Morning Must-Read: Steve Randy Waldmann: Pro-Family, Pro-Children, Anti-”Marriage Promotion”

Steve Randy Waldmann: interfluidity » Followup: Pro-family, pro-children, anti-”marriage promotion”: “James Pethokoukis misreads the views of people like me.

He writes: ‘Folks who agree with [Waldman’s] view often advocate a hugely expanded government safety net — universal pre-K, one-year paid parental leave, a universal basic income among other programs — to do the work of transmitting social and intellectual capital that intact families no longer can.’ Folks who are me do advocate for vastly expanded government benefits for families…. But the purpose… is not to ‘do the work… that intact families no longer can’… I support these programs because they would enable and assist the work that couples must do to stay together and in love and raise children well….

The quantitatively relevant challengers to the intact, two-parent household are divorced parents and single moms. Those households do not result from any decline in positive norms surrounding married life, though they may in part enabled by a relaxation of negative norms surrounding single parenthood and divorce. Americans do not, in large numbers, choose to become single or divorced parents when they have the option of raising children in loving, economically secure marriages. They become single parents because they want to be parents and the loving, economically secure marriage is not available. People who imagine that nefarious alternatives to married childrearing are being promoted and must be countered in the cultural sphere are simply misguided. The effective way to support traditional families would be to increase the likelihood that a marriage chosen remains loving and economically secure….

In a better world, social conservatives would have more confidence in the power of their own ideals. One doesn’t have to be cajoled or trapped into the good life…. Yes, Hollywood puts out a lot of prurient and violent movies. But the same industry produces scores of romantic comedies and sappy chick-flicks in which marriage epitomizes the happily-ever-after…. The centrality of wedding fantasy in American cultural life reflects a powerful, durable aspiration. America really is exceptional in its attitude towards marriage…. There is little more harmful to life and love than poverty and economic instability. Social conservatives are fond of pointing out that AFDC used to explicitly subsidize single motherhood, and that was obviously bad. (It was!) But present arrangements subsidize romantic cohabitation in preference to marriage in poorer, more precarious, communities…. The option of kicking out an indigent partner is extremely valuable, especially for moms in communities where men are frequently out of work. Mothers are wise, not foolish, to retain that option…. Vigorous full employment, or a universal basic income, would eliminate the strong economic incentive for mothers to prefer cohabitation without commitment and make marriage rational where now it is not.

Conservatives often claim to have faith in America, in American exceptionalism. I wish they’d have a bit more faith in the institutions that they claim are valuable and in Americans who aren’t rich…. Rich liberals aren’t shamed, exhorted, counseled, bribed, or propagandized into marriage. They choose it. There are rational, remediable reasons why poorer Americans don’t make the same choice. I wish we would address those reasons rather than pretend the choices are mistakes or moral failures.

It is very depressing that even to the usually-reliable Pethokoukis, William Julius Wilson wrote in vain–that it does not appear to occur to Pethokoukis that what social policy ought to be doing is making males “marriageable”…

You know what is also depressing? All this interacts in a way that I do not understand with birth control. When I listen to too many conservatives–like Rand Paul–I find myself genuinely creeped out by what I am hearing. It seems to be: “It is unconscionable for Obama care to pay for birth control. You are not supposed to plan to have sex–you are supposed to have sex in the heat of the moment. And then you are supposed to get pregnant, and have to marry the man in a shotgun marriage, and then stick with him in a bitter depressing relationship because you can’t survive economically on your own. That is the just punishment for not controlling your libido. And liberal policy short-circuits that just order of the universe info so many ways…”