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it was going to be june. keep an eye out for that. working on something with boomers is a fun fest. let's just start here.

as much as you can preview your book ande what you are thinking about. if i were ever to articulate an issue on why there is this realignment happening, i think anyone would come back to this idea of policy. that would be the first one. what is your response to what that happened. going down over the past three or four years. we will have to start there. >> one of the disturbing things about the work i've been doing lately is seeing how much the families story is really a working-class story when it comes topr marriage and families among working-class americans from 1980. why working-class americavi is e way that it is. you have to understand appreciate that there is a lot there. a lot of it is revolving around what is happening in american working-class families.

not the floor, not the middle-class, certainly not the upper class, we see the demands from 1980 to the present. that is what is bringing people in new political directions. there is a lot of pain that is driving all of that as well. >> how would you destroy english the working-class family. >> you can see unfortunately kind of marriage is already in a pretty pure curious way by the 70s among the poor. from 1980 until the present ucs share of kids going from 75% in that working-class, you know, to around 55% currently. no group in american life in terms of those saws much of a decline and marriage as did this working-class demographics. >> that is part and parcel of

what is driving these conversations. >> what are your thoughts?ma >> well, that me make sure i'm audible. thank you for having me. especially in my current state. i think i was sam -- it was sam that made me aware of a study that said quite relevantly to our topic today that unfortunately, most of the policy levers that you can pull to try to increase the fertility rate just do not move the needle very much. the one exception is effects. if somebody in your social circle has a baby you are much likely. >> all of your friends are having babies. >> the problem so much bigger

than policy woke's appreciate. it is no secret that there's been a decline in fertility. they have one kid before they would have one, two or they would prefer to have three and then there are 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. if the problem were women, you know, getting women who are married and families tap more kids and have as many kids as

they want to have, not something you can tweak with the tax credit are baby boomers something like that, but if they are not forming families in the first place, youst are talking about a social problem rather than a financial problem. >> some of your work that is resignation at their most. the most viral, most popular content i will ever do is on lack of male wages, opportunity, listen this -- listen this and resonates at on' of the deepest levels. i don't see anyone touching on it. people often do this, they will

blame the women. in terms of what women find desirable among men is also very downstream of an economic structure, of opportunity, of expectations that go back for quite a long time in the way we are structured right now is not creating the conditions for that to even occur where you can have the choice to have one child or not. i would like to hear from both of you about the conditions, political or government aside, that have created this mess we are in right now. brad, youis can go first. >> sure. one of the things that i've heard is just a frustration with the qualityco of men that they e encountering. not every guy, but many of them in thatin they are encountering. there are questions about capacity to commit, drive, agency and their success. we have seen basically a pretty dramatic increase in the men that are not working full time. it has about doubled since 1970. this means particularly in working-class and poor communities, you often have couples where she is working more hours than he is, she is earning more money than he is and despite that reality, she is also doing more housework. it just creates a lot of resentment and an unwillingness to think about marriage for many women working class and poor

communities across the country. i've been thinking about what is it about our current social context that sort of made men more likelyhn to sort of be eitr idle or not fully engaged in labor force. there is a lot we could say about that. i think certainly technology is one factor. so much good high quality cheap entertainment out there. keeping men sort of distracted from being fully engaged and also fully engaging at work. but we are also seeing in some new data just published last week that the guys that are the most likely not to be working today are also reporting physical and mental health problems. those are in turn related to family instability orr family dysfunction growing up. it brings us back to the family again. if families are not l forming wl

, there is not a decent father on scene, then it looks like the boys will be experiencing both appeared emotional distress. not really prepared to fully engage the working world as well that is part of the larger landscape that helps to inform some of our current challenges today. >> two answers to your question. the first is the political factors helping to create this problem. as soon as you said that i had a thought about the most recent election. in one of the most notable things to come out of that in the analysis of the various breakdowns of which party on which group was that the gender gap is really a marriage gap. that you think of republicans doing better among men and democrats doing better about women, but married women but single women love the democratic party and they love it a lot. it sounds cynical to say it, but if you think that those do not affect democratic politicians, you arere crazy. it is depressing, but it is simply true. >> quick question.

if we are starting with, you knowow, starting off with a stuy that says that there is very little that government can do to turn, you know, the thing, what thing are democrats not incentivized to do. if people are not getting married, what would be your thought on that. >> that is a perfectly dental point number two. a policy lever that we could pull that would make a really big difference. it has to do about disappointment in men. which is, something that we have all heard from ladies out there today. as a woman on the panel i feel like i am well-positioned. right now one of the biggest reasons for the decline in marriage is the college gap.

for college-educated women who are unmarried for every three college-educated males? and women are earning more bachelors degrees in advanced degrees at every level of higher education. and that has only recently become true. so the gap is only 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 they have. a woman with a college degree, you have closed off from the marriage market all the men out there without college degrees. that is where those women may be saying men are not living up to my standards. it definitely does not mean he is not up to your standards, honey. he could be great. if your degree is in early childhood education you are not so hot yourself. in other words, that was a joke,

but what i mean is we could stop all of these unnecessary college degrees and not really lose very much of a society. >> i think college is such a key part of the story. we talked about this before. with the male dropout surge of 2020-2021, we are now at 60/40. elite institutions in particular for women and men. like you said, if that would be and remain static, well, not just about what we have seen, it is not even about willing to date somebody or be with somebody who has the same educationea.

though wage,hi the lack of wage increase for working-class men in particular appears to be deeply tied to the story of lack of family formation, of lack of marriage ability. brad, you can touchch on this, o a lot w of downstream health problems. we are not talking about mental health, i'msu talking about physical ailment. injured in a much higher degree. much more likely to drop out of the workforce because of a workplace injury. they died much earlier than their married counterparts. the level of despair that this reaches in one's life, it is kind of difficult to describe unless you really take a hard look at the data care. >> i think thatoo what we are seeing is just a big spike in the number of young adults who are reporting these problems healthwise. in terms of thinking about how do we address the problem, not just the college, but our middle schools and high schools to kind of create classroom context that is much more male friendly. talking about this in the last couple of months. we just need to do a lot more to

get moreys men in the classroom. beyond that sort of thinking about curriculum, different ways to make boys feel like they have a place in our schools. also doing more to revive education as well. asand then in terms of high schl and beyond doing a lot more to promote the location education. doing more what germany and japan due to give a trade that will give them a decent middle income that will make them more attractive. >> checking on that particular point,research indicating that

when women are marrying down educationally, they are still marrying up financially. they find the guy that is, you know, working asft an emt and making a good salary. they find the guy flourishing in the trades and that is a guy who they marry. the point is we have to continue to think about ways to sort of strengthen especially working-class men's opportunities to flourish when it comes to providing. that's good for them and good for their marriage ability as well. >> i think this is a great opportunity to recognize that many people on the left are thinking about this issue seriously and about improving economic opportunities for working-class men. there is an ideairir that is vey prevalent on the left and that that would be extremely dangerous for us to embrace in a bad direction. i just wanted to raise it so we can all objected and not go there.

one thing that richard observes in his book on the decline of men is that the gender integration of various professions and jobs has really only gone way -- one way since the 1970s. formally male dominated professions now have lots and lots of female representation. formally female dominated jobs and professions are still extremely female dominated. not that many male eligible teachers or anything like that. and 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 aidesi and things like that in the paint color female work. faced with that arrayg of fact, many peoplee on the left have said what we need to do is make more men willing to go be nurses and preschool teachers and whatever. tell men that there is nothing unmanly about joining a helping profession. i really do not think that thing keeping them out of these health

professions is stigma. i think it's just natural differences between men and women. women are more interested in caring, touchy-feely jobs all day and men are more interested in building things with their hands or things that are analytical or whatever. it would be a mistake to try to push more men into female jobs and to f solve the decline in me working-class that way. fixing this problem will require bringing back or fortifying the male-dominated industries because i don't think it would work. >> it is a political economy pulling from your comments. you think about our policies reinforcing excessive employment higher education. tons and tons of administrators doing work that did kng not neeo be done. >> and there are women for the most part. >> the same in healthcare as well. we could think about steering our economy and directions that

are more favorable towards manufacturing. and all ofatural gas that kind of stuff. a bunch of infrastructure. i am not sure what kind of progress we have made spending this money. there are ways that we can shift the political economy that would be more conducive towards maximizing working-class men's engagement in the real world as well. >> i am really curious here, starting with you, brad, to what degree should we conceive of marriage and fertility issues moving forward asho primarily economic or cultural ones. it feels like with both options, now that we have progressed into the discourse, we know that you cannot just turn on the policy, you know which would appeal to centerleft spaces. on the s cultural and, we are kd of left with this, at best, frustrating with robert putnam and our institutions having to come back together and after 40 years not really knowing how to do that we will fix the thing.

where we left considering both of those factors. >> it is a both and challenge. i was just talking with the scholarr today. they haveol been throwing every policy. this is not moving the dial. just passing a child allowance, a family allowance, you know, having some kind of day care policy to the menu will not do it, on the one hand. but, i think conservatives have had this idea that all we need to do is change the culture. you know, capturethe heights of

the new york times and our elite colleges and engineer different messages. i think that wouldld be really helpful. make sure that there's a political counter piece being acknowledged, too. on the one hand, telling people the truth which as far as i can tell, the number one predictor that i've been able to run across and all my data analyses is marital quality. the quality of your marriage. it beats job satisfaction. it beats money. it beats a lot of things. giving people a true portrait of the world as it really is, we are social animals. we thrive on good family relationships friendships and et cetera. we are not doing so well on this front. needs to be better articulated and better communicated and better disseminated. we also have to make sure people get the economic resources that they need to build those flourishing families. allowance is child helpful. kind every thinking the kind of money we are spending on higher education.

that is where, too, the center of educational policy. ordinary families more resources to steer their kids away from failing public schools toward schools more aligned with their own values and commitments. that would also be helpful. we still have an economic piece to do here and there is a cultural piece. we need some creative institutions and actors also, make this case more exciting to young adults today i think as well. >> i completely understand your frustration. you've come to the conclusion that there is a huge economic piece to this problem. how do we solve the marriage crisis? bring back manufacturing. okay, no sweat. >> just started working onte th. [laughter]

>> i think that there is actually a lot of value as is so often the case. one of the big lessons is it is sometimes the best thing you can do is just not screw up. don't introduce any new horrible factors 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 for subsidized childcare because the dual earner t family is a very difficult model to make work and a lot of families are finding that theyy are spending as much on childcare as a woman is bringing in and the numbers are not adding up. out thereul saying universal fre childcare. that would be doubling down on the two earner family model to the structural disadvantage of people that want to pursue the model. making so many people so happy for so many centuries. so, one of the biggest things we could do for families in the next 10 years is just make sure the left does not bring in universal subsidized childcare. it will come up in every

presidential election. with enough momentum, it could actually happen. there will be enormous value just stopping all of that from happening. that would make all of our family problems even worse. >> this idea of family policy as it sort of kind of rolled out over there on capitol hill and over context often about making appearance better workers. it is not about kind of connecting parents to their kids so, from my perspective and family studies, talking about family policies that re- functionalized the family. give parents more time, more money, more opportunities to be with their children. what surprised me and some of my recent analyses is, yes, doing fun things as a family was predictive of happier husbands and wives, but, doing chores together as a family, this really kind of blew my mind, even better predictor than doing fun things as a family.

>> semi that. i'm going to tell my husband. [laughter] >> doing productive work together as husband and wivesofs children in the household for one another, i think there is solidarity that is often lacking in household that are much more about consumption and about, you know, getting the kids to excel in school and sports. again, the idea is people really investing in one another and in the home as a whole. >> i think it is very easy to go into doom and gloom on the subject. is there anything on this that you are optimistic about when looking at this on a social level? >> i was going to ask for a minute to think. >> okay. brad. >> when you look at the research on marriage and child well-being

, it just keeps coming in and in. maybe at some point it will just break out to the public. good news in the sense that the research continues to kind of reinforce the importance for kids and adults. my thought is marriage matters more than ever in a way that is more secular. less engaged in their local communities. spending too much time on our devices. halfway decent spouse and parent to have in-person community in a very local way. if youse are a pair you're sendg your kids to school, soccer, maybe if you are religious, sunday school. just out and about you are more social. we are social animals. we thrive only have these

opportunities. what i convey to folks, look, this fundamental institution is super good for you on average. it can be extremely tough and hard, but on average it is good for you. it is getting relatively that more beneficial than it was ever before because our institutions are not doing so well today. >> i did think of one. >> all right. >> the lockdown -- we saw a little uptick in the u.s. fertility rate. it will take a while to break down the numbers on why exactly that happened and among whom it happened, but my sense is that it is because women were stuck at home from lockdowns and discovered they really like spending time with their kids in baking bread and doing the housewife thing and a lot of them are not going back into the workforce or they are going back into the workforce part-time and continuing and realizing family is pretty great. all it takes is just stepping off, you know, the rat race for one second and you realize the

things that actually make you happy. i think it is an actual trend. >> not looking back to 1955 as the model before us. this whole baby boom, a lot of families able to work in some new ways from home. kind of reintroduce the home economy, too. as we lookc forward, looking at the ways they can be working from home in some cases, some professions, obviously, facilitating a more family centric way of life that looks like, for a lot of people, conducive to more happiness and maybe even more kids, too. >> well said. thank you sore much. thank you for driving up today. we really appreciate that. this is been really great. i will pass the mic to zach graves. this is a great closing panel. [applause] >> hi, everyone. i am as i could have director of lincoln network. we thank you for joining us today for this great series of panels. the second live realignment conference we have done.

the first was in miami and we are really excited to bring this to d.c. please join me in thanking marshall for a marathon of interviews today. [applause] >> this year, book tv celebrates 25 years of presenting nonfiction books and authors. >> book tv is live with t library of congress national book festil. >> since 2001, book tv and partnership with the library of congress providing signature in-depth uninterrupted coverage of the national book festival featuring hundreds of nonfiction authors. watch saturday as book tv once again brings you live all day coverage of the national book festival. guest and authors include librarian of congress -- a book i've something to tell you for

young adults and former nfl player author of the yards between us. here complete national book festival online. live saturday beginning at 9:00 a.m. eastern on c-span2. ♪♪ >> c-span now has a free mobile app featuring your unfiltered view of what is happening in washington live and on demand. keep up w