B (29:31)

It's a pleasure to be here.

A (29:33)

Okay, let's jump right in. Many people have argued that the family is in some sort of trouble. That whether you believe that the family needs to be revived, whether you believe that it has to be rescued from what's happening in society, critics of the family, supporters of the family, everyone seems to agree that there's some sort of problem with families. And the disagreement then comes as to why and what ought to be done about it. So let's begin and have you tell us what's your sense of what's happening to the family, particularly here in the United States these days?

B (30:17)

Well, what's happening to the family in the United States is that it's basically failing now. The family is still the most basic emotional unit for support, particularly among children. And children are the most in trouble in the United States. One in six doesn't have enough to eat. They are the poorest Americans. Single mothers are the second poorest. So the family of a single mother and a child is in the deepest trouble of all. Now all families are in trouble for the first time in American history. The majority of people who they consider of prime fertility, age 18, between 18 and 35 years old, are not married now. They're not married because they don't have the security and stability with which to plan. There's a very good book by Jennifer Silva on what has happened, which is that life is too precarious for couples to talk about and think about a future together. Because for the mass of people, even though a lot of people have jobs that didn't used to, they don't have jobs that could earn much of a living for one, no less for a family. And we don't have what other countries do to support families. This is a phenomenon across the board in developed economies. However, America is in the most trouble because we don't help people.

A (31:49)

All right, so let me stop you and pick at something which, you know, bear with me, I'm an economist. We know that jobs have become less secure than they have ever been. England, they have something called zero hours work. Large numbers of people in England are under zero hours contract. What that means is the employer is free to give and take hours from one week to the next. Workers have no idea what their situation will be in terms of their time, their energy, their personal life, their income. I mean the level of insecurity built inand we know the same is true in this country, particularly in the mass jobs in retailing, in fast food, in the growth sectors like Amazon type distribution systems. So the very precarity, the very uncertainty, the very irregularity coupled with the stagnant wages that you're telling us has fundamentally disrupted not just the existing family, but the very idea of family in the upcoming generation.

B (33:05)

That's right. The biggest employer in the United States is Walmart. There is no guarantee. So that planning a future together when you don't even know if you'll be able to survive very well is terrifying. And people don't do it. They have an instinctual aversion to it. They stay away as they did in the last Great Depression. Certain groups haven't really revived at all. That's single mothers who have the worst credit, so that they have to go to the most risky and usurious overcharging lenders are in the most trouble of all. And those are 42% of American children are born to unmarried parents. So you have a terrible situation, particularly for children who need the family the most. Also, if you look at it, most families, most marriages at any rate, and in separation, if not divorce, legal separation or divorce is 50% people without assets to fight over just Separate. Other people don't get married. So that institution is on life supports and they're taking away the supports. So it's dying.

A (34:23)

So it puts children in a particularly vulnerable situation. Because if it's already difficult, as you point out, to plan to have a married life with some stability and security, then the decision to have children on top of being married is doubly problematic.

B (34:45)

It is. The most frequent kind of marriage that's still happening is married people without children. That's the biggest new development because it's too hard to afford them. We don't have the childcare, other countries do. We don't have the supports. We don't have maternity and paternity leaves. We just don't have the conditions that would make a family possible.

A (35:08)

All right, again, let me draw this out. We live in a society where the bulk of people have a job in the private sector. It is insecure. It has fewer benefits than it always has. It is uncertain. And all the things we've just said, and now you're telling me the same society that subjects the family to this kind of dissolving set of circumstances is also the society that provides the least amount of public support for the family. So we're hitting the family two shots, one through the job in the private sector and the second one from the government services which are not there to, to help them. They're not even there as much as in other societies which don't even have this level of family dissolution. It means we're putting families under an unbelievable pressure. And so we shouldn't in a sense be surprised at your statistics about how the family is disappearing or failing.

B (36:08)

Well, what's made people very confused is that the right wing doesn't want to take pay the taxes. They just got a big generous tax cut for the top. They don't want to pay for quality child care, maternity and paternity leaves, family leave, paid vacations, child supports, child nutrition is even being cut back. And so they want to find a ruse. Now they can't have the slogan make us even richer. That won't work. They say family values, just like at the time of Horace Mann when public education was starting. They said, no, that disrupts the family's authority. Ronald Reagan, who started this Republican right wing stuff, said he denied every child in America Head Start, which was going to pass. He vetoed that bill that would have passed Head Start for everyone on the basis that it interfered with the family program so that the family is a cover for right wing accumulation of even more by cutting the Already inadequate existing programs that support families and children. And at the same time as they deny them, they promote family values. Of course it's a failure. The red states have even more divorces than the blue states. They can't sustain marriage even in a worse way. But nonetheless, this is what happens.

A (37:40)

Well, you're a psychotherapist, a psychologist, you study that. You're telling us that on the one hand, the system is crushing the family, and the very people most gung ho to let corporations do what they want to relieve wealthy and rich people and corporations from taxes, the same people that are making this crushing of the family happen present themselves publicly as champions of family values. This is extraordinary. You're doing the damage and then become the critic of the damage you just did. How does this work?

B (38:21)

Well, you ascribe the damage not to the fact that you've withdrawn crucial life support, but there's something wrong with the patient. This is a sick patient, an immoral. This is immorality. There's a guy named Murray who wrote what Happened to American Families? And he says that white workers have joined their African American brothers and sisters in their immorality, having children outside of marriage and not working enough out of laziness, not out of unemployment.

A (38:51)

Aha. So that the breakdown of the family isn't the result of all the economic conditions we've just summarized, but lies instead in the internal moral lacks of individuals.

B (39:04)

Which should be buttressed by fanatical giving, no matter how poor you are, to the evangelical movement because they have family.

A (39:15)

Values, they'll restore the family.

B (39:17)

Even though, you know, Jimmy Swaggart was found twice with prostitutes who reported him because he didn't pay, because he thought what he was doing was immoral. They didn't deserve the money. One of the trustees of Liberty University was found dead, hanging himself because there's an erotic thing out of hanging yourself in a rubber suit and so on. Falwell's wife gave free cell phones to coeds so she could call them at night, you know, notwithstanding, just like Trump, who was the hero of the evangelical movement, who is the pussy grabber in chief and has three wives and doesn't pay his taxes and so on. That there's this disconnect. But people are desperate to somehow think they can be saved from the dissolution of a basic emotional support. Because whether I think it's a great idea to depend so much on a family, I absolutely don't. I know that it needs other supports. That is what most people have. And one of the signs of the dissolution is A huge increase in foster care. 64,000 people died last year of overdoses, opioid overdoses primarily. Many of them were parents. When they're dead, their children go into the foster care system. They take drugs in part because they can't deal with the difficulties of their lives with their children. Then they die and their children are in foster care. Or maybe one out of 10 children lives with a grandparent because their parents can't take care of them. 60% of people of my generation help support their children and grandchildren because we got the American dream if we were white and attached to males and they didn't get it, they don't have that anymore.

A (41:15)

Let me ask your comment. As I listen to you, it strikes me that the conservatives and Republicans have hit upon a genius politics. You support big corporations and the rich who give you loads of money for your movements and your politicians, but they destroy the family by their behavior of cutting wages and destroying the benefits and cutting government services. Then you turn around and celebrate the family, the thing that's dissolving, the thing that people miss, the thing that people want to hold on to. You say you will champion bringing it back. So you make the victims of your economic policy still vote for you as the champion of the family so that you can continue to support the tax cuts and the corporate behavior that causes the problem. This is a genius. You hold on to the votes of the very people that you're helping to damage by your economics.

B (42:23)

That's right.

A (42:24)

Stunning.

B (42:25)

They claim that territory. Now, I think that progressives need to claim that territory and say that the family's important, that women's work in the household is important, that as women's liberation has allowed women to have fuller lives, that house domestic labor and menial labor should be well paid and women should be honored, which the right wing does a very clever thing. It's like country music, you know, the woman is revered for being a mother. For all the things you gave me, mom, no charge, and so on. But at the same time, who's supporting mom for all the things you give? No support for you. That. That's the other part. And partly the progressives have not done enough on personal life and emphasizing the importance of supporting families and children.

A (43:18)

All right, well, tell us a little bit about, because I know you've discussed this with me, the kinds of support that other countries are already giving, that the United States could give, that all countries could give. Because if capitalism as a system is unable or unwilling to pay the kinds of wages to allow the traditional family to Survive, which clearly you've shown us is the case. Well then, what kinds of alternative family units which are already happening? The couples without children, the people who are not coupling up in the normal ways that we have. I shouldn't call it normal. The traditional ways. What kind of supports do countries have? What kind of supports should we think about to actually help people form and sustain relationships that are important if we're destroying the family upon which they have relied?

B (44:19)

Well, we should think about the measures that just about every other country is taking. The United States is at the very bottom, or one higher than the worst among the 30 OECD nations, the wealthier nations that are not all wealthy. It includes Mexico, it includes Hungary and Slovakia. Hardly wealthy countries. However, we're at the bottom, we're one away from the bottom. And that's because these other countries provide services. We are the only ones that do not provide any free maternity leave or paternity leave leaves that are compensated by the government. So the companies are not held back in their profiteering by compensating for this.

A (45:09)

In other words, we're the only ones. There's an important point here, though. There are private companies who offer those things in the United States. But what is lacking in this country, if I understand it, is there's no law, there's no mandate mandating that. This is a requirement to give every couple or every young person that is contemplating parenting right that that must be given as a human right, as a right of an adult. Other countries make this mandatory. The United States refuses to do this. It's extraordinary.

B (45:47)

We're the only ones without maternity leave or paternity leave, without paid maternity and care without preschool, well, quality preschool. 70% of the countries give preschool to 3 year olds.

A (46:04)

Again, mandating that is an availability.

B (46:07)

100% of 3 year olds on are given that in France, 98% in places like the Netherlands or Sweden or Denmark or Finland or so on. We are way behind in that. We also don't have the kind of subsidized quality after school and summer programs that these other nations have. So children are playing in the street or left alone because their parents have to work. We also have a very bad welfare system. And the SNAP program, which was supplemental nutrition and food stamps, is being converted to a much more difficult program as it is for welfare. You have to fill out so many different forms that you'd have to have a PhD in form filling to do this. And so people give up. Also they have to report regularly, even if they have a BA and know how to do it, they have to take the same class over and over again about how to fill out a job application, how to write a resume. If their kid is sick and they can't go to it, they're cut. So they can't go to these required classes over and over again that don't get them jobs. There's a level of harassment that is now being extended to food stamp subscribers. And one out of four families in the United States gets food stamps. Things are so bad for families that they need that and they're not getting it. And so now they will be starving. One out of six kids is hungry. They call it food scarcity instead of hunger, but it's hunger.

A (47:51)

Tell me what kinds of support in realms like housing and the medical structure exists? And what would you suggest, even if it doesn't exist somewhere, as a way of reconstituting new forms of family to provide what is no longer available because the system capitalism has destroyed the traditional family.

B (48:16)

The other wealthy countries have free medical care for everybody. What Bernie Sanders was suggesting, you know, Medicare for everybody. They also have quality child care and after school care. They have maternity and paternity leaves. They have quality public school for kids from three years on and quality childcare before that.

A (48:42)

And these are all supports then, either for an individual who wants to have a child without being married or, or for a couple or any combination of adults that take responsibility for children. There's all what you're telling us, all of these kinds of supports, medical, educational, housing structures and so on. And so the question, I guess becomes, what is going to happen here in the United States if you destroy the family, which you describe as the last kind of emotional support network that many people have, and you don't provide alternative supports? You are what, you know, in the first half of this program, I talked about this recent survey that CIGNA and IPSOS did that shows that more than half the American people are very lonely and say so and are aware of it. You're producing a society that is not, not emotionally held together. What does that suggest about where this economic system is taking us?

B (49:50)

I think the best suggestion is to look at the opioid crisis where 64,000 people died. And that's not all the users, of course, just the people whose ODS killed them. That is huge. It's the biggest cause of death in the United States. More than heart attacks, car accidents, all of those other things put together, it's cancer. It's because people are desperate and they look for personal solutions. And those personal solutions are for sale and they kill themselves. They're desperate. Also, you know, people who are newly immiserated because of the lack of marriage supports, like the middle aged women in the south, die. The white ones die faster than the black ones because African Americans are used to coping in a situation of women needing to support each other in extended families and the whites are not.

A (50:48)

So the family values. I want to get back to that for a moment. The family values is not just a hypocritical push by fundamentalists. It really has a much more important political function, which is probably why it survives so strongly because it gives the conservatives a way to hold on to the votes of the people whose emotional and personal life they're destroying.

B (51:15)

Exactly.

A (51:15)

It's extraordinary.

B (51:16)

They create a terrible problem, they worsen the existing problem and then they pretend that the policies that cause the problem will be the salvation. And they are the only people talking much about families and so they get away with it.

A (51:34)

Can you tell us a little bit about what other kinds of family, using that word loosely, might emerge that are different from the traditional one as people try to cope with this situation?

B (51:48)

Well, co housing is one kind of family that's a phenomenon in the United States that's also all over the world where people who have children and people who don't have children, old people, young people, all have apartments within a big complex and they have a big collective dining room as well as kitchens in their own apartment. And there's a system of letting people know if you'd like to be visited or not, so kids can go and visit, they can see other people, they have people to take care of them, there's people to babysit, There's a whole collectivity that happens. There are apartment buildings primarily for single people and older people in Sweden, where they're designed with small personal apartments and big collective spaces so that single people won't be so lonely because they have collective. They eat collectively if they want to. They have films and activities and games. The money is put into a collective area, if you have the money. There are those experiments that are very successful in California where people have basically a room but a lot of collective space and they pay to be there for the elderly. There are wonderful developments where not only you're in a mixed area, but also where there are redone old hotels so people have their own little room, but big collective spaces. And those have turned out for the elderly to be a huge saver for the government because the Medicare expenses go way down. When people aren't lonely and miserable, that's one of the reasons that in England they have a cabinet minister on loneliness because they found that with a public health system they saved millions and millions of dollars by helping people be less lonely, connecting with each other, living near one another or together. These are being done all over the world successfully. They're not being done here very much except by private initiatives with private money that people have who can afford it. Pay.

A (54:08)

You said in an earlier program as our last point, that we have time for today that the only people getting married and having children in what might be called the traditional way is a small percentage of folks at the upper end of the income distribution that can afford this because it's become a luxury.

B (54:29)

Yes, it is. Marriage has become more of a luxury good, at least a stable marriage that lasts. And those the marriages that last longer are marriages where there are at least minimal college educated people with better jobs because then they can hire poorer people to take care of their children, to do their laundry, to do their cooking because they can get takeout or take the kids to a restaurant to they can go on vacations and have someone watch their kids. They can have a nanny. They can use their money to escape.

A (55:03)

I wish, as always, we had more time. Thank you very much. We're going to come back to the explore what capitalism is doing to the family because it is a vital part of American politics and of America's future and that of the rest of the world too. Thank you very much for being with us.

B (55:21)

Thank you. And we do have to remember that without this basic support, people are even more miserable, lonely and drug addicted than they would be otherwise.

A (55:32)

Thank you all for being with us. I hope you found this discussion as interesting and provocative as I did. I want to thank you all for being partners in sharing what we do on this program with your co workers, your relatives, your neighbors. I also want to thank trust truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that has been a good partner with Economic update for a long time. And most of all, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.