by Stephanie Coontz
January 31st, 2008
As I have argued in this forum and in my recent book, good marriages today are fairer, more intimate, and more likely to improve the well-being of their members (husbands, wives and children) than ever before — indeed, part of today’s gap between child outcomes in one and two-parent families may [...]
Read: The Next Question: How Can We Improve the Lives of America’s Children?
by Norval D. Glenn
January 30th, 2008
I appreciate the fact that Stevenson and Wolfers get down to specifics in their latest post. That is constructive. However, I don’t appreciate their saying that I am an advocate of changes in divorce law. I am not and never have been. In my second set of comments in this exchange, I said that [...]
by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers
January 30th, 2008
We have previously noted the deregulation of family life that began in the middle of the last century, and thought it worth thought that it would be useful to summarize what happened and what social scientists have learned about the effects of these changes. To be clear about terminology, by “deregulation,” we are referring [...]
by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers
January 27th, 2008
Our job as social scientists is to help disentangle causation from correlation. This can be a very difficult, and sometimes impossible, job. Sometimes it is a matter of the chicken and the egg. For instance, we know that divorced people are more likely to drink, use drugs, have lower income, and be [...]
by Kay S. Hymowitz
January 27th, 2008
Alas, Norval Glenn is correct that our debate thus far has contained some gratuitous “slams.” Still, I’m not as sanguine as he is that our disagreements are illusory. True, we all agree that marriage has become a locus for self-fulfillment. We also all agree that women are no longer of necessity tied down [...]
by Stephanie Coontz
January 26th, 2008
Sharp debates over questions such as the potential impact of marriage promotion in reducing poverty or the effect of single parenthood on child outcomes are sometimes necessary, because our political climate is filled with simplistic claims that ignore complex family interactions, confuse correlations with cause and effect, promise one-step solutions for social ills, and ignore [...]
by Norval D. Glenn
January 25th, 2008
This exchange has been useful, in my opinion, because it illustrates that much of the public discourse about marriage is based on the illusion that there is more disagreement about marriage-related issues than there really is, or at least than there really is among some of the major participants. This illusory disagreement makes for some [...]
by Stephanie Coontz
January 23rd, 2008
Some of the responses to my article contribute to clarifying the areas of agreement and disagreement surrounding contemporary family trends, and some of them really don’t. On the positive side, Stevenson’s and Wolfers’ piece shows how researchers working with very different data and methodologies can produce similar analyses. Their description of the nature of modern [...]
by The Editors
January 23rd, 2008
Writing at the Austrian Economists blog, Steven G. Horwitz, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University and a scholar of the economics of the family, takes off from this month’s Cato Unbound discussion, but pushes even deeper into the question of the historical and economic forces changing the shape of marriage and family.
Read: Best of the Blogs: Steven Horwitz on Economic Forces and the Family
by Norval D. Glenn
January 21st, 2008
In his reply, University of Texas sociologist Norval D. Glenn, identifies Stephanie Coontz as a member of the “family-change-is-irreversible school of thought,” which he says “includes the view that attempts to retard, stop, or reverse any major aspect of recent family change are futile and thus are at best a waste of effort and at worst downright harmful…” But, Glenn asks, don’t liberals generally think policy can mitigate the consequences of economic change? Moreover, is anyone really asking to return to some Golden Age of marriage? There is evidence, Glenn submits, that marriage trends will further improve and that policy interventions, like marriage education, can help.
by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers
January 18th, 2008
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the Univesity of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, “re-frame Coontz’s careful history of the family in the language of economics,” exploring the economic forces underlying changes in marriage. Modern marriage, Stevenson and Wolfers argue, is marked by “a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption.” Modern marriage, which they call “hedonic marriage,” is more centered on love and companionship. Marriage as such isn’t doomed, they claim, but “marriage in which one person specializes in the home while the other person specializes in the market is indeed doomed,” especially as women’s educational levels begin to surpass men’s. Attempts to “re-regulate” the family to fit a classic ideal, they argue “may actually be a force undermining the dynamic institution that is the modern U.S. family.”
by Kay S. Hymowitz
January 16th, 2008
Kay S. Hymowitz, the William E. Simon fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argues that Stephanie Coontz’s sketch of the state of marriage is badly incomplete, failing to acknowledge the class divide in marriage and childrearing. “This marriage gap,” she writes, “has profound implications for our political, social and economic prospects for one simple reason: overall, children do better in life if they are raised by their own married parents.” According to Hymowitz, “The de-linking of marriage and childrearing is a particular dilemma in the Unites States … [W]hat you have is a recipe for entrenched, trans-generational poverty, inequality, racial disparities …, reduced social and economic mobility, and — libertarians take note! — demands for government taxes to fund programs to correct the mess.”
by Stephanie Coontz
January 14th, 2008
In this month’s lead essay, historian Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, briefly lays out the history of marriage to understand its present and future. “Today, when a marriage works,” Coontz argues, “it delivers more benefits to its members — adults and children — than ever before.” However, “the same things that have made so many modern marriages more intimate, fair, and protective have simultaneously made marriage itself more optional and more contingent on successful negotiation.” Instead of trying to resurrect a bygone ideal of marriage, those of us interested in encouraging healthy families now need to focus on what makes unmarried co-parents, single parents, cohabiting couples, as well as contemporary marriages successful on their own terms.
Learn more about the Cato Institute:
Stay up-to-date daily on issues at the Cato Institute:
Editor: Will Wilkinson
Managing Editor: Jason Kuznicki
Senior Editor: Brink Lindsey
Cato Unbound is powered by WordPress Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).