Brad Wilcox: How to save civilization... by getting married!

Hey, welcome back everybody. I know it's Valentine's Day, you know it's Valentine's Day, so let's get into what Valentine's Day represents. That's relationships, marriage, girlfriends, boyfriends. Brad Wilcox is all over this. He's the director of the National Marriage Project and a senior fellow of the Institute for Family Studies and author of a brand new book called Get Married, Why Americans Bustify the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. Brad, welcome.

Good to be here, Brian. What prompted you to write this book? Well, I've been studying kind of the effect of marriage.

on kids for a long time. I was raised by a single mom and kind of, you know, had the sense that marriage is beneficial for kids. But as I've been talking to UVA students, particularly younger women, what I'm hearing from them is just kind of like a voice of concern about their prospects for dating and marriage. And I've just come to realize that I think it's gonna be harder and harder for our young adults today to get married. And so I wanted to write a book that kind of underlined the importance of marriage for adults and then kind of gave people some ideas about how they can forge strong families today.

Right. What have you found that people are pushing back on, which was a natural in America, that was find some you love, get married and have kids, are people pushing back on that model? Yeah, there's a kind of what I call a Midas mindset where a lot of folks today, especially kind of elite liberals and outlets like Bloomberg and The New York Times, are kind of telling folks that, you know, the path to prosperity and happiness runs through education, money, and especially work, kind of tends to discount, deny, devalue the importance of marriage. That's sort of one thing that I've been seeing in the media, but I've also been seeing in the last couple of years, people on the online right, people like Andrew Tate and Pearl Davis also kind of making a similar argument. But kind of targeting men. So the left is sort of saying to women, you know, you don't need marriage. And the online right is saying to men, you should steer clear of marriage. In fact, Pearl Davis called marriage a death sentence for men. And who's Pearl Davis? She's a she's a big online influencer.

She's got a very big platform on Twitter and other YouTube platforms. And both she and Andrew Tate think that there's really no ROI. There's no return on investment for men. And one of their primary concerns is that they think that most marriages end in divorce for guys. They're actually they're wrong about that. But that's sort of their perspective. And they're articulating that, you know, to a lot of people online.

All right. So how is that relate to happiness? Well, there's no better predictor of happiness in my research than marriage, especially a good marriage. So Americans who have what they would sort of describe as a good marriage are just much, much happier than other Americans who are either unmarried or Americans who are not doing so well in their marriage. But again, the quality of your marriage matters more than how much money you have, what kind of job you have, how much sex you have.

If you go to church services a lot, for instance, it's the number one factor. And a lot of Americans, I think, don't recognize, don't appreciate the importance of investing in their marriage. And also then, of course, getting married in the first place. And you say the term soulmate doesn't really apply to a successful relationship.

How do you define it? Well, so I talked about sort of this idea of the myth of the soulmate in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend. And the basic idea there is that I think too many folks have this notion that love and marriage are about kind of an intense emotional or romantic connection.

And that's basically it. There's going to be kind of one perfect person that's going to fulfill you. It's going to kind of perfectly connect with you. And oh, by the way, if there's any kind of like, you know, difficulty or tensions, you know, in your relationship or in your marriage, you kind of maybe just discard this current marriage and had, you know, for a new marriage. And I talk about the book by Liz Gilbert called Eat, Pray, Love, very famous book, very popular book, which kind of, I think, embodies that soulmate approach to love. The problem with that approach is that feelings are a fragile foundation for marriage. We see that people understand that, yeah, romance is important, but also realize that marriage matters for their kids, matters for their kin, matters for their financial well-being, have kind of a richer view. I call it the family first model of marriage are more likely, of course, to steer clear of divorce court, but they're also happier in their marriages as well because they're not kind of expecting to have like this intense romantic connection kind of running throughout their relationship, you know, for the next 10, 15, 30 years. So what led you to this conclusion?

Well, how did you go about your study? So I look at more than seven large national surveys, do a lot of statistical analysis of my colleague, Dr. Wendy Wang at IFS Institute for Family Studies, and then also interviewed more than 40 Americans kind of across the U.S. about their experiences with love and marriage and relationships. And you're led to, OK, if you look at a successful two person marriage, it also not only gives you a more rounded life, maybe a more happy life, but you also say, think about the kids.

When you have kids, how do they do when they're from a two parent household? Now, I want to kind of preface my response here again by saying I was raised by a single mom and, you know, there are many kids who are raised by single moms. You went to the University of Virginia and I went to UVA as an undergraduate and that is a elite college. It's a good school.

Yep. And so, you know, many kids who are raised by single parents can do just fine. I want to be clear about that. But I'm also a social scientist and I can tell you that basically kids are raised by, you know, their unmarried parents are more likely to be flourishing. Brian, we see, for instance, the boys who are, you know, being raised by their own parents are about twice as likely to graduate from college compared to boys who are raised in some kind of not intact family. What's also strike probably the most striking thing in my book in terms of the kids story is that boys are raised outside the intact family are about twice as likely to end up in jail or in prison. They're more likely to go to jail or prison by the time they turn 30 than they are to graduate from college. I think it's important to back that up and say you said that if you are from a single or a broken family or a single... It could be single, step family, cohabiting, you know... You're more likely to be in prison than you are to go to prison or jail at some point before you hit 28 than you are to graduate from college. And by contrast, boys who are being raised by their own married parents are about four times more likely to graduate from college than they are to spend time in prison or jail. So just kind of a huge, you know, story there about education versus incarceration. And you found, too, when it comes to minorities, Hispanic and black families, what was taught in their school, the success sequence matters to them, right? Family matters to them.

Sure. So we have this idea out there called the success sequence is this notion that you get at least a high school degree. You work full time in your 20s and you put marriage before the baby carriage.

Take those three steps in terms of education, work and marriage as a young adult. Your odds of being poor are just 3 percent. Your odds of kind of rising to the middle class or higher as a young adult are 86 percent. And this success sequence matters not just for white folks, you know, or for kids from rich families.

It applies across the board. So black, Hispanic, lower income kids are much more likely to be flourishing if they take these three steps as they move into adulthood. Going into the 60s has been said the black family is much more intact than it is today, statistically. But that was before the civil rights movement.

Have you looked at this? Yeah, I think what's striking is a lot of Americans don't realize that really from the 1870s to it depends on kind of where you look at the 1940s, early 50s. What we saw was that African-Americans were actually more likely to marry than whites. And that's really kind of since the 1960s that there's been this, you know, huge gap growing between black and white families on the marriage front.

Why is that? I think it's a couple of things. I think it's partly a cultural story. You know, in the 60s and 70s, we kind of devalued the importance of marriage. Sex revolution was part and parcel of that as well. I think the way in which welfare policy rolled out in the 60s and 70s tended to de-emphasize, you know, and penalize marriage as well in ways that had a disparate impact on blacks.

And then I think just there is still kind of an underlying fragility from slavery that has still kind of been with us. And as the broader society became kind of less marriage friendly, I think that kind of movement, both culturally and legally, had a disparate impact on African-Americans. And then finally, economically, we saw obviously a move away from an industrial economy towards an information economy, and that hurt a lot of black working class men in terms of their marriage ability. Do you also think the government programs had a negative effect, even if the intention was to have a positive effect?

Yes. So I think, you know, certainly back in the 60s and 70s, a lot of poor families kind of had marriage effectively being penalized by the way in which welfare policies were crafted. And then today it's actually more of a working class issue because just the way in which benefits are structured.

So a lot of couples, both black and white, Hispanic, you know, who are working class today, tell me that when they're making decisions about marriage, things like the structure of Medicaid and how it works discourages them from putting a ring on it. All right. So also you bring up this. There are things government can do to help. You can incentivize, for example, don't penalize people if they're single, but provide a bigger child tax credit for multiple kids.

Right. Or for kids. Bigger allowances. You notice what the military does. If you get married in the military, they give you a bigger house, bigger allowance. There's almost an incentive. There is. So can you do that in society? I know Hungary has gone to the great extent. They're actually paying their families to have more kids.

Yeah. So in terms of I think there are a lot of folks in D.C. particularly that I've spoken with who are kind of what I'd say naysayers. They say nothing can be done to strengthen marriage, strengthen families. And I say, well, do you know that the biggest federal agency in America has a very pro marriage policy? And they can look at me blankly like, well, the Department of Defense, you were just saying military. If you get married and, you know, your partner has access to benefits in terms of housing and health care, they're just much better.

If you go have it, they don't have access to those benefits. And we see in America today, we just live together. Correct. We see that whites, blacks, working class Americans, guys who've served in the military, much more likely to have gotten married than their civilian peers. And it shows us then that kind of the way in which the military approaches things by incentivizing marriage could be a model for how we could restructure federal policy in general to be more incenting and less penalizing marriage. And by the way, we're talking to Brad Wilcox. He's giving us a great this a great topic at a great time.

It's February 14th. And we're talking about his book, Get Married Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilizations. Do you also think to be dispassionate about it, structure matters? Because in marriage, you have a structure, you have a system, you know, got to get the kids off school, got to buy a house, see if we can get a bigger house, see if we can put a dormer on. Let's see if we can get a fence. Let's get that lawn handled. Let's get a job.

Let's get vacation. So I know exactly where I'm going when, you know, especially in the military. One thing people say when they get out of the military, they get out of sports. All of a sudden, the coach is not telling what time practice is, telling them what to eat, how much to lift in the military. They're not saying you got to be here at a certain time, even if you don't like doing those things.

So there is a format. Exactly. And he's actually particularly important for men. So I was talking to a guy in the outer suburbs of Washington, D.C., actually a conservative, good job, six figure salary, he owns his own home. So by kind of the culture standards of what I call the Midas mindset, he should be doing just fine. But he doesn't have a girlfriend.

He's not married. And kind of he was sort of palpably lonely and directionless in the evenings and on the weekends. And he kind of said, like, he just doesn't feel like there's much meaning and direction in his life.

So I think particularly for guys without kind of the purpose and direction that a wife and kids bring to their lives, you know, an obligation to help others. Not for yourself. Exactly.

It's about we, not me. Yeah, totally. That's that's part of my book. Yeah. So I think for guys, especially not having this kind of mission and direction and even just sort of a routine on the weekends and the evenings can be really hard for a lot of guys. When we get back, I want to ask Brad about this part, elites and people against the idea of marriage and tradition.

And even though they might be the product of it, because what he's seeing because you are a professor at the University of Virginia. Back in a moment. Brad, you gonna stick around?

Yes, I'll do. And by the way, you can always watch us on the Fox News app. You click on Watch and you just scan over and you can see the cameras.

If you have watching on Fox News, you could also watch on the phone. Don't move. Brad Wilcox is here. He's the director of the National Marriage Project, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, author of a brand new book called Get Married. Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization.

And by the way, especially it's this great theme, too, and I'm sure it's not a coincidence that Valentine's Day is today. Yes. Some people talk about relationships. Tell me if this is right, Brad, because sometimes I type things wrong. 73 percent of students at elite colleges, not just Ivy, come from two parent families and 51 percent of high school seniors.

I did not finish that sentence, so I'll stop saying it. Most marriages, you say this to most marriages do not end in divorce. So that 50 percent thing is not true.

Right. So there's two different points that, you know, I think to touch on there. One is that what I'm seeing at elite universities, including UVA, is that the vast majority of those kids are actually coming from intact families. And what's striking about that is that only about one in two kids across the board, you know, have intact families growing up. So it's just kind of showing us that even though a lot of our elite students tend to be very progressive on family issues, they're benefiting from this more traditional institution that is the intact married family.

That's kind of a bit of a, you know, a contradiction. But then on the divorce question, what we're seeing is that a lot of Americans believe today that one in two marriages end in divorce. But actually, divorce has been coming down since 1980, Brian. So that means that today most people are getting married go the distance. And so it kind of gives us a note of hope when it comes to encouraging our young adults to get married.

Right. It's interesting because everyone says, oh, you know, one of every two marriages, you said you found that when your studies doesn't happen. So but when you get those kids to these elite institutions, I know you have so many friends in the in who are professors and the ones you experience at University of Virginia. Do they appreciate the two parent family or do they think that they realize the role that you say it plays in their success?

So obviously, you know, they're they're professors across the spectrum, but they tend to be on the left side. And so there are some folks who would kind of explicitly articulate this idea that marriage doesn't matter. I talk about it as the family diversity myth. It's this idea that's really about love and money, that any kind of configuration for kids works just fine.

As long as, you know, the parent or parents are loving or the adults are loving and as long as they have enough money. And what they don't, I think, appreciate is that the intact married family is the strongest option for our kids, you know, on average today. And that's in part because the intact married family is the situation where you have two parents who are most likely to be spending actually a lot of time and giving a lot of affection and also kind of having the best kind of discipline. So the love, if you will, is stronger in the intact family. And then also financially, there's just no question that when you stay together, you're able to accumulate income and assets far better than if you're doing it as a single parent or if you're kind of moving in and out of a series of relationships or marriages.

And now I heard this, too. I think this is from a different group, the Ramsey Group, but they say that having joint checking accounts, do you believe that, too? Yes, I report in the book, basically, the couples who have joint accounts, you know, are about 15 percentage points more likely to be very happy, also much less likely to get divorced. And I contrast this with Suze Orman's advice, and she's, you know, this big financial guru, and she tells couples to kind of have separate accounts and keep your financial autonomy.

I'm like, that's, you know, autonomy and marriage don't go together like a horse and carriage, right? It's about we before me, like you were saying. And so when it comes to money, having a we before me approach to money is much more sensible.

Actually, I have an experimental study that just came out from Indiana that randomly assigned newlyweds to either joint accounts or single accounts and found that the couples who were assigned to separate accounts had a bigger decline in marital quality in the first two years of marriage. So pretty rigorous evidence that we before me, money is the way to go. So one thing you haven't just to go through the success sequence, if tell me if I have it right, and I don't get my feelings hurt if I don't record correctly, well, I have a high school degree. Number two, work full time in your 20s. And number three, marrying before you have children.

Correct. So these are the things that set yourself up to be successful. A lot of Americans, you know, I think don't appreciate, don't realize that there really are three pillars to kind of the American dream, financially speaking, and those are education, work and marriage. And if you kind of, you know, understand that and act accordingly, you're much more likely to make it America. And let's end with this. You say generations talk left, but they walk right.

What do you mean? So I'm talking about our elites tend to talk left and then walk right. And so from politically, politically, culturally, you know, so professors, you know, college presidents, Hollywood, you know, producers and moguls, journalists. So what I mean by that and I talk in the book, you know, about Reed Hastings at Netflix.

And there's, you know, a lot of offerings from Netflix that you could wonder about. Big time lefty. But he has this thing called Marriage Story, this film that they produced, totally negative portrait of marriage. But he himself has had a stable marriage, I think of more than 30 years, two kids. They worked on their marriage when they had tough times and they got through that. So he's an example of a very marriage minded elite. Right.

Yeah, look at what they're doing, not what they're saying. Get married is the name of the book. Brad, love your insight. Thanks so much for doing it. And happy Valentine's Day. Thanks, Brian. You too. Bag it a moment.