America is not doing just fine
Conn Carroll
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Multimillionaire Joe Scarborough, who divorced two women who bore him children before marrying his third wife Mika Brzezinski, wants everyone to know that the 74% of Americans who believe America is headed in the wrong direction are all wrong.
America, Scarborough argues, is awesome, and people less fortunate than him should just stop complaining:
Childhood poverty has dropped to the lowest level on record; teenage pregnancy has done the same; the U.S. dollar has experienced generational highs over the past year; unemployment recently hit a 54-year low; the number of job openings this past year also hit record highs. Overall, the U.S. economy continues to surge forward despite economists’ dire predictions. America’s GDP grew to $25 trillion last year.
Whoopee for the GDP.
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What Scarborough conveniently leaves out of his cheerleading for the status quo is that life expectancy in the United States is dropping, real wages are falling, and economic mobility is declining as well.
If the American Dream is about the next generation doing better than their parents, then the American Dream is dying. Driving all of this decline is the collapse of marriage, an institution Scarborough clearly does not value.
From the earliest census up through 1950, roughly 80% of households were led by a married couple, and fewer than 10% of children were born to unmarried parents. Today, less than half of all households include a married couple, and almost 45% of children are born to unmarried parents. In fact, the U.S. now leads the world in single-parent households.
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And there is a direct causal link between the decline in marriage and the decline in economic mobility. Research has found that neighborhoods with more fathers living with their children have better economic mobility than those that don’t. This father factor was even a stronger predictor of economic mobility than race and income. And there is no government program better at keeping fathers in the homes of their children than the institution of marriage.
America is still a great country. There is a reason literally hundreds of millions of migrants want to come live here. But America is no longer the engine of economic mobility it used to be. We can’t start fixing this problem until we acknowledge there is one.