Jason Furman's Reviews > The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

The word “important” is overused in describing books. Part of why overusing it is a problem is that it diminishes the power it carries when it is truly merited. And Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege truly deserves to be called important.

Economists' discussions of poverty have largely shied away from “cultural” issues like marriage because of the fear of falling into cultural judgments, the belief that they are entirely a consequence of economic outcomes not a cause of them, and a worry that we do not have any solutions to them. All three of these have some truth to them. Nevertheless I have always been a bit guilty that my own writing, reading, and policy work has been on conventional poverty issues like tax-and-transfer programs and ways to facilitate and encourage work while avoiding culture entirely.

Enter Kearney with a thoughtful, non-judgmental account of the undesirable consequences of the decline in children’t being raised by married couples—much of it based on her previous scholarly research as well as the research of others (including a number of sociologists, which is nice to see in a book by an economist). She documents this trend which is particularly pronounced for lower-income families, rebuts a number of ways of explaining it away (e.g., there is not much cohabitation without marriage and the little there is tends to be relatively unstable), establishes its importance for outcomes for children and the channels by which it is important, and discusses a number of the causes as well. For good measure there is also a discussion of declining birthrates. And woven throughout is a set of policy conclusions from specific programs (e.g., fatherhood programs and what they need to do to improve) to a broader plea that we should all be taking marriage more seriously.

The story is a complicated one because the decline in marriage is partly caused by economic developments (most notably the decline in earnings for men) but also causes them. Moreover her earlier research found that when men got more opportunities from fracking it did not lead to more marriage so the economic relationships may not work in reverse and there may be persistence in a new set of norms. Moreover the programs that deal with these issues are complicated too, with mixed success and nothing particularly huge. The result is not a magic bullet solution to the problem Kearney so ably documents so much as a plea for all of us to care more about it—a process that holds out the hope of developing more solutions in the future.