W. Bradford Wilcox
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Oct 11, 2012
There is nothing inevitable about the splintering of America into an upper class defined by stable marriages and a lower class defined by marriage breakdown. But in order to stop that splintering, we will need to improve—and in some cases, revive—institutions that serve the 70 percent of non-college-educated Americans, particularly those that direct them toward steady work, thrift, and marital commitment.
Oct 9, 2012
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.