Search and filter by content type, issue area, author, and keyword
July 21, 2023
Does the typical American family today enjoy better living standards compared to 1985? We may have bigger TVs in our living rooms and smartphones in our pockets, but a recent report from Washington, DC, think tank the American Compass suggests the cost of a thriving, middle-class lifestyle has risen over the past generation. To discuss what that…
July 21, 2023
Over the past 40 years, no party has dominated the Spanish political landscape like the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, or PSOE, now headed by Pedro Sánchez. Yet frustration over its handling of key issues — from the economy to immigration to regional separatist movements — has provided an opening for the centre-right People’s Party (PP)…
July 17, 2023
“The shift among nonprofits and funders towards valuing lived experience has been a journey,” Anna Verghese, executive director of the Audacious Group, told the Chronicle of Philanthropy earlier this spring. Verghese, whose group includes the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, MacKenzie Scott, and the Skoll Foundation, says this shift has been “the result of generations…
July 10, 2023
Sixty years ago, in 1963, 94% of American children were born to married mothers. Today, the figure is only 60 percent. This decline signals a fundamental disruption in the long-standing stability of the traditional family, the foremost institution shaping each generation of children. Using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, I find that in 2021, 40% of…
June 30, 2023
We just got more bad news about marriage. A record-high 25% of 40-year-olds in the United States were never married in 2021, according to sobering new statistics from the Pew Research Center. That statistic compares to just 6% of never-married 40-year-olds in 1980, underscoring marriage’s falling fortunes in recent decades. Digging further into the Pew data reveals that this retreat from…
June 22, 2023
When I was born in 1978, the median American was 30 years old. These days, the median American is 38.9, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Thursday. That’s a rapid aging of the American population. Some portion of that increase is good news: Older people are living longer than they were 40 years ago. In 1980, the average American life expectancy at…
June 20, 2023
How much do we have in common with our children and grandchildren? Less than our parents had in common with us—or at least that’s the theory animating Jean M. Twenge’s new book, Generations. Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, is most widely known for iGen, which chronicled how the rise of the smartphone should be…
June 16, 2023
Editor’s Note: The following essay is an edited transcript of AEI senior fellow Ian Rowe’s opening remarks at “A Debate on Fatherhood,” hosted by the National Marriage Project at UVA and the American Enterprise Institute on April 25, 2023. The event, which was moderated by IFS senior fellow Brad Wilcox, featured a discussion between Richard Reeves and Ian Rowe on the question:…
June 11, 2023
Marriage rates in America are falling fast: Many men and women are marrying later, and more and more people are never marrying at all. Marriage is in retreat for a host of reasons, but one overlooked cause is the rising difficulty many young people have finding a partner who meets all of their requirements—emotional, physical, financial, and political. That last…
June 2, 2023
America’s birthrate has been falling steadily since the Great Recession 15 years ago, and the brief uptick of 2021 proved to be a statistical blip, as new birth data show a small drop in births in 2022. Speculation of a COVID baby boom hasn’t panned out. Provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and…