Sure

... three things to us, you know, both in the U.S. and in much of the world.

One is they kind of basically, um, diminish our social ties and social skills in ways that have obvious impact on things like dating.

Um, the second thing was they often tend to divide young women and young men from one another.

So they're pushing young women to the left culturally and young men to the right.

Now, of course, a lot of folks are in the, are in the middle, but relatively speaking, they're pushing more women to the left and more men to the right, which makes it harder for them to find common ground, like religiously, politically, culturally.

And then they're also, I think, kind of advancing what I would call kind of like a Midas mindset, and this is the idea that what matters in life is kind of high-status things like, you know, travel and money and education especially, kind of like really, um, kind of stressing the importance of work as the be-all and end-all.

Mm-hmm.

tells us,

there's a real religion story here obviously playing out as well.

And about a year and a half ago, Ross Douthat had a pretty depressing piece in the New York Times talking about the great call that is sort of unfolding.

And his point was that in this technological age that we're living in, there's a kind of a bottleneck and only certain types of people are gonna make it through in terms of having kids and grandkids and the like.

And it's folks who, as Catherine's work kind of tells us, folks who are more religious nowadays, folks who are more conservative nowadays, but then also we're seeing, obviously in the research too, that folks who are more educated and affluent, at least in terms of the marriage piece, are also kind of still doing that.

So basically the idea is that if you have, a lot of sort of economic resources today, or if you have the cultural commitments today that make marriage and family life either easier or more compelling than people are doing it.

But for folks who are more secular, who are more liberal today, and folks who are less advantaged, we're certainly seeing among those three groups a kind of decline in marriage.

Yeah, I think that's right.

How do you counteract that in a culture like the Black community where you're seeing multi-generations of single-headed households?

Well, I think we have to understand and appreciate that history does not unfold, Lauren, in a linear fashion.

I think many of us, myself included, kind of have this sort of idea that everything's going to kind of continue the way it always has, right? And since the 1960s, the family in general has gotten weaker and the black family in particular has also gotten weaker in terms of fewer kids being raised in a stable married family.

But it's important in the case of the black family in particular to understand, I think, two things a lot of folks out there don't understand today.

Number one is You know, 60, 70 years ago, the vast majority of black kids were being raised in stable married families.

And there have been points in American history also historically when more black men and women have gotten married than white, you know, American men and women.

So it's not the case that marriage has to be more fragile in the black community.

But they've got to understand how big a factor that plays in The success of a school district, the success of an individual student, where should they be putting their money in terms of and how should they be looking at a child rather than just saying, well, if he just had more money, everything would be OK?

So I'm assuming that the engagement with it is, has increased, uh, in the last five years.

Y- yeah, my sense is, and that's the case, uh, [clears throat] Jason, that I think with the rise of not just obviously first Pornhub, but then even more recently OnlyFans, that a lot of this is just sort of, uh, you know, as with everything else, it's kind of migrating online.

And so yeah, there is more of a kind of simulacra of sex in the form of, of things like, you know, OnlyFans, for instance.

But kind of real sex, you know, which is what I'm most concerned about, is definitely down.

And there was a slight uptick after, after COVID, per your comment, Peter, um, but that's, that's since kind of come down as well.

So a- again, it's kind of this in-person stuff that has really taken a big hit as the digital revolution has gotten more distracting, more engrossing, um, and has emerged as a k- as a kind of, you know, a counterfeit on a number of different fronts, including on the sexual front.

Which would make sense.

I, uh-

a bit on that? What are some of the other factors you think at play here?

Yeah, so there's been a lot of research done by Institute for Family Studies, done by other think tanks, kind of underlying the importance of marriage for kids.

Also, Melissa Carey at Notre Dame has been an academic in this space as well.

We've obviously seen other figures in the media like Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, have been kind of underlying the importance, too, of marriage in their public messaging around these issues.

So we have, I think, been kind of hearing about the value of marriage.

The vice president, too, in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, also kind of weighed in on the importance of young adults getting married and starting families as well.

So there's just been a lot of kind of, I think, research and media interest and political commentary in recent years on the right that's been kind of like plugging marriage.

How long does a trend like that take to reverse?

Walk us through some of these numbers.

So what we're seeing is that there's been a lot of commentary from journalists sort of arguing that kind of marriage is a retreat just for working class and poor Americans.

They're arguing that marriage is kind of difficulties are just about money.

And our research shows that culture matters as well and that liberals are markedly less likely to be married today compared to conservatives.

We find, for instance, that conservatives who are college educated, about 50 percent more likely to be married compared to college educated liberals.

That's one key finding that we see.

And we also are seeing too that there's no group of Americans who are less supportive of marriage than college educated liberals.

What do you think is driving that divide?

Go ahead, Brad.

Yeah, no, you do get pushed back in certain, and Ian's had more kind of practical experience with this in the school context, but certainly kind of in the academic and journalistic worlds, there's a lot of folks who are offended by the success sequence, especially kind of with stress on the value of putting marriage before the baby carriage.

So that's why it's controversial, but we've seen the data is that, for instance, your odds of being poor as a young adult are 60% lower if you put marriage before the baby carriage, even controlling for factors like you know, family income growing up, you know, your education, your labor force status.

And for folks who are kind of more skeptical on the left of this idea, Steve, what we see in the research is that marriage is important for families and adult families in large part because it's a key source of family stability.

And so if people are getting married before having kids, they're way more likely to end up as a single mom in their 30s and as a non-resident dad in their 30s.

And it's that kind of pattern of family stability that, you know, basically gives them more economies of scale.

It reduces their costs related to having some kind of court case with a family lawyer and a judge and keeping up the cost of two households, et cetera.

What are some others?