I am excited to share Episode 2 of the Savage Collective Podcast. Our first episode was released in collaboration with my friends at the Beatrice Institute. This episode is being released independently on our own stream. Look for more podcasts in the future released independently and in collaboration with other friends. You can also now access these episodes on Spotify as well as Substack.
Marriage and family formation are important signs and determinants of human flourishing. However, marriage and family formation rates are cratering across the United States especially among working class Americans. Brad Wilcox, Professor of Sociology at University of Virginia and Future of Freedom Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, is the preeminent marriage and family scholar in the United States. Grant and Brad recently recorded a wide ranging conversation about various topics including why progressive elites are more likely than others to get married but reluctant to promote the institution, factors driving reductions in marriage rates, and why pornography should be illegal.
You can listen to the episode here or read the full transcript.
Full transcript
Grant Martsolf: My guest today on the podcast is Brad Wilcox. Brad is a professor of sociology and the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, also the Future of Freedom Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. So, Brad's research focuses primarily on the determinants of marital quality and stability.
And the impact of marriage on society. His most recent book is called Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. And Brad and I have been working on a project together looking at marriage rates among working class men. In the relationship to employment, I've had a really great time getting to know Brad.
So, I'm grateful that you're here and I'm looking forward to our conversation.
Brad Wilcox: Thanks, Grant. It's good to be here today.
Luxury Beliefs in Practice
Grant: So, I want to start with a general question about elites. That is something that's in your title. So, I want to start by talking about elites in America. So, what gives rise to luxury beliefs?
Brad: So just to kind of step back here for a second, you know, one of the arguments in the book is that our [00:01:30] elites are often saying things in a more progressive way or standing for more progressive family values, so to speak, even as they, in their own private lives, are often moving in a more neo traditional direction.
And, one way to think about this is to use the term Rob Henderson has coin called “luxury beliefs”. His thought is that elites are often using more progressive ideas to signal their elite status and their capacity to display unique and distinctive ideas.
And those often end up being kind of more progressive because they break older traditions and norms. And the, the problem though, with this kind of luxury beliefs approach, as Rob has argued, is that these luxury beliefs often confer status on elites, but as [00:02:30] they kind of diffuse throughout the entire society they end up hurting working class and poor Americans. And so on. My book focusing on marriage talks about how the challenge is that our elites often kind of publicly discount or devalue or just don't talk about marriage and family in public. As journalists, as professors, college presidents, school superintendents, CCE executives, and yet they have a kind of tacit or even explicit knowledge of how to do marriage and make it work for themselves that they operationalize in their own lives and the lives of their children.
But they're not sharing that broader wisdom with the public. And so, one example of this is that when my book title first came out, Matt Yglesias, who's a prominent center left journalist, kind of made fun of this idea about the encouraging folks to defy the elites because he said, well, look, elites are, are succeeding when it comes to marriage.
I'm like, Brad, why are you saying you defy the elites? And what Matt didn't really appreciate is that, yeah, I talk in the book about how elites actually do forge [00:03:30] generally strong, and simple marriages, but often say something very different in their public capacities. And the irony was that Matt himself had written an article in Vox, a while back, saying that the decline in marriage was not a problem.
So, he himself unwittingly was a perfect example. Here's a guy who's married and they've got a son. I think everything seems great in their family. You know, he's kind of doing the neo traditional thing in his own personal family life. And yet in his public capacity as a journalist he was arguing that the decline of marriage was not a problem. So, he was a perfect and unwitting example of someone who, kind of an elite, that talks left on family issues and yet walks right in his own private life. And the problem with that is that he is an influential cultural figure. And I think, had he raised the alarm about the decline of marriage in his earlier piece, that would have helped people understand and appreciate that marriage is an important institution and we [00:04:30] need to be thinking about ways to strengthen it and not to minimize its role in our common life.
Declining Birthrates transposed with the Merits of Marriage
Grant: So, how do you think Matt Iglesias squares that position on marriage with his fear about declining birth rates? Because he also wrote a book where he raised that concern as well.
Brad: I honestly don't know. I mean he, and to me for an amount, he's evolved in his thinking about family issues over the years, probably partly just because he's been married with a son now awhile now. I don't know how old he is, probably around 10 would be my guess, so I think he may have written that piece in Vox that I'm referencing before his son was born. I suspect he's probably a bit more marriage friendly publicly now than he would have been at that earlier point. We also can see the work that's been done by my colleague Lyman Stone, that marriage is an incredibly powerful predictor of fertility in the U. S. and in many countries around the globe. And so, if [00:05:30] you're interested in kind of boosting the fertility rate, in the United States, to bring us back closer to replacement, then you'd also be wanting to think about ways to strengthen marriage as well.
Marriage Rate Reduction
Grant: Yeah. So, we're going to return to that question of fertility rates a little bit, but first I want to talk about factors driving people to get married or not. So, what's a more important factor in recent reduction in marriage rates? Is it reductions in interest in getting married or a rise of social conditions that make it difficult for those who want to get married to actually make that happen?
Brad: You know, I think if we had to kind of put our finger on one of those things, I would say it's primarily a cultural shift that has led Americans to deprioritize marriage. There have also been shifts that have made dating, mating, and [00:06:30] finding that someone more challenging as well, but these are primarily cultural shifts.
And for kind of more elite folks, I think it's been a kind of shift from focusing on marriage and family to focusing more on education and work. And for less elite folks, I think it's a much more complicated, messy, and ambiguous issue. The relational train that they have to navigate doesn't often lead in a straightforward and successful way to marriage and family.
Grant: Yeah. So how do you explain the difference in marriage rates between college educated and non-college educated Americans?
Brad: So, I think college educated Americans tend to move through life and in their relationships in a more deliberate way. They tend to be a bit slower and more careful in terms of how they, you know, [00:07:30] move through life and into relationships. And I think that that kind of slower path, if you will, is linked to better outcomes.
And then when they kind of do get married and start having families, they're more likely to have guys who are employed full time and who are reliable breadwinners. And I think that's also important, and it's a bit ironic because a lot of people who are more educated, more elite, you know, would embrace relatively progressive ideas about gender.
And yet, they're kind of in their own private lives, I would argue, kind of benefiting from a world where, even if the wife is working full time, whatever, they still kind of can fall back on a reliable male breadwinner as a financial foundation for their family that gives both of them a certain degree of financial security. But I also think it gives the husband an [00:08:30] important economic position and sense of self-worth within the family.
By contrast, working class and poor couples and families are much more likely to have guys who are not stably connected to full time work. And that, I think, makes those men feel more insecure about their place in their relationships and families. And also makes their girlfriend or wife more upset or resentful or frustrated with their lack of consistent financial support for the relationship or family.
Grant: So, you mentioned before that a large driver of the reduction of marriage rates has to do with culture. So, to what extent do you think something like tax policy can improve marriage rates. Is this really about money? Uh, cause the reason I bring this up is we talked a lot about, pro-natalist tax policy.
And if you look in places like Hungary and Poland where they're doing very aggressive pro-natalist tax policy, it seemed to have made a little bit of a difference, but it certainly didn't return us to replacement rates. And you think of [00:09:30] Singapore, Japan, all these countries that are really trying to boost birth rates through tax policy or other financial incentives, but they don't seem to move the dial because it seems like a cultural problem.
Is it the same in marriage or do you think it's a different dynamic?
Brad: So, I think on the marriage score, some work done by my colleague, Dr. Laurie DeRose indicates that Hungary has made some real progress on the marriage front, but they haven't basically had any distinctive success on the fertility front. So that's a bit of a puzzle about why they've done better than many other states in Europe on marriage, but not in fertility.
So, I think there's a cultural story when it comes to fertility that we haven't quite cracked in terms of how to make parenthood more attractive and more of a priority than it is right now in the minds and hearts of many young adults and middle aged [00:10:30] adults. There may also be a way in which we're just going to have to wait for a kind of successive or successor culture to arise that is more child centered than the one we currently live in.
How Do I know I found the Right Person
Grant: Right. So, we'll return to that question in a second. But I want to ask a little bit about some experiences I've had with college students. So, you know, we spend a lot of time with college students here, uh, as a professor, but also my wife and I spend a lot of time at the Newman Center on campus and we just spend a lot of time with college students.
And in fact, we just had students over for dinner on Sunday night and inevitably they'll, there's, a number will be dating, and they'll say, how do I know when I found the right person? And we basically tell them there's three boxes that you need to check and then you should go for it. What are the three boxes that you think young people need to check before they get married?
Brad: I think a strong friendship and a degree of maturity and [00:11:30] responsibility on the part of both parties, and common values, you know, that they have, broadly speaking, a pretty common worldview about religion or family life and how they kind of want to think about their future as husbands and wives and fathers and mothers.
And I think today there's a lot of disagreement about whether you want to have kids, how you want to raise your kids, whether you want the kids to be, you know, raised at home, placed in childcare, all that kind of stuff. And so, I think having some degree, and it's not going to be a hundred percent, but some degree of agreement about kids, work, and family and sort of how you look at your way of life, big picture is very important.
Grant: Yeah.
Brad: So, what's your three buckets?
Grant: It's almost [00:12:30] identical to yours, you know, we tell students that 99 percent of marriage is hanging out together. So, you just enjoy each other's company, being friends, and then share faith because we tend to be talking with Catholic students and then do you want to have sex with each other?
So that's, those are the three things. So maybe we're a little more crass than you, but those seem to be the three things. And then the rest of it is just hard work and making it work.
Brad: Yeah, that's I mean, I hadn't thought about the sex one. I thought that was kind of like taking that for granted. But I guess these days you can't take anything for granted, you know, I mean seriously 100%.
Grant: Well, you know what, we often, my friends and I, often talk about how John Paul II would rethink theology of the body for this age in which it's a strange sort of hyper sexual, sexually saturated culture, but at the same time people don't seem to want to have sex with each other. It's really quite a strange, strange environment, if you know what I mean.
Brad: Yeah, and I do think the impact of pornography has made the actual sex that people have with one another very complicated in many cases and in ways that are often, [00:13:30] I suspect, really not helpful for their marriages. I mean, one of the strange things that I've, found in my book on this whole issue of sex is that today, contrary to what I think a lot of people expect, it's religious couples who are having a lot more sex than secular couples. About 66 percent of religious couples have sex at least once a week, married couples, and that's converted to less than half of secular couples. Which I just find to be an astonishing statistic and there was no religious secular gap in sexual frequency in 2000 in the general social survey of the GSS.
So, between 2000 and the present, if the GSS is to be believed, and it's a pretty reliable survey, something has happened that's made religious couples much more advantaged when it comes to frequent sex. And I think that's a probably a pretty telling indicator of something [00:14:30] that's happening in the culture at large. It's not conducive to real sex.
Grant: Yeah, it's interesting. I'll give some of these statistics to my students. I didn't know that one exactly, but that's, that doesn't surprise me. But I'll tell them, well, you know, the married couples have way more sex than single people and they just, they fundamentally cannot believe it because, you know, they're just told repeatedly that, you know, free love and, you know, marriage is stifling and being conservative religious is stifling.
But in reality, to your point, getting married, and being religious is one of the great drivers of a healthy sex life, which is counterintuitive for a lot of young Americans. Yeah. Okay. So is online dating a net benefit or net harm for marriage in the 21st century?
Brad: Right.
Online Dating
Grant: Yeah. Okay. So, is online dating a net benefit or net harm for marriage in the 21st century?
Brad: I'd say it's a net harm. I think, overall, it makes people more kind of inclined to look at dating as a kind of exercise in trying to find the perfect dish to pick [00:15:30] up and try and then compare it to some other dish. I think it also it tends to advantage people who have great online profiles who look great or have some kind of really cool job or income or education, whatever, but it tends to kind of make people who are not as attractive in an online profile have a harder time finding men and women to date. I also think, too, that, my colleague Wendy Wang has found that folks who marry and met either in college or at the workplace or in a church context or at a party held by friends, are happier than folks who met online or folks who met in a bar.
And I think both meeting online and meeting at a bar are places where you don't really have a strong social context where, you know, you can make some [00:16:30] inferences, rely upon the judgment of, you know, your friends, you know, see someone in a more organic context, and so I think there's an artificiality to bar meetups and even more so obviously to online meetups as well.
Grant: So, you’ve said a couple of times now that conservatives and religious people are more likely to get married and be in happy marriages. Are these independent effects?
Brad: Yeah, that's one of the strange things when I started the book project for get married, you know the research behind it, I had the assumption that I'd find three groups that are more likely to be married in the first place and happily or stably married in the second place. Those would be Religious, Asian American, and college educated Americans.
And that's what we found when you bring my colleagues here and IFS. But we also found that when you added in ideology as a separate factor, the models, it was predictive, even net of controls or net [00:17:30] of religiosity and education and ethnicity. So, that's interesting. And I think it reflects the fact that, unfortunately, we're living in a culture where everything's polarized ideologically and the left has taken a much more negative view of marriage, especially in more educated, with it circles, that includes even attitudes towards infidelity.
So, we see in the data there is about a 38-percentage point gap now between liberals and conservatives in beliefs about whether or not, you know, any sex outside of the marriage is always wrong, where conservatives are more likely to take the classic view that it's always wrong and liberals are about, I think it's 38 percentage points less likely, which is, and this is a totally new since 2014. And before then it was, there wasn't really a big gap by partisanship or by ideology. So that's just one example, I think it's on the left, since the great “awokening”, has taken a much more skeptical view about both marriage and many [00:18:30] of the norms that sustain strong marriages too.
Grant: Interesting. So, is that also a luxury belief or do they act on that belief as well? The infidelity rates higher.
Brad: I think it's both. I think for plenty of folks on the left, it's just a luxury to believe. Oh yeah, polyamory is great, whatever. I mean, they're not going to do it for themselves because they have some prudence kicking in there.
Grant: Right.
Brad: But I think for some they do act on it and then that, I think it, adds a level of complexity. Even if you read that book that was spotlighted in New York Times about polyamory. What was striking about the book was that the woman who was the main kind of, the star of the show, so to speak, seeming pretty unhappy with how this is playing out with her and her husband and these people, you know. For a different context, I can remember, for instance, traveling to Qatar and meeting with a, you know, middle aged woman, [00:19:30] who her husband came home one day and told her that he wanted to have a second wife. And she was like, well, you know, that's fine. You can do that. And then she added that, you know, I'll divorce you. So I think people don't appreciate that once you open up the sort of polyamorous or polygamous box in a cultural society, I think it creates a lot of ambiguity and tensions and instabilities that were not there prior to that new option on the table.
Legality of Pornography
Grant: Right. So, this has come up a number of times. I think we're gonna talk about JD Vance a few times because a lot of his positions are very relevant to what we're talking about today. Do you think pornography should be illegal?
Brad: Sure. Yeah.
Grant: Okay.
Brad: No, I think the challenge right there is its sort of like saying that it's illegal for [00:20:30] underage adults to consume alcohol. I'm not sure how that would be effective, but it would certainly be nice to make pornography much harder to access for adults and especially children online.
So, I think making it much more difficult to access, especially for our kids, would be ideal.
Grant: Right. So, I don’t know if you followed what was happening in Louisiana where they just made a very simple change. You had to basically show a picture of your driver's license in order to get on Pornhub. And the use of pornography just fell off the cliff as soon as dad has to put in his driver's license.
He's not so eager to get on Pornhub anymore.
Brad: Right. And so, I think this is an example of where we're kind of adding barriers to accessing pornography is good. Because again, I think one reason why there's less sex in the, in the culture is just because the alternatives online, it becomes so enticing and distracting [00:21:30] and yet I think in person sex is better for us than the counterfeit.
Happy Marriages
Grant: So, I want to talk a little bit about happy marriages. We're not just interested in getting married. We're interested in having happy marriages. So, in our circles, and this is an observation, and I'm interested to see whether or not you think it's true, it seems like there's a pattern of wives leaving their husbands around the age of 55.
Is that an actual pattern? And if so, how might you explain it? Seems to be a spike.
Brad: So, you're saying, say that again, there's, there's a pattern of what?
Grant: A spike in wives leaving their husbands when they hit about 55.
Brad: And you're saying you've seen that in your circles?
Grant: Yeah, I don't know if it's just an observation of where I am or if that's an actual pattern. It seems to be like age spikes where there's more divorces in particular, it seems to us, and again, this is our observation, that there's a spike when the woman hits about 55.
Brad: I've heard that kind of anecdotally. I mean, what I've seen in the data is more like the there's sort of period [00:22:30] between seven and 12 years into marriage, where a lot of divorces kind of take place, but I've also been hearing too about more empty nest divorces of late as well.
Where once the kids have flown the nest, the marriages end and often it's the wife who's, you know, taking the lead on that. So that would correspond to what you're observing. And I think there are at least two things happening there. One is that I think a lot of couples in our culture today are focusing so much attention on their kids and their kids, you know, schooling and sports and other activities that they kind of can lose sight of their own marriage and keeping their marriage strong and healthy.
And then I think two people have a moment when the kids are gone, it's like, there's nothing to kind of keep them together. There's no common project, so to speak, and they haven't cultivated their marriage. But then I think too, for some portion of [00:23:30] middle aged women, there's sort of a sense that like the big project of her life is over, or at least that's animated her to that point in time.
And she's looking for a fresh start. You know, some, some new big project, a new big thing. And, you know, her marriage and family seem like an obstacle to kind of getting that second chapter going in her life or that whatever next chapter going in her life. I think there's a way in which our culture still kind of gives people this sort of idea that you can always reinvent yourself. You can always kind of experience something new and exciting and sort of serve the self's desires rather than kind of prioritize your family's needs and that kind of expressive individualism certainly can feed this desire to have a 50 something divorce.
Grant: [00:24:30] Yeah.
Brad: What, but what, in your, in your experience, what kind of patterns have you seen?
Grant: Yeah, so it is some of that, we've seen a number of empty nest divorces, and I think it's to your point that they've sort of gotten the kids out of the house. And they've been unhappy for a long time. And now, you know, at 55 or 60 they still feel pretty young, and they still feel like there's quite a bit of life ahead of them and they'd rather just restart, reset.
So here, actually another thing that, and I don't know if this is it also, but I think. Within our friendships, we have a few really close friends. And we talked about this from time to time, where I think a lot of men are still trying to adjust what it's like to share breadwinning responsibilities.
I think there's just this cultural thing, right? So, in a lot of marriages that we know, the wife feels like she's parenting both the kids and the husband, because the husband still, they split time. They both work, but the husband still feels , not consciously, that the house is still the wife's [00:25:30] responsibility.
Brad: Right.
Grant: And I think there's a lot of frustration there. And these are like, I'm talking college professors, you know, like, like very, very capable men who in many ways, if you ask them, is the home, your, or is it a joint responsibility they say yes, but then they still leave dishes in the sink and they don't clean the toilet and that sort of stuff.
And I think that might be relevant. The men just not quite being able to figure out how to be co-adults. Does that make sense?
Brad: Yeah, it does. Although I think the solution there is the division of labor. I think couples in today's world have to be much more intentional about sort of, and it doesn't have to be, you know, what you and your wife work out, you know, it can be different from what me and my wife work out.
But I think the challenge [00:26:30] to there is, if there's not some clarity about who's doing what. You know, generally speaking, that can create a lot of extra problems and I think men do better with like a clear script and a clear set of expectations. Just say, look, this is your domain so make it work rather than sort of split everything in the house halfway.
That's the recipe for disaster.
Grant: Right. Especially because the expectations for cleanliness are a little bit different as well. So that's what we actually did in our marriage is, I've said, okay, here's my five rooms. I'm responsible for these five rooms, everything in them. And that's actually seemed to be pretty helpful for us rather than having some unknown expectation for who's responsible for what part of things.
Brad: Yeah. Right. However, you kind of do it but I think the challenge is again, our elites. They want to make everything flexible and kind of ad hoc, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I think for a lot of other folks out [00:27:30] there, the lack of clear norms for how to do all this just ends up in disaster zone, you know, and even more obviously as your comments suggests, even for some elite folks, the lack of kind of clear norms.
And again, I might say everything back to 1955, but I think just the fact that so much of contemporary marriage and family life is negotiated and in play and you have to communicate about it and it just ends up being very challenging to navigate without having some clear rules of the road.
40-Year Divorce Rate Reduction
Grant: So how do you explain the steady reduction in divorces over the last 40 years?
Brad: Explain that state reduction in divorce of what?
Grant: The last 40 years.
Brad: So, I think there are a couple of things. One is that marriage has become more selective. And that means that people are getting married in a relatively more educated, more affluent, more religious, more conservative manner. And so, these are all things that are stabilizing forces. But I also think too, that there's been some kind of recognition [00:28:30] that the kind of era of easy divorce in the seventies was not great for kids and families. And so, I think there's also a rejection of that easy divorce ethos that wasmore common, and it's still there today, but it's I think was even more common in the 70s and early 80s.
Mike Pence Rule
Grant: What's your thought about the Mike Pence rule?
Brad: Yeah, I don't think it has to be that strict. But I think having some kind of idea that when you're traveling or when you're out with buddies, you know, that drinking and getting overly familiar with someone who's an attractive alternative to your spouse can get you into trouble. So, I [00:29:30] think just exercising some prudence and kind of keeping some walls up between yourself and people who might be attractive alternatives to your spouse is a prudent kind of thing to do. When I talk about a guy in my book who's not religious, not conservative, but what he does is that while traveling for his work, he is very clear when he's meeting people for the first time, you know, in terms of talking about his wife and kids and he is careful about how he kind of interacts with people online to sort of indicate that he's married.
And so I think there's kind of an ethic of prudence that has to kick in lest you be caught in a situation where you're on a work trip or you're at a party or whatever else, or you're at work and you're sharing your deepest concerns and hurts from your marriage with someone who really shouldn't be hearing them.
So, I think this issue of prudence is important.
Impacts of Kids on Long-Term Marital Happiness
Grant: So, I've seen some studies that suggest that [00:30:30] there is a drop in happiness in marriage after the kids come. And rebounds when the grandkids come, how do you explain that? And how should we understand that for couples that, you know, are newly married and thinking about kids?
Brad: So, I think it is the case that kids make marriage more challenging and especially the first child. It's a big transition, you know, where the focus is on the couple and then, when the baby comes, the focus is on the baby, especially for the mom. And that requires everything to be renegotiated and reorganized.
But I do think over time people make that adjustment and find that having kids is just an enormous source of meaning and happiness, you know, generally speaking. And we do see now in the data that at a descriptive level, to be sure. Married dads and married moms are markedly happier [00:31:30] than their fellow folks who are childless, be they married or not married.
So, I think people have to kind of recognize that kids are extremely important. They are certainly challenging, hard, difficult, stressful, you know, you lose your sleep, all that kind of stuff. Yes, but they also love you and you love them, and they provide an incredible addition to your life.
Grant: And kids are also for the common Good as well. Sometimes I wonder if that question of individual happiness is really what the important issue is when we think about having kids. To your point, I think they can make us very happy, but for the most part, having children is for the common good, for the common good of the children and for society and for the marriage itself.
Brad: Yeah, and our culture has an incredibly difficult time understanding that kind of argument [00:32:30] about kids.
Grant: Yeah, because then it goes immediately to the handmaid's tale, right? Like, so you said that I should have kids for the, for the society. Just to a certain extent, yes, I don't think we need to force people to get pregnant, but it's undeniable that kids are for the common good.
Brad: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, obviously kids are future taxpayers, they're future workers, they're future citizens, and those are among many of the reasons why they exist and are advantageous for the common good, as you said.
Grant: So, do you think women actually like being the breadwinner?
Brad: So, what I find is that in current marriages today, there isn't really a strong relationship between her breadwinning status and their marital happiness. But there is for women who have kids in the home, you know, a statistically significant relationship [00:33:30] between his full time breadwinning and her happiness. And so what I'm saying then is it looks like in today's marriages, what matters more is not necessarily how she's doing work outside the home as that she can kind of rely upon her husband to be a reliable breadwinner who provides for her and the family, a measure of financial security and stability that then allows them to make choices about how she's going to organize her work and family life.
Birth Rates
Grant: So, the last thing I want to talk about is birth rates. Obviously this is very highly relevant to marriage. So, if you woke up from a coma after 15 years, and I told you that the fertility rate was back at replacement, what would be your first guess about what happened?
Brad: In terms of the fertility rate in the next, say, 20 or 30 years?
Grant: Yeah, say again, you're in a coma for 15 years, you wake up, we're back at replacement, you didn't know what happened, what would be your guess? [00:34:30]
Brad: Yeah, I mean, I think we're going to see fertility fall to about 1.3, give or take, 1.4, give or take, and sit there for a while. And then I think at some point we'll see, you know, in the next 20 years or so, fertility increase as a different kind of orientation to marriage and family takes hold among a successor generation.
But that's assuming that we don't turn to artificial wombs and reproduction. And if we do that Grant, then I think things move in very different directions that I can't anticipate.
Impacts of Childless Policy Makers
Grant: So, I told you I'd bring up JD Vance again. So, as I'm sure you've heard, He's been in some hot water for some comments lately that he made about childless cat ladies. So, I'm sure you've heard, have you [00:35:30] heard that comment that he made about, this is essentially about Kamala Harris about how childless cat ladies are running American institutions.
But there does seem to be something serious underneath that rhetoric. How does the significant increase in single women without children impact how we think about politics going forward?
Brad: Yeah, I mean, I think having a large number of single people without kids is a situation where, I mean, the challenge I think, is that people are generally, as my book indicates, more likely to be flourishing when they have a spouse and kids. They're less lonely, they have more meaningful lives, more financial security and are generally happier. And so, I think that the challenge with a large number of single adults is that it's a more anomic trajectory. [00:36:30] And if we look at the events playing out in South Korea, it looks too like we can see this already in the U.S. to some extent too, it turns out that a lot of single men move in a rightward direction of a sort, and a lot of single women move in a leftward direction of sorts. There's a kind of political polarization that takes place.
It affects both their relationships and the broader polity. So, I think a big increase in singledom is challenging for people both at a financial and psychological level, but also, it's challenging too, for the health of the, of the Republic, because it seems like it just fuels a kind of polarization. That's not good for us.
Grant: Well, Brad, that is the end of my questions. I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This is a lot of fun. I'm really looking forward to working together in the future, both on this current project and then anything else that we find to work on together. So, thanks so much.
Brad: Thanks for having me on Grant. Appreciate it.
Grant: All right. Take [00:37:30] care.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to University of Pittsburgh graduate student Branden Dutchess for helping with editing the and cleaning up the transcript. Also, the introductory music was written by Joshua Goniea.
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