know, walking on a sidewalk, like in a, you know, some kind of urban context or some kind of like, you know, they're out about town, right?

Speaker 2 They appreciate it when the guy takes the street side of the sidewalk and kind of keeps them on the inside portion of the sidewalk.

Speaker 2 I'd never heard that, right, before interviewing these women, but it was like a reoccurring theme, but it's just one way, again, of like the guy sort of is basically physically expressing his kind of, you know, desire to be protective.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the women that I spoke to, and again, on both the left and the right, kind of appreciated that

Speaker 2 kind of more chivalrous behavior on the part of their boyfriends and husbands.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's interesting

Speaker 1 just thinking about what are the underlying

Speaker 1 fundamental traits that this is talking about. So I guess cheating is seen as a betrayal of trust, but it doesn't actually indicate weakness.
It doesn't indicate cowardice in quite the same way.

Speaker 1 Again,

Speaker 1 not saying that it's got to be one or the other here.

Speaker 2 Right. And women, though, it's interesting too is that one woman I spoke to also mentioned that, you know,

Speaker 2 reasonably successful successful woman living in the, in the Rockies, that when she came home in the evenings to her apartment, that she would kind of, she was somewhat afraid.

Speaker 2 She kind of, you know, look around, look in the closet and things like that. And

Speaker 2 her kind of comments just reminded me that, you know, when you kind of survey women more generally, they're much more likely to be concerned about their physical safety than guys are.

Speaker 2 And for good reason, obviously, as well. Right.
And so I think we, again, in this kind of modern world that we live in, we don't talk about that that much, right?

Speaker 2 But I just think that, again, like women are more attentive to their physical safety.

Speaker 2 And given that, you know, having a boyfriend or husband who kind of is attentive to that as well and can kind of, you know, stand in the breach if need be is definitely appreciated.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I learned from you that young men are more likely to end up in prison or jail in the U.S. than they are to graduate from college if they're raised in a non-intact family setup.

Speaker 1 Do you think that this men's session thing that we're dealing with at the moment could perhaps be due to a disproportionate impact of broken homes on boys versus girls?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I do think certainly one of the reasons why young men are floundering in today's world is that they're less likely to have, you know,

Speaker 2 a married dad in the picture than was the case, you know, 40 or 50 years ago or 60 years ago.

Speaker 2 So yeah, that's certainly I think part of the

Speaker 2 you know the dynamic we're seeing and it's you know it was like the most surprising statistic for me in the book for looking at kids was just again that we do see today as you mentioned that boys are more likely to land in prison or in jail today if they're raised outside of the intact you know household than they are to graduate from college it's a pretty striking at least for me statistic

Speaker 2 but we do see even kind of for boys who are hailing from intact you know married families they're more likely to be floundering than their sisters are.

Speaker 2 So, that's part, I think, of the dynamic we're talking about today in terms of the relative problems that boys and men are having.

Speaker 2 But it's not the only factor in play as well.

Speaker 1 With this tall girl problem of socio-economically successful women struggling to find a equivalently or more socioeconomically successful partner, is the stay-at-home dad model a workable solution?

Speaker 1 Can we just pivot the flip the dynamic in that way?

Speaker 2 Yeah, you know, it's interesting, Chris.

Speaker 2 I think there are certain, I mean, I know plenty of guys who have, you know, been successfully, you know, at home for periods of time while their wife is out working to provide financially for the family and have done fine, right?

Speaker 2 But at scale, Chris, the answer is no. And the reason I say that is both in my book, I do find that for married moms, they're less happy when their husbands are at home,

Speaker 2 you know, as stay-at-home dads, than women whose husbands are employed full-time. We also know that when it comes to divorce, when women lose their jobs, no effect on the risk of getting divorced.

Speaker 2 When men lose their jobs, their risk of divorce goes up 33%.

Speaker 2 So it just kind of tells us that, you know, again, even today, there's a way in which providing is

Speaker 2 still coded, you know, more

Speaker 2 masculine. And then the other thing, too, is that in the average marriage,

Speaker 2 even when guys are at home, they're just not as attentive to all the kind of details and nuances of kids' schedules and of kind of keeping the home as sort of clean and well-functioning as the average wife would like it to be.

Speaker 2 And so, what often happens is that when the wife is the primary earner or the sole earner, she feels like her husband isn't doing his, you know, share when it comes to kind of managing the household and also kind of managing the kids,

Speaker 2 the kids' lives.

Speaker 2 And the other thing that's interesting here too, Chris, is that what my book shows is that, you know, there's been a lot of talk about kind of the rising number of female breadwinners out there in today's world.

Speaker 2 But people haven't really kind of focused on how that's incredibly stratified.

Speaker 2 And what I mean by that is that we're seeing that sort of female dominated, you know, breadwinner households are overwhelmingly working class and poor kind of pattern.

Speaker 2 And upper-middle class and upper-class households are much more likely either to kind of have roughly, you know, similar earnings between mom and dad, or to have dads kind of leading out when it comes to their earnings.

Speaker 2 And what do you see in general? You see, obviously, upper-middle-class, upper-class homes, much more marriage, much more stable marriage.

Speaker 2 Because again, I think we still associate for you know a number of important reasons

Speaker 2 breadwinning with men and marriage and family stability. So again, at scale, I don't see kind of trying to

Speaker 2 have large numbers of men stay at home and care for their kids as being

Speaker 2 a good

Speaker 2 way of handling the challenges we're facing now. It's also interesting that we have some new work at IFS, Institute for Family Studies, kind of just showing that there's this kind of continuing gap.

Speaker 2 When you look at who's getting married today, Chris, even though women are outperforming men educationally, it's still the case that when you look at who's getting married, you know, men are way more likely to be earning more money than their, you know, newly married, you know,

Speaker 2 their spouse.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 So in that way, do you think that the decline in marriage rates could be laid at the feet of socioeconomically less desirable men?

Speaker 2 Right. And so I think what we have seen also, you know, this is a new piece from Richard Reeves' group showing that almost all of the recent decline in marriage is among less educated women.

Speaker 2 not college educated women.

Speaker 2 And what's fascinating about the college educated women is that even when they're marrying guys who are less educated than they are, they tend to be marrying guys who have good income.

Speaker 2 So they're marrying, you know, cops, firemen, guys in the trades, you know.

Speaker 2 So they're kind of picking the cream of the crop, you know, financially, even when these guys don't have the same kind of educational credential that they do, right?

Speaker 2 And so the fact is that we're seeing

Speaker 2 a lot of guys who don't have as much education,

Speaker 2 they're doing less well in the labor force. So one statistic that I find in my book, for instance, is about one in four

Speaker 2 prime age guys who don't have a college degree are not working full-time. Of course, that's a huge issue financially and otherwise, and would be one reason why we're seeing kind of

Speaker 2 less marriage in working class and poor communities in the US. And the same seems true for the UK as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Why, you mentioned to me about the South Korean election with a twist. Why do you think that's a good analogy to draw?

Speaker 2 To Trump, you were saying? Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 what we saw, obviously, in South Korea in the most recent presidential election was just that the more conservative candidate managed to kind of win the election because he got a lot of younger men who had turned kind of in a more conservative direction, more anti-feminist direction to vote for him.

Speaker 2 And what's fascinating about sort of South Korean case, I think, as well as in part the American case, is that It looks like when young men are floundering and they're feeling they're not really doing that well, like in school and in the workplace they're more likely to identify with a kind of anti-feminist or kind of hyper masculine you know ideology a kind of andrew tate ideology if you will and i think that helps to explain why you know south korea turned to the right among young men in the recent election of course the young women in south korea were kind of turning to the left culturally and we saw you know kind of a similar dynamic playing out here in the u.s to some extent in the most recent elections where um you know young men voted.

Speaker 2 One survey found 56% of young men voted for Trump. And by contrast, 58% voted for Harris.

Speaker 2 And this is kind of emblematic, too, of the way in which I think a lot of young men are kind of frustrated with

Speaker 2 their performance in school, their performance in the workplace, and it makes them gravitate sometimes to a more kind of anti-feminist or hyper-masculine ideology. And

Speaker 2 they would certainly see that in some ways, I think with parts of the the MAGA coalition including including Trump himself yeah I well a lot of people thought that the

Speaker 1 rise of black votes immigrant vote Hispanic vote single vote would

Speaker 1 fuel the Democratic sort of coalition the emerging Democratic majority how come it didn't work out that way do you think Well, in part because larger numbers of black men and especially Hispanic men voted voted for Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 And some of that dynamic is about, again, you know,

Speaker 2 younger guys who are kind of finding it difficult to, you know, find a good footing or a foothold in the economy and society, and even I think relationally, you know, and worrying about their prospects as breadwinners and potential husbands down the road.

Speaker 2 And so they kind of find, you know, Trump's message, which is both more macho and also much more directed towards men, you know, as appealing.

Speaker 2 So I think that's part of why we saw Trump win a majority of the voters in this round.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, wasn't it Trump's success was really,

Speaker 1 it was pretty much everywhere. Like his

Speaker 1 46% of women voted for Trump, 55% of white women voted for Donald Trump, 45%

Speaker 1 supported Kamala Harris.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, I mean, it's certainly the case that, you know, it wasn't just the gender dynamics that we're talking about today that were in play for Trump.

Speaker 2 I think there was also kind of a real sense that, you know, obviously the cost of living and inflation had been pretty high under Biden.

Speaker 2 So there are, you know, a number of different factors kind of driving the Trump story.

Speaker 2 But I think certainly part of the story here is that, you know, men have gravitated towards Trump and moved towards the right, including black and Latino men to some important extent.

Speaker 2 And they've done so in part because they feel...

Speaker 2 Tyler Cohen wrote about this last summer, talking about the vibe shift, you know, before Trump was elected. He was already kind of anticipating this vibe shift.

Speaker 2 And he was kind of arguing that one reason the vibe is shifting, again, is that too many guys feel like

Speaker 2 they're not doing well. They feel like women are dominating, you know, their institutions, their workplace, their schools, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And they look at, you know, Trump and Republicans as, you know, vehicles for,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 boosting the fortunes of men in today's America.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Another really shocking stat.
Trump gained support among every racial group except for white people, where he lost 1%.

Speaker 2 Wild. Right.

Speaker 1 Super wild. I mean, look, it's another case, I think, of rules for thee, but not for me, or the sort of talking left, but walking right, or the luxury beliefs thing from Rob Henderson.
It's largely

Speaker 1 the rubber meeting the road. with this stuff.
Okay, what's actually going to happen when

Speaker 1 my potential future is on the line?

Speaker 1 Am I going going to behave or vote or procreate or design my household or have you know move forward in my career in the way that seems to be fashionable or am i going to do something that i don't know ultimately uh people sort of vote with their efforts and uh it it seems like i don't know a little bit of a falling away of the um able to say this while doing something else it i i don't know how long that can continue to go for

Speaker 2 right and i do think you know, one of the more hopeful signs is that I would look for from the center left is just kind of a growing willingness to sort of speak, you know, simple truths that have been kind of hidden for a while just because they would like to kind of re-engage their possibilities of speaking to the broader electorate.

Speaker 2 We have seen, for instance, pieces in the Atlantic recently on the importance of cities taking a harder line when it comes to public safety.

Speaker 2 You know, I think this is kind of the kind of thing that the left needs to do if it wants to kind of move back to the center and

Speaker 2 have a greater shot at,

Speaker 2 again, winning a majority for the next presidential election and just elections in general as well.

Speaker 1 What is most interesting from a research perspective over the next couple of years for you? What are you going to be focused on?

Speaker 2 Yeah, the big question I'm thinking about is whether or not it's not just that marriage matters, Chris, but that it might matter more than ever for both kids and for adults.

Speaker 2 And what I mean by that is that I think in a world that's more technologically distracted, in a world that's more economically unequal, in a world where a lot of our core civic institutions are weaker now than they used to be, it could be the case that getting married and having a family for adults is more valuable emotionally and socially and financially than for kids as well, because especially nowadays when dads are more engaged with their kids.

Speaker 2 So the point is, again, that having like a spouse, having a family could matter more than ever for our adult men and women. And then also for our kids.
And I've already seen this with kids.

Speaker 2 And college graduation, for instance, we're seeing that the link between having an intact family and graduating from a college is stronger for millennials than it was for boomers.

Speaker 2 So I'm just exploring the possibility empirically that on some key outcomes, we might be finding in the near future that, again, having a family, getting married, staying married could be more valuable in a world that in some ways is more precarious now than it was, you know, 30, 40, or 50 years ago.

Speaker 1 Interesting stuff. Well, I look forward to seeing what you discover.
Brad Wilcox, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They want to keep keep up to date with everything that you do.

Speaker 2 So, familystudies.org has a lot of interesting stuff from my colleagues at IFS Institute for Family Studies, and I'm on Twitter at Brad WilcoxIFS.

Speaker 1 Heck yeah, Brad, I appreciate you. Until next time.

Speaker 2 Okay. Thanks, Chris.

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