294. The Fracking Boom, a Baby Boom, and the Retreat From Marriage

Over 40 percent of U. S. births are to unmarried mothers, and the numbers are especially high among the less-educated. Why? One argument is that the decline in good manufacturing jobs led to a decline in "marriageable" men. Surely the fracking boom reversed that trend, right?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:48Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:20Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  As an economist, why are you interested in things like marriage and fertility, things like that?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  So I'm really interested in issues of poverty, US poverty in particular. And it turns out that poverty and family structure are very intertwined in this country. And so if you're thinking about the economic well-being of children in particular, it's really hard not to be interested in questions of family structure.

• 2:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Melissa Carney.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  I'm a professor of economics at the University of Maryland.

• 3:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  We've spoken with Carney before for an episode called, Is America Ready for a No-Lose Lottery?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  And in fact, you know, a recent national survey of 1,000 adults, one in five American adults said their greatest chance of accumulating hundreds of thousands of dollars was through the lottery. That number jumps to 40% for folks making less than $25,000 a year.

• 3:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  And we spoke with her for an episode called, Does Early Education Come Way Too Late?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  We find that kids who were preschool age in places where they could watch Sesame Street were 14% less likely to fall behind when they got to elementary school.

• 3:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if you are an economist trying to figure out why so many poor adults put their financial hopes in the lottery, and whether Sesame Street helps poor kids do better in school, it makes sense to go all the way back to the start of the life cycle: marriage and fertility, or, in a lot of cases, just fertility.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  So in 1960, 5% of births in the US were to unmarried mothers.

• 4:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK, got that? 5% of births in the US were to unmarried mothers in 1960. Fast forward now to 2014.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  In 2014, over 40% of births in the US were to unmarried mothers.

• 4:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  So first of all, wow. Anything that spikes from 5% to 40% is a big change. But when you're talking about something as elemental as family structure, what does that mean?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  The kids who are being born to less educated, single moms, they are falling farther and farther behind.

• 4:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  That probably doesn't surprise you. Decades of social science research have confirmed this sad fact. But what may surprise you, certainly surprised Melissa Carney, was what some fascinating new data told her about marriage and fertility. She was pretty sure it would confirm a hunch she had. She was pretty sure it would offer some good news.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  And in fact, the data showed the opposite.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  The link between family structure and poverty is something that academic researchers like Melissa Carney have known about for a long time.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  It's really hard for researchers to establish the causal effect of family structure or marriage on kids' outcomes, of course, because we don't randomly assign kids to married or unmarried parents. But there's a lot of research that works really hard to sort of isolate factors. And that research consistently shows that kids who live with two

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Married parents have lower rates of poverty, have higher cognitive test scores in childhood, have fewer behavioral problems. They seem to have better health outcomes. They're less likely to live in poverty when they're 25. They're more likely to complete college. And they're less likely to become young unmarried parents themselves.

• 6:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what is your marital and maternal status?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  I am a married mother of three. But that does not make me a biased researcher.

• 6:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  And so you're sure? You're sure you're not shaming everybody else by imposing your social norms?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  That's completely unfair. If people don't want to-- I'm not saying that anybody should get married who doesn't want to get married. What I'm saying is that we see in the data that kids who are born to married mothers have better short-term and long-term outcomes.

• 7:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  These days, roughly 4 million babies are born each year in the US. That's a fertility rate of 62 babies for every 1,000 women of what's called prime childbearing age, 15 to 44. If you go back 60 years to the baby boom, well, it's called that for a reason. The rate of childbearing was nearly double. So that's one big change in the fertility picture. Another one, as Carney noted earlier.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  So in 1960, 5% of births in the US were to unmarried mothers. In 2014, over 40% of births in the US were to unmarried mothers. Yeah, this is really a dramatic increase.

• 7:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  And if you're convinced, as Carney is, that kids in unmarried households have worse outcomes, well, this is bad news.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  And the 40% masks really high rates in particular groups. So 71% of births to African-American mothers now are outside of marriage. 71% of births to women under the age of 25 are outside of marriage.

• 8:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  The concern about African-American kids in single-parent homes has been around for a long time.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Not a matter of a bad situation that doesn't improve, but rather a bad situation that worsens.

• 8:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist turned politician who became a longtime Democratic senator from New York. But before that, in the 1960s, he worked in the Labor Department, where he co-wrote a report, came to be known as "The Moynihan Report." Its official name, using the nomenclature of the time, was "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action."

• 8:43Speaker 03

  About a quarter of Negro families are headed by women. The divorce rate is two and a half times what it is. And all of the, these, the number of fatherless children keeps growing.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  Moynihan's argument was that children do better if there's a father in the home.

• 8:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  He saw a rise in single parenthood, in children living without fathers in the home. He saw the rises bigger among African-Americans, and he focused on them.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  How'd you learn how to behave? From your father, and your mother, and your older sisters, maybe, and the people around you? Well, suppose there is no father, where children are just brought up without any of that support which a family gives them?

• 9:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  The report, as you can imagine, was controversial. Moynihan was clear that racism was a significant factor, and that the lack of good jobs was a big problem.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  We've got to get men to work. You can't, a man can't run his family if he doesn't have a job. Does it just, just starts there? Is there any secret to that? I mean, do you have to have sociologists tell this country that?

• 9:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Moynihan argued that it wasn't all about the economics. As he wrote, quote, "The fundamental problem is that of family structure. The evidence, not final, but powerfully persuasive, is that the Negro family in urban ghettos is crumbling. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself."

• 10:09Speaker 04

  But here's the difference.

• 10:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Andrew Cherlin again.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Back in Moynihan's day, this was an, an issue relating to poor people. And African Americans.

• 10:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  The issue, Cherlin means, of single parent families.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  It's still the case that there are lots of such families. So if you think of the stereotypical unmarried mother in 1965, you might think of an unmarried teenager living with her mother, who'd likely be from a minority group. If you think of the typical unmarried mother today, she's white, she's in her 20s, and she's probably living with the guy who's the father of the children. That's the big change that we've seen, that huge shift in the middle.

• 10:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  The rate of unmarried births to non-Hispanic white women is nearly 30% now, triple what it was in 1980. So that is a big shift. But as Melissa Carney points out, the most powerful predictor of single motherhood is education level.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Fewer than 10% of births to women with a college degree are outside marriage, as compared to roughly 60% of births to women with a high school degree or with less than a high school degree.

• 11:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  This surge in unmarried births among low-education women seems to present a double whammy. Number one, these kids are likely born into a household with one income at most. And number two, since low-education moms tend to have low incomes, that means fewer resources. No one, of course, is looking to beat up on low-income, single-parent families. It's also considered bad form, at least in some circles, to prescribe marriage as a solution. Melissa Carney gets that, but she also gets that the so-called marriage premium is legit.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I am perfectly comfortable saying that it looks like being born to two or living with two married parents is beneficial for kids. And I know a lot of academics, they don't want to say that, right? Because it sounds really socially conservative and preachy. But I think what's really interesting is if you think of how Higher educated, higher income parents are behaving. They are still almost entirely having children inside of marriage. Both parents are investing an extraordinary amount of both financial resources, but time and energy into their kids. And so, you know, in some sense, it's a luxury to be able to say, oh, I don't want to make

• 12:39Speaker 01

  social commentary like that. Well, that's because the kids of higher educated, higher income parents, they're doing extremely well. But the kids who are being born to less educated, single moms, they are falling farther and farther behind. And so, to not be honest about that, I don't think that's doing anybody any favors, even if it's politically more comfortable.

• 13:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, the big question. What has caused this huge spike in unmarried births? One obvious fact to consider is that marriage itself has become a lot less popular in the US. We looked at the many reasons for this in a two-part Freakonomics Radio episode. It was called "Why Marry?" And a lot of unmarried couples, of course, live together. Still, what accounts for so many more unmarried births among mothers with less education? Social conservatives tend to point to the breakdown of old school social norms. Social liberals cite less access to contraception, although that has improved a lot, and especially the lack of economic opportunity.

• 13:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is, men without good jobs aren't eager to marry, or, from the other end of the equation, they aren't considered good husband material. In Melissa Carney's world, this is called the marriageable men theory.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, that's based on this idea that's been around since William Julius Wilson's really seminal work in the 1980s, arguing that this decline in the economic security of less educated men, and in certain populations or demographic groups in particular, is behind this rise in nonmarital childbearing and retreat from marriage.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  A woman will benefit the most if she can find a guy who's got a decent, steady income. But those guys have been disappearing because the industrial jobs they used to have are no longer there.

• 14:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Andrew Cherlin again.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  The people in the middle have been hurt the most by the changes in our economy. It's the factory jobs that used to employ people with high school degrees that have moved overseas or been automated.

• 14:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that's the theory, that the unmarried birth spike is due, at least in large part, to a shrinking pool of men with good, stable employment. And so...

• 14:52Speaker 01

  And so, sort of hypothesizing the reverse, I've been keen to find a situation where we've seen an improvement in less educated men's economic situation.

• 15:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  That makes sense, right? If only Melissa Carney could find a scenario like that, where less educated men suddenly had a job and wage boost.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  And the fracking boom constitutes the rare context where men without a college degree have seen an improvement in their employment and earnings prospects in recent years. So that gave us a place to look at how family formation outcomes responded.

• 15:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right. And I'm just curious, as a researcher, do you get really excited when you see, you know, in the news, something like the fracking boom because you know it'll provide some great variables, some shocks to the system that you'll then exploit to answer some research questions?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's always a joke among empirical researchers. You see some shock and, you know, whether it's on that good or bad for society is an open question, but you know you can't help this instinctive thought of, ooh, that provides great exogenous variation that I can exploit. And so the fracking boom, these localized fracking booms, really sort of meets our standard in the sense that it's determined by pre-existing geological formations in the earth. And even the most, you know, persnickety economists will tend to grant that whether there is this geological formation under your county is probably exogenous to family formation preferences.

• 16:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Exogenous to family formation preferences, meaning what exactly?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  The concern in trying to figure out how economic conditions affect things like family formation outcomes is that if you see a place where the men are working and have high wages and you want to relate that to their rates of marriage, there's always an issue of, oh, well, the kind of men who live there and have steady jobs, those are exactly the kind of men who would make good husbands and fathers. And so this isn't really independent variation. But when you take a place and all of a sudden, because of this technological innovation in the early 2000s, all of a sudden, the geology under the county becomes really economically valuable, such that now there's an economic boom and the men are more likely to get

• 17:24Speaker 01

  jobs and have high earnings potential. That's really independent to other aspects of sort of who is living there and family formation and other related preferences.

• 17:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a technique to extract oil and gas from the earth. It's been around for many decades, but as Carney notes, technological innovations led to a fracking boom in the early 2000s. The ramifications have been huge. Environmentally, there's been great concern about pollution and destabilization.

• 17:57Speaker 05

  Critics of fracking say it harms the environment. They worry that the method contaminates groundwater.

• 18:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  There's also been a massive shift in global petroleum markets. The US started producing so much oil and gas that it reclaimed its title as the top oil-producing country in the world. This led to economic and geopolitical scrambling in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and elsewhere. Melissa Carney wasn't concerned about any of these huge changes, not much at least. The fracking boom was, for her, a perfect natural experiment to measure exactly what she'd been wanting to measure: if and how birth and marriage rates changed when thousands of good jobs suddenly appeared out of nowhere. What'd she learn? That's coming up right after this break.

• 19:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 19:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it, which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example. Well, PNC Bank did since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely not YOLO type. PNC Bank: brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 20:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster. With business preferences, save your travel must-haves, like gym access or breakfast, just once, then get tailored results whenever you search for work travel. Plus, with a free membership, you can save up to 20% on hotels and earn rewards on every stay for future travel. Book now at hotels.com. Visit hotels.com for details.

• 20:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  The University of Maryland economist Melissa Carney, along with her colleague Riley Wilson, have released a working paper called "Male Earnings: Marriageable Men and Nonmarital Fertility: Evidence from the Fracking Boom." The central idea? If the disappearance of good jobs for less-educated men over the past few decades was a contributing factor in the huge spike in unmarried births, maybe an economic spike among less-educated men would lead to a rise in married births. The first thing to consider is how economists think about childbearing decisions.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  If people have greater levels of income, all else equal, we should expect they should have more children. But we also know that there's a price effect. So kids are expensive. So if the price of having kids goes up, or the price of child-rearing goes up, we expect people will have fewer kids.

• 21:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do our choices in having children correspond very much the way that they correspond with buying a new car versus a used car or no car at all, and so on?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  I was afraid you were going to ask me that, and I don't know that off the top of my head. But I do think the evidence is pretty strong at this point. There are a number of rigorous studies showing that when there's some sort of exogenous shock to income, we see an increase in fertility. So for example, a paper I wrote a couple of years ago with a graduate student at the time, Lisa Detling, we found that during the housing boom, homeowners had more kids and renters had fewer kids. And that's totally consistent with people who owned a house, saw their home equity went up.

• 22:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK, so in terms of a job boom or a wage boom, how does fracking compare?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  OK, so these fracking booms have been touted as creating tens of thousands of jobs and providing starting salaries at $50,000 for recent high school graduates. With average earnings... For folks who are actually working in oil and gas extraction jobs of between 70,000 and 80,000, and also, there's positive spillovers to nearby counties. So it's important to realize that the positive economic shock coming from local fracking is not limited to folks who are working in fracking jobs. There's a local economic boom, so other industries also see an uptick in business.

• 23:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, tell us just a bit about the data. How many locations are we talking about generally? And then, in terms of trying to measure the relationship between income and childbearing and marriage and all that, where are those data all coming from?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  First, let me be clear that we are not looking at North Dakota and Montana and what's called the Bakken region up there. I think that captures a lot of the public imagination or attention when it comes to thinking about fracking.

• 23:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're not looking at them because the scenario is too pronounced there? It's too migratory?

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. We're not looking at them because it's a really unique situation up there, where a lot of the fracking jobs were filled by inflowing migrants. And so, North Dakota, the counties that had fracking there, their populations increased significantly in response to the fracking boom, so it's a very different setting. We're looking instead at Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Texas, West Virginia, Ohio, a number of other places where there wasn't really a large migration response. We're looking at data from the early 2000s, and during this period, 966 counties in the US had new fracking wells.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  And we obtained drill-level information from a private company that sells this data. So we know the exact location of every well and when it started drilling. And then, we link that with government data on wages and jobs, as well as vital statistics data on the universe of births in the US, and on census data about marriages and rates of cohabitation. So there's a lot of data being pulled together for this analysis.

• 25:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, the underlying idea is that one reason fewer mothers have been getting married over the past few decades is because fewer men have good economic prospects, and therefore, if there's a job boom or a wage boom... That would theoretically increase the supply of men with better economic prospects. Yes, that's kind of the theory that you wanted to test?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  That was the hypothesis, that's right.

• 25:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. And how'd that work out? What did you actually learn from your data?

• 25:37Speaker 01

  So, you know, my speculation going in was that an increase in the economic, you know, opportunities for men would lead to a reduction in non-marital childbearing. And in fact, the data showed the opposite, or let's say it didn't support that. So, the data do show that in response to these increased economic activity and earnings potential, we do see an increase in births. But interestingly, there's the same response among married births and non-married births, and no increase in marriage. So, this does not offer support for what I'll call a reverse marriageable men story.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Whereas if we see more marriageable men, that we'll see an increase in marriage. That the data do not support that.

• 26:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so there's a fertility boom when there's a fracking boom. How big is the fertility boom? And can you compare it to the size of the fracking boom?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, what our estimate suggests is that an additional $1,000 of fracking production per capita is associated with an increase of six births per 1,000 women.

• 26:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, my god.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, this is-

• 26:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a lot of babies.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Um, it's actually consistent with previous evidence. So, I think one of the most interesting things in our research was a comparison to the coal boom and bust situation. It's a similar economic shock, it's a similar industry, they're in similar sort of areas. You know, the Appalachian region is in both.

• 27:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  A similar employment cohort then, as well, right? Education-wise, age-wise, stuff like that?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  That's right. It was just a different period. So, the coal boom and bust happened in the 70s and 80s. And what we find is that a 10% increase in earnings associated with the coal boom led to very similar-sized increases in married birth rates, as it did in the fracking boom. So, like, an 8% increase in marital birth rates for a 10% increase in earnings with the coal boom, and a 12% increase in married birth rates associated with the fracking boom. But the non-marital birth response is very different. So, a 10% increase in earnings associated with the coal boom actually led to a reduction

• 27:56Speaker 01

  in non-marital births, but a 12% increase in non-marital births with a 10% increase in earnings associated with fracking. So, that's where the real, the response differed. And, in the earlier period, when earnings increased associated with the coal boom, marriage increased. And as we've been saying, there's no increase with the fracking boom.

• 28:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow. So, a coal boom produced more marriage and more kids, and fewer kids born to unmarried moms, whereas a fracking boom produced more kids, but no more marriage and a lot more kids born to unmarried moms.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, equal proportion increase in married and non-married births in the fracking boom. So, I mean, we speculate that, you know, this suggests that social context is really important to determining the response to economic changes.

• 28:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  I didn't understand that.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  So, in the 70s and 80s, very few births were outside of marriage, and there was a social stigma associated with non-married births. And so, in the 70s and 80s, when you got more income, it looks like you had more births, but only if you were married. And now, we're at a period where non-marital births are extremely common among less educated populations. And so, now, what we see is if you get more income, you have more babies, right? But it doesn't matter whether you're married or not. That's a real difference.

• 29:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gotcha. How male is the fracking industry?

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Okay, so, that's a good question. So, I don't know the specifics, but what I can say is, we do confirm in the data that the increase in wages and job opportunities are twice as large for men as for women in these areas. And that's important to keep in mind, because we would expect that the sort of marriage/birth responses to female versus male economic opportunities would be different.

• 30:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm curious whether these jobs and this industry is seen as more cyclical or less durable than other industries?

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, we wondered about that. So the data do show that the impacts of new production on wages are persistent. So two years after the initial fracking drilling begins in a county, 2/3 of the wage income is persistent. So it doesn't seem to be the case that sort of someone comes and fracks in a county and leaves right away.

• 30:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, yeah, but I'm thinking if I'm getting the job, or if I'm planning to marry someone who's getting that job, I may think, wow, this is a great job and great income right now. But given the nature of the industry, it may be a two or three-year boom and that's it. And I'm just curious how that might change your marital or childbearing prospects.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  I think that's right. So that's one of the potential explanations for why we don't find a marriage effect, is that maybe this positive economic shock is thought to be temporary. And, you know, the potential male partner is going to go back to being unemployed or having low wages in a couple of years. So there's a couple of thoughts I have on that. The first is, if people really thought this was just temporary, it's surprising then that there's a fertility response, right? Because we do see that this fracking boom led to an increase in earnings and that led to increased childbearing. So there would still have to be some asymmetry there. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think it's curious.

• 31:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's surprising, especially if, however, you're assuming that the fertility is intentional, though. I mean, if you're just thinking about jobs means money, which means opportunities to do things like, you know, go out and drink in bars and meet people and have sex, then that's different than having a fertility plan. That's all I'm saying.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  So the marital birth response is sort of of the same size as the non-marital birth response. So married couples are also increasing their fertility in response to this. I'm less inclined to think that that's unintentional.

• 32:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  According to survey data from the National Center for Health Statistics, more than 55% of all non-marital births in the US are unintended. This compares to 23% of married births. Now, you might think, wait a minute, just because parents aren't getting married doesn't mean they're not living together as a family. In fact, nearly 60% of unmarried births are to couples who do live together. And you might think that a cohabiting couple and a married couple are pretty much the same when it comes to their children's outcomes. But there, you would be wrong.

• 32:49Speaker 06

  When we consider the family structure at birth, whether it's cohabiting or married, we see more negative outcomes for children who are born to cohabiting than married parents.

• 32:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Wendy Manning, a sociologist and demographer at Bowling Green State University.

• 33:02Speaker 06

  And that's true when you look at physical health, or psychosocial outcomes, or cognitive indicators. If your parents get married, then you are going to fare better than if you're a child who's raised by cohabiting parents who don't get married. But it doesn't seem as if cohabiting parents who eventually marry really achieve the same level of health as children with stably married parents. So it doesn't seem as if they're able to catch up maybe in the same way.

• 33:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  At least not the way cohabitation works in the US. In much of Europe, unmarried parents routinely live together for decades, all the semi-permanence of marriage, without the ritual or paperwork. In the US, Melissa Carney says cohabiting relationships tend to be less durable than marriage.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  At the time of child's birth, half of these unmarried parents are living together, and another third are living apart but are romantically involved. And many of them express very high hopes that they're going to stay together and eventually get married. But actually, what we see in that data is that five years after the birth of the child, only a third of the parents are still together. And new partners and new children are very common. So it's not quite right to think of them as primarily stable relationships.

• 34:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  So when people talk about marriage as a commitment device, it seems true, yeah?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  It's certainly true that married parents are more likely to stay together than cohabiting parents. They're more likely to pool their resources. And the children born into such unions have access to many more resources through their childhood in terms of being much more likely to live in a household with higher levels of income, lower levels of instability, more time input from parents.

• 34:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  So your paper argues that the fracking boom has led to greater employment among low-income men, which did lead to higher birth rates among that cohort, but not to higher marriage rates. You sound like, as a human, you're disappointed to have found out what you found out. Yes, you were hoping that this employment would lead to better outcomes for kids ultimately, and it doesn't seem like it will.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. The fact that, you know, it looks like in the past, people would have responded to an increase in economic opportunities with an increase in marriage and a reduction in nonmarital childbearing was probably good for children in particular. The fact that they no longer respond that way sort of makes me rethink how we can address, you know, what I think is a challenge. Not everyone sees the rise in nonmarital childbearing as a challenge. But if you look at the data on the economic circumstances of kids, I think it's hard not to think of that as a challenge.

• 35:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  This challenge is exacerbated, in Carney's view, because the unmarried birth trend is moving up the income ladder. It was always an issue among low-income mothers, but now it's hitting the middle class.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  And what's interesting and noteworthy is that that's exactly where we see kids from two-parent families doing appreciably better than kids from a single-mother household. And so let me just be specific about what I mean for a minute. If we look at longitudinal data on kids and the family structure they're born into or their family structure at age 14, what we see is that kids who are born to teen moms or the youngest moms, their outcomes... Are pretty bleak whether or not their parents are married or not. And that's potentially not all that surprising because, you know, who are the dads that these teen moms or really young moms are coupling with?

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Probably not all that economically stable or secure. But when you start to look at moms with some college or in their, you know, mid 20s, that's exactly where we've seen the rise in non-parent, uh, non-marital childbearing. And that's also exactly where we see the greatest differences. And that's not surprising if you think of this from a resource perspective, where those are the dads who, if the parents were to marry into Form 1 households, they're more likely to sort of bring in a reasonable income. And those additional resources would push the kid out of poverty and make it more likely that the kid graduates high school, for example.

• 37:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Carney admits that her research findings have been surprising and sobering.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  So as an economist, when I've been asked, you know, in policy context in the past few years, what would it take to sort of halt the retreat of marriage among less educated populations? My answer's always been, oh, we need to see the economic situation of less educated men improve. So now, when I'm asked what's going to help, now, now I have no idea. If it's not just about economics, but if it's about, you know, quote unquote, "culture" or "social norms", that's a lot harder to deal with. I have no idea how to change social or cultural norms. Whereas if you told me it was about economics, I could think of certain policy levers to pull.

• 38:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  That said, Carney has thought about possible solutions.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Now, there's been two schools of thought on that. One is, look, the marriage ship has sailed. And so now we need to adjust to this new reality that many kids in this country in particular, many sort of low-income or minority children are going to grow up without the benefit of living in a two-parent household. And so what is our social contract going to be? Like, we need to potentially increase, you know, safety net resources or just make sure that those kids have more resources. Making sure that they have adequate food and nutrition and healthcare is extremely important. And we should think about that as an investment in our human potential.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  We can't afford to write off all of these kids who are born into economically disadvantaged circumstances. And then another school of thought is, or a complementing school of thought, is we need to push on that and think about ways to increase rates of marriage, or foster marriage, or at the very least, foster more sort of stable unions, whether or not the couples are actually married.

• 39:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Should we be thinking about just paying people to get married and penalizing them if they either don't stay or have kids out of marriage?

• 39:37Speaker 01

  I think most of us would be very hesitant to sort of offer financial incentives specifically to get people to marry or stay married, because we do realize how complicated a decision that is. But I will point out that all of our tax and transfer programs actually explicitly financially penalize marriage. So at the very least, we could make our tax and transfer system marriage neutral. I'm not saying that would solve it, but certainly we've set up our system to have the wrong incentives when it comes to marriage.

• 40:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Has anyone ever done a good job of measuring how much those tax incentives that penalize marriage have actually affected unmarried births?

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a long literature on this. You know, the generosity of welfare benefits does have some small increase in the likelihood of single motherhood. None of those policy changes have a large enough effect to explain any of these trends. I mean, the other thing that's interesting is to think about marriage as sort of requiring skills. And so... Sort of being married and staying married requires constant negotiation and communication. And these are skills, right? So I don't know how much of the sort of higher rate

• 41:07Speaker 01

  of marriage and marriage sustainability that we see among higher educated people is associated with higher skills. But it's not ridiculous to me to think that some of these couples could benefit. You know, many of them, we see in the Fragile Families Survey, they say they want to stay together. You know, how much support even nonprofits or community groups could give to these couples? You know, it's not crazy to think that that could have moved the needle a little bit.

• 41:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are you worried that you sound more socially conservative than you may identify with by saying something like that?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  I don't have, no. Fortunately for me, I don't have these identity issues.

• 41:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  There have been government programs to teach couples good relationship skills, like the Healthy Marriage Initiative, which was backed by then-President George W. Bush.

• 42:04Speaker 07

  Not every child has two devoted parents at home. I understand that. And not every marriage can or should be saved. But the evidence shows that strong marriages are good for children.

• 42:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Alas, an assessment of this project by four researchers, including the Bowling Green sociologist Wendy Manning, found that some $600 million worth of government spending didn't seem to have many benefits. In any case, as Melissa Carney notes, if an economic boost, like the fracking boom, doesn't help, it's time to find out what does. She gets that some people are uncomfortable criticizing the decisions of unmarried parents.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Because it sounds really socially conservative and preachy.

• 42:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  But she also gets that the kid has no say in that decision. There is, however, one hugely positive fertility trend to note, something that pushes against the tide of rising unmarried births. This trend is encouraging not only on its own, but in how it seems to have been achieved. Since 1991, overall teen pregnancies in the US have fallen 64%.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  The dramatic fall in teen childbearing has been nothing short of spectacular. And there are definitely policies and interventions that move the needle a little bit. But the bulk of that reduction really seems to be driven by sort of universal factors, like not just access to better contraception, but also, I'll use economist speak here, sort of a reduced demand among young women to become teen mothers. And so we could sort of think about that as a social or cultural win. But people are trying to figure out what made teenagers do this. My colleague Phil Levine and I wrote a paper a few years ago where we looked at the effect

• 44:03Speaker 01

  of the MTV reality program 16 and Pregnant. For most American teens, high school is about having fun. But for these six girls, high school will not be the same. And what we did was, we looked at places, we had Nielsen television ratings data, and in places where MTV viewership ratings were higher before the show came on the air. So we're just saying, in places where more teenagers were watching MTV, when this show came on the air, you saw those places experienced a larger relative decline in teen childbearing.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  So the places where more kids were watching MTV, this experiment comes on. You could think of it that way. All of a sudden now, they're watching a show that makes teen motherhood look really hard. And you see fewer teen births in that place, like nine months after the show came on the air. So teen childbearing has been falling steadily, at like 2.5% a year. And then around the time that that show came on the air, you saw a large drop, in the sense that it declined like 7.5% and has stayed at that rate. Part of that was due to the Great Recession. But a lot of it was due to this show. And what's really interesting about that

• 45:28Speaker 01

  is that that show just affected and changed the way teenage viewers thought about being a teen mom.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so that's like a really different way about thinking of affecting their outcomes, right? It's about sort of appealing to teenagers where they are and saying, hey, look, this is hard. This doesn't really fit with the lifestyle you probably want to live as a teen, and it affected their motivation.

• 45:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Affecting someone else's motivation, as we've seen time and again on Freakonomics Radio, can be incredibly hard. And yet, it does happen, often by accident. Not by the well-intended public policy, not by the right-thinking moral messaging, not by an economic spike that you might think would help solve a problem. So what happens to all those kids who are born into unstable, low-income families? Next time on Freakonomics Radio, we keep this conversation going with a look at one of the most fascinating and troubling research findings in the history of social science.

• 46:37Speaker 08

  It was a little bit like a mystery, and you're trying to track people down. And every time you found someone, it felt like a little treasure hunt.

• 46:45Speaker 09

  Without exaggeration, it is still shocking to this day.

• 46:50Speaker 08

  I think her first response was to be crestfallen, finding that it had hurt people in measurable ways. I think she had had so much hope for this kind of intervention.

• 47:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  When helping hurts, that's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 47:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Christopher Wirth with help from Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Shelley Lewis, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Stephanie Tam, Eliza Lambert, Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, and Brian Gutierrez. We also had help this week from Sam Baer. The wonderful music you heard throughout this episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should also check out our archive at Freakonomics.com. You can also find the blog, the books, much more. You can also stream or download every Freakonomics Radio episode we've ever made. You can also read the transcripts, look up the underlying research. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks for listening.

• 48:20Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 48:52Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 49:23Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 50:01Speaker 09

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