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edward wilcox, thank you for joining us. you have a book coming out september. it was going to be june. keep an eye out for that. on the material sense to. obviously it's very important . let's just start here. i'd love to and as much as we could preview your book and what you're thinking about. if i were to articulate an issue that defines realignment happening everyone would come back to the idea of family policy. that's a universal one. how that's gone down over the past several years, let's start there. >> one of the striking things and disturbing things about

the work i've been doing recently is seeing how much the family story is really a working-class story when it comes to americanlife . we've seen the biggest declines among working-class americans from 1980 to the present so thinking about why working-class america is the way that it is you have to appreciate there's obviously a lot of pain and pathos their revolving around what's happening in american working-class families so not the middle class, certainly not the upper class as seen dramatic decline from 1980 to the present so that part of what's bringing people in i think political directions and obviously there's a lot of pain driving all of this. >> how would you distinguish the working class family? >> if you look at how households are divided by quintile you can see unfortunately marriage is

already in a precarious way by the 70s among the poor but from 1980 to the present we see a share of kids living from around 75 percent in working-class quintile to around 55 percent currently. and no group in american life saw as much of a decline in marriage as did this working class demographic. that's part and parcel of what's driving these conversations . >> first let me make sure i'm audible. thanks for having me especially in my current state. i think it was sam hammond who made me aware of a study that said quite relevantly to our topic today that unfortunately most of the

policy levers that you can paul to try and increase the fertility rate just don't move the needle very much. their affects are that large but for one exception is effects. if somebody in your social circle as bbs you are much more polikely in the coming 12 months to be become pregnant . i'm here to keep in mind that all of your friends are having babies . i think the problem of the decline of the family is so much bigger even than most family policy wonks appreciate because it's no secret there's been a decline in fertility but there are two different types of fertility decline. one is women who are married or having one kid before where they would have had two or three. and then there is women who are just not getting married,

not having kids at all. i think when you look at the millennial generation the biggest problem is in that latter category and that's a lot more intractable. it's the problem getting women in families to have more kids, as many kids as they want to have, that's something you could tweak these baby boomers but if ou people are not forming families in the first place then you're talking about a social problem rather than a financial one u. >> some of your work has resonated the most and some i of the most popular content i will ever do is on lack of male wages, opportunity, listlessness, marriage ability and the dating market . it resonates out one of the deepest cultural levels i've seen and i don't see anybody in themainstream touching on it . there's one way and some people often do this with women but in terms of what

women find desirable among men is downstream on economic structure, of expectation that goes back for quite along time and the way where structured is not creating the conditions for that to occur where you can even have one child or not so i'd like to hear from both of you about the conditions political or government aside that have created this mess we are in right now. >> certainly one of the things i've heard from women more generally is kind of frustration the quality of men there encountering. not every guy but many of the men they are encountering and their capacity to commit, drive, avagency and their success in the labor force. we've seen a dramatic increase in the share of men not working full-time. it's about double since 1970. this means particularly poor

communities often have couples where she working more hoursthan he is . even despite that reality, she's also doing more housework and childcare so it creates all lot of resentment and unwillingness to think about marriage for many women particularly in working-class and poor communities across the country and thinking about what is it about our current social context that made men more likely to sort of be idle or not fully engaged in the labor force. there's a lot one could say that technology is one factor, the way in which there is much good high-quality cheap entertainment out there to keep men distracted from fully engaging in high school and fully engaging in technical school. but where always seeing data,

one study published last week that the guys most likely not to be working today are having physical and mental health problems related to family instability or family . dysfunction growing up so this brings us back to the family again . if there's not a father on scene then it looks like the boys are more likely to be experiencing physical maladies, emotional distress. they're not care to engage in the working world as well so that's part of the larger landscape of how to inform some of ourcurrent challenges today . >> the first is on the political factors that have helped to create this problem and as soon as you said that i had an impish thought about the most the election and one of the most notable things to come out of that is this

analysis of the various demographic breakdowns of which party and which group was that the gender gap is really a marriage gap. you think of republicans doing better around men and democrats doing better among women but among married women its single women love the democratic party andlove it a lot . the gap is massive and it sounds cynical to say but if you think those in incentives don't affect rather politicians and those issues they choose to prioritize your correct. it's depressing but it's true . >> if we're starting with technocratic study that says the this is what government can do to turn the thing it's unclear what are democrats not incentivized to do but also liberalization and divorce, what would be your thought on that.

>> that's the perfect lead-in to point number two which is a thing we could do tomorrow that would make ceus a big difference and it has to do with this s point you raised about disappointment in men. which is also something that we call offered from ladies out there today but as the woman on the panel i feel like i am well-positioned to criticize the women a little bit. right now we one of the biggest reasons for the decline in marriage is the college gap. we are approaching a point where there are for college etiquette educated women who are unmarried for every three college educated males and women are earning more bachelors degrees that advanced degrees at every level of higher education and that's only recently become true so the gap isonly going to get bigger . and it is simply an observable fact that women are not willing to pair off with men who have less education than we have.

>> .. weto could stop minting all of these unnecessary college degrees and not religions very much as a society pure spirit i think college is a key part of this story we talked about this before but with the male dropout surge of 202021, where now at 60-40. with elite institutions in particular for women and men. like youto said, if that's going to be and remain static it's not

just about what we see in the sort of like you touched on this not even about willing to date somebody or be with somebody who has the same education. it comes down to wages and the lack of wage increase for working-class men in particular appearsrs to be deeply tied to e story of lack of family formation, lack of manageability brad you can touch on this, a lot of downstream health problemslk which are surprising but not evenca not talking about mental health on talking physical ailment when you d at a much higher degree much more likely toof drop out of the workforce because every workplace injury. they died much earlier actually tender married counterparts like the level of despair the switches in one's life it's difficult to describe unless you would take a hard look at the data here. >> what we are saying as we saw

last week is a big spike in the number of young adult for reporg these problems healthwise. part of the issue, think about how do we address the problem is look at obviously schooling not just college but enter middle schools and high schools to kind of create classroom contacts at a much more male friendly. i was talking about this in the last couple of months but we just need to do a lot more to get more men in the classroom but beyond that to some think about curriculum, pedagogy, moral recess obviously but different ways to make boys feel like they got a place in our schools here i think also doing more to h revive single-sex education as well. and then in terms of high school and beyond doing a lot more to promote but was classically called vocational education and doing more like what germany and japan do to give men and on road into trades that will give them a decent middle income that will make them more attractive even

to college-educated women who might be willing to marry down educationally for what's striking that is relatively new research indicating that when women are bearing down educationally, they are still marrying up financially. so they find the guy who is working as an emt and making a good salary. they find a guy who's working in the traits and that's the guy who they marry to the point is whether to continue to think about ways to strengthen especially working-class man's opportunities to flourish when it comes to providing because it'sth good for them and it's gd for the marriage ability as well. >> i think this is a great opportunity to recognize that many a people on the left like richard reeves are thinking about this issue seriously and about improving economic opportunities for working-class men. but there is an idea that is very prevalent on the left in that strain ofha the left that would be extremely dangerous for us to embrace, kind of a

primrose path in a bad direction pick up want to raise it so we can all reject it and know not to go there. one thing that richard reeves observed in his book on the decline of man is that the gender integration of various professions and jobs has really only gone one way since the 1970s. formally male-dominatedat professions now have lots and lots of female representation. feedback representation formerly female dominated jobs and professions are still extremely female' dominated peer there still not that many male elementary school teachers or librarians or things like that this is a problem because given the changes in the economy in the last 20 years, the biggest job growth has been in the caring professions and home health aides and things like that, in thehe sort of pink colr female work. so face without array facts, many people on the left have said what we need to do is make

more menen willing to go to the nurses and preschool teachers and whatever. tell man there's nothing unmanly about joining helping profession. i really don't think keeping men out of these healthy professions in these pink collar jobs is a stigma. it's just naturale differences between men and women for women are more interested in caring touchy-feely helping job stability and minimal interest in building things with her hands or things that are analytical, whatever. so it would be a mistake to try to push more men into female jobs and to solve the decline in male working-class that i way. fixing this problem will require bringing back or fortifying male-dominated industry because i don't think shoving them into female jobs is going to work. >> there was a political economy piece that is flowing from the comments and when you think

about how our policies do you or do not tend to reinforce excessive employment in american higher education. there's tons and tons of administered doing work that doesn't need to get done as we all know spirit and they are women for the most part. >> many of them are women and same true in k healthcare as wel we can think about steering our economy and corrections are mora favorable towards manufacturing, natural gas, all that t kind of stuff that would be come not mention infrastructure for i'm not sure how much progress we've made spending this infrastructure money that is been passed in good ways to the our ways we could shift the political economy that would be more i conducive to maximizing working-class man's engagement in the rural economy as well. >> i'm really curious here, starting with you brad, to what degree should be conceived of marriage and fertility issues moving forward as primary like economic or cultural ones? especially because it seems it

feels like with both options, now that we progress into the discourse, and to your point, we know you can't just turn on the technocratic policy. you know, valve, which would appeal to the centerleft spaces and then on the cultural and we are kind of left with this at best frustrating kind of robert putnam and her institution tech to come back together and once we come after 40 is not known how to do that will fix the thinker so where are we left considering both those factors? >> yeah, i think it's a both and challengeded i was talking to scholar today at uv who was visiting and she studying japan and family life in japan and theyhe been throwing every poliy think they can't at the t and is not moving the dial. just passing a child allowance, family allowance, adding some

kind of day care policy to the sordid menu is not going to do it on the one hand. body for conservatives have sort of had this idea that all we need do is change the culture, capture the commanding heights of the "new york times" and early colleges and sort of engineer different messages. i think that would be really helpful but we also to make sure there's a political economy that is being acknowledged so we are on the one hand, telling people the truth which is as far as i can tell the number one predictor of global life satisfaction that i've been able to run across and all my data analyses is marital equality, the quality of your marriage, that beats jobit satisfaction, t beats money, a lot of things. so giving people a true portrait of the world as it really is underlying where social animals. we thrived with good family relationships come good friendships, et cetera we're not doing so well on the front. >> that's the classic conservative perspective pick it needs to be better articulated and betteric communicated and

better disseminated. but we've also got to make sure when it comes to giving people the economic resources they need to build forcing families that they have the resources. that's were a child allowance is helpful. that's were we thinking the kind of money were spent on higher education versus vocational education is helpful and that's where educational policies helpful in terms of giving ordinary families more resources to steer their kids away from failing public schools toward schools that are moree allied with their own values and commitments would also be helpful. is both an economic piece to do here and there's a cultural piece to do here. we need some creative institutions come ngos, actors kind of also make this case for marriage and family more exciting to young adults today i think as well. conclusion that there's a huge economic piece to this. and so you're left with how do

we solve the marriage crisis, bring back manufacturing. okay. no sweat. but i started on that. right. the first person to have that thought. right. but but i think there's actually lot of value as as is often the case, one of the big lessons of conservatism is that sometimes the best thing you can do is just not screw up, don't introduce any new, horrible factors, pushing things in the wrong direction. and we have seen, for example, a massive push in the united states and across the western world in the last decade, subsidized childcare because the dual earner family is a very difficult model to make work. and a lot of families are finding that they're spending as much on childcare as the woman is bringing in. and it's just the numbers aren't adding up. and so elizabeth warren is out there now saying universal free childcare from that would be doubling down on the two earner family model to the structural

disadvantage age of people who want to pursue the one earner model, the one that made so many people so happy for, so many centuries. and so the one of the biggest things we could do for families in the next ten years is just make the left does not bring in universal subsidized childcare, it's going to come up in every presidential election and, you know, with enough momentum, it could actually happen. so there will be enormous in just stopping that from because that would that would make our family problem even worse. and i think one thing that sort of underline in connection with helen's point is this this idea of family policy as it sort of kind of rolled out over there in capitol hill and other contexts, is often about basically making better workers. it's not about kind of parents to their kids. so from my perspective, perspective, it's true for family studies. we're talking about family policies that actually re functionalized the family give

parents more time, more more opportunities to be with their children. that's in part because when i've been looking actually at marriage equality, what surprised me in some of my recent analyzes is that, yes, doing fun things as a family was of happier husbands and wives in my data. but doing chores together as a family. and this really kind of blew my mind. it made me rethink some priorities in my own household and even better predict, more of marital quality than doing fun as a family. but i think if you send me that study, i'm going to tell my kids it points to kind of a deeper reality. and that is that kind of when we're doing productive, work together as husbands and wives and children in the household for one another year i think it tends to engender a sense of solidarity that's often lacking in households today that are much more basically consumption and about, you know, getting the kids to excel in school and in sports. but again, the idea here is we're trying to re functionally samuel have so people can really

invest practically in one another and in the home a whole. i think it's very easy to go into doom and gloom on this subject. so there anything on this that you're optimistic about when looking at this at a sociocultural level? helen, i was going to ask for a minute to. okay. brad. well, you know, i think, you know, one of the sort of mysteries is that, you know, when you look at the research on marriage and child well-being, it just kind of keeps coming in and in. so it's like, you know, maybe at some point it's just going to like break out into the public, you know, that there is this sort of like, you know, so but i mean, it's good news in the sense that like, the research continues to kind of like reinforce the importance of stable married families for kids and adults in my my newer thought is that marriage matters more than ever in a world that's more secular, in a world where people are less engaged local communities and a world of we spend too much time on our devices like being a halfway decent spouse, halfway decent parent forces you to kind of have in-person community in a very local way. and then also, if you're a parent sending your kids to

school soccer, maybe if you're religious, you know, sunday school, you're just out and about you're more social and we're social animals. we thrive, you know, when you have these opportunities. so think since the good news that i would at least convey to folks is that look like this thing, you know, this fundamental institution and is super good for you on average, it can be obviously extremely tough and hard, but on average is good for you. and like it's it's getting relatively that much more beneficial and it was ever before because other institutions are not doing so well today. so that's sort of the good news. i'd say i did think of, all right, the lockdown baby boomlet we a little uptick in the u.s. fertility rate and it's going to take a while to break down numbers on why exactly that happened and among whom it happened. but my sense is that it is because women stuck at home from lockdowns and discovered they really liked spending time with their kids and baking bread and doing the housewife thing. and a lot of them are not going back into the workforce or

they're going back in the workforce part time and continuing to and they're realizing, yeah, family's pretty great. i ate it. all it takes is just stepping off, you know, the rat race for one second and you realize the things that actually make happy. so i think that's i think that's a national trend. i think that's a real, real thing. absolutely. and i think to be clear, we're not looking looking back to 1955 as the model that is before us. but i think the point about this little baby boomlet is that what happened, too, is that a lot of families were able to kind of work in some new ways from home, kind of reintroduce the home economy, too. so as we kind of look forward, you know, we can think about ways in which husbands and wives can be working from home. in some cases, some professions, obviously. and that will kind of facilitate a more family centric way of life that looks like for a lot of people, you know, is is conducive to more happiness and maybe even more kids to. well said i'm thank you so much brad and how i brought especially you driving up from india today we really appreciate

that this has been really great. i'm going to pass the mic to zach graves, but this was a great closing panel. thank thanks, guys. all right. okay, everyone i'm zach graves, executive director of lincoln network. and we thank you for joining us we thank you for joining us today for this great series of panels but it's the second life we live in a conference we've done. the first one was in miami and we are really excited to bring this to d.c. so please join in thinking marshall insider for a marathon of images today. [applause] >> this year booktv celebrates 25 years of representing nonfiction books and authors. >> for the 22nd your integral booktv is live with library of congress national book festival. >> and since 2001 booktv in

partnership with the library of congress has provided signature in-depth uninterrupted coverage at the national book festival featuring hundreds of nonfiction authors and guests. watch saturday as booktv once again brings you live all day coverage of the national book festival. guests and authors include librarian of congress cla hayden, cast and buttigieg on his book i have something to tell you for young adults, and former nfl player rk russell off of the yards between the spirit the library of congress national book festival live saturday beginning at 9 a.m. eastern on c-span2. >> s that i did night on c-span's qa date newsmax chief white house correspondent james rosen author of scalia, rise to greatness, 1936-1986 talks about

the first of this two-part biography of the late supreme court associate justice antonin scalia. >> scully i think we come from the excesses of the student antiwar movement of the late '60s, the unrest, the taking of alonzo nance confounds a debate and all that shaped him in ways that made him a better judge and better just to say really can't understand how we got to be just as clear without understanding the elements of his academic career. >> james rosen with his book scalia cited night at cspan2 a a but you can listen to q&a of over podcast on a free c-span now app. >> a healthy democracy doesn't just look like this. it looks like this, where americans can see democracy at work, where citizens are truly informed, a republic thrives. get informed straight from the