Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Luis Peralis. This is an editor here at the dispatch and my guest today is Melissa Carnegie. Melissa is an economist at the University of Maryland

She is a non-resident fellow the Brookings Institution

And she's the author of a new book the two-parent privilege how Americans stop getting married and started following behind

We talk all things related to marriage two parent families and other rice of single parenthood is still something they should all take seriously. Hope you enjoy it

Melissa Carnegie welcome to the dispatch podcast. Thanks so much for having me. And really at the outset congratulations on the book. It is incredibly insightful. It's super readable. That's not something that you normally say about economics research. I appreciate that. No offense intended. No, it's really a compliment. And I think it's really gotten a conversation about marriage

And family formation going and that's what we're going to be talking about today for listeners to kind of set a bit of an agenda. I'm hoping that we can talk about the meat of the book. Just the research that you put together and compile and the importance of marriage. And the kind of what two-parent family really does for children for couples. Then talk a little bit about the response that you got to the book since this release a couple of weeks ago.

What kind of get started can you tell us a little bit about before even talking about who's getting married the broad sweep of marriage how that's changed in the us over the past couple of decades. How many people are getting married how likely is it that a child will be born into a two-parent family or single-parent family now as opposed to say the 90s for the early 2000s.

Yeah, sure. So the major change in the marriage landscape that I'm focused on is a very crude one and it's simply the decline in marriage among parents in particular. But as I show in the book and hopefully we'll unpack a little bit the reason why the decline in parents has happened is really because of a broader decline in marriage overall.

Right, especially outside college educated adults. There's been a massive decline in the share of sort of primate adults adults 22 to 54 who are married. And that has been steadily declining among adults who don't have college degrees through the 80s 90s through 2020.

And what has happened is that that has led to an increase in the share of children being born outside of marital unions such that now 40% of babies in the US are born to unmarried parents as compared to 18% in 1980.

So really a massive sort of separation of marriage from having and raising kids in this country.

You alluded to this in that response that that's a sort of top line figure but it varies when you're looking at different groups in the book you tell a story about race and ethnicity you also tell a story about age.

But the main story that you talk about is story about class. How does marriage look differently from say college educated adults versus those who don't have a college education?

This, this is precisely why I've come to this topic and and want to situate the topic of family structure into our conversations about income inequality and social mobility in the US is because there's now a major class dimension and I define class simply based on education.

Major class dimension and who is and isn't getting married and raising their kids and married parents homes.

12% of kids born to moms with a college degree live in with an unpartnered mother.

Okay, so that's college educated mothers 12% of their kids are in unpartnered mother's homes as compared to 30% of kids whose moms don't have a college degree.

And so this is like a major difference and we see this by the way this comes directly from what's happening in marriage.

They're the share of college educated women who are married has basically hovered around 70% through the past 40 years and it's straight lying down among moms with only a high school degree.

So there's this really major inequality element at play both cause and effect, but this is why I mean anyone who sort of cares about class gaps and in the ways in which the college educated class is pulling away from everyone else in society to their advantage.

The idea that college educated couples college educated adults the most successful adults in society are still the ones getting married at high rates their rates of marriage really haven't declined in 40 years.

They're still the ones finding marriage to be an appealing attractive feasible institution is really compounding the advantage of that class to the detriment of everyone else frankly since everyone else is pulling away from marriage and their kids are much less likely now.

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