In “The Two-Parent Privilege,” Melissa S. Kearney looks hard at the data but doesn’t dare to imagine new possibilities for societal structure.
At its worst, social science can take the form of a play in four boring acts. When the curtain rises on Act I, the heroine selects a phenomenon of general interest, perhaps something as meaty and intriguing as love or art. In Act II, we watch with dismay as she whittles the complex provocation of her choice into something simple and measurable, generally at the cost of rendering it unrecognizable; love is now a soup of pheromones, art a pleasant tingle in the rightmost quadrant of the brain.
One measure of Kearney’s bias is her eagerness to frame herself as a martyr bent on speaking unpopular truths to power. In the first chapter, she recalls attending an economics conference where she asked whether two-parent households might improve children’s lives. “As in earlier instances, this set of questions elicited a muted reaction — uncomfortable shifting in seats and facial expressions that conveyed reservations with this line of inquiry,” she sighs.
To understand how to close the chasm between children with this “two-parent privilege” and those without it, Kearney maintains that we must understand why marriage has become a less appealing prospect in the first place. “The mothers who are not married are not married precisely because the men with whom they have fathered children would not meaningfully contribute positive resources to the raising of their children,” she writes.
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