Washington Monthly - September/October 2015 - 19

far from resolved, the results from these more revealing methods tend to be similar (though often diminished in magnitude) to the findings described above, which suggests that there's more than just correlation underlying these outcomes. Still, at the end of the day, McLanahan and Jencks honestly conclude that "[t]hese findings do not mean that children would necessarily be better off if their biological parents were married." All else simply isn't equal, especially in this arena, where kids of unmarried moms are more likely than other children to have a father who is incarcerated and disconnected from the workforce. "Furthermore," they write, even when a child's absent father is a model citizen, the mother often has problems that marriage cannot solve. Unmarried mothers have seldom done well in school, many lack even a high school diploma.... [I]f these mothers find work, their earnings are usually lower than those of married mothers who work, and their hours are often long, erratic, or both.... [T]rying to raise children alone on a tiny budget is likely to exacerbate whatever problems a mother had initially.... [M]arrying the man who fathered her child may magnify a mother's problems rather than solve them. These critical observations underscore the bargain I'm touting here. But first, what's the role of culture in all of this, and isn't there something we can do about that? B efore I can argue the dominance of the strong version of the grand bargain, I must try to deal with the claim, one which is surely partially correct, that culture and changing norms, not just economic opportunity, are a significant determinant of changes in family structure. But just how significant? As the sociologist Kathryn Edin's work has shown, many economically disadvantaged poor women are not willingly choosing single parenthood; many would prefer to form stable, two-parent families. One recent survey found, for example, that, "relative to higher income respondents, lowincome respondents held more traditional values toward marriage, had similar romantic standards for marriage, and experienced similar skills-based relationship problems." We'd expect the opposite to be true if culture and norms were the major drivers behind these trends. I suspect that what's really happening here is that, due to diminished economic opportunity and incarceration policy, low-income, noncollege-educated women face both more constrained choices regarding marriage partners (the economic part), and less constrained choices regarding whether that means they can't have families (the norms part). Social conservatives argue that the expanded choices facing women are born less of devaluing marriage and more of the absence of stigma associated with out-of-wedlock childbearing and divorce. As recently as the 1960s, they argue, men and women wanting a regular sex life, a long-term romantic relationship, and, indeed, children, had to marry or face ostracism (or at least judgment) by the predominant culture. Another contributing factor, according to conservative culturistas, is the normalization of contraception and abortion to the point that childbearing is seen not as a joint decision by the child's parents but as the woman's choice, in turn relieving societal pressure on their male partners to marry. They may be onto something, but I'm not so sure. The distinction between devaluing marriage and destigmatizing single parenthood seems to me to be one without much of a difference; the Edin research seems to contradict the notion that greater reproductive choice has led men to feel less responsible for children they father. Moreover, there are ways in which alleged cultural changes interact with economic outcomes that cannot be meaningfully untangled. Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, references another shift that he argues is pushing against marriage: "the erosion of a kind of working-class prosocial masculinity connected to providership." He suggests that the routine of providing for a family historically played a disciplining and self-affirming role in men's lives. But as gainful work has become more scarce for working-class (i.e., non-college-educated) men, the discipline and affirmation has eroded, with negative effects on marriage rates. I have no idea whether that's true in a cultural sense (that is, whether workingclass men lack some dimension of masculinity that they used to possess), though it sounds squishy, if not fishy. But I agree that diminished access to steady jobs that pay living wages has been a larger problem for men than women, due in no small part to industry shifts from manufacturing to services. (Decades of large trade deficits have exacerbated this problem.) What's interesting about this formulation is that if it's true, it illustrates how culture and economic trends are inextricably wound up together. It also implies, in sync with McLanahan and the sociologist William J. Wilson, that better job opportunities might help ameliorate the allegedly eroded norm. Similarly, increased gender equality is both a cultural and an economic phenomenon, as feminism strives to increase both choices and opportunities for women, in part through fights for pay equity and occupational desegregation. While this is surely a positive development, conservatives worry that the rising cultural norm of female economic independence reduces social pressure on men to support them. Again, even if that were true, it's hard for me-as I suspect it would be for most conservatives- to imagine an ethical, cogent argument that suggests women give back their (incomplete) gains in this economic space so that men will feel more responsible for the children they father. Our attitudes and policies toward crime and incarceration are also having devastating effects on the economic prospects of generations of mostly male and disproportionately minority Americans. This aspect of our culture is clearly reducing marriage rates as well, as many women recognize the instability and economic volatility that our criminal Washington Monthly 19

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2015