How Inequality Shapes the American Family {interview}

http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-inequality-shapes-american-family




Law professors June Carbone and Naomi Cahn have been investigating how inequality influences family life. In their new book, Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family, they find we are creating profound social changes through America's tolerance of wealth and income disparities. In the New Gilded Age, class once again becomes a dominant force in human life, just as it was aboard the Titanic. In an email interview, I caught up with the authors to delve further into the new class-based American family.

Lynn Parramore: Why did you write this book at this time?

June Carbone and Naomi Cahn: We wrote the book because we are concerned that marriage has become a marker of socioeconomic class. The book addresses three questions about the relationship between economics and the family that arose from our previous research.

First, we knew from our family law studies that almost all simple statements about the family are misleading. Take divorce rates. We began to hear in the '90s that they were leveling off. In fact, divorce rates are not leveling off for anyone. Instead, they are moving in two diametrically opposed directions. The divorce rates for college graduates, who marry later and largely marry each other, have fallen dramatically, back to the levels of the mid-'60s before no-fault divorce. Everyone else’s divorce rates have continued to rise. So looking at the aggregate figures obscures what is happening to the family and we wanted to make these differences—the movement of families is opposed directions by class—explicit.

Second, in our earlier book, Red Families v. Blue Families, we explored why the vote maps onto family form. We found that the more conservative areas of the country encouraged younger ages of marriage and more fertility, which in turn produced teen births and divorces. The more liberal areas of the country produced later marriages, more non-marital cohabitation, more support for contraception and abortion, and greater investment of resources in each child. We knew that one of the things we were seeing was a wealth effort—blue areas of the country were richer to begin with and in an area of inequality and austerity, regional differences were increasing. We wanted to address the role of socio-economic class as a factor that exacerbates these ideological, political and cultural differences.

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