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 23, 2025
In Case of Emergency, Open Block Grant: Part 2
Congress’s efforts to produce “one big, beautiful bill” that reflects President Donald Trump’s tax and spending priorities is about to kick into high gear as the House and Senate turn to crafting their respective reconciliation bills. Yet one key source of contention between House and Senate Republicans remains the amount of mandatory savings included in…
April 23, 2025
In Case of Emergency, Open Block Grant: Part 1
Congress’s efforts to produce “one big, beautiful bill” that reflects President Donald Trump’s tax and spending priorities is about to kick into high gear as the House and Senate turn to crafting their respective reconciliation bills. Yet one key source of contention between House and Senate Republicans remains the amount of mandatory savings included in…
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…