Lou Wangberg

This new American Experiment symposium grows out of a book of mine published just about a year ago, From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation, which examined many of the problems and shortcomings resulting from very high rates of nonmarital births, very high rates of divorce, and routinely short-lived cohabiting relationships. One of the book’s central themes is how such family churning—more specifically, the extent to which it hurts great numbers of children—is leading, and can only lead, to stunted mobility and deeper class divisions in a nation that has never viewed itself in such splintered ways.

In an American Experiment symposium released last fall, 20 writers grappled with the question of what it would take for them to start or expand a business in a low-income neighborhood. A main rationale for that exercise was the economic fact of life that unless commerce in a neighborhood, or at least in its vicinity, is healthy, chances are that little else will be healthy either, including poverty rates, crime rates, and graduation rates, to pick just three gauges. The not-unrelated new question, considered here by 23 participants, is how we might better encourage and reinforce the most talented and entrepreneurial among us; a core motivation this time being the pivotal importance of creating many more jobs and much more wealth so as to enable the nation to make it through the coming decades of aging-boomer and entitlement-skewed exigencies.

How Can Conservatism Better Allay the Economic Fears of Working-Class and Middle-Class Americans? is the third in a current series of American Experiment symposia aimed at vitalizing conservatism in Minnesota and the nation.