The book titled “The Two-Parent Privilege” is still creating heartache among progressives. I’ve written about this several times and the gist of the book is that kids do better when they grow up in two-parent families. Last month, Jill Filipovic did her best to argue the problems described in the book (i.e. the decline of marriage) are the fault of conservatives. I didn’t find her argument very convincing and you can check here for my reasons.
Today, the Washington Post published another critique of the book and this one is heavy on attitude and light on actual reasons to dislike the book.
Melissa S. Kearney, a professor at the University of Maryland and a self-described “MIT-trained economist,” makes just such mistakes in her tiresome new book, “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.” She begins by defining marriage as “a long-term contract between two individuals to combine resources and share the responsibilities of keeping a household and raising children” and ends by making broad policy recommendations on the basis of her blinkered findings.
That’s a lot of snark in just the third paragraph of this review. So what does the author have to back it up? Not a whole lot. She breezes through the general outlines of the book as if they are all self-evident. Kids do better with two parents. Marriage rates have declined sharply but not evenly among all groups. Upper middle class people with a 4-year-degree are most likely to have a traditional marriage, hence the idea that this once uniform tradition is becoming another form of privilege.
The author’s real problem isn’t with the data or with Kearney’s take on it, per se. Her problem is with all the things the book should have been about instead.
I have no doubt that Kearney is correct, in her limited way, about the data. But when it comes to wringing living significance out of dead statistics, much less making policy proposals, she is less adept. She is insistent that she is an impartial scientist, compelled by math to make certain recommendations. “My job is to look at vast amounts of data with nuance and precision and produce and interpret the resulting evidence,” she writes. “While this book will not contain mathematical equations or econometric specifications, it will present the findings of analyses that use them,” as if the numbers simply excreted ready-made moral imperatives, no further assembly required…
Problems arise not because Kearney asks narrow questions but because she mistakes their answers for more all-encompassing guides to what we ought to do. After all, if marriage is “perhaps even mostly” a matter of “love and companionship,” why does Kearney devote her book exclusively to its impact on children? Why don’t the pains and pangs of married adults — and, in particular, women, who have historically been disadvantaged or worse by the arrangement — even feature as considerations to be weighed against its benefits?
Granted it’s fair to point out if a book’s author has skipped over some aspect of the topic that seems rather obviously connected to it. That might indicate a desire to ignore some evidence that undercuts the argument at hand. But I don’t think that’s what the author of this review is pointing out. She is literally asking for a completely different book, one which isn’t about the data but focuses on broad speculation about alternative family structures.
If marriage benefits children because it affords them more emotional support, why should we “work to restore and foster” the nuclear family, which privatizes affection and attention, instead of working to foster a new norm of communal child-rearing? Is there any reason to conclude that marriage is the best solution, except that it is the solution that already (although perhaps not for much longer, if current trends continue apace) exists?
If the evidence shows that children of married couples are better off, which it clearly does, why go off on a tangent (communal child rearing) which has never been more than a marginal consideration for the vast majority of people? Marriage works and has a long history of adoption in our society. Why not simply promote what works? The whole argument made in this review reminds me of the people who argued we should defund the police without any clear plan or evidence for what would come next. Turns out that wasn’t a great idea.
Anyway, it’s a strange book review that seems more focused on vague tangents the author didn’t take rather than the focused arguments she did make.
Read the full article here