Playing With Mismatches

Economist Melissa Kearney has a new book out, and so she's been giving interviews and writing articles in an attempt to get her name out there, and drum up some sales. She's hitting the publicity circuit, which is something that a lot of authors do. To Mary Harris at Slate magazine, however, this has the makings of a moral panic over marriage rates, with Conservative thinkers and pundits looking to roll back women's rights by trapping them in bad marriages in the name of helping children.

But over the past month, this conservative panic burst into the mainstream. You might have noticed one article after another—in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic—arguing that marriage is good for you, makes you richer, makes your kids more successful. Some took this a little further, arguing marriage should be a policy goal.
Marriage Won’t Fix All of America’s Problems

The problem, as I see it, is stated somewhat succinctly in the NPR article on Ms. Kearney's work (which post-dates Ms Harris' breathless Slate article): "[Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas'] book suggests that many women don't marry the father of their child not because they reject the concept of marriage, but because they do not see him as a reliable source of economic security or stability. They appear to have a higher bar for a potential spouse than their partners, or the fathers of their children, have met." This is not a new concern; at least, not for the nation at large. Low educational attainment, leading in turn to a lack of good employment prospects, has been a problem in America's lower-income Black community for at least as long as my lifetime. It's part of the reason why only a minority of Black adults are married. Black men are married at low rates because they're not considered good prospects, and Black women are married at low rates because they don't consider many Black men good prospects and won't typically look to other communities for partners. People like Melissa Kearney have become involved because the pattern has become widespread enough in the non-college-educated White population that people are starting to take notice.

The general Liberal critique (and/or fear) of books like Ms. Kearney's is that it will be taken as a reason to enact policy that makes it more difficult for unmarried women to get along in society, the assumption being that this will force them to marry whomever they can, even if that person is a poor partner for one or more of any number of reasons. And it's not completely unfounded; finding self-described Conservatives who believe that women's rights should be rolled back in the service of forcing them back into the role of men's domestic partners isn't particularly difficult. And that leads to a perception that people like Ms. Kearney are useful idiots for reactionaries who want a return to the relationship mores of the past. Casting the whole enterprise as revanchist, however, doesn't actually deal with the underlying problem; namely that a woman who declines to marry someone who will be either unable to add anything to the household, or, in a worst-case scenario, need to be actively supported by her (along with any children the couple might have) is a perfectly rational choice. Not wanting to marry someone who is incapable of routinely contributing anything is much different than an insistence on "marrying up."

I do think the government should increase income assistance to economically struggling individuals and families, both married and single. But no government check—even one much larger than what’s politically feasible in the U.S. today—is going to make up for the absence of a supportive, loving, employed second parent in the home.
Melissa Kearney “A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking About”

Not having read Ms. Kearney's book, I don't know if she's outlined any plans for dealing with that lack. I wouldn't be the first person to point out that no-one has figured out how to legislate the presence of a supportive, loving and employed second parent. And a number of women have clearly decided that they're not in the business of gambling that a man who doesn't fit the bill when she isn't married to him will find a way to meet those criteria if she is. And, as often as people would point out that all children deserved a father and a mother, no-one was, or is, in the business of finding single people who would make good second parents and enticing, or coercing, them into taking on the role. Of course, Ms. Kearney isn't the only person who is at a loss. When I touched on this topic more than a decade ago, I was coming at it from the other direction, that is was unrealistic to expect single people to avoid having children until they'd found a suitable marriage partner. I noted:

There is no viable method of ensuring that only those people who are financially (or physically, or emotionally) capable become parents. So we're better off working to broaden the population of capable people.

That struck me as a tall order then, and it strikes me as one now. Both reducing the costs of having children or helping the low-income become less low-income so as to make them both more secure parents and better partners are likely simply off the table. And maybe that's why so many people fear that Melissa Kearney is enabling bad ideas; there seems to be a distinct lack of good ones.