At its worst, social science can take the form of a play in four boring acts. When the curtain rises on Act I, the heroine selects a phenomenon of general interest, perhaps something as meaty and intriguing as love or art. In Act II, we watch with dismay as she whittles the complex provocation of her choice into something simple and measurable, generally at the cost of rendering it unrecognizable; love is now a soup of pheromones, art a pleasant tingle in the rightmost quadrant of the brain. In Act III, our protagonist hooks electrodes to heads or scribbles away at statistical calculations while we look on in horror. Finally, in Act IV, she applies insights about the suspiciously shrunken entities under investigation to the world writ large. As the curtain drops, the audience is left to wonder: Do her neat, precise observations about hormones and neurons have anything to do with the disorderly devastations of love and art in the wild?
The first three acts often represent indispensable, if frequently unglamorous, episodes in the epistemological drama of social science, but dangers lurk in Act IV. It is at this stage that some scholars carelessly apply discoveries about discrete ingredients to the whole mélange.
Melissa S. Kearney, a professor at the University of Maryland and a self-described “MIT-trained economist,” makes just such mistakes in her tiresome new book, “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.” She begins by defining marriage as “a long-term contract between two individuals to combine resources and share the responsibilities of keeping a household and raising children” and ends by making broad policy recommendations on the basis of her blinkered findings.
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Throughout, she is careful to pay lip service to the obligatory caveats. “I am not blaming single mothers,” she doth protest, perhaps too much. “I am not saying everyone should get married.” “I am not promoting a norm of a stay-at-home wife and a breadwinner husband.” I believe her — but reactionary mores make their way into her book regardless; not because of her nefarious intentions, but because she fails to acknowledge (much less interrogate) her many controversial assumptions.
“Ideology is not acquired by thought but by breathing the haunted air,” the cultural critic Lionel Trilling once wrote. Prejudice is a particular liability for scholars convinced they are impervious to it. “The Two-Parent Privilege” is an object lesson in failing to reckon with the flicker of ideological ghosts.
One measure of Kearney’s bias is her eagerness to frame herself as a martyr bent on speaking unpopular truths to power. In the first chapter, she recalls attending an economics conference where she asked whether two-parent households might improve children’s lives. “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,” she sighs. She goes on to call the contention that marriage benefits children “the elephant in the room.”
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But in which room is this bromide anything but a piece of the standard furniture? Kearney herself quotes from the landmark 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which declares that “marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children.” In fact, her concern with “the decline in marriage and the corresponding rise in the share of children being raised in one-parent homes” is shared by a swath of pundits and politicians as popular and voluble as Ross Douthat and Barack Obama.
All of these people are distressed that, as Kearney writes, “in 2019, only 63% of children in the U.S. lived with married parents, down from 77% in 1980.” They are all worried that children with “two resident parent figures” tend to boast higher educational attainment and larger incomes as adults.
To her credit, Kearney is clear that it is not actually marriage that confers these benefits. “Cohabitation, in theory, could deliver similar resources as marriage, but the data show that in the U.S., these partnerships are not, on average, as stable as marriages,” she explains. In other words, if unmarried Americans lived and parented together, then their children would be just as apt to flourish as the children of married Americans — but, as matters stand, “children whose parents are unmarried are much more likely to be living with just their mom than both parents.”
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It is not hard to guess why two-parent households might be more conducive to adult success. In an academic context, it can be worthwhile for scholars to rigorously substantiate intuitive truths. But it is a bit deflating when a book intended for a public audience contains so few surprises. Who will be stunned by the revelation that households outfitted with two parents also tend to be outfitted with “more resources”? These resources are most obviously economic, but Kearney emphasizes that they are also wider ranging. Regrettably, a comprehensive list never appears in “The Two-Parent Privilege,” but among the nonmaterial goods that two-parent households enjoy are “time” and “emotional energy.”
Unfortunately, the decline in marriage — and therefore the spike in children who lack the package of resources in question — is not distributed “equally across the population.” While “there has been little change, for example, in the family structure of children whose mothers have a four-year college degree,” Kearney writes, “only 60% of children whose mothers had a high school degree or some college lived with married parents, a whopping 23 percentage point drop since 1980.” Thus, “a two-parent family is increasingly becoming yet another privilege associated with more highly resourced groups in society.”
To understand how to close the chasm between children with this “two-parent privilege” and those without it, Kearney maintains that we must understand why marriage has become a less appealing prospect in the first place. “The mothers who are not married are not married precisely because the men with whom they have fathered children would not meaningfully contribute positive resources to the raising of their children,” she writes. Drawing on the work of the redoubtable Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, she suggests that American men are no longer “marriageable,” which is to say that they are no longer “a reliable source of economic security or stability.” (You may have gathered by now that “The Two-Parent Privilege” treats heterosexual marriage almost exclusively.)
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What, then, is to be done? Kearney believes that we should provide children consigned to single-parent arrangements with compensatory material aid — but that it would be even better if we could somehow increase the proportion of married parents in the country. This course of action is, however, more challenging; not only are fewer men marriageable, or so Kearney suspects, but “the social norms surrounding childbearing and marriage have changed enough” that many women no longer want to get hitched, even to the handful of men who still have sufficient resources to offer. Having acknowledged that women may not go in for marriage, even to men with money, Kearney nonetheless proposes that we should improve “the economic position of non-college-educated men so they are more reliable marriage partners and fathers.” Less inanely but more mysteriously, we should “work to restore and foster a norm of two-parent homes for children,” though it remains unclear how, exactly, we might do this — or, more crucially, whether we should want to.
I have no doubt that Kearney is correct, in her limited way, about the data. But when it comes to wringing living significance out of dead statistics, much less making policy proposals, she is less adept. She is insistent that she is an impartial scientist, compelled by math to make certain recommendations. “My job is to look at vast amounts of data with nuance and precision and produce and interpret the resulting evidence,” she writes. “While this book will not contain mathematical equations or econometric specifications, it will present the findings of analyses that use them,” as if the numbers simply excreted ready-made moral imperatives, no further assembly required.
But underlying her dispassionate data-mongering are the sort of redolent presumptions that equations cannot prove. For instance, Kearney may be right that children in single-parent households fare worse than children with happily married parents — but is she right to compare these two cases? As the political commentator Matt Bruenig has argued, parents are not generally in a position to choose between amiable, healthy marriages and raising their children alone; instead, they have the option of pursuing tense (if not outright abusive) partnerships or proceeding as best they can by themselves. If Kearney really wants to determine whether the current situation is preferable to a realistic alternative, she ought to compare the outcomes of children in single-parent households with the outcomes of children in unstable or violent two-parent households.
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Which comparison is most apt? Which idealizations best reflect reality? These matters are not settled by data alone. By studiously dodging the real elephant in the room — namely, her own ideological commitments — Kearney misses out on an opportunity to justify the values she smuggles into her nominally neutral models. Though she makes note of her myopic methods on several occasions, she neither alters them nor takes the time to consider how her circumscribed definitions may skew her conclusions. “Of course, the marriage proposition is also — perhaps even mostly — about love and companionship,” she concedes. “But that does not negate the reality that marriage is, as a practical and child-raising matter, also an economic institution.”
Of course, marriage is in part an economic institution, and there is nothing wrong with defining it as such for the limited purpose of calculating the costs borne by children in single-parent households. Problems arise not because Kearney asks narrow questions but because she mistakes their answers for more all-encompassing guides to what we ought to do. After all, if marriage is “perhaps even mostly” a matter of “love and companionship,” why does Kearney devote her book exclusively to its impact on children? Why don’t the pains and pangs of married adults — and, in particular, women, who have historically been disadvantaged or worse by the arrangement — even feature as considerations to be weighed against its benefits?
Perhaps the drabbest statistical tic that Kearney imports into her moral analysis is that we should take much of the status quo for granted. This is an assumption that makes sense in an economic context: When we are trying to isolate the effects of marriage on children’s outcomes, we should hold the rest of the social world fixed. But why must we take the existing world for granted when it comes time to devise reforms? Why must we continue to act like economists when we enter the realm of philosophy?
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If marriage benefits children because it affords them more emotional support, why should we “work to restore and foster” the nuclear family, which privatizes affection and attention, instead of working to foster a new norm of communal child-rearing? Is there any reason to conclude that marriage is the best solution, except that it is the solution that already (although perhaps not for much longer, if current trends continue apace) exists?
Kearney does not answer these questions because she does not ask them. Her ingenuity fails her whenever she quits the terrain of numbers and enters the territory of human chaos — whenever, that is, her book threatens to become interesting.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.
The Two-Parent Privilege
How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind
By Melissa S. Kearney
University of Chicago Press. 225 pp. $25
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