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May 23, 2025

How AI Will Harm Working-Class Families

Donald Trump rose to power in large part by appealing to working-class men. He was able to channel their frustration with trade deals and automation that destroyed working-class jobs, helped fuel thousands of deaths of despair, and powered a wave of anger in working-class communities across America. These economic shocks also proved devastating for all too many families in working-class communities across America. Job…

May 13, 2025

Out of Work and On the Dole — Is Uncle Sam Contributing to Young Men’s Malaise?

American men are in trouble. From Richard Reeves’ “Of Boys and Men” to Nicholas Eberstadt’s “Men Without Work,” we have learned that men are opting out of our most important institutions — work, education and family — in record numbers.  But what or who is to blame for this male malaise? Uncle Sam.  This was Allysia Finley’s…

April 30, 2025

Is The Collapse of Blue-Collar Marriage a Foregone Conclusion?

It’s been just over 40 years since Springsteen’s bestselling Born in the USA came out in 1984 — an album with “a rowdy indomitable spirit,” as Debby Miller wrote in Rolling Stone at the time. The melodies suggested a deep optimism but the lyrics were primarily concerned with “people … getting left behind” full of foreboding of the fate of small-town…

April 29, 2025

Good Jobs, Strong Families: How the Character of Men’s Work Is Linked to Their Family Status

Introduction Over the last half century, the U.S. economy has shifted, moving away from manufacturing and towards being an information and service economy. The mid-1980s, for instance, were punctuated by news of the closures of major steel manufacturers, including Homestead Works, Aliquippa Works, and Duquesne Works in Pittsburgh, PA, and Republic Works in Youngstown, OH….

April 25, 2025

What’s holding women back from starting a family?

Media influencer Brett Cooper did something last year that most people her age won’t: she got married. “It’s the most grounding experience I’ve ever had,” she told a crowd gathered at the University of Virginia for the National Marriage Project’s spring conference, cosponsored with the Wheatley Institute. Cooper is 23 and had celebrated her one-year anniversary…

April 24, 2025

Musk’s High-Tech Polygamy Is a Dead End

Elon Musk told a conference in Saudi Arabia last year that his listeners “should view the birthrate as the single biggest problem [we] need to solve. If you don’t make new humans, there’s no humanity, and all the policies in the world don’t matter.” In this way, he spotlighted his commitment to the pronatalist cause—the idea that…

April 15, 2025

Utah Hands Parents the Keys to the App Store

Two devoted Utah parents experienced the unthinkable in 2022: They lost their 14-year-old son—a warm, football-loving boy—to suicide. In the painful days that followed, as they searched for answers, they discovered something chilling. Despite their best efforts to set up parental controls and screen time limits, their son had been relentlessly fed pro-suicide content by…

March 17, 2025

How State Policymakers Can Save the Nuclear Family

Blue states are better for families. That is what many academics contend.  In their classic book “Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture,” law professors Naomi Cahn and June Carbone argue that blue states have the liberal values and policies they believe make for strong and stable families.  Scholars like…

March 17, 2025

Progressives Are Starting to Come Around on the Importance of Marriage and Fatherhood

Progressives and conservatives rarely agree. But there’s a growing consensus about this one data point: America’s men are not OK. This isn’t exactly a political phenomenon — although men are changing politically, too. Last summer, economist Tyler Cowen detected a “vibe shift” in American culture, noting people were drifting rightward. Among his 19 reasons for the shift,…

March 12, 2025

Why Alabama Needs The Success Sequence

“The American Dream is beyond my reach.” This is increasingly the view that many young men and women take regarding the long-held belief that anyone can succeed in the United States. In fact, over half of young adults today believe the American Dream is no longer within their reach. What many of them do not know is that…