From my email (on single-parent families)

I won’t do double indentation, but this is all from Rick from Baltimore:

“In your post today, you cite to an interview you gave in which you describe the negative effects of children growing up with one parent and state that “I don’t have a magic wand to wave to make all those men worthy of having a nice family, but we could do much more than what we’re doing now”.  So my question is what is it that we can or should be doing?  It seems like one of the more important questions of our day.

So what does a Tyler Cowen pro-parent plan look like?  I can think of a number of candidates for interventions, but most of them don’t strike me as things you would advocate for either because of their limited effectiveness or their unintended consequences.  Some possibilities that I can think of:

1. Parenting interventions in poor communities (i.e. an army of social workers descending on poor communities to teach parenting and advocate for children).
2. Shorter/fewer prison sentences in order to allow more poor men to be present for their children and improve the sex ratio in poorer communities (thereby encouraging more committed relationships).
3. Similarly – more drug decriminalization?  Less?
4. Tax reforms of the kind advocated for by people like Brad Wilcox to encourage rather than penalize marriage.  (Seems like a good idea to me, but I don’t know how many people there really are out there who choose not to wed for tax reasons).
5. Better/more jobs for working class men and all-out brutes?  (Seems like an obvious idea, but how?  More unions? Fewer?  More tariffs and less free trade?  Get rid of the Jones Act?  More immigration? Less?  A larger standing army?  A return to more vocational education as advocated for by people like Mike Rowe?)
6. The re-churching of America?  If so, what are your suggestions for how to accomplish this (evangelical minds would like to know)?
7. Cultural shifts?  Melissa Kearney points out that up and down the educational ladder, Asian kids almost always have a dad.  Should we be more Asian?  More Mormon?
8. Less cultural feminization?  Less blame cast on structural oppression and more of a return to a culture of personal responsibility as preached by Jordan Peterson et al.?
9. More recognition of the downsides of the sexual revolution as described by Louise Perry?  Less premarital sex and pornography? The return of the shotgun marriage?
10. More cultural depictions in Hollywood etc. of successful mixed-collar marriages in order to encourage more college-educated women to marry plumbers and electricians?

What else am I missing?  What do you think would work?”

TC again: I would add this.  We don’t know what would work.  But it can’t hurt to have the intelligentsia unified and vocal in a belief that a) this problem really matters, and b) like most problems it is not a hopeless one and improvement is possible.  I propose that as step number one — are you on board?