1. I think this is wrong "And another camp consists of racists who don’t like to talk about family structure as a source of disadvantage because they believe it detracts from the idea that Black people are inferior."
I think it's more like racists point to family structure as evidence that black people are inferior.
2. This is going to be controversial as fuck, but there is a societal push to elevate single mothers, above and beyond normal mothers, which I don't necessarily think is healthy. The single mothers are saints and heroes canard could possibly do more more harm than good. But obviously, stigmatizing and ostracizing single mothers is also bad. But the fact is that social pressure is very powerful.
Being a single mother is such a powerful image that we sort of speak it in the same tone as we do veterans. It's use to almost boost a persons status. I don't think we do it consciously, but it's more of a thing where we overcompensated our support of single mothers and sort of in some ways glorify it. I have been guilty of this too.
Personal Story: My 23-year old daughter is a single mother. I mean it's true she is awesome. She is a full time student, working hard to raise my granddaughter. The effort she puts in versus a married mother is awe inspiring. But at the same time... she is a single mother because she slept with some loser Scottish dude who didn't have his life together and was lazy about birth control. Her life is hard because she messed up. Ok... I love love my granddaughter, and am blessed to have her, but you get the point. I would gladly love to be in an alternate Universe where my daughter was married to a guy while she went to school and shared the responsibilities and I still got to hang with my granddaughter. But... if she did that... I probably wouldn't brag on her as much. And that is the issue.
I think we try to elevate the status of single mothers in their own mind to try to encourage them through the incredible challenging task they face. I don't think anyone is saying, "Oh man...It sure would be great to be a single mother."
We try to encourage but we don't do lots of practical stuff like the late, lamented child care credit, after school programs, subsidized daycare and the like.
I still think there's a decent amount of stigma, at least for the young, never-married type of single mother (the only kind I have experience being). Maybe I'm a in a more socially conservative milieu, but it might also be that one-step removed, you can choose your audience more carefully (even if subconsciously), so you don't discuss your daughter's situation with that coworker you know would consider her trashy - or who would just give that super-long awkward look when you have to clarify that no, she isn't married. But as it affects your daughter's life in more obviously practical ways, she has to be more open about it with a less-selected group of people, and likely does get plenty of negative feedback - and even if the positive outnumbers the negative, we humans tend to take the negative much more to heart.
It’s probably worth spreading the news that a low earning husband is adding good value to the kids life. Matt acts like this is something *everybody* knows but that’s not my experience. We can see in Wilcox proposal even he doesn’t really know what he knows—his idea is to get these low wage dads working even more hours even though they could add value spending those hours doing childcare, which is quite expensive.
And eliminating the welfare state marriage penalties is simply a must and I’m tired of liberals acting like conservatives should take care of this for them. It’s our welfare state after all, when it’s not working right we should fix it! I know the senate is sooooooo busy and unable to take up a lot of legislation but they should just move a bill on this that isn’t full of poison and make Romney etc vote against it. I doubt he will. This is quite a pernicious way for the government to nudge peoples lives and getting the other party to do the work for you down the line is just not such an amazing win as our legislators seem to think.
One angle of approach here, though not fully fleshed out as policy: make working-class men more compelling as husbands. Liberals and conservatives might both like this or both hate this, depending on how you frame it.
I forget who did this research, but there was a study of the fathers of single mothers' children that found that many of them consider themselves involved parents who derive great meaning from spending time with their kids, even as their standards for what constitutes sharing the parenting load are much, much lower than those of your average high-SES married dad. If you're a single mother, and your kid's father is patchily employed or employed in a line of work that requires constant travel or on-call availability, has a home that isn't safe for kids, and maybe even has a drug problem or trouble with the law – and on top of that he likes doing the fun, "quality time" parts of parenting but never shows up for the stressful, boring bureaucracy... why would you marry him?
Conservative discourse on this tends to imply that women should be less picky about their husbands. I think that disrespects women's autonomy and their equal rights. No one should be pressured into a lifelong commitment they don't want, and women deserve better than to be the helpmeet of someone who won't pull his weight. Conversely, though, left-wing discourse often prescribes basically "do better, men". This is a viewpoint I'm pretty cautious about sharing with even some of my closest friends, but... cultural leftists have to do better than "do better, men". For one thing, "do better, men" fails the test of – of all things – intersectionality, specifically understanding the intersection of gender and class. Low-SES men may benefit from lower societal expectations on a lot of things, but they are also beset with much graver problems than low-SES women. The large majority of murder victims are men, as are the large majority of people living on the street.
My strong belief as a liberal and a feminist (and an LGBT person) is that the policy answer to the problems men face is *not* "accept gender roles as a fact of life and treat boys and girls differently as a result". I think more male nurses and more male kindergarten teachers, for instance, would be really beneficial here. But even if the consensus immediately breaks down on solutions, I think it's valuable to frame the problem in the above terms.
I don't hear a lot of "women should be less picky about their husbands" from conservatives. I do hear that "there should be better men" quite a lot. I don't think there is as big of a difference as you state.
It's weird to me when people describe Jordan Peterson as a conservative. I guess if I was forced to binarize all public figures into either lib or con I'd go with con for Jordan Peterson. But we're not forced to do that! He may align with conservatives on some prominent issues, but he's not GOP aligned or active otherwise, and many of his fans are not politically active or inclined people either.
You may be hearing about enforced monogamy from Peterson (I don't actually follow or listen to him, myself, so I don't know) but he's not a good example of a conservative.
If we were talking two years ago I would actually somewhat agree with you on this. But Peterson has become far more aligned with the right since the 2020 election and the pandemic – to the point where he explicitly called himself a conservative earlier this year.
So I guess I'm just willing to take Jordan at face value and call him by his preferred political affiliations.
I take issue with your caricature of the working class man. Certainly everyone should acknowledge this subset has its unique challenges (and the left in particular should know better), but in all but perhaps the previous two generations (if that) working class men had it worse than today, and yet marriage rates were much higher. Were many of those marriages sub optimal? Sure. We certainly all know the caricature of the alcoholic abusive husband/father, and *some* were like that. But many, many, were not. They were good loving fathers who worked hard to provide for their families and were also active involved parents (according to the gender roles of the time, sure, but that’s far from being absent or only “for the fun parts”). That this is becoming increasingly rare today is a societal, cultural shift, that cannot be exclusively explained in material terms. These are important, and need to be addressed, and here the left would be right. But the cultural aspect cannot be ignored either, nor the individual responsibly of the parents in a given case, and here the right is right (even if totally bereft of solutions).
Let's talk about that "Sure" Given that women, now much more likely than in earlier generations to be in the workforce, and indeed in lower income communities likely to be higher earning than most of her sexual partners, no longer need their partners income might impact their inclination to stay in a suboptimal marriage or enter one in the first place?
I’m not sure I understand your point. Upper class and upper middle class women earn far far more than working class women today and still seem to “need” or want to marry men and raise children with them at high rates. Why should we assume that working class women wouldn’t want and need this kind of partnership too ? Even if in some cases the man earns less than them couldn’t they still use the money and the help (not to mention the companionship etc) ?
I'm not arguing that women no longer want to marry men and raise children with them. I'm arguing that women no longer need to marry UNMARRIAGEABLE men just to have children. Since women tend to date & marry in their peer group upper & middle class women are less likely to match across chronically unemployed and/or periodically incarcerated men. It seems like you're making the argument that they should marry these unmarriageable men. I mean, I'm not the one you need to convince.
I don’t think it’s quite accurate to consider “ chronically unemployed and/or periodically incarcerated men” as synonymous with working class men (by any stretch of the term) to put it mildly… in any case whether or not marriage is “needed” to raise children (as opposed to raising them with certain outcomes more likely vel sim) is and always has been a cultural, not an economic, question, which is precisely my point.
In that area, you turned up to the labor exchange in the morning and each local employer sent a foreman down with a number of workers and skills required, and you hoped you got chosen.
every age has its idiosyncrasies. In that era it was more likely by contrast that they had to leave for seasonal work for prolonged period etc. The point is rather, whether there is something so drastic about the material conditions alone in this day and age that is sufficient, in and of itself, to explain the shifts, when considering the material challenges faced by working class people in the past? I think it’s very clear that the answer is no, and while this is certainly *part* of the picture, it works in combination with cultural factors. It’s the combination (“intersection”) of the changes in culture together with the changes in the economy and the nature of work that proved particularly destabilizing for family structure among working class people.
“We elites are doing married life correctly and therefore have earned the privilege of raising children in a stable family environment which will set them up for success, but not calling this ‘traditional’. You benighted proles are not and therefore your women should all leave you and your children suffer.”
And we wonder why conservatives think we’re tribalistic assholes…
Their entire argument seems to boil down to classism.
I am a high-SES father. Most of my social circle who've had kids are high-SES, at least middling-SES.
Trust me, there are plenty among us who are just as lazy and useless as the stereotypical "fun absentee dad". And there are those whose jobs consume their lives to the point where they're an ATM to their kids and not much more. Several in my social circles are already divorced, a few others aren't there yet but I can't see how their wives will tolerate it for long.
I find it incredibly demeaning to suggest that we need to somehow "teach" a narrow group of people to "be better." It's no less horrible a sentiment to hold when you're talking about poor men than when you're talking about black men or gay men.
It's also, as others have noted, basically caricaturizing the conservative position on this, but that's a side issue at best.
Isn’t the point of the comment that *current* liberal discourse on this is just saying “be better”, ie someone just needs to teach them, while the proposal is that we change structural features of working class employment to make them more compatible with being a good father?
And the fact that we're ending on "lets solve this problem by getting more male nurses and kindergarten teachers" tells me that we're back in la la land again.
What we need to be discussing is how we rebuild manufacturing employment AND turn service gigs of all sorts into stable employment that pays well enough to support a decent standard of living for a family.
"Gender parity in individual fields of employment" is a fantasy, and an irrelevant one to boot.
That's a pretty straightforward extrapolation of "traditional" throughout history. Accumulate capital, get married, then have kids.
It's near-identical to childbearing patterns from Early Modern through late Industrial Europe, adjusted for life expectancy. Marriage was delayed until the breadwinning men hit their mid-to-late-20's, at a time when life expectancy was around 55-60.
The "golden age" of post-war US and European family formation is the outlier here, but still conceptually similar, it's just that it was easier and faster for median folks to establish a stable foundation such that they could get married and have kids in their early 20's, not early-to-mid-30's.
So, as I said a few weeks ago, the economic elite of the country is basically neo-traditional on this topic, but they refuse to preach what they practice, bending over backwards not to criticize any living arrangements reached by others, at all, no matter how bad those arrangements are on the merits.
wait so are you mad at my comment for scolding working-class people, or for refusing to scold them?
Okay, so, I was unclear. Here's a clear restatement of what I think:
- I agree with Matt that all else being equal it is good for children to grow up in a stable two-parent home.
- Women who choose not to marry their children's fathers are often doing so for serious, understandable reasons. Pressuring them to marry the guy whatever his faults is not an acceptable solution.
- Men who are not ready for fatherhood are unready for structural, material reasons, and need better job opportunities and training, less mass incarceration and especially less of a security state in schools, and an education system that's run by people who think boys and men are valuable, complex human beings, not troublemaking future rapists, and that provides them with male role models with jobs that aren't traditionally masculine. Pressuring them to take crappy jobs, stop playing video games, or make their beds or whatever, is not an acceptable solution.
When I say “traditional,” unlike you, the sense of history involved goes back beyond mid-20th century America.
The marriage and child-rearing habits of modern professional class Americans are entirely in keeping with what the middling classes both agricultural and mercantile have done for five centuries.
It’s just that instead of moralizing in favor of it, they’ve started moralizing against it.
And also, historically the child counts after the various Horsemen had their way weren’t much above replacement. Agricultural productivity didn’t allow it.
“And another camp consists of racists who don’t like to talk about family structure as a source of disadvantage because they believe it detracts from the idea that Black people are inferior.”
This is worse than uncharitable, it is a mistake. The entire “welfare queen” trope, which has thrived for 50 years, implies that blacks are inferior because they have suboptimal family structures or, at a minimum, that blacks have bad family structures because they lack discipline. In either case, conservatives are perfectly happy saying that blacks have undesirable family structures.
I think you might be missing something here talking about the hypothetical child that is not existing because a woman had an abortion (or used birth control). Particularly in cases of unintentional pregnancies that occur when a woman is young, the choice is less a child that exists or doesn’t; the trade-off is between a child born now when the parents are much less able to provide a good life, and a hypothetical child born a few years later when the parents are ready and better-equipped to handle parenthood. The benefit isn’t the hypothetical child existing or not, it is the hypothetical child being born in worse circumstances for the parents or better ones.
I agree. Maybe I spend too much time on relationship subreddits, but my impression is that far too many people are having children before they are ready to, and that we should be encouraging people to be a little more deliberate about when to have kids. I'd like to see widespread availability of LARCs, similar to the Colorado experiment.
I have a totally unfounded theory that one reason for QAnon's success is that we have an underground ocean of generational trauma in this country from child neglect and abuse. If I had to guess, I would say that the marginal child (i.e. the child who wouldn't have been born if their parents had been slightly more deliberate about the choice) is living in abuse and neglect, and actually would be better off not being born or being born "later".
In other words, a version of the liberal position on the trilemma that emphasizes birth control instead of abortion. I know birth control is caught up in the culture wars, as well, but as policy and politics it's the most tractable lever to pull.
This argument seems bizarre to me. Almost all evidence I see shows that people in the modern time spend vastly more time, money, and effort on children than previous generations did.
Oh yeah, and one more area where conservative values can make for more difficult child-rearing: homophobia and shunning of queer relatives. While us queers are a very small part of the reproduction discussion, the fact that many/most of us won’t have any children of our own means that we have extra resources we can use to help our straight family members with their own child rearing.
Well, and also that small town homophobia (among many other 'culturally conservative' views that don't appeal to most young adults) tend to be another factor driving young people to live in cities. Of course, moving from a small town to a city tends to be associated for a variety of reasons with having a smaller family later in life than otherwise would have happened.
So, a main reason people cite is lack of good male partners. Better job opportunities, reduced incarceration, improving schools outcomes are often pointed to here. But if the culture shifted where “bring a successful man” = a well run home and being a great stay at home dad that could also work. How do you change the culture? A successful network comedy about a cool dad raising the family’s kids. (Well, it’s a start)
Edit: Yes, there are lots of beloved comedies already about good dads WITH jobs!
Absolutely. Especially as more and more low-income jobs shift to the service sector - which seems to be advantaging low SES women relative to low SES men - it would be good to play up the potential for male contributions beyond those of providing financially.
My experience is that the progressive skepticism of several of the solutions is due to a (IME, entirely justifiable) suspicion that a lot of it is trying to reduce the amount of leverage women have.
So they're fine with "marriage promotion by creating more stable occupations for working class men", don't care about "a bunch of PSAs promoting marriage", and hate "make it harder to get divorced."
I'm curious if there's much data about outcomes for children in situations where one parent dies, and then two of their uncles move in to help their dad raise them. Most of what I've seen on that specific scenario has been anecdotal.
Actually that’s a good point. The data says that kids with a deceased married parent do just as well as kids with living married parents. But kids with divorced parents do worse.
One explanation is that the heritable personality traits that lead to divorce are the culprit not the simple presence or absence of a parent.
I think the data is pretty clear - the youngest children in these families will go on to become wildly financially successful, while the older children will just manage and will spend their adulthoods trying to relive the glory days of their childhood.
1. Free long-acting birth control (e.g. IUDs) for everyone (insurance-blind) under 25.
2. Free high-quality therapy for everyone (insurance-blind) under 25. (The idea being to help reduce people's childhood baggage before they have kids, hopefully helping them to have kids in better circumstances, and to stay married once there.)
3. This one is harder, but being married to a guy who doesn't pull his weight (as far as housework, parenting, emotional support, faithfulness, etc.) can make a woman's life much worse than being single, and I think that's a lot of what we're running up against. Meanwhile, as a society we seem to lack 'masculinity done right' role models and ideals, leading the left to decry masculinity as toxic and try to avoid it, and the right to complain that the left just sees men as inferior women, without offering a more useful vision themselves. (For the record, I know a lot of men are already awesome - but I think that's in spite of our culture rather than because of it, and shifting the conversation might help more men get there.)
And that's unfortunate because great parenting, for example (e.g. patiently tending a kid who wakes up every 2 hours) requires hard-work, strength, self-discipline... all virtues that have traditionally been seen as at least as much masculine as feminine. I would love to hear that trumpeted from the rooftops.
I am going to venture a guess that the vast majority of Slow Boring readers are wealthy and either childless or married. There is a cultural dynamic impacting lower-income portions of our nation that we have no way of developing solutions for because we aren't part of it. All that being said, this 2 hour conversation between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin from 1971 is absolutely incredible and they discuss this from a human perspective. Note that on the graph above, 1971 is right around a major inflection point in marriage rates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jc54RvDUZU
Cultural problems are hard to solve. Look how far our "racial reckoning" has gotten us (nowhere, backwards maybe). If there are tax policy levers, great, but I'm with Matt in being skeptical that they're up to the task.
As I understand it, virtually all on-line spaces will be above average in income and educational achievement by virtue of who is most likely to have internet access. I'd have to presume paid subscribers to economic policy focused blogs trend even higher by quite a bit.
Yeah totally. I’m just throwing out there that we likely don’t have the right first-hand knowledge to be able to come up with effective ideas. We can certainly still discuss it!
“I’m skeptical anyone has any really good marriage promotion ideas”
Shame.
Shame and opprobrium.
And intentionally raising children outside a stable family structure is, liberal “openness” notwithstanding, absolutely one of the few instances where society should employ those to maximum effect even though it’s regarding a “lifestyle choice”.
The reason it isn't working for you is because only 10-20% of the population holds your values. Not possible to shame people when they outnumber you 5-1. Thank Christ for that.
All societies run on social pressure and the human need for peer approval, it's just a matter of the ends to which it is turned and how much of it exists.
I get what you are saying, and I think it can work for some people. But I think it could also backfire. I have a friend who is a social worker in a juvenile detention center. She tells me a lot of the girls in there want to have a child as soon as possible with no regard for the father, because they think that is the only way they will get love and affection, which they never get in their home. I don't know what policy can fix that, and shame might make it worse.
Since the white working class is increasingly aligned with Republicans and the "conservative" movement (whatever that means these days) and shows low marriage rates, we have a wonderful opportunity to put your proposal into practice. Since conservative thought leaders are the ones most in favor of shame and opprobrium, I'd like to see them mount a campaign of shaming the white working class into increasing their rates of marriage. It's fine to even use their favorite go-to tool and blame the lack of marriages in this group on bad liberal ideas as long as they're shaming that group into rejecting those liberal ideas.
But we know this will never happen and if it did, it would have no effect.
I think David R's comment was worth engaging with more seriously than that.
It is interesting to observe that cultural values tend to drive marriage rates across societies, with East Asia, India and the Muslim world frowning most heavily on marriage out of wedlock and not coincidentally also having very low rates of out of wedlock births.
It would be silly to say we need to imitate those societies, but there may be something to learn there or a place for more societal pressure against bad personal choices.
Just something to think about. No reason to launch into an unrelated attack on conservative though leaders or the white working class (50% of whom either don't vote or still vote for Dems).
It's not an attack; it's an observation and a thought experiment.
If we put their responses on the ideological spectrum, we would see conservatives lining up with "shame/opprobrium" and liberals with "toleration/accepting."
To prove that the conservative "s/o" position is not just a stalking horse for attacking liberals (and specifically aiming at the Black population), we would need to see that they think the same approach should be applied to their own followers. And to show that an "s/o" approach has any efficacy, their efforts should bear fruit.
Maybe this would actually happen! I wouldn't be hugely surprised if there are conservative-affiliated ministers and preachers who follow the "s/o" approach toward their congregations. And maybe that even works!
Still, I'd like to see evidence of that. I read Tim Alberta, listen to David French, and draw the conclusion that the old-time religion has been replaced by something much darker and less constructive.
So, pending evidence, I remain a skeptic that conservatives actually believe in this or have any idea how to make it work.
Just to clarify here, I'm not talking about shaming people for not getting married. That aspect of China's treatment of women, in particular, is shameful beyond all reckoning. I'm talking only of leveling more public shame at people who set out to have kids outside the context of some sort of established family structure.
Hell, in reality I'm all for that "established family structure" including stable, single career folks with firm extended family and friend group support, plural relationships, whatever.
But the data needs to bear out "stable", because otherwise we're just punishing the most vulnerable among us in the name of tolerance.
I'm also not at all agreed about that latter 90% stat. There are billions of happy and contented people worldwide. And even on a simple income measure a low income person in the US is not in the 90th percent of incomes worldwide.
But we are talking about resources being taken away. A human needs a place to sleep, food to eat, teachers to teach them and healthcare to take care of them. If they're not contributing to the pool they are very likely taking away a share from someone else.
Material possessions are a too narrow view of better off when talking about total or average happiness. In any case you would want to adjust by Purchasing Price Parity, after which 20,000 is is knocked down quite a lot of percentiles.
Japan seems to be doing fairly well and it’s by far the furthest down that slow slide.
As it turns out, with money, good automation, high state capacity, and an emphasis on health, activity, and independence… old people mostly do just fine without constant babying.
In the US, we're going to need it. Our per capita infrastructure and service needs are nuts because of how dispersed, car-centric, blah blah blah... we are.
I suspect Europe, East Asia, and South Asia will do this much more gracefully.
Japan's elderly score better on many quality of life metrics than its prime-age workers, one of the few places in the developed world where that's true. They absolutely score better on those metrics than their counterparts in the US and in most of Europe. The only place in which they don't is when one tries to take survey data from transliterated questions and compare them head-to-head across countries.
The American old-age care system is broken in and of itself, but it also operates downstream of a society and physical infrastructure that mostly leaves people in shockingly poor health by the time they enter retirement. Further, the building blocks of independent living in the United States are not nearly as accessible to the very old as they are in denser countries, and accessing them doesn't reinforce better health outcomes. This is not true elsewhere in the world.
TL;DR: The US will need huge numbers of low-paid guest care workers to succor its hordes of overweight, chronically ill, non-driving elderly if it ages like Japan has. Japan does not.
EDIT: More broadly, it doesn't behoove you to believe me only when my experience and knowledge agree with your preconceptions. Most of what Americans "know" about various East Asian nations is either wrong or vastly oversimplified.
Matt is normally very fair in his characterization of conservative views. But not today. His summary of Rich Lowry's piece as "saying that Ta-Nehisi Coates should stop complaining about racism" is wrong on the merits and deliberately misleading. Lowry's summary paragraph is enough to refute Matt's characterization:
"Coates reminds us of the shame of the American inner city, where kids have so few social supports and live with little margin of error. His account of slavery and the ensuing discrimination against blacks is powerful and true. But his is a stunted version of America. Here’s hoping his son reads more widely."
I encourage others to read the piece and draw their own conclusions.
I'm not familiar enough with Lowry's work to know if he's right more frequently than a broken clock. But in this case he's right, when he says "Coates is selling snake oil" because even if the reparations Coates argued for were implemented, "For poor blacks to escape poverty, it would still require all the personal attributes that contribute to success" and that "would still require the moral effort that he won’t advocate for."
It often seems that the phrase "systemic racism" is a euphemism invented to discuss this very issue without explicitly saying that is what's being discussed. Otherwise, what's the difference between systemic racism and regular racism?
I think systemic racism is just a general term for when systems lead to racially disparate outcomes even without the people involved needing to do anything that has racist motivations.
A classic example I've heard brought up from times past was the radical disparity in sentencing between drug crimes involving crack and coke, which was not based on sound premises (e.g. the false notion that crack is far more addictive). Crack convictions were predominantly black people, coke convictions were minority black people, and so this unjustified disparity ended up massively biasing the severity of convictions against black drug users and traffickers over white and hispanic ones. And a totally not-racist judge and not-racist cops who just follow the rules would still bring about these racially disparate outcomes, cuz the racism was baked in to the system.
I just googled it and it was the first thing that popped up. Maybe it's not reliable, I don't know. The Atlantic has a more in-depth look where they picture is less clear, but at a minimum winning the lotto seems to raise the odds of going broke several years out.
In any case, I'm not seeing sources from your side supporting the view that generational wealth is easy to maintain or commonly maintained by degenerate rich people around America.
This is from Lottery winners: The myth and reality
H. Roy Kaplan in the
Journal of gambling behavior (2005).
Contrary to popular beliefs, winners did not engage in lavish spending sprees and instead gave large amounts of their winnings to their children and their churches. The most common expenditures were for houses, automobiles and trips. It was found that overall, winners were well-adjusted, secure and generally happy from the experience.
I think Matt is missing a lever conservatives (and a lot of moderates on both sides) see and act on. Sure, the Republican Party seems to be less vocal about this, but there are a lot of cultural figures and institutions pushing hard on it. I'm thinking of the attempt at culture change from people like Jordan Peterson and the general "Be a responsible man, clean up your act and get a job and become a good mate and settle down and raise a family and be a positive, contributing member of your community" strain of discourse. In this frame, the highest leverage point is making men better--they're the ones leaving their partners to raise the kids alone (either because they're not willing to commit, unable to support the family, or commiting crimes that leave them in jail and away from the kids). Clearly, there are upstream variables: why are so many men ending up without the psychological, social, and economic resources to play those constructive, positive roles in the first place? But setting that aside for a different discussion and trying to deal with the situation as it is right now, there's still what I consider an entirely worthwhile effort to increase marriage rates by increasing the character of men.
Unfortunately, I think this is offputting to progressives because it triggers three sacred cows: 1) individuals taking 'personal responsibility' for their actions, becoming more virtuous, and 'pulling themselves up by their bootstraps' are the solution to systemic social ills, 2) talking to poor people (and especially people of color) about 'engaging in more responsible behaviors' and 'developing character' reminds them of old-school thinly veiled actual white supremacy, and 3) this kind of approach is very often closely intertwined with religious institutions or messaging, which comes with baggage the left doesn't like. A more cynical take is that it circumvents progressives' ideological and political machinery, cutting them out of the loop on money and power. Seems like that's a factor for some, but I generally lean charitably on this one.
I don't think any off those three objections are legitimate critiques of a genuinely good-faith approach to developing healthier, more positive men. And tragically, I think if progressives could look past their prejudices (and many can or already do, I'm sure), they would see that this is exactly the natural complement to something like the #MeToo movement: we have a problem with men abusing their power and hurting women in this society, and what should we do about it? Develop men into stronger, more loving and capable male figures who both provide for and support their families while respecting women, themselves, and their communities. That requires not just shaming and calling them out, but also providing them with support (in particular, from other men) to grow into the kind of healthier, more responsible, strong but safe figures we would all like to see.
As usual, there seems to be an enormous amount of common ground here between working/middle class people on both sides of the aisle and across all races. In Shelby Steele's "What Killed Michael Brown?" (which I found to be kind of cringy but also illuminating), he interviews leaders of community orgs that are doing this kind of thing: pastors, nonprofit heads, etc., all of whom are focused on providing healthy outlets for (especially young, poor, or black) men to form part of a community, find redemption or hope, and contribute their efforts to something meaningful and positive (instead of, say, meaningful and destructive, like being part of a gang). They seem to be liberals and conservatives, but united by pragmatism and in-the-trenches, skin-in-the-game, real-world experience. Maybe I'm romanticizing, but they seem representative of a very positive, often-underlooked thread of community work. I think Jamil Jivani has some good thoughts on this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2vctUezliE).
Almost everyone who doesn't form part of the woke Ivy League crowd agrees that this kind of approach is awesome and totally not a dog whistle for "Black men are degenerate criminals who need to be reformed by white saviors". Duh, it's often black men trying to mentor other black men! But then someone like Denis Prager (an older white man) says "The solution is simple: anyone in this country can succeed and live a good life if they follow Judeo-Christian values of hard work, personal responsibility, etc." and it's off to the races on the racism stuff.
Anyway, I hope that doesn't get overlooked, because I think it's probably the best bet. And my sense is that Matt, as a left of center wonk, is going to underweight the value and legitimacy of "bottom-up culture change" as a path to improving outcomes.
Also, good piece!
**EDIT: I thought about this a bit and I feel like I kind of leaned into defending Peterson because of my frustration with progressives who annoy me, rather than because I think he's a great example of the thing I'm trying to describe. I haven't read any of his books, have just watched a few of his interviews and portions of his talks. I know what I'm thinking of, and Peterson doesn't really embody it fully; just a small part (the "have courage, think of yourself as a hero on a journey, clean up your act and at least try to be a good man" shtick). I regret falling into the either/or culture war trap (Peterson or the libs!), albeit mildly.
I also regret using the phrase "Ivy League Woke crowd," which is obviously pretty inflammatory. I do think there's something to what I'm saying there, and if I were to rephrase it less antagonistically, I'd say something like "most people who are not self-identified strong progressives, young people attending elite colleges, politically active Twitter users -- people often referred to as 'liberal elites'".
Jordan Peterson is currently having a meltdown over a Sports Illustrated cover.
So here's an interesting note -- the children of the "woke Ivy League crowd" often have excellent social outcomes and are quite likely to be married themselves.
Now, why do you think this is?
Progressives (including, well, the woke Ivy League crowd themselves) will put the focus on material factors. The opportunities their family provided, money, and so on. Sure, hard work and responsibility was a necessary condition to some degree, but it's clearly not the sufficient one. Moreover, clearly their values are working for them when it comes to childrearing.
On the other hand, conservatives have plenty of opportunities on their own to run this sort of organization -- for instance, their churches, their small towns, and so on. Their are lots of GOP state government, long periods of Republicans in power, and so on. If this theory was true, they should be able to teach men the value of hard work and individual responsibility, and produce good results. It's just hard to see that happening.
The Sports Illustrated thing is ugly, and I think Peterson was out of line with his comment. I would put a question to you: do you think this incident (or any other culture war dustup Peterson has gotten into) discredits the rest of his work? Do you think it renders all of the advice he's given to young men bad, or invalidates the large number of young men who attribute significant positive personal growth to his influence? I have my gripes with his approach; concretely, I think he's too harsh and rigid and falls into the culture war lanes too easily. However, I would say emphatically no, his failure to meet his own standards does not wipe away the good that he has done. AND, I also think it's also absolutely worth calling out his failing to be a good man in this moment (and many others). But there's a baby in the bathwater, in my view, which is the kind of guidance for men becoming healthier and playing more positive roles in the world. Curious if you think JP has not had that effect on his audience (acknowledging that clearly it's not foolproof, as a number of his followers seem to be dicks; although Twitter is also not real life).
I agree with your analysis that something is working for the "woke Ivy League crowd" in that their kids tend to have good outcomes. I'd agree it's not all material (although clearly that's a huge factor, as the part of Matt's post about income indicates). I think we both agree, then, that there's a major role for culture and values in individuals' decisions and outcomes for their kids. That's my point! A good way to make the world better is to influence people (especially men) with good values and culture.
I think you read my theory to be "Conservatives/Republicans know how to teach men how to be good men, and progressives don't." That is absolutely not my theory. My claim is "There seem to me to be avenues to increase the marriage rate by providing men, in particular, and men from poor or less well-off communities in particular, with social and cultural support that will guide them towards greater responsibility and more positive, constructive behavior (which usually includes elements of "progressive" values like 'Be gentle and caring and nurturing' as well as "conservative values like 'Be tough and strong and get shit done'). That includes many organizations involved in communities doing work that is both effective, and that people on both the left and right would support. I think we should do more of this and support it, because it seems to me to be a unifying thing AND a constructive way (among others, like policy change I don't know enough about) to ameliorate this problem. However, it seems like many people that could be characterized as "liberal elites" don't support this kind of thing because they have negative perceptions associated with some elements of it." <- Is there anything in there you you disagree with? FWIW, if conservatives oppose the kind of thing I'm talking about, I think they're mistaken, too! I'm not trying to do a political team thing, I'm trying to identify shit that actually works and brings people together and lift that up.
What would you like to see, or what do you think would work to address the extremely high rate and destructive rate of single parenthood in the US?
I'm not super familiar with JBP's work (just have a friend who digs him) but my impression is that he isn't really pushing young men to do the actual most valuable thing that society fails to teach men in my view: learning to reason about their emotions.
It seems to me that it's only a minority of young men who even attempt understandings like "I am feeling [this way] and it's causing me to engage in [these behaviors]" and "it's [these circumstances] that seem to bring about feeling [this way]" for all but a narrow range of emotions like anger and jealousy. And IME this is particularly true in poorer and less progressive milieus where I think dudes are more generally expected to put up a strong front.
If you tell me some psychologist is shepherding young men toward a brighter future and then I don't see any evidence of him doing that, well, color me underwhelmed.
So I'm actually not super familiar with his work either, but I share your desire for more men to hear and viscerally take in "Look guys, it's a really good thing to be able to recognize how your behavior is driven by your emotions. That means noticing what you're feeling, being okay with it on some level (even if it's uncomfortable, especially with shame or fear), and working with it in a positive way--say, by sharing it with someone or making art out of it or taking constructive steps to improve the situation rather than just lash out and hurt yourself or others." That's the shit I love, and I think JP probably does some of that (I'm not super familiar with his work either, tbh) but definitely not enough. I also feel disappointed that Peterson is the most visible and popular guy out there in the "Help young men build character" game, since my aspiration is much higher.
Now, as for my actual policy views, I'm a liberal Democrat. That means I support stronger unions (thus helping working class men), full employment (creating jobs), regulations on working hours (preventing people from needing to be on call all the time), access to contraception and abortion (thus preventing unwanted pregnancy), building more housing (so families have somewhere to live), so on and so forth. I would also promote tax code changes to avoid a "marriage penalty", though I'd need to read up on it more to know for sure. I support expanding access to education (college-educated people are less likely to be singled parents, and can have more stable careers.)
I'm fine with funding community organizations like you describe, but not if they're just about pushing people to go to church.
I'm deeply skeptical about approaches that try to incalculate some sort of "individual responsibility", for the same reason I dislike diversity training. The evidence for "just say nice things about marriage and fatherhood" just seems very marginal, and trying to scale that kind of intervention upwards is very difficult.
Yeah, man, it seems to me like you're missing a huge chunk of what causes people to actually change their lives for the better. Your characterization of what I think is valuable ("just say nice things about marriage and fatherhood") is obviously extremely dismissive and reductive, but I've explained it a couple times so I think you're attached to ignoring it and don't think I'll say more.
I'm bummed about it though, because I bet if you thought about it you'd agree that most of the time when people turn their lives around it's not simply the result of material provisions or policy (although of course that plays a role in allowing opportunities for spiritual/character development). I have no objections to any of the policies you mentioned really, they all seem good. But people who go from gangs to taking care of their community aren't out there gushing about how much the union helped them (even though it very well may have!); they're expressing their thanks for a person who cared enough about them to support and mentor them, to help them realize their potential and find a good path.
I mean, not to plunge us into a whole other third rail, but it's not as if we don't have enough homes to house homeless people; there's just a lot more to solving that problem than giving someone a home. My dad, for example, just got evicted and is allowing his health to deteriorate at a shocking rate. He has all the resources he could possibly need, but there's something else, something inside, that is preventing him from using them. Policies matter, they really do. AND they're necessary but insufficient, in my mind, without support from local institutions that provide a healthy, solid culture. Seems tragic to me if you can't see that.
Oh also, I definitely appreciate your skepticism of things like diversity training programs, but that's because studies have proven their ineffectiveness (or even counterproductiveness). But I think there's good reason to expect community programs are vastly more effective. Human evolutionary history, for example, suggests small groups of people (up to Dunbar's 150, eg.) is the scale we're equipped for. Agree it's difficult to scale, but that's kind of the point. Big top-down things are often more likely to fail because they're working at odds with human tendencies towards the local. I think a good question is, "Which are the most effective local organizations/programs that have positive impact on mens' lives and behavior, and how feasible is it to scale them?"
In general, one heuristic that probably differs between a liberal Democrat like yourself and a politically homeless radical centrist like myself (or a conservative) is confidence in the global / top-down versus the local / bottom-up. Obviously that's not a rule across the board, but my bias is towards the local, the bottom-up, the person-to-person, the embedded in a community. Based on your responses, seems like you put more stock in the higher-level, systemic, top-down policy changes. Seems like there's worth in both.
Ah okay, I don't think Jordan Peterson is "bad", so we have a disagreement there. As I said before, I disagree with things he says and don't like his rhetorical style much of the time. I also think he has real insight and positive contributions to our culture/discourse. You seem pretty committed to lining up against him, so I think there's no point trying to find any nuance there. I'll say that the Reddit thread looks like motivated crap to me. "He said this thing, which is similar to a thing Hitler said" is some of the most bush league hit job work there is, so place absolutely no stock in that. It's clear to me he's not an anti-Semite, so "Look how his words are like a Nazi's words!" holds absolutely no significance to me. I'd just reiterate my question about whether picking all of someone's worst moments is enough in your mind to discredit everything they've said and make them "bad". I'd also recommend "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt, if you haven't read. Could be interesting, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it.
I thought about this a bit and I feel like I kind of leaned into defending Peterson because of my frustration with progressives who annoy me, rather than because I think he's a great example of the thing I'm trying to describe. I haven't read any of his books, have just watched a few of his interviews and portions of his talks. I know what I'm thinking of, and Peterson doesn't really embody it fully; just a small part (the "have courage, think of yourself as a hero on a journey, clean up your act and at least try to be a good man" shtick). I regret falling into the either/or culture war trap (Peterson or the libs!), albeit mildly.
I also regret using the phrase "Ivy League Woke crowd," which is obviously pretty inflammatory. I do think there's something to what I'm saying there, and if I were to rephrase it less antagonistically, I'd say something like "most people who are not self-identified strong progressives, young people attending elite colleges, politically active Twitter users -- people often referred to as 'liberal elites'".
I feel like a lot of the pushback from the individual improvement crowd is because there's a kind of patriarchal quality to the kind of self improvement a lot of these guys recommend. Like no one has ever gotten mad at me for modeling anger management techniques in the classroom. No one has gotten mad at me for sharing stories that indicate that I do chores, and have hobbies typically coded as feminine.
I mean Twitter is an outrage machine so someone out there thinks this is bad I'm sure but it's not like I'm getting yelled at.
I don't think is actually that complicated - it is probably true that two parents are better than one for obvious reasons outside of weird conservative morality, but outside of incredibly terrible policies that would greatly make a lot of people's lives worse, it's virtually impossible to turn the clock back to 1960. Some of those policies that the conservative commenters on this substack are basically OK with.
Like, yeah, some wonky proposals might help on the edges, but I think this is just reality we're going to have to grapple with.
"it's virtually impossible" is lame defeatism. It is really hard to make cultural progress, but if there is a will then it's worth trying to find a way.
I'd compare it to drug overdoses - OD fatalities rose from 50,000 in the Obama years to 70,000 in the Trump years to 100,000 in 2020 and they are still rising to 110,000 in the last 12 months. But it would be lame to say "nothing can be done". Of course many things can be done, it's just a very hard problem and I still don't know what the answer is.
But it starts with acknowledging that it's an important issue and building a societal will to face the problem. If cultural spokespeople and leaders - the political and media "elites" started to openly acknowledge that 2 parent families are better for children than that would be the first step in the right direction. On its own that acknowledgement might even move the needle a little bit. From there it's harder and I don't know exactly how to "solve the problem", but the first step is building some societal and political will to face it.
Matt had an earlier article about the opioid crisis that came to the same conclusion as here: “this is a big deal and none of the proposed solutions seem up to the job.” Acknowledging that isn’t lame defeatism any more than demanding ineffective solutions and demonizing the bad guys (single mothers, big pharma, w/e) is.
There are not many big real problems for which the solution is more demagoguery. I assure you, that’s already being tried.
If most of those dying in the opiod crisis were gay or trans or black, we'd have a completely different discourse and set of policy considerations. But most of the dead are just poor white people, so...
So... it's still a big deal and none of the proposed solutions seem up to the job. Maybe some other people would approach that problem from a racial perspective and thus get more wrong, but it would still be a big problem hurting a lot of people and the proposed solutions would still probably not be very good.
Also, a cursory look at the relevant percentages suggest that black people make up a larger share of opioid deaths than they do of the total population (17% and 13%, respectively). But I'm sure that if you keep trying you'll find an argument to which the standard "liberals would care more about this if it happened to minorities" critique applies.
The data you point to shows that this is only true for the 2020 and 2019 years. The deaths before that, for almost 2 decades, were disproportionally white, non-hispanic. I do think this factors into the relative indifference this topic has received relative to the AIDS epidemic or the BLM movement against police shootings.
Has anyone denied or refused to accept that two parents households are better than one parent households? I feel like that point is the starting point of all discussion on all sides of the issue. The only dispute is whether some *particular* second parent is better or worse than being free of that person.
On this site, I don't know, probably not, but there's probably a not too rare subset of left wingers out there who would think that raising children should be independent of how many people raise them, and that the government should be generous in giving people the resources they need to accommodate that. (And that generous support tends to manifest in strictly child care only over, say, a child allowance/tax credit, so the parent can be free to pursue a career if so desired.)
I guess I don’t see how what you’re saying contradicts the idea that these people accept that more parents in the household is better than fewer? Of course government policy shouldn’t subsidize households with more parents more than it subsidized households with fewer parents. But that doesn’t mean that a household with fewer parents works as well as a household with more parents!
The way I'm thinking about how this typically manifests is an intersection of a liberal (in the pure sense of promoting liberty) sense of not being judgmental on what type of relationships people form, with a feminist sense of being leery of being nudged into more of a caretaker lifestyle.
As I said, I don't think this is common at all overall, but I sense that it gets added exposure in left wing discourse, particularly among the Very Online set.
I’m a little surprised the drug war didn’t come up in this article. Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that a large percentage of black male incarcerations are for relatively minor drug infractions. I can think of almost nothing more destabilizing to a marriage or family unit than having the partner jailed, even for just a few months.
I would be interested to know how much more room we have to decriminalize non-violent drug offenses, and how much positive impact that could have on family stability.
I think the percentage for drug infractions themselves is smaller than we sometimes think. (Although yes, if these were disproportionately brief, that would understate the impact. And any felony conviction can make it much harder to find work, can disqualify the family from subsidized housing, etc.)
My understanding is that a lot of non-violent 'drug related' crime involves illegal firearm possession due to the dangers of the drug trade. Unfortunately, we probably do want to treat those crimes seriously (to lower the murder toll on black families), so short of full legalization, we might be out of luck.
There are 1.9 million currently incarcerated Americans, and 350,000, or roughly 1 in 6, are in for drug offenses. 38% of the total incarcerated are black, so if we assume rates across crimes are very roughly constant, that works out to 133,000 black americans incarcerated for drug crimes, out of a total population of 47 million black americans.
The headline number is 1 out of 353 black people incarcerated for drug crimes. That seems like far too small a number to really mess with the broader black populations' family structure.
Of course as you mention some of these incarcerations may be brief, so this understates how many people are being jailed over the course of a decade or two. But on the other side of things, not all of these drug charges are minor. Many of the incarcerated were selling large quantities of more serious drugs, or selling to children or other things that would be hard to decriminalize.
Even more significantly, many of those imprisoned on drug charges were originally arrested for other criminal infractions: speeding, assault, larceny, DUI, and then drugs were found and added as a charge. In many cases the arrested pleads guilty to the more minor drug charge in exchange for avoiding a trial on the more serious charge.
At the end of the day the number of people who are in prison for innocently sitting on their porch enjoying a joint is very small, but for some reason that seems to be the idea the media has put into everyone's heads.
Personally, in light of the still growing number of overdose deaths (110,000 annually at last count), I think we should be arresting and prosecuting drug offenders much more frequently. If someone would arrest the white drug dealers and junkies in my area I wouldn't worry about the impacts on family formation. In my personal experience these aren't people who are setting up model families and raising responsibly children if only the police wouldn't hassle them.
Two comments:
1. I think this is wrong "And another camp consists of racists who don’t like to talk about family structure as a source of disadvantage because they believe it detracts from the idea that Black people are inferior."
I think it's more like racists point to family structure as evidence that black people are inferior.
2. This is going to be controversial as fuck, but there is a societal push to elevate single mothers, above and beyond normal mothers, which I don't necessarily think is healthy. The single mothers are saints and heroes canard could possibly do more more harm than good. But obviously, stigmatizing and ostracizing single mothers is also bad. But the fact is that social pressure is very powerful.
Being a single mother is such a powerful image that we sort of speak it in the same tone as we do veterans. It's use to almost boost a persons status. I don't think we do it consciously, but it's more of a thing where we overcompensated our support of single mothers and sort of in some ways glorify it. I have been guilty of this too.
Personal Story: My 23-year old daughter is a single mother. I mean it's true she is awesome. She is a full time student, working hard to raise my granddaughter. The effort she puts in versus a married mother is awe inspiring. But at the same time... she is a single mother because she slept with some loser Scottish dude who didn't have his life together and was lazy about birth control. Her life is hard because she messed up. Ok... I love love my granddaughter, and am blessed to have her, but you get the point. I would gladly love to be in an alternate Universe where my daughter was married to a guy while she went to school and shared the responsibilities and I still got to hang with my granddaughter. But... if she did that... I probably wouldn't brag on her as much. And that is the issue.
Hey everyone.
I think we try to elevate the status of single mothers in their own mind to try to encourage them through the incredible challenging task they face. I don't think anyone is saying, "Oh man...It sure would be great to be a single mother."
Right, but it rubs off on some % of young would-be mothers who see all that encouragement and elevation and start to think it looks appealing.
Of course that's not wise, but young people are famously impressionable.
This must be that new Conservative nanny wokeism I keep hearing about.
We try to encourage but we don't do lots of practical stuff like the late, lamented child care credit, after school programs, subsidized daycare and the like.
Why aren't these things done more in blue states and blue metro governed metro areas? Or are there and I'm ignorant of that fact?
My own sense is that too many members of the political class prefer throwing red meat to the base to being painstaking trustees of the common weal.
I still think there's a decent amount of stigma, at least for the young, never-married type of single mother (the only kind I have experience being). Maybe I'm a in a more socially conservative milieu, but it might also be that one-step removed, you can choose your audience more carefully (even if subconsciously), so you don't discuss your daughter's situation with that coworker you know would consider her trashy - or who would just give that super-long awkward look when you have to clarify that no, she isn't married. But as it affects your daughter's life in more obviously practical ways, she has to be more open about it with a less-selected group of people, and likely does get plenty of negative feedback - and even if the positive outnumbers the negative, we humans tend to take the negative much more to heart.
We missed you, Rory. (Don't read my comments on yesterday's post.)
Now I have to look. I just been so busy at work I finally finished traveling so I got time to throw out wild opinions
It’s probably worth spreading the news that a low earning husband is adding good value to the kids life. Matt acts like this is something *everybody* knows but that’s not my experience. We can see in Wilcox proposal even he doesn’t really know what he knows—his idea is to get these low wage dads working even more hours even though they could add value spending those hours doing childcare, which is quite expensive.
And eliminating the welfare state marriage penalties is simply a must and I’m tired of liberals acting like conservatives should take care of this for them. It’s our welfare state after all, when it’s not working right we should fix it! I know the senate is sooooooo busy and unable to take up a lot of legislation but they should just move a bill on this that isn’t full of poison and make Romney etc vote against it. I doubt he will. This is quite a pernicious way for the government to nudge peoples lives and getting the other party to do the work for you down the line is just not such an amazing win as our legislators seem to think.
One angle of approach here, though not fully fleshed out as policy: make working-class men more compelling as husbands. Liberals and conservatives might both like this or both hate this, depending on how you frame it.
I forget who did this research, but there was a study of the fathers of single mothers' children that found that many of them consider themselves involved parents who derive great meaning from spending time with their kids, even as their standards for what constitutes sharing the parenting load are much, much lower than those of your average high-SES married dad. If you're a single mother, and your kid's father is patchily employed or employed in a line of work that requires constant travel or on-call availability, has a home that isn't safe for kids, and maybe even has a drug problem or trouble with the law – and on top of that he likes doing the fun, "quality time" parts of parenting but never shows up for the stressful, boring bureaucracy... why would you marry him?
Conservative discourse on this tends to imply that women should be less picky about their husbands. I think that disrespects women's autonomy and their equal rights. No one should be pressured into a lifelong commitment they don't want, and women deserve better than to be the helpmeet of someone who won't pull his weight. Conversely, though, left-wing discourse often prescribes basically "do better, men". This is a viewpoint I'm pretty cautious about sharing with even some of my closest friends, but... cultural leftists have to do better than "do better, men". For one thing, "do better, men" fails the test of – of all things – intersectionality, specifically understanding the intersection of gender and class. Low-SES men may benefit from lower societal expectations on a lot of things, but they are also beset with much graver problems than low-SES women. The large majority of murder victims are men, as are the large majority of people living on the street.
My strong belief as a liberal and a feminist (and an LGBT person) is that the policy answer to the problems men face is *not* "accept gender roles as a fact of life and treat boys and girls differently as a result". I think more male nurses and more male kindergarten teachers, for instance, would be really beneficial here. But even if the consensus immediately breaks down on solutions, I think it's valuable to frame the problem in the above terms.
I don't hear a lot of "women should be less picky about their husbands" from conservatives. I do hear that "there should be better men" quite a lot. I don't think there is as big of a difference as you state.
I definitely hear it when conservatives like Jordan Peterson keep talking about the virtues of "enforced monogamy" as the solution to our social ills.
It's weird to me when people describe Jordan Peterson as a conservative. I guess if I was forced to binarize all public figures into either lib or con I'd go with con for Jordan Peterson. But we're not forced to do that! He may align with conservatives on some prominent issues, but he's not GOP aligned or active otherwise, and many of his fans are not politically active or inclined people either.
You may be hearing about enforced monogamy from Peterson (I don't actually follow or listen to him, myself, so I don't know) but he's not a good example of a conservative.
If we were talking two years ago I would actually somewhat agree with you on this. But Peterson has become far more aligned with the right since the 2020 election and the pandemic – to the point where he explicitly called himself a conservative earlier this year.
So I guess I'm just willing to take Jordan at face value and call him by his preferred political affiliations.
Fair enough
'Be a better man' is pretty much central to Peterson's message, isn't it?
From what I know that is a lot of it. But I have never followed him closely, so I am not sure about the specifics.
I take issue with your caricature of the working class man. Certainly everyone should acknowledge this subset has its unique challenges (and the left in particular should know better), but in all but perhaps the previous two generations (if that) working class men had it worse than today, and yet marriage rates were much higher. Were many of those marriages sub optimal? Sure. We certainly all know the caricature of the alcoholic abusive husband/father, and *some* were like that. But many, many, were not. They were good loving fathers who worked hard to provide for their families and were also active involved parents (according to the gender roles of the time, sure, but that’s far from being absent or only “for the fun parts”). That this is becoming increasingly rare today is a societal, cultural shift, that cannot be exclusively explained in material terms. These are important, and need to be addressed, and here the left would be right. But the cultural aspect cannot be ignored either, nor the individual responsibly of the parents in a given case, and here the right is right (even if totally bereft of solutions).
Let's talk about that "Sure" Given that women, now much more likely than in earlier generations to be in the workforce, and indeed in lower income communities likely to be higher earning than most of her sexual partners, no longer need their partners income might impact their inclination to stay in a suboptimal marriage or enter one in the first place?
I’m not sure I understand your point. Upper class and upper middle class women earn far far more than working class women today and still seem to “need” or want to marry men and raise children with them at high rates. Why should we assume that working class women wouldn’t want and need this kind of partnership too ? Even if in some cases the man earns less than them couldn’t they still use the money and the help (not to mention the companionship etc) ?
I'm not arguing that women no longer want to marry men and raise children with them. I'm arguing that women no longer need to marry UNMARRIAGEABLE men just to have children. Since women tend to date & marry in their peer group upper & middle class women are less likely to match across chronically unemployed and/or periodically incarcerated men. It seems like you're making the argument that they should marry these unmarriageable men. I mean, I'm not the one you need to convince.
I don’t think it’s quite accurate to consider “ chronically unemployed and/or periodically incarcerated men” as synonymous with working class men (by any stretch of the term) to put it mildly… in any case whether or not marriage is “needed” to raise children (as opposed to raising them with certain outcomes more likely vel sim) is and always has been a cultural, not an economic, question, which is precisely my point.
Is it true that patchy and variable working hours were a common feature of working class employment several decades ago?
In the depression era, for instance, I should think so.
Presumably in an era without telephones they were less likely to have someone on call to say "we need someone for two hours this evening".
In that area, you turned up to the labor exchange in the morning and each local employer sent a foreman down with a number of workers and skills required, and you hoped you got chosen.
And if you didn't, then no work that day.
every age has its idiosyncrasies. In that era it was more likely by contrast that they had to leave for seasonal work for prolonged period etc. The point is rather, whether there is something so drastic about the material conditions alone in this day and age that is sufficient, in and of itself, to explain the shifts, when considering the material challenges faced by working class people in the past? I think it’s very clear that the answer is no, and while this is certainly *part* of the picture, it works in combination with cultural factors. It’s the combination (“intersection”) of the changes in culture together with the changes in the economy and the nature of work that proved particularly destabilizing for family structure among working class people.
“We elites are doing married life correctly and therefore have earned the privilege of raising children in a stable family environment which will set them up for success, but not calling this ‘traditional’. You benighted proles are not and therefore your women should all leave you and your children suffer.”
And we wonder why conservatives think we’re tribalistic assholes…
I guess the important thing is that you made an awesome dunk on someone rather than charitably engaging with their argument.
Their entire argument seems to boil down to classism.
I am a high-SES father. Most of my social circle who've had kids are high-SES, at least middling-SES.
Trust me, there are plenty among us who are just as lazy and useless as the stereotypical "fun absentee dad". And there are those whose jobs consume their lives to the point where they're an ATM to their kids and not much more. Several in my social circles are already divorced, a few others aren't there yet but I can't see how their wives will tolerate it for long.
I find it incredibly demeaning to suggest that we need to somehow "teach" a narrow group of people to "be better." It's no less horrible a sentiment to hold when you're talking about poor men than when you're talking about black men or gay men.
It's also, as others have noted, basically caricaturizing the conservative position on this, but that's a side issue at best.
Isn’t the point of the comment that *current* liberal discourse on this is just saying “be better”, ie someone just needs to teach them, while the proposal is that we change structural features of working class employment to make them more compatible with being a good father?
It's not well articulated, if that's the theory.
And the fact that we're ending on "lets solve this problem by getting more male nurses and kindergarten teachers" tells me that we're back in la la land again.
What we need to be discussing is how we rebuild manufacturing employment AND turn service gigs of all sorts into stable employment that pays well enough to support a decent standard of living for a family.
"Gender parity in individual fields of employment" is a fantasy, and an irrelevant one to boot.
Isn’t rebuilding manufacturing employment as much a fantasy as rebuilding agricultural employment would have been in the 1940s?
"What we need to be discussing is how we rebuild manufacturing employment." And unicorns. Everyone should get a unicorn. \s
That's a pretty straightforward extrapolation of "traditional" throughout history. Accumulate capital, get married, then have kids.
It's near-identical to childbearing patterns from Early Modern through late Industrial Europe, adjusted for life expectancy. Marriage was delayed until the breadwinning men hit their mid-to-late-20's, at a time when life expectancy was around 55-60.
The "golden age" of post-war US and European family formation is the outlier here, but still conceptually similar, it's just that it was easier and faster for median folks to establish a stable foundation such that they could get married and have kids in their early 20's, not early-to-mid-30's.
So, as I said a few weeks ago, the economic elite of the country is basically neo-traditional on this topic, but they refuse to preach what they practice, bending over backwards not to criticize any living arrangements reached by others, at all, no matter how bad those arrangements are on the merits.
This is a bad thing.
wait so are you mad at my comment for scolding working-class people, or for refusing to scold them?
Okay, so, I was unclear. Here's a clear restatement of what I think:
- I agree with Matt that all else being equal it is good for children to grow up in a stable two-parent home.
- Women who choose not to marry their children's fathers are often doing so for serious, understandable reasons. Pressuring them to marry the guy whatever his faults is not an acceptable solution.
- Men who are not ready for fatherhood are unready for structural, material reasons, and need better job opportunities and training, less mass incarceration and especially less of a security state in schools, and an education system that's run by people who think boys and men are valuable, complex human beings, not troublemaking future rapists, and that provides them with male role models with jobs that aren't traditionally masculine. Pressuring them to take crappy jobs, stop playing video games, or make their beds or whatever, is not an acceptable solution.
When I say “traditional,” unlike you, the sense of history involved goes back beyond mid-20th century America.
The marriage and child-rearing habits of modern professional class Americans are entirely in keeping with what the middling classes both agricultural and mercantile have done for five centuries.
It’s just that instead of moralizing in favor of it, they’ve started moralizing against it.
That seems charitable.
And also, historically the child counts after the various Horsemen had their way weren’t much above replacement. Agricultural productivity didn’t allow it.
“And another camp consists of racists who don’t like to talk about family structure as a source of disadvantage because they believe it detracts from the idea that Black people are inferior.”
This is worse than uncharitable, it is a mistake. The entire “welfare queen” trope, which has thrived for 50 years, implies that blacks are inferior because they have suboptimal family structures or, at a minimum, that blacks have bad family structures because they lack discipline. In either case, conservatives are perfectly happy saying that blacks have undesirable family structures.
I think you might be missing something here talking about the hypothetical child that is not existing because a woman had an abortion (or used birth control). Particularly in cases of unintentional pregnancies that occur when a woman is young, the choice is less a child that exists or doesn’t; the trade-off is between a child born now when the parents are much less able to provide a good life, and a hypothetical child born a few years later when the parents are ready and better-equipped to handle parenthood. The benefit isn’t the hypothetical child existing or not, it is the hypothetical child being born in worse circumstances for the parents or better ones.
I agree. Maybe I spend too much time on relationship subreddits, but my impression is that far too many people are having children before they are ready to, and that we should be encouraging people to be a little more deliberate about when to have kids. I'd like to see widespread availability of LARCs, similar to the Colorado experiment.
I have a totally unfounded theory that one reason for QAnon's success is that we have an underground ocean of generational trauma in this country from child neglect and abuse. If I had to guess, I would say that the marginal child (i.e. the child who wouldn't have been born if their parents had been slightly more deliberate about the choice) is living in abuse and neglect, and actually would be better off not being born or being born "later".
In other words, a version of the liberal position on the trilemma that emphasizes birth control instead of abortion. I know birth control is caught up in the culture wars, as well, but as policy and politics it's the most tractable lever to pull.
This argument seems bizarre to me. Almost all evidence I see shows that people in the modern time spend vastly more time, money, and effort on children than previous generations did.
this is basically the "wantedness" argument of Steven Levitt's argument/paper on legal abortion in the 70's leading to less crime in the 90's.
edit: fixed name
edit: was recent re-podcasted https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion-and-crime-revisited-update/
Oh yeah, and one more area where conservative values can make for more difficult child-rearing: homophobia and shunning of queer relatives. While us queers are a very small part of the reproduction discussion, the fact that many/most of us won’t have any children of our own means that we have extra resources we can use to help our straight family members with their own child rearing.
Well, and also that small town homophobia (among many other 'culturally conservative' views that don't appeal to most young adults) tend to be another factor driving young people to live in cities. Of course, moving from a small town to a city tends to be associated for a variety of reasons with having a smaller family later in life than otherwise would have happened.
Matt missed the chance to posit that an increase in marital co-habitation would help the housing crisis :)
So, a main reason people cite is lack of good male partners. Better job opportunities, reduced incarceration, improving schools outcomes are often pointed to here. But if the culture shifted where “bring a successful man” = a well run home and being a great stay at home dad that could also work. How do you change the culture? A successful network comedy about a cool dad raising the family’s kids. (Well, it’s a start)
Edit: Yes, there are lots of beloved comedies already about good dads WITH jobs!
Maybe if he was a successful black professional like, I dunno, an obstetrician? Could be a hit!
Bob Saget's estate, is that you?
Absolutely. Especially as more and more low-income jobs shift to the service sector - which seems to be advantaging low SES women relative to low SES men - it would be good to play up the potential for male contributions beyond those of providing financially.
My experience is that the progressive skepticism of several of the solutions is due to a (IME, entirely justifiable) suspicion that a lot of it is trying to reduce the amount of leverage women have.
So they're fine with "marriage promotion by creating more stable occupations for working class men", don't care about "a bunch of PSAs promoting marriage", and hate "make it harder to get divorced."
I'm curious if there's much data about outcomes for children in situations where one parent dies, and then two of their uncles move in to help their dad raise them. Most of what I've seen on that specific scenario has been anecdotal.
Actually that’s a good point. The data says that kids with a deceased married parent do just as well as kids with living married parents. But kids with divorced parents do worse.
One explanation is that the heritable personality traits that lead to divorce are the culprit not the simple presence or absence of a parent.
Do we have data about kids with a deceased parent?
Where’s Saget when you need him?
I feel like there's lots of bait through this comment section, and so far all we have is a joke on a head tax for head.
I was busy bothering Jesse
I think the data is pretty clear - the youngest children in these families will go on to become wildly financially successful, while the older children will just manage and will spend their adulthoods trying to relive the glory days of their childhood.
A few thoughts:
1. Free long-acting birth control (e.g. IUDs) for everyone (insurance-blind) under 25.
2. Free high-quality therapy for everyone (insurance-blind) under 25. (The idea being to help reduce people's childhood baggage before they have kids, hopefully helping them to have kids in better circumstances, and to stay married once there.)
3. This one is harder, but being married to a guy who doesn't pull his weight (as far as housework, parenting, emotional support, faithfulness, etc.) can make a woman's life much worse than being single, and I think that's a lot of what we're running up against. Meanwhile, as a society we seem to lack 'masculinity done right' role models and ideals, leading the left to decry masculinity as toxic and try to avoid it, and the right to complain that the left just sees men as inferior women, without offering a more useful vision themselves. (For the record, I know a lot of men are already awesome - but I think that's in spite of our culture rather than because of it, and shifting the conversation might help more men get there.)
And that's unfortunate because great parenting, for example (e.g. patiently tending a kid who wakes up every 2 hours) requires hard-work, strength, self-discipline... all virtues that have traditionally been seen as at least as much masculine as feminine. I would love to hear that trumpeted from the rooftops.
I am going to venture a guess that the vast majority of Slow Boring readers are wealthy and either childless or married. There is a cultural dynamic impacting lower-income portions of our nation that we have no way of developing solutions for because we aren't part of it. All that being said, this 2 hour conversation between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin from 1971 is absolutely incredible and they discuss this from a human perspective. Note that on the graph above, 1971 is right around a major inflection point in marriage rates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jc54RvDUZU
Especially this part: https://youtu.be/4Jc54RvDUZU?t=2891
(A full transcript is also available here: https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/821530/mod_resource/content/1/James%20Baldwin_%20Nikki%20Giovanni%20-%20A%20Dialogue-Lippincott%20%281973%29.pdf )
Cultural problems are hard to solve. Look how far our "racial reckoning" has gotten us (nowhere, backwards maybe). If there are tax policy levers, great, but I'm with Matt in being skeptical that they're up to the task.
As I understand it, virtually all on-line spaces will be above average in income and educational achievement by virtue of who is most likely to have internet access. I'd have to presume paid subscribers to economic policy focused blogs trend even higher by quite a bit.
Yeah totally. I’m just throwing out there that we likely don’t have the right first-hand knowledge to be able to come up with effective ideas. We can certainly still discuss it!
“I’m skeptical anyone has any really good marriage promotion ideas”
Shame.
Shame and opprobrium.
And intentionally raising children outside a stable family structure is, liberal “openness” notwithstanding, absolutely one of the few instances where society should employ those to maximum effect even though it’s regarding a “lifestyle choice”.
Shame based policy-making is a bad idea and tends to backfire.
Trust me, we know.
Sincerely, a woke progressive.
The reason it isn't working for you is because only 10-20% of the population holds your values. Not possible to shame people when they outnumber you 5-1. Thank Christ for that.
All societies run on social pressure and the human need for peer approval, it's just a matter of the ends to which it is turned and how much of it exists.
I get what you are saying, and I think it can work for some people. But I think it could also backfire. I have a friend who is a social worker in a juvenile detention center. She tells me a lot of the girls in there want to have a child as soon as possible with no regard for the father, because they think that is the only way they will get love and affection, which they never get in their home. I don't know what policy can fix that, and shame might make it worse.
Since the white working class is increasingly aligned with Republicans and the "conservative" movement (whatever that means these days) and shows low marriage rates, we have a wonderful opportunity to put your proposal into practice. Since conservative thought leaders are the ones most in favor of shame and opprobrium, I'd like to see them mount a campaign of shaming the white working class into increasing their rates of marriage. It's fine to even use their favorite go-to tool and blame the lack of marriages in this group on bad liberal ideas as long as they're shaming that group into rejecting those liberal ideas.
But we know this will never happen and if it did, it would have no effect.
I think David R's comment was worth engaging with more seriously than that.
It is interesting to observe that cultural values tend to drive marriage rates across societies, with East Asia, India and the Muslim world frowning most heavily on marriage out of wedlock and not coincidentally also having very low rates of out of wedlock births.
It would be silly to say we need to imitate those societies, but there may be something to learn there or a place for more societal pressure against bad personal choices.
Just something to think about. No reason to launch into an unrelated attack on conservative though leaders or the white working class (50% of whom either don't vote or still vote for Dems).
It's not an attack; it's an observation and a thought experiment.
If we put their responses on the ideological spectrum, we would see conservatives lining up with "shame/opprobrium" and liberals with "toleration/accepting."
To prove that the conservative "s/o" position is not just a stalking horse for attacking liberals (and specifically aiming at the Black population), we would need to see that they think the same approach should be applied to their own followers. And to show that an "s/o" approach has any efficacy, their efforts should bear fruit.
Maybe this would actually happen! I wouldn't be hugely surprised if there are conservative-affiliated ministers and preachers who follow the "s/o" approach toward their congregations. And maybe that even works!
Still, I'd like to see evidence of that. I read Tim Alberta, listen to David French, and draw the conclusion that the old-time religion has been replaced by something much darker and less constructive.
So, pending evidence, I remain a skeptic that conservatives actually believe in this or have any idea how to make it work.
Just to clarify here, I'm not talking about shaming people for not getting married. That aspect of China's treatment of women, in particular, is shameful beyond all reckoning. I'm talking only of leveling more public shame at people who set out to have kids outside the context of some sort of established family structure.
Hell, in reality I'm all for that "established family structure" including stable, single career folks with firm extended family and friend group support, plural relationships, whatever.
But the data needs to bear out "stable", because otherwise we're just punishing the most vulnerable among us in the name of tolerance.
"I'm talking only of leveling more public shame at people who set out to have kids outside the context of some sort of established family structure."
Does this exist, though? I get the sense that most single-parent families are from committed partners that became…uncommitted.
That’s a good thing, we shouldn’t be bringing kids into unstable family structures to suffer just because we need more fodder for the global market.
I guess everyone should have 10+ children?
I'm also not at all agreed about that latter 90% stat. There are billions of happy and contented people worldwide. And even on a simple income measure a low income person in the US is not in the 90th percent of incomes worldwide.
But we are talking about resources being taken away. A human needs a place to sleep, food to eat, teachers to teach them and healthcare to take care of them. If they're not contributing to the pool they are very likely taking away a share from someone else.
Material possessions are a too narrow view of better off when talking about total or average happiness. In any case you would want to adjust by Purchasing Price Parity, after which 20,000 is is knocked down quite a lot of percentiles.
Japan seems to be doing fairly well and it’s by far the furthest down that slow slide.
As it turns out, with money, good automation, high state capacity, and an emphasis on health, activity, and independence… old people mostly do just fine without constant babying.
Japan also belies the notion that low birth rates mean mass immigration is somehow inevitable.
Really? Isn’t Japan just struggling to hold out and doing worse and worse every year as a result?
In the US, we're going to need it. Our per capita infrastructure and service needs are nuts because of how dispersed, car-centric, blah blah blah... we are.
I suspect Europe, East Asia, and South Asia will do this much more gracefully.
I'm just as skeptical that in Japan all is "suffering, suffering, suffering all around"
Japan's elderly score better on many quality of life metrics than its prime-age workers, one of the few places in the developed world where that's true. They absolutely score better on those metrics than their counterparts in the US and in most of Europe. The only place in which they don't is when one tries to take survey data from transliterated questions and compare them head-to-head across countries.
The American old-age care system is broken in and of itself, but it also operates downstream of a society and physical infrastructure that mostly leaves people in shockingly poor health by the time they enter retirement. Further, the building blocks of independent living in the United States are not nearly as accessible to the very old as they are in denser countries, and accessing them doesn't reinforce better health outcomes. This is not true elsewhere in the world.
TL;DR: The US will need huge numbers of low-paid guest care workers to succor its hordes of overweight, chronically ill, non-driving elderly if it ages like Japan has. Japan does not.
EDIT: More broadly, it doesn't behoove you to believe me only when my experience and knowledge agree with your preconceptions. Most of what Americans "know" about various East Asian nations is either wrong or vastly oversimplified.
Matt is normally very fair in his characterization of conservative views. But not today. His summary of Rich Lowry's piece as "saying that Ta-Nehisi Coates should stop complaining about racism" is wrong on the merits and deliberately misleading. Lowry's summary paragraph is enough to refute Matt's characterization:
"Coates reminds us of the shame of the American inner city, where kids have so few social supports and live with little margin of error. His account of slavery and the ensuing discrimination against blacks is powerful and true. But his is a stunted version of America. Here’s hoping his son reads more widely."
I encourage others to read the piece and draw their own conclusions.
Link: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/the-toxic-world-view-of-ta-nehisi-coates-120512/
I'm not familiar enough with Lowry's work to know if he's right more frequently than a broken clock. But in this case he's right, when he says "Coates is selling snake oil" because even if the reparations Coates argued for were implemented, "For poor blacks to escape poverty, it would still require all the personal attributes that contribute to success" and that "would still require the moral effort that he won’t advocate for."
It often seems that the phrase "systemic racism" is a euphemism invented to discuss this very issue without explicitly saying that is what's being discussed. Otherwise, what's the difference between systemic racism and regular racism?
I think systemic racism is just a general term for when systems lead to racially disparate outcomes even without the people involved needing to do anything that has racist motivations.
A classic example I've heard brought up from times past was the radical disparity in sentencing between drug crimes involving crack and coke, which was not based on sound premises (e.g. the false notion that crack is far more addictive). Crack convictions were predominantly black people, coke convictions were minority black people, and so this unjustified disparity ended up massively biasing the severity of convictions against black drug users and traffickers over white and hispanic ones. And a totally not-racist judge and not-racist cops who just follow the rules would still bring about these racially disparate outcomes, cuz the racism was baked in to the system.
It may not sound hard to you, but evidently it's more than the typical person can handle.
70% of lotto winners go broke in 5 years or less.
I just googled it and it was the first thing that popped up. Maybe it's not reliable, I don't know. The Atlantic has a more in-depth look where they picture is less clear, but at a minimum winning the lotto seems to raise the odds of going broke several years out.
In any case, I'm not seeing sources from your side supporting the view that generational wealth is easy to maintain or commonly maintained by degenerate rich people around America.
This is from Lottery winners: The myth and reality
H. Roy Kaplan in the
Journal of gambling behavior (2005).
Contrary to popular beliefs, winners did not engage in lavish spending sprees and instead gave large amounts of their winnings to their children and their churches. The most common expenditures were for houses, automobiles and trips. It was found that overall, winners were well-adjusted, secure and generally happy from the experience.
No argument there, but it's not inconsistent with what I'm saying.
**See edits below**
I think Matt is missing a lever conservatives (and a lot of moderates on both sides) see and act on. Sure, the Republican Party seems to be less vocal about this, but there are a lot of cultural figures and institutions pushing hard on it. I'm thinking of the attempt at culture change from people like Jordan Peterson and the general "Be a responsible man, clean up your act and get a job and become a good mate and settle down and raise a family and be a positive, contributing member of your community" strain of discourse. In this frame, the highest leverage point is making men better--they're the ones leaving their partners to raise the kids alone (either because they're not willing to commit, unable to support the family, or commiting crimes that leave them in jail and away from the kids). Clearly, there are upstream variables: why are so many men ending up without the psychological, social, and economic resources to play those constructive, positive roles in the first place? But setting that aside for a different discussion and trying to deal with the situation as it is right now, there's still what I consider an entirely worthwhile effort to increase marriage rates by increasing the character of men.
Unfortunately, I think this is offputting to progressives because it triggers three sacred cows: 1) individuals taking 'personal responsibility' for their actions, becoming more virtuous, and 'pulling themselves up by their bootstraps' are the solution to systemic social ills, 2) talking to poor people (and especially people of color) about 'engaging in more responsible behaviors' and 'developing character' reminds them of old-school thinly veiled actual white supremacy, and 3) this kind of approach is very often closely intertwined with religious institutions or messaging, which comes with baggage the left doesn't like. A more cynical take is that it circumvents progressives' ideological and political machinery, cutting them out of the loop on money and power. Seems like that's a factor for some, but I generally lean charitably on this one.
I don't think any off those three objections are legitimate critiques of a genuinely good-faith approach to developing healthier, more positive men. And tragically, I think if progressives could look past their prejudices (and many can or already do, I'm sure), they would see that this is exactly the natural complement to something like the #MeToo movement: we have a problem with men abusing their power and hurting women in this society, and what should we do about it? Develop men into stronger, more loving and capable male figures who both provide for and support their families while respecting women, themselves, and their communities. That requires not just shaming and calling them out, but also providing them with support (in particular, from other men) to grow into the kind of healthier, more responsible, strong but safe figures we would all like to see.
As usual, there seems to be an enormous amount of common ground here between working/middle class people on both sides of the aisle and across all races. In Shelby Steele's "What Killed Michael Brown?" (which I found to be kind of cringy but also illuminating), he interviews leaders of community orgs that are doing this kind of thing: pastors, nonprofit heads, etc., all of whom are focused on providing healthy outlets for (especially young, poor, or black) men to form part of a community, find redemption or hope, and contribute their efforts to something meaningful and positive (instead of, say, meaningful and destructive, like being part of a gang). They seem to be liberals and conservatives, but united by pragmatism and in-the-trenches, skin-in-the-game, real-world experience. Maybe I'm romanticizing, but they seem representative of a very positive, often-underlooked thread of community work. I think Jamil Jivani has some good thoughts on this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2vctUezliE).
Almost everyone who doesn't form part of the woke Ivy League crowd agrees that this kind of approach is awesome and totally not a dog whistle for "Black men are degenerate criminals who need to be reformed by white saviors". Duh, it's often black men trying to mentor other black men! But then someone like Denis Prager (an older white man) says "The solution is simple: anyone in this country can succeed and live a good life if they follow Judeo-Christian values of hard work, personal responsibility, etc." and it's off to the races on the racism stuff.
Anyway, I hope that doesn't get overlooked, because I think it's probably the best bet. And my sense is that Matt, as a left of center wonk, is going to underweight the value and legitimacy of "bottom-up culture change" as a path to improving outcomes.
Also, good piece!
**EDIT: I thought about this a bit and I feel like I kind of leaned into defending Peterson because of my frustration with progressives who annoy me, rather than because I think he's a great example of the thing I'm trying to describe. I haven't read any of his books, have just watched a few of his interviews and portions of his talks. I know what I'm thinking of, and Peterson doesn't really embody it fully; just a small part (the "have courage, think of yourself as a hero on a journey, clean up your act and at least try to be a good man" shtick). I regret falling into the either/or culture war trap (Peterson or the libs!), albeit mildly.
I also regret using the phrase "Ivy League Woke crowd," which is obviously pretty inflammatory. I do think there's something to what I'm saying there, and if I were to rephrase it less antagonistically, I'd say something like "most people who are not self-identified strong progressives, young people attending elite colleges, politically active Twitter users -- people often referred to as 'liberal elites'".
Jordan Peterson is currently having a meltdown over a Sports Illustrated cover.
So here's an interesting note -- the children of the "woke Ivy League crowd" often have excellent social outcomes and are quite likely to be married themselves.
Now, why do you think this is?
Progressives (including, well, the woke Ivy League crowd themselves) will put the focus on material factors. The opportunities their family provided, money, and so on. Sure, hard work and responsibility was a necessary condition to some degree, but it's clearly not the sufficient one. Moreover, clearly their values are working for them when it comes to childrearing.
On the other hand, conservatives have plenty of opportunities on their own to run this sort of organization -- for instance, their churches, their small towns, and so on. Their are lots of GOP state government, long periods of Republicans in power, and so on. If this theory was true, they should be able to teach men the value of hard work and individual responsibility, and produce good results. It's just hard to see that happening.
The Sports Illustrated thing is ugly, and I think Peterson was out of line with his comment. I would put a question to you: do you think this incident (or any other culture war dustup Peterson has gotten into) discredits the rest of his work? Do you think it renders all of the advice he's given to young men bad, or invalidates the large number of young men who attribute significant positive personal growth to his influence? I have my gripes with his approach; concretely, I think he's too harsh and rigid and falls into the culture war lanes too easily. However, I would say emphatically no, his failure to meet his own standards does not wipe away the good that he has done. AND, I also think it's also absolutely worth calling out his failing to be a good man in this moment (and many others). But there's a baby in the bathwater, in my view, which is the kind of guidance for men becoming healthier and playing more positive roles in the world. Curious if you think JP has not had that effect on his audience (acknowledging that clearly it's not foolproof, as a number of his followers seem to be dicks; although Twitter is also not real life).
I agree with your analysis that something is working for the "woke Ivy League crowd" in that their kids tend to have good outcomes. I'd agree it's not all material (although clearly that's a huge factor, as the part of Matt's post about income indicates). I think we both agree, then, that there's a major role for culture and values in individuals' decisions and outcomes for their kids. That's my point! A good way to make the world better is to influence people (especially men) with good values and culture.
I think you read my theory to be "Conservatives/Republicans know how to teach men how to be good men, and progressives don't." That is absolutely not my theory. My claim is "There seem to me to be avenues to increase the marriage rate by providing men, in particular, and men from poor or less well-off communities in particular, with social and cultural support that will guide them towards greater responsibility and more positive, constructive behavior (which usually includes elements of "progressive" values like 'Be gentle and caring and nurturing' as well as "conservative values like 'Be tough and strong and get shit done'). That includes many organizations involved in communities doing work that is both effective, and that people on both the left and right would support. I think we should do more of this and support it, because it seems to me to be a unifying thing AND a constructive way (among others, like policy change I don't know enough about) to ameliorate this problem. However, it seems like many people that could be characterized as "liberal elites" don't support this kind of thing because they have negative perceptions associated with some elements of it." <- Is there anything in there you you disagree with? FWIW, if conservatives oppose the kind of thing I'm talking about, I think they're mistaken, too! I'm not trying to do a political team thing, I'm trying to identify shit that actually works and brings people together and lift that up.
What would you like to see, or what do you think would work to address the extremely high rate and destructive rate of single parenthood in the US?
I'm not super familiar with JBP's work (just have a friend who digs him) but my impression is that he isn't really pushing young men to do the actual most valuable thing that society fails to teach men in my view: learning to reason about their emotions.
It seems to me that it's only a minority of young men who even attempt understandings like "I am feeling [this way] and it's causing me to engage in [these behaviors]" and "it's [these circumstances] that seem to bring about feeling [this way]" for all but a narrow range of emotions like anger and jealousy. And IME this is particularly true in poorer and less progressive milieus where I think dudes are more generally expected to put up a strong front.
If you tell me some psychologist is shepherding young men toward a brighter future and then I don't see any evidence of him doing that, well, color me underwhelmed.
So I'm actually not super familiar with his work either, but I share your desire for more men to hear and viscerally take in "Look guys, it's a really good thing to be able to recognize how your behavior is driven by your emotions. That means noticing what you're feeling, being okay with it on some level (even if it's uncomfortable, especially with shame or fear), and working with it in a positive way--say, by sharing it with someone or making art out of it or taking constructive steps to improve the situation rather than just lash out and hurt yourself or others." That's the shit I love, and I think JP probably does some of that (I'm not super familiar with his work either, tbh) but definitely not enough. I also feel disappointed that Peterson is the most visible and popular guy out there in the "Help young men build character" game, since my aspiration is much higher.
Now, as for my actual policy views, I'm a liberal Democrat. That means I support stronger unions (thus helping working class men), full employment (creating jobs), regulations on working hours (preventing people from needing to be on call all the time), access to contraception and abortion (thus preventing unwanted pregnancy), building more housing (so families have somewhere to live), so on and so forth. I would also promote tax code changes to avoid a "marriage penalty", though I'd need to read up on it more to know for sure. I support expanding access to education (college-educated people are less likely to be singled parents, and can have more stable careers.)
I'm fine with funding community organizations like you describe, but not if they're just about pushing people to go to church.
I'm deeply skeptical about approaches that try to incalculate some sort of "individual responsibility", for the same reason I dislike diversity training. The evidence for "just say nice things about marriage and fatherhood" just seems very marginal, and trying to scale that kind of intervention upwards is very difficult.
Yeah, man, it seems to me like you're missing a huge chunk of what causes people to actually change their lives for the better. Your characterization of what I think is valuable ("just say nice things about marriage and fatherhood") is obviously extremely dismissive and reductive, but I've explained it a couple times so I think you're attached to ignoring it and don't think I'll say more.
I'm bummed about it though, because I bet if you thought about it you'd agree that most of the time when people turn their lives around it's not simply the result of material provisions or policy (although of course that plays a role in allowing opportunities for spiritual/character development). I have no objections to any of the policies you mentioned really, they all seem good. But people who go from gangs to taking care of their community aren't out there gushing about how much the union helped them (even though it very well may have!); they're expressing their thanks for a person who cared enough about them to support and mentor them, to help them realize their potential and find a good path.
I mean, not to plunge us into a whole other third rail, but it's not as if we don't have enough homes to house homeless people; there's just a lot more to solving that problem than giving someone a home. My dad, for example, just got evicted and is allowing his health to deteriorate at a shocking rate. He has all the resources he could possibly need, but there's something else, something inside, that is preventing him from using them. Policies matter, they really do. AND they're necessary but insufficient, in my mind, without support from local institutions that provide a healthy, solid culture. Seems tragic to me if you can't see that.
Oh also, I definitely appreciate your skepticism of things like diversity training programs, but that's because studies have proven their ineffectiveness (or even counterproductiveness). But I think there's good reason to expect community programs are vastly more effective. Human evolutionary history, for example, suggests small groups of people (up to Dunbar's 150, eg.) is the scale we're equipped for. Agree it's difficult to scale, but that's kind of the point. Big top-down things are often more likely to fail because they're working at odds with human tendencies towards the local. I think a good question is, "Which are the most effective local organizations/programs that have positive impact on mens' lives and behavior, and how feasible is it to scale them?"
In general, one heuristic that probably differs between a liberal Democrat like yourself and a politically homeless radical centrist like myself (or a conservative) is confidence in the global / top-down versus the local / bottom-up. Obviously that's not a rule across the board, but my bias is towards the local, the bottom-up, the person-to-person, the embedded in a community. Based on your responses, seems like you put more stock in the higher-level, systemic, top-down policy changes. Seems like there's worth in both.
Yes, Jordan Peterson is bad.
He recorded videos with Stefan Molyneux, an overt white supremacist.
He argues that Islamophobia doesn't exist (https://ottawasun.com/2017/06/10/chambers-islamophobia-is-real-sorry-prof-peterson/wcm/d07e9864-3422-4d8f-b976-e8695ec270f1 )
He supports climate denialism ( https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/825871336333574144 )
He has fantasized about child abuse, and talking about it potentially benefiting them ( http://nationalpost.com/news/excerpt-from-jordan-petersons-new-book-12-rules-for-life-if-you-hate-your-kids-so-will-other-people
).
I can go on if you want. See here for more -- https://www.reddit.com/r/enoughpetersonspam/comments/c2n9kj/whats_wrong_with_jordan_b_peterson_a_primer/
Ah okay, I don't think Jordan Peterson is "bad", so we have a disagreement there. As I said before, I disagree with things he says and don't like his rhetorical style much of the time. I also think he has real insight and positive contributions to our culture/discourse. You seem pretty committed to lining up against him, so I think there's no point trying to find any nuance there. I'll say that the Reddit thread looks like motivated crap to me. "He said this thing, which is similar to a thing Hitler said" is some of the most bush league hit job work there is, so place absolutely no stock in that. It's clear to me he's not an anti-Semite, so "Look how his words are like a Nazi's words!" holds absolutely no significance to me. I'd just reiterate my question about whether picking all of someone's worst moments is enough in your mind to discredit everything they've said and make them "bad". I'd also recommend "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt, if you haven't read. Could be interesting, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it.
I thought about this a bit and I feel like I kind of leaned into defending Peterson because of my frustration with progressives who annoy me, rather than because I think he's a great example of the thing I'm trying to describe. I haven't read any of his books, have just watched a few of his interviews and portions of his talks. I know what I'm thinking of, and Peterson doesn't really embody it fully; just a small part (the "have courage, think of yourself as a hero on a journey, clean up your act and at least try to be a good man" shtick). I regret falling into the either/or culture war trap (Peterson or the libs!), albeit mildly.
I also regret using the phrase "Ivy League Woke crowd," which is obviously pretty inflammatory. I do think there's something to what I'm saying there, and if I were to rephrase it less antagonistically, I'd say something like "most people who are not self-identified strong progressives, young people attending elite colleges, politically active Twitter users -- people often referred to as 'liberal elites'".
I feel like a lot of the pushback from the individual improvement crowd is because there's a kind of patriarchal quality to the kind of self improvement a lot of these guys recommend. Like no one has ever gotten mad at me for modeling anger management techniques in the classroom. No one has gotten mad at me for sharing stories that indicate that I do chores, and have hobbies typically coded as feminine.
I mean Twitter is an outrage machine so someone out there thinks this is bad I'm sure but it's not like I'm getting yelled at.
I don't think is actually that complicated - it is probably true that two parents are better than one for obvious reasons outside of weird conservative morality, but outside of incredibly terrible policies that would greatly make a lot of people's lives worse, it's virtually impossible to turn the clock back to 1960. Some of those policies that the conservative commenters on this substack are basically OK with.
Like, yeah, some wonky proposals might help on the edges, but I think this is just reality we're going to have to grapple with.
"it's virtually impossible" is lame defeatism. It is really hard to make cultural progress, but if there is a will then it's worth trying to find a way.
I'd compare it to drug overdoses - OD fatalities rose from 50,000 in the Obama years to 70,000 in the Trump years to 100,000 in 2020 and they are still rising to 110,000 in the last 12 months. But it would be lame to say "nothing can be done". Of course many things can be done, it's just a very hard problem and I still don't know what the answer is.
But it starts with acknowledging that it's an important issue and building a societal will to face the problem. If cultural spokespeople and leaders - the political and media "elites" started to openly acknowledge that 2 parent families are better for children than that would be the first step in the right direction. On its own that acknowledgement might even move the needle a little bit. From there it's harder and I don't know exactly how to "solve the problem", but the first step is building some societal and political will to face it.
Matt had an earlier article about the opioid crisis that came to the same conclusion as here: “this is a big deal and none of the proposed solutions seem up to the job.” Acknowledging that isn’t lame defeatism any more than demanding ineffective solutions and demonizing the bad guys (single mothers, big pharma, w/e) is.
There are not many big real problems for which the solution is more demagoguery. I assure you, that’s already being tried.
I don't think I'm calling for demagoguery. I think Matt writing this post is a step in the right direction, for example.
If most of those dying in the opiod crisis were gay or trans or black, we'd have a completely different discourse and set of policy considerations. But most of the dead are just poor white people, so...
So... it's still a big deal and none of the proposed solutions seem up to the job. Maybe some other people would approach that problem from a racial perspective and thus get more wrong, but it would still be a big problem hurting a lot of people and the proposed solutions would still probably not be very good.
Also, a cursory look at the relevant percentages suggest that black people make up a larger share of opioid deaths than they do of the total population (17% and 13%, respectively). But I'm sure that if you keep trying you'll find an argument to which the standard "liberals would care more about this if it happened to minorities" critique applies.
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/opioid-overdose-deaths-by-raceethnicity/?
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221
The data you point to shows that this is only true for the 2020 and 2019 years. The deaths before that, for almost 2 decades, were disproportionally white, non-hispanic. I do think this factors into the relative indifference this topic has received relative to the AIDS epidemic or the BLM movement against police shootings.
Has anyone denied or refused to accept that two parents households are better than one parent households? I feel like that point is the starting point of all discussion on all sides of the issue. The only dispute is whether some *particular* second parent is better or worse than being free of that person.
On this site, I don't know, probably not, but there's probably a not too rare subset of left wingers out there who would think that raising children should be independent of how many people raise them, and that the government should be generous in giving people the resources they need to accommodate that. (And that generous support tends to manifest in strictly child care only over, say, a child allowance/tax credit, so the parent can be free to pursue a career if so desired.)
I guess I don’t see how what you’re saying contradicts the idea that these people accept that more parents in the household is better than fewer? Of course government policy shouldn’t subsidize households with more parents more than it subsidized households with fewer parents. But that doesn’t mean that a household with fewer parents works as well as a household with more parents!
The way I'm thinking about how this typically manifests is an intersection of a liberal (in the pure sense of promoting liberty) sense of not being judgmental on what type of relationships people form, with a feminist sense of being leery of being nudged into more of a caretaker lifestyle.
As I said, I don't think this is common at all overall, but I sense that it gets added exposure in left wing discourse, particularly among the Very Online set.
I’m a little surprised the drug war didn’t come up in this article. Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that a large percentage of black male incarcerations are for relatively minor drug infractions. I can think of almost nothing more destabilizing to a marriage or family unit than having the partner jailed, even for just a few months.
I would be interested to know how much more room we have to decriminalize non-violent drug offenses, and how much positive impact that could have on family stability.
I think the percentage for drug infractions themselves is smaller than we sometimes think. (Although yes, if these were disproportionately brief, that would understate the impact. And any felony conviction can make it much harder to find work, can disqualify the family from subsidized housing, etc.)
My understanding is that a lot of non-violent 'drug related' crime involves illegal firearm possession due to the dangers of the drug trade. Unfortunately, we probably do want to treat those crimes seriously (to lower the murder toll on black families), so short of full legalization, we might be out of luck.
"I can think of almost nothing more destabilizing to a marriage or family unit than having the partner jailed, even for just a few months".
One worse thing that comes to mind as more destabilizing is having a partner who is regularly using or selling drugs. Parenting is hard enough sober.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html
There are 1.9 million currently incarcerated Americans, and 350,000, or roughly 1 in 6, are in for drug offenses. 38% of the total incarcerated are black, so if we assume rates across crimes are very roughly constant, that works out to 133,000 black americans incarcerated for drug crimes, out of a total population of 47 million black americans.
The headline number is 1 out of 353 black people incarcerated for drug crimes. That seems like far too small a number to really mess with the broader black populations' family structure.
Of course as you mention some of these incarcerations may be brief, so this understates how many people are being jailed over the course of a decade or two. But on the other side of things, not all of these drug charges are minor. Many of the incarcerated were selling large quantities of more serious drugs, or selling to children or other things that would be hard to decriminalize.
Even more significantly, many of those imprisoned on drug charges were originally arrested for other criminal infractions: speeding, assault, larceny, DUI, and then drugs were found and added as a charge. In many cases the arrested pleads guilty to the more minor drug charge in exchange for avoiding a trial on the more serious charge.
At the end of the day the number of people who are in prison for innocently sitting on their porch enjoying a joint is very small, but for some reason that seems to be the idea the media has put into everyone's heads.
Personally, in light of the still growing number of overdose deaths (110,000 annually at last count), I think we should be arresting and prosecuting drug offenders much more frequently. If someone would arrest the white drug dealers and junkies in my area I wouldn't worry about the impacts on family formation. In my personal experience these aren't people who are setting up model families and raising responsibly children if only the police wouldn't hassle them.