Episode 384: Melissa Kearney
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Putting the Family Back Into Economics
The family household is a fundamental unit of economics, and by extension – a fundamental unit of society. But the amount of research and study on the family within the profession of economics is still developing.
Melissa Kearney is a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, and the director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Her book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, examines how the makeup of families can determine a child’s economic success.
She and Greg discuss the success gap between children from two-parent homes vs. one-parent homes, the role families play in the overall economic state of our country, and what needs to be done to bridge that inequality and address poverty.
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Episode Quotes:
Why does family structure matter in economic success and social mobility?
03:43: When you look at all of the research that economists have done on poverty, inequality, and social mobility, family structure is important and determinant of all of that. And so what I'm doing is not uncovering something that isn't there in all of the academic evidence. I just think it doesn't get the attention it deserves when we then say, so what should we do about inequality, threats to social mobility, or poverty? We take family structure as a given in all of our research, and so it matters because it is so determinant. Even if we wish it were otherwise, it is so determinant. We just see that over and over and over again that kids from one-parent homes are less likely to graduate high school, graduate college, go on to achieve high earnings. It's really determinant of all of these markers of what we might think of as economic success.
The real constraints of higher educated parents vs. economically constrained parents
36:58: Higher-educated folks, married parents; they have more resources that allow them to be the kind of parents that they want to be. And more economically constrained parents have less; they have fewer resources, allowing them to be that.
The impact of diverging structures on social disparities
08:02: We don't just want to think about single moms and their kids being more likely to live in poverty, but I think the right way to think about it now is that the divergence in family structure between the college-educated class and everybody else is perpetuating inequality. It's exacerbating inequality precisely because these gaps are really large.
Shared income and time are key for positive child development
14:46: As an economist, my earnest wish is that this shouldn't be such a third-rail topic to talk about because nobody is blaming single parents for not doing an awesome job and putting in the hard work. But when there's a second parent in the house, there's more income coming in; there's more time coming in; there's more supervision; and there's more bandwidth. And we see that all of that collective input yields better outcomes for kids.
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Guest Profile:
Faculty Profile at University of Maryland
Director, Aspen Economic Strategy Group
Nonresident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institute