You Might Also Like: It Turns Out

**Cara Miller** (0:00)
In early 2026, the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative think tank, released a report called Saving America by Saving the Family. And their concern went something like this. Marriage is falling apart, that's gonna have terrible consequences for the US, and we're all just kinda watching it happen.
Now, the report got a lot of attention, but was it surprising? Not really. Over the last few years, conservatives have increasingly embraced the idea of getting married, having kids, ideally a bunch of kids. What was surprising was when an economist from the University of Maryland, who got her doctorate at MIT and is affiliated with the Brookings Institution, started saying publicly that maybe folks on the left were ignoring the benefits of marriage.

**Melissa Kearney** (0:53)
And so I came to this topic as somebody who's been in the higher education sector, who's been in the think tank sector, not who's generally spent my career around social conservatives.

**Cara Miller** (1:05)
Melissa Kearney is the author of The Two-Parent Privilege from the University of Chicago Press.

**Melissa Kearney** (1:11)
And it felt like to me in all of the conversations that I've been part of in the past 20 years on inequality and mobility, this issue got short shrift for obvious reasons, right? It's hard to talk about, it's value-laden, and so my goal was, let's take it out of the culture wars, and let's talk about it like a policy challenge.

**Cara Miller** (1:31)
But here's the thing. It's hard to take anything out of the culture wars, especially marriage.
Welcome to It Turns Out, I'm Cara Miller. Melissa Kearney was the very first person I interviewed on this show in late 2025, and the reason was because she's fascinating, she's smart, and she's complicated.

**Melissa Kearney** (2:05)
I came to this topic, and I came to write this book as somebody who's studied inequality and poverty and social mobility in this country, and I looked at all the usual things that economists tend to look at. Policymakers have tended to focus on the generosity of the social safety net, neighborhood characteristics. But in the academic literature, it's very, very clear that family structure is incredibly predictive of kids' outcomes, both at an individual level and at a neighborhood level.

**Cara Miller** (2:33)
Kearney's quandary was how you say the things that she wanted to say to the people that she wanted to say them to without seeming like she was making value judgments. Because what she was focused on was economics.
Economics that affluent suburbs from Massachusetts to Texas seem to implicitly understand.

**Melissa Kearney** (2:55)
The attachment to marriage and in particular, raising kids in married parent homes, is really quite universal across the college educated class in this country. Even as that class finds themselves divided over politics or political ideas and other things, there's a very strong commitment to this institution that's very beneficial and also very beneficial to kids.

**Cara Miller** (3:24)
Kearney's book came out in 2023 and the reaction to it surprised her. Some people thought she was trying to push marriage on women or that she was making unnecessary distinctions between groups with higher and lower marriage rates, or that she discounted how hard it is to find a good partner even if you want one.

**Melissa Kearney** (3:44)
All of a sudden, I was invited to give my book talk at universities in red states.
Notre Dame, BYU, they loved my talk. Large schools in the south, they loved my book. And it was actually, though I came to it as a scholar, it was both striking and disappointing how much like, gosh, this really is something. My book has no values or culture or promotion kind of like lesson in it. I'm not saying one kind of family, like you have to be this particular model of a family. I am highlighting that a two-parent family in particular is very beneficial. Nonetheless, the message of the book resonated more with folks on the political rights, social conservatives.

**Cara Miller** (4:29)
Kearney's academic work has focused a lot on inequality and children, and there was plenty of positive coverage of her argument about marriage. But the whole picture was not exactly what she had hoped for.

**Melissa Kearney** (4:43)
What's I think disappointing about that is progressives who really care about kids and inequality and social mobility in my view, need to figure out a way to talk about this and accept it as a policy challenge. Because if we don't do something about this, we're going to cement class gaps. So through an equity lens, we would like as a society for more families who are not college educated, who are not white or Asian, we would like them to be able to achieve this.