Episode 104 – Focus on the Family with June Carbone

Macro N Cheese – Episode 104
Focus on the Family with June Carbone
January 23, 2021

 

[00:00:02.880] – June Carbone [intro/music]

One of the things that’s fascinating about the post-war period – and again, we’re talking about roughly 1950 into the 70s – is that college graduate parents and high school only graduate parents spend about the same amount of time interacting with their children in that time period.

[00:00:21.140] – June Carbone [intro/music]

It turns out that men who have been recently laid off are right up there with alcoholics who are the most likely to be engaged in domestic violence. If you look at financial downturns, you find financial downturns increase substance abuse especially if the guy isn’t working.

[00:01:26.670] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Gumbine.

[00:01:34.530] – Steve Grumbine

All right, folks, and this is Steve with Macro N  Cheese. This is our second podcast out of the covid ward of the hospital. And I went ahead and embarked on an adjacent subject to our last conversation with Fadhel Kaboub on the job guarantee. This particular focus is going to be on the family, the impacts of the family, the dynamics within the family, within stability with an environment of economic turmoil that we see in our present society.

But we’re also going to look at the history of the family and the dynamics of the state. So what I did was I reached out to Professor June Carbone, who is a law professor at University of Minnesota and an accomplished author, and also the wife of Bill Black, who is a friend of the program as well. And we thought, what better place to start than with June? So, June, tell me. You’ve written several books. What are some of the books you’ve written and welcome, by the way.

[00:02:35.160] – June Carbone

Well, thank you. Thank you very much for having me, and I certainly hope you feel better and make it through this interview.

[00:02:42.310] – Grumbine

Yes. [laughs]

[00:02:43.650] – Carbone

So I’ve written three books on the family and a textbook. I’m a family law professor. But, you know, the nice thing about being a family law professor, especially one who’s been around for a while, is I get to write on whatever I want. So my first book. I just thought everybody had the family all wrong, and I was writing more about law in those days, and it’s called “From Partners to Parents: The Second Revolution in Family Law.”

And part of the reason I wrote that book is I thought, you know, I’d go to family law conferences in the 90s and the law professors would be talking about how divorce rates had leveled off. And then I’d look at the data. And divorce rates weren’t leveling off. For college graduates, they were declining back to the level before no-fault divorce. For everybody else, they were continuing to go up.

They were moving in opposite directions. And for the previous 50 years, that didn’t happen.  The family moved in the same direction. But we were entering into a new era where different parts of the family were moving in opposite directions at the same time. And no one had an explanation for that. That’s where I got started. Then the second book was called “Red Families v. Blue Families: Political Polarization and the Reinvention of Culture.”

And in a way that was trying to deal with the fact different parts of the family were moving in opposite directions and so was the law. So if you go back to 1980, family law in the United States is pretty much the same everywhere. And again, the trends all move in the same directions. You want to talk about a father and mother who are divorcing, the father comes out as gay. He’s living with his partner.

The question is, what is the impact on custody? You talk cases cited –  New York cases in that era – there was no big difference in family law across the states. They were converging. So fast-forward to when we wrote the book – and it came out 2010 – and the answer is family law is diverging big-time from places that are welcoming same-sex marriage to places that are resisting it completely. And when we looked at why, we said, “Oh, there’s a new model we called ‘blue,’ a new model that’s really the upper-middle-class adaptation to a new economy.

It works at least in terms of creating more stable families that invest, have a lot of kids. And there’s wholesale resistance from the more religious parts of the country.” So we wrote about that. We were very proud of that. That book got more popular attention. And then we had another book called “Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family.” And with that, we realized that a lot of what we had called red and blue is really a divide between the richer, more modernist parts of the country and the places left behind.

The places left behind are seeing family decline, not just economic decline. And in looking at that, we wanted to capture something that I think was important. So in a way, when you say who are the big theorists of the family, in many ways they’re coming from the right; and people like James Q. Wilson would write “well, economics can’t explain a change in moral sentiment. The family is about morals. It’s about the long, slow emancipation of women.

Marriage started to fall apart in the Enlightenment, and that’s not about economics.” And we looked at that and said, “Oh, come on. The only group in American society whose marriage rates have increased are the top 10 percent of women by income.” And if you ask why… It’s not that economics causes divorce. People don’t dump their spouses because they got laid off. It’s that a change in economics changes moral systems, changes norms. We wanted to capture that and that’s what we’ve been writing about. So that’s a bit of an overview of my books.

[00:06:52.120] – Grumbine

 Very good. We talked offline. One of the things that you brought up was the need to understand the historical nature of the family within the United States. And we went back to the industrial revolution. Talk to me about origins and what family meant and the evolving family dynamic throughout the United States leading up to this present time.

[00:07:15.610] – Carbone

Yes. So one of the things and one of the reasons I got started rebelling against the dominant discussions about family is people like Gary Becker, who talk about specialization between men and women, and economists, and the folks talking about morality, and some of the feminists as well, talk about the family as though it was the same in every year. And what really gets me excited is not the paradigm type of the delta. That is, not what things are, but why do they change?

And, so I keep looking for the causes of change. And I’ve come up over the years with this story. Go back to the time when the United States was founded. We have an agricultural society. Is it patriarchal? Clearly. Why is it patriarchal? Because the foundation of the colonial era family is the farm. And farm ownership is tightly controlled by men. Few women, especially widows, end up owning land. But really, this is a male-dominant system, and a man is ready to marry and achieve his true role as head of the household if he owns land on which he can sustain his family.

And in that world, the women help out in the fields. But there’s no question who the boss is legally and practically. And the colonial era farm can take care of itself. It can grow enough food to feed people on there, supplemented by hunting and fishing. It can produce enough protein. Women make their own clothes in this era. And so the farm is a self-contained unit. It provides stability and security and it’s patriarchal. Think about what happens when you get industrialization.

All of a sudden, you’ve really, really disrupted the system. So with urbanization and industrialization, the entire economy is dramatically more insecure. There are boom-bust economic cycles that were not as severe in agricultural times, but more critically, think of your average factory worker, think of what we think of now as a union worker, but in 1840, there were no unions. You can get laid off. You can get hurt. There’s no unemployment compensation. You’re injured, nobody’s taking care of you. There’s no health insurance.

And indeed, the first efforts to adopt those kinds of laws were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the Lochner era in the early 1900s So you have mass insecurity. What’s the reaction to that? Well, the family of the separate spheres, which feminists like to say is oppression, the women are confined to the home. No. The men left the home and women now got a promotion. They are the moral centers of the family. What’s their job?

Well, we think of it as sparkling kitchen floors from the 50s. But the real job of the women in the separate spheres is the creation of a new upper-middle class. It is to have the girls prevent the boys from getting them pregnant. Why? Because if the girls get pregnant too early, the boys have to marry them and that derails the whole enterprise. You’ve got to keep the boys in school. They’ve got to get the job. They’ve got to get through the first couple of years where they’re working their way up, and then they can afford a wife, and then the girls are allowed to sleep with them. So . . .

[00:10:41.820] – Grumbine

Is that how it works? [laughs]

[00:10:42.310] – Carbone

That’s how it works. So in 1800, and by the way, also in 1960, 30 percent of brides gave birth within eight and a half months of the nuptials – the way the system worked in 1950s and in 1800 – is on farm communities all those teenagers, the randy teenagers were sleeping with each other where the girl got pregnant and the boy married her. Same thing in San Francisco in 1960. But that meant a very young average age of marriage and limited investment, pre-marriage and employability, employment, education.

So to invent the upper middle class of the industrial era, you had to postpone marriage, which meant you had to police women’s virginity. By 1860, that number, 30 percent of the brides pregnant at the time of the nuptial, dropped to 10 percent. Over the course of the 19th century, in 1800, the average married woman had eight kids. By 1900, she had four kids. And in 1800, the wealthier women had more kids. By 1900, they had less kids.

The new upper-middle-class model is a model, they wouldn’t call it a hyper-investment in kids, it was simply an investment in kids. But that required postponing marriage until the man could support the woman, keep her and the kids out of the factories, and it didn’t work through the industrial era working class. They sent their kids into the factories. African-Americans, the women always worked, though after emancipation, they tried to keep the kids out of the factories because they believed in education.

But the separate spheres is an upper-middle-class model designed to produce better-educated kids. The threat is factory work and for the working class, the factory, which hires kids and hires women, though at very low wages, is the safety net for the men who get laid off or injured. So that idea of the family isn’t there in the literature. Yes, all the pieces are there.

The historians talk about it. But this idea of the specialization between men and women is an upper-middle-class model designed to produce greater investment in the men who now specialize among themselves in a system of radically greater inequality that’s not there in the histories of the family, and it sets the stage.

[00:13:18.700] – Grumbine

Well, let me ask you a question there, because obviously with this upper-middle-class perspective, that leaves out an incredibly large swath of the working class to be very insecure and living in precarity.

[00:13:30.820] – Carbone

Yes.

[00:13:31.660] – Grumbine

Is that the thrust here?

[00:13:33.220] – Carbone

Absolutely. And that remains true until after World War II.

[00:13:37.720] – Grumbine

OK, so take us to the next ramp, because obviously, religion in this country has been a very key organizing factor.

[00:13:47.050] – Carbone

Yes.

[00:13:47.440] – Grumbine

. . . .In the US. And still, you can see it in politics everywhere we go, the ‘shoulds,’ as I call them, a lot of ‘shoulds.’ And the approach that the religious right in this country and to some degree the religious left have a significant impact on how we see one another outside the family. But it also directly has power dynamics inside the family. I’m curious, given the investment model, the sphere’s model you spoke to within the upper-middle class, we see slaves. So much of their world was centered around religion, too. There was so much religion in society. How do you think that impacts this dynamic you’re calling out?

[00:14:33.140] – Carbone

Well, actually, in the 19th century, it has a very happy influence. So this new family model, the separate spheres model I’m describing, arises in urban areas in the northeast, in the 1840s. And what it does is it emphasizes women’s virtue, so the religions love it. But where it really takes hold in a way that’s important for the overall American story is in farm communities. So farm wives in the separate spheres model women are the more moral sex.

We’re writing a new book that emphasizes a little bit how the men are now free to rape and pillage, not literally, but as business types. The men of the Gilded Age play out the separate spheres because the men of the separate spheres are the amoral competitors in the market. The women become the more virtuous sect who are in charge of instilling the proper values in children. It is important for women, therefore, to be educated, so they can read the Bible to their children, not to mention teach them the right moral values.

And the place where this really takes hold is in farm communities, especially farm communities that don’t have slaves and believe in relative equality. So, the Upper Midwest, the West Coast, the mountain states embrace this model. And when they embrace this model, they also embrace free secondary education. By 1900, the US emerges as the best-educated country in the world, with women outpacing men in terms of educational achievement.

The men quit to go to work. The women stay in school because they don’t have to work in farm communities in the same way the men do. And they embrace an idea of scientific agriculture rooted in large state universities. So here’s my story. How does the United States enact the bill that empowers the land grant college system? Quincy University of Minnesota and its the foundation for scientific agriculture. Well, the South then, as now, blocked such things.

Didn’t believe in investment in things like the state or public education, but the South seceded. So in 1863 after the South seceded, Congress could pass the land grant college system and that became the backbone for educational efforts throughout the agricultural portions of the country. But the South resisted this model then. It resisted this model afterwards. It lagged.

Both blacks lagged and whites lagged behind the educational achievement of the rest of the country until after World War II. And so this model, this model of women’s virtue, turned out to be very important in encouraging and emphasizing what we think of as the distinctively American emphasis on education. It required pre-secondary education and women joining men in the pursuit of education in order to read the Bible to their children. Religion and this model went hand in glove.

[00:17:50.190] – Grumbine

So with that in mind, clearly families at some point in time… We read the books. Now, mind you, they may not be good books, but we read the books that described how family was everything. And you always hear about white picket fences. And even now, part of the Trump phenomenon was the whole concept of “make America great again.”

And so there’s this harkening back to a time where things were once great. And I’m wondering from a family perspective, from this dynamic that you’ve explored, what is the confluence there between this whole MAGA concept or this utopian view of what family life was once like and how reality squares up to it?

[00:18:35.880] – Carbone

Well, here’s the thing. And there’s a lot of debate on this. The thing we don’t have good statistics on is what happened during the Great Depression. There’s a lot of reason to believe there was something called poor man’s divorce. Families not doing too well. Mom moves back in with her parents and dad disappears. Then maybe he’s living down the street, but formal divorce is rare.

Separations were not so rare. But if you want to harken back to the ideal period, I think the progressives should be taking a closer look at what happens in the period from 1940 to 1980. So this includes the 50s, but it also includes the 60s. And this is the distinctive period in American history. And I think we should give MAGA supporters some credit.

If you want to talk about civil rights, the single most important decade for African-American progress was a period from 1940 roughly into the 60s, preceding the civil rights era. In the south, it’s the period from 1965 to 1975 in terms of the closing of the economic gaps between African-Americans and whites. And what happens in this period is that you pass a bunch of New Deal measures, one of the most important is the National Labor Relations Act in the mid 50s.

But the real progress starts with World War II. World War II, it turns out, is really, really important for progressives because it does two things. It employs everyone. It really fuels a great migration of African-Americans out of the south to take these jobs in the north. And, you know, the African-Americans who got good union jobs and kept them when the troops came home, their kids went to college. But that progress comes to an end by 1970 in the north.

As I said, in the south, it continues a little bit further into the mid- 70s. But that progress pretty much stops after that. And when you say what did the New Deal do? So, first, got a lot of jobs. But the second thing is high marginal tax rates. In the period from basically 1942, well certainly into the 60s, you have average marginal tax rates of 82 percent. And what that means is there’s really no point in giving your CEO’s bonuses of $50 million dollars a year because they don’t get to keep it.

And so what you see is a much bigger investment in institutions. And so you look at the postwar era and this is the era where the working class gets access to the advantage of the separate spheres, where the women can stay home, where the children can complete high school. And what you’re seeing now is the huge increase in marriage rates at younger ages. These marriages will fuel the divorces in the 70s so I don’t want to be too optimistic about them. But you do see an era in which white-collar guys and blue-collar guys work about the same number of hours and it’s 40 hours a week.

You see a dramatic increase in economic equality. You see that how much money somebody makes has less to do with how well their children’s test scores are going to be and there’s more likelihood of upward mobility. So you see an era where this upper-middle-class family model that emphasizes a family wage – that is, a man who can earn enough to support a family without his wife having to go off to the factories, and that has a job that’s relatively secure and provides benefits like pensions and later, health care.

You see that model takes off in the period from 1940, and then it begins to erode toward the end of the 70s. That period is an era of enormous equality in the United States, greater economic equality than any other era. My PC friends say I can’t talk about the 50s without calling it racist and sexist. And of course, it was racist and sexist. But if you look at it – this is the era in which I was a little kid.

I can tell you all about the 50s. I’m old enough. But if you look at racial progress, there is a lot of racial progress occurring. As I said, in economic terms, racial progress pretty much comes to an end with the election of Reagan. But the stepping stones are the good union jobs that pay a family wage, and they provide a measure of stability and security that had been lacking.

There are lots of people who talk about this, but if you go back and you say, “What does economic equality do?” Economic equality was a precondition in agricultural areas for support for free secondary education – the relatively more economically equal farm community and the greatest embrace of free secondary education at a time when most of Europe didn’t and it was still a new idea. When you look at the 50s, you also see the beginning of a system in which the working class enjoys the advantages of what I call the new family system of the 1840s for the first time.

A big swath of the working class has access to it, and you see greater relative equality and investment in children. The payoff for children from the 50s is high. And you see greater economic opportunity for the people who emerge – from stable families and investing more in children.  Well, that’s not the whole population, and it begins to fall apart for African-American communities before it falls apart for communities. But this is a period of progress in terms of family stability and the marshaling of investment in children.

[00:24:35.080] – Grumbine

What does it mean to invest in children? It’s kind of a vague term. But when we talk about that, what does that actually mean?

[00:24:43.150] – Carbone

Well, one of the things you can take a look at, for example, and Robert Putnam at Harvard is part of a research group that tries to measure these things. And there are two kinds of things you can look at: one is money and the other is time. But there are time measures that look at how much interactive time, for example, do parents spend with their children. One of the things that’s fascinating about the postwar period, and again, we’re talking about roughly 1950 into the 70s, is that college graduate parents and high school-only graduate parents spend about the same amount of time interacting with their children in that time period.

When you look at high school graduate-only parents, the mothers are spending more time and the fathers, a little bit of time. College graduate parents in that era, the fathers who are college graduates spend more time with kids than the working-class families, but they spend about the same minutes per day in interactive things with children reading to them, playing with them, taking them to the park, that kind of thing, not simply being in the same room, but interacting with children. That has a high payoff.

You look at today’s world and the class differences in time spent with children are enormous. Upper-middle-class women now, even upper-class women who work full time spend an hour a day more in interactive time with young children than working class mothers. That’s actually huge, an hour a day is huge. And the difference among fathers is even greater.

So that idea of how much time do you spend in adult interaction with children is a big predictor of things like academic performance. And the differences in income are also huge. In the bottom of the economic ladder, the amount of money being spent on children today at the bottom quintile is about the same as it was 50 years ago in constant dollar terms. But for well-off couples, it’s probably five times as much as a comparable group 50 years ago. So if you look at investment in children, the differences are enormous.

[00:26:54.440] – Grumbine

Let me ask you a question. Since one of the current exploding trends has been special needs children.

[00:27:01.860] – Carbone

Yeah.

[00:27:02.210] – Grumbine

We’re seeing a huge amount of children born onto the autism spectrum and the amount of investment it takes to work with a child with special needs. Just forget the family dynamic for a moment. Just the explosion of autistic cases in America and the impact on the family having to invest, having no choice but to invest, not being able to blow that kid off because that kid requires needs beyond.

I’m curious, has your research looked into autism at all, because this seems to be a huge growing dynamic that more and more families are having to navigate as they balance out what it means to be a family in today’s society.

[00:27:50.200] – Carbone

Yes. And so we have three children and the youngest had mild but hard to diagnose special needs. And so we spent some time looking into different school settings. I went to, I can’t tell you how many lectures I went to on this, but I have two stories to tell out of that. The first is that the conviction is that virtually every child in America can be taught to read by the third grade, that we know how to do it.

It is simply a matter of spending the resources and the right approach, and that unless a child is profoundly handicapped, they can learn to read. The conventional wisdom was not that this is true. Right now, we really know how to do that. My second story about autism is about girls and autism. And I have a grand theory, which is that if autism is the extreme form of the female brain, her daughter is the extreme form of the female brain.

It is not well diagnosed or understood, but it corresponds closely with the idea of ADD, not hyperactive behavior, but attention deficit issues in girls so that attention deficit issues are not one thing. And the opposite of the autism spectrum disorders in boys is actually difficulty staying on task, excessive socializing, being overwhelmed by social cues. And difficulty in organizing that corresponds to math phobia.

And it is absolutely under-researched what happens in girls. But what we see – and our son went to a charter high school – the son with learning disabilities went to a charter high school where he got [inaudible 00:29:28] and found his niche hanging out with the kids who were on the autism spectrum because they excused his lack of appropriate interpersonal skills.

But the boys who were his friends, many of them had been diagnosed as profoundly autistic at age two, but by high school, were starring in the school play, had 800 Verbal SAT scores, were quite successful, although they still had some rough edges on the interpersonal dynamics. And that’s quite different from somebody who has profound issues, you know, and is essentially handicapped in a way that they will not be a fully functional adult.

So what we found over this time period is not just that we know a lot more about these things, but that investment pays off because it turns out that the really intensive investment in early childhood gives you dramatically better adult outcomes. And that’s where we’re not making the investments on a societal basis. So when I talk about the comparison in the 19th century, if free high school education was the key in 19th century advancement, the issue that should be on the table today is universal pre-K, which addresses both daycare needs and societal investment in children’s needs with the best payoff for the poorest families.

[00:31:05.300] – Intermission

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, and Instagram.

[00:31:41.280] – Grumbine

To me, this is where the public purpose steps in. And this is where delineating between private interests and public interests should be the number one thing, in my opinion, because obviously, once you put this into a profit motive, once you start making this means-based, once you start balkanizing who has access and who does not.

I feel like this is just a huge spotlight for something that should be a public right – to universal pre-K or whatever it is, this program. I feel like this is a public space thing. This should not be privatized. This should be the advancement of all children, regardless of station in life. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:32:39.300] – Carbone

Oh, absolutely. And this one, there’s no doubt, we need the research. The research shows that if there’s one thing society could do that would immediately produce, that would pay for itself in terms of better results, that has lifelong consequences, still paying off 30 years later, it is investment in early childhood. And when it’s been on the ballot, as it was in Florida, conservative states vote for it as much as liberal states because it both addresses…

I mean, talk about upper-middle-class models. Every upper-middle-class family I know sends their kids to preschool, but they pay for it out of pocket. And if you’re working full time and you need full-day program, it can cost a lot. And it is something that prevents mothers from going back to work earlier. So it hits two needs: the need for investment in children and to equalize the access to that investment, and the question, where do you want your children to be spending their days while mothers are working alongside fathers.

Universal pre-K is the answer. So we have now a system of radical inequality. It’s there. But you raise a second point, which is how we think about these public investments. And so what’s interesting about the 19th century is again and Claudia Goldin at Harvard has written beautifully about this. She’s an economist who says equality begets more equality.

The farm communities of places like the upper Midwest, Minnesota, where I am, which are relatively egalitarian, settled by immigrants – in Minnesota it’s Scandinavian immigrants from relatively egalitarian cultures – tend to adopt measures like free secondary education that promote greater equality, and it’s reinforced. And it gets to why the 50s worked. So when you look at the 50s, I mentioned the two big things, which is we’ve limited the power at the top, which is 90 percent, eventually 80 percent marginal tax rates.

But you also empower the bottom through unionization. And what happens with large corporations is there is actually a win-win mindset, which is really different from the Gilded Age, different from now. But when Charlie Wilson, the CEO at General Motors, said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America,” he said it and he got flack for it. He said, “I was misunderstood. I meant what is good for America is good for General Motors. We’re all in this together.”

And here’s the piece I want to emphasize. With unionization and the family wage, and Henry Ford adopted the family wage in 1913. He paid his workers more. Why? Because he had 375 percent turnover in 1913. And he said this has got to stop. So he boosted the wage. And then what he did is he had socialization committees who visited people in their homes, got rid of the drunks. If the wives worked, you weren’t eligible for the family wage.

And he imposed his model of what good family life was. But what he got return was loyalty. And so big companies with unionization started making it harder to fire people. We think that’s a terrible thing, but it had two really good effects. First, the companies in that era were, at least in 1913, were a bit pickier about who they hired; but once they hired somebody they committed to them.

So employers invested in workers. You could get a job at Ford Motor Company at 18 and stay through retirement, but the company invested in you. And so you became more valuable to the company over time. Now, the company also carried you through your declining elder years, but you had to retire at 65, and you got a significant pension. So this was a life-long system over the workforce. It wasn’t just what can you do for me today? Tomorrow I’m going to offshore the plant to China or Mexico.

This was an investment in the identification of the company with the community, with the workers over the life course. And so there is cross-subsidization over the life course. Again, workers in midlife – maybe at their most productive years – they stay with the company. Even though they could get paid more elsewhere because they see loyalty as important.

It is a component of their identity. We can tell you. Bill’s stepfather worked for Ford, and he would never, ever dream of buying a car that wasn’t made by Ford or at least had the Ford label. That identity was incredibly important, but the company was loyal in return. Now that gives you stability, stability in the community, stability for family. But the company gets loyalty in return, and they get more productive workers, and that’s one of the things we dismantle.

Now, that system is also extended to women and children only through marriage. It certainly limits women’s options, but it provides security for the kids. So even if a Ford employee working on the assembly line has a terrible job and isn’t making that much money, they have a secure place in the community and so do their children. They’re going to schools that are decent schools.

I grew up in a working-class community in the inner city. We were among the last white families to leave. But when we went out to the suburbs – you know, my father was a carpenter.  The school I went to, which was not an elite suburb, the children whose fathers were lawyers and the children whose fathers were carpenters like mine, we went to school together. We had the same education.

There was much less inequality in that sense, though, certainly racial segregation was an issue. So if you think about that foundation, it’s not just that the people who worked at Ford in Detroit were better off, the community was better off, the schools were better off. The level of stability for families and for communities was greater. And the company contributed to the community because it had a stake in it.

[00:38:49.530] – Grumbine

It sounds like a lot of the fabric of society is what you just described.

[00:38:54.390] – Carbone

Yeah.

[00:38:55.320] – Grumbine

It’s all those interactions, those connecting points that serve as anchors, serve as stabilizers from a social perspective as well as a supply chain structural matter, but then harkening back to the emotional side of things and more of the base level Maslow type needs with shelter, food… Very interesting. One of the questions I guess I have for you is with the dismantling of so many of the things they see as nice-to-haves, which we clearly see are glue to society, but with the dismantling of these connecting points, it’s quite obvious that women over the course of time have been impacted by this very severely because of the way society has been structured.

Many women stepped out of the workforce. They raise children. Their skill sets were subject to erosion, and then they were expected to go back into the workforce if they wanted to leave a bad situation where they were expected to go back into the workforce after the children had graduated from high school or whatever other preconditions the family determined. But these women went back unskilled, uneducated, no job history and an incredible amount of precarity that probably left them in very terrible situations with the idea that there is no alternative. Can you talk a little bit about the precarity of being a woman in a society where these conditions exist?

[00:40:31.850] – Carbone

Yes, and I think it’s a little hard for me because things change over time and place, but I want to capture a little bit of that. So when you describe – and again  I’d like to treat the period from 1948 to the 1970s as a unique period – and what’s happening there are two overlapping trends. So in the beginning of the 50s, working-class women get the opportunity to stay home. 

Now staying home instead of working in a factory is a promotion. So there’s all this literature on how terrible the 50s were, but, you know, I had a mother who had worked at a clothing factory, and then she married my father. My father and mother married in their mid-thirties. My aunts married at 16. And so my mother viewed this as her last chance to have kids. And she was delighted to marry my father and delighted to be home and out of the factory.

This is a big step up – moving out to the suburbs. I remember it vividly. It was a big step up. It was not a step-down. She wasn’t bored. She finally got to do what she wanted to do, which was take care of us and the house. And I’m serious about that. I’m not being sarcastic. But at the same time, one of the things that’s beginning to happen is that as early as the 50s, the demand for women’s market labor is increasing. And the percentage of women who graduate from college doubles in the 60s and increases another 50 percent in the 70s.

Now, if you’re a college graduate woman from a middle-class background, as opposed to a working-class background being stuck at home with the kids, the dog, the swimming pool, and the expectation of producing sparkling floors using Spic and Span is not a step up. And so it is this new generation of women who come online, in effect, with greater education, which is just exploding the 60s, that fuels, I think, the real disconnect.

Only 10 percent of the entire population graduated from college in 1950, a smaller percentage of women, but that is increasing dramatically. And it is the women going to college who fueled the demand for the [birth control] pill and for abortion. I remember being in college in the 70s and my classmates running around in the buzz on campus talking about their abortions. And the odds of a sexually active woman becoming pregnant in the 70s was actually pretty high because birth control was not systematized yet.

I remember a lot of women of my generation being terrified that if they took the pill, they’d get cancer. They felt it was new and untested and the IUD no doctor would recommend if you were planning to have children. It was not safe. So birth control is incredibly unreliable. Abortion rights skyrocketed. And college campuses before the lowering of the age of majority to 18 didn’t necessarily prescribe contraception.

So you have this period in which women are getting married really young, as I said, 1960, 30 percent of women got married, gave birth within eight and a half months of the nuptials, meaning they got married because they were pregnant, and they often ended up marrying a man they didn’t know very well. So that what happens is that then fuels the divorces that take place after that, the big explosion of divorce with the adoption of the no-fault divorce comes about because the average age of marriage was 18 for women and 20 for men in 1960. 

But at the same time, the number of women going to college is increasing exponentially almost. Exponentially for a brief period in the 60s, and then it slows down to simply, steadily rapid growth thereafter. And so what you’re getting is this huge transformation in women’s lives and that transformation begins before the wholesale decline in jobs for men.

One of the things when you look at the history of African-Americans is that part of what the Moynihan Report was picking up on is that in the Rust Belt North, the entry-level jobs for African-American men were already drying up by 1965. By the time you get into the 70s, you’re seeing a wholesale rates of Great Depression levels of unemployment in urban areas in the North.

The South is a different story and it’s a different timeframe, but you have depression conditions for African-Americans in the North. African-Americans always had a tenuous hold on the good jobs for working-class men. They disappeared starting in the 60s, in a period of relative prosperity, and by the 70s, we’re talking about depression-era conditions.  S

o what happens to the African-American family is an omen of what’s going to happen to whites roughly two decades later. But again, precarity unemployment is beginning in the Rust Belt North, by the end of the 60s. People don’t recognize it.  And I know when I used to go to conferences closer to that time period, people didn’t know about it. When I was a new professor, I remember one of our deans saying the number of black men graduating from college declined in absolute numbers in the 80s.

[00:45:57.870] – Grumbine

When I think about this, it brings to mind the federal job guarantee, which we champion here frequently, and basically, it is an automatic stabilizer that lifts up the bottom to ensure that instead of having unemployed people, we have a pool of employed people.

And this kind of plays back to my question, which you answered especially specific to that period, the 60s going up to Reagan. But I guess my question to you is this. With a federal job guarantee, how much stability does this family unit receive by having that kind of a guarantee baked into their day to day lives, some of the intangibles, some of the unspokens in general? What does that kind of baked-in stability do for a family?

[00:46:54.180] – Carbone

So one of the things and one of my points of frustration, and it’s what I’ve been focusing on more recently, is: we’ve finally gotten economists to admit that the disappearance of blue collar jobs for men has something to do with family instability. It’s taken…

[00:47:09.510] – Grumbine

A couple minutes. [laughs]

[00:47:11.060] – Carbone

Yeah, it’s taken actually decades. But David Autor at Harvard is doing some really good work on this in particular. What they’re not studying is instability in employment, and there are some really interesting things that capture this. The first is one reason they don’t study it is there’s not such good data. The best data comes from Henry Farber and his data shows, again, this is class. He looked at college graduates from roughly the period from the 80s into, say, 2006.

There’s not much of a change in periods of unemployment for white-collar men in that period. For blue-collar men – defined by men without a college degree – there’s a big drop in economic instability in terms of the number of times they switch jobs, those kinds of measures. And when you look at that, it corresponds to the period where the divorce rates begin to divert.

Now, I haven’t seen a good study that runs the kind of regression analysis that might give you some causal explanations. But you certainly see with David Autor a link between that and lower marriage rates and more single-parent families. So certainly the disappearance of the stable jobs now is accepted. With instability, you see instability declining. But the ethnographic studies, and the work by sociologists like Paul Amato, they try to say what’s happening and there’s a really great study by Paul Amato.

He looks at families in 1980, and then he compares families in the year 2000. And what he shows is that in 1980, if the family reported economic distress, they were more divorced prone. But the differences were small. You look at 2000, and the two bars on the chart move in opposite directions. So the people who report economic distress have become dramatically more divorced.

And the people who say they are not experiencing economic distress have become dramatically less divorced. And Amato sorts through a whole bunch of data, and he presents the following picture. When you look at dual-career families, yeah, they don’t spend any time together. They don’t say everything is hunky dory. They say we’re not fighting. That having two jobs, getting up and going to work every day means they have structure in their lives.

They’re not spending that much time together, but the time they’re spending together is very focused on what they need to get done for the house, the kids, paying the bills, those kinds of things. And it turns out that corresponds with greater family stability. When you look at the families that report greater amounts of financial distress, with most of them what has happened is the husband’s job has been in some way undermined. He’s lost his job. He’s unemployed.

He takes a lesser job that he doesn’t like as much or doesn’t pay as well, is commuting further away, or is sitting on the couch watching TV and drinking beer. All of those things correspond with much greater rates of family distress, and they do so for a series of related reasons. The first is men. It turns out a hit in a man’s status, among other men, corresponds with bad behavior.

If you look at the poorest women, well, if you look actually at ordinary women, it turns out that men who have been recently laid off are right up there with alcoholics who is most likely to be engaged in domestic violence.

[00:50:56.120] – Grumbine

Jeeze.

[00:50:56.120] – Carbone

If you look at financial downturns, you find financial downturns increase substance abuse, especially if the guy isn’t working. If you look at what is called gender performance theory, laid-off women tend to spend their extra time spending more time with the kids and working on the house. Laid-off men spend less time assisting with housework than fully employed men. Because both are status jobs, helping out around the house more is a status loss if you’re not employed.

And so if they don’t feel good about themselves, they help out less. They feel good about themselves, they help out more. So this increases the tension. The second factor, even if you have a mature, well-adjusted man who gets laid off, it’s not his fault, he’s doing what he can, that’s fine. The wives’ reactions also increased tensions. They tend now to devote more time to their employment. If they’re both employed and taking care of the house, which often they are, they’re increasingly unhappy.

But there’s another factor that makes this much worse, and that’s families without a financial cushion. So if you take a look at the studies that say 40 percent of American families could not deal with an unexpected $400 bill, paying out-of-pocket. Now, imagine you have two people who, if they both work, are just barely getting by. And now one of them loses a job and/or has increased expenses. I’ll give you an example of increased expenses.

[00:52:36.380] – Grumbine

I resemble that. [laughs]

[00:52:38.930] – Carbone

Well let me give you an example. [laughs] There is a marriage promotion program, one of these Christian groups that gets funding to preach to people about how wonderful marriage is and give them skills, so they can get along with each other. And they interviewed some of the people in this marriage promotion program and one of the couples said, “yeah, we’re planning to get married when he pays off his traffic tickets.”

You know, we’re kind of scratching our heads – traffic tickets? Well he has $5,000 in unpaid traffic tickets and the fines, they multiply when you don’t pay them off. And then he lost his driver’s license, which meant he lost his job, and then he got a worse job, and to get to the worse job he has to drive without the license, so he’s always at risk of being pulled over. And the women in this, they have kids together.

And the woman is saying, yeah, we’d kind of like to marry each other, but I’m afraid to marry him. On any given moment, I got to bail him out of jail and, you know… So those kinds of things. And then they’re simply the people who run up credit card bills because when they’re not feeling good about themselves and they go out with the boys, they buy a couple of rounds of drinks to show that they’re still cool and if this is a shared credit card [laughs] the woman at home is going to go nuts.

But I like to explain this in economic terms. Think Econ 101 Risk Management. If you’re setting up a company and you have a more volatile income stream, you need a higher capital base or your liquidity is at risk and so is bankruptcy. If you’re two people and you’re both earning, fine.

But if you’re both barely getting by together with both people working, and then one person suddenly has either more expenses or less income, that’s going to be a whole lot more fights because the money that’s there has to come out of the children’s mouths – sometimes, quite literally. Got to bail the guy out of jail for the traffic tickets, or the unpaid traffic tickets, or simply to support everybody, and all of a sudden income is down. That dramatically increases conflict.

[00:54:38.460] – Grumbine

Yeah, no kidding. So one of the things that I think that jumps out at a lot of us is – I don’t know what the statistics are – but huge numbers of families are no longer together. They are separated in some way. And as a father who went through many rounds of custody battles and all kinds of family law that I really wish I’d never had to experience a day in my life, a lot of this translated into something more grim and more painful.

And that is parental alienation and the role of the “us against them” and the precarity that neoliberalism brings, that extra pressure it puts on everyone. It’s the punitive nature of law. You’re a deadbeat. And all this heaping mounds of adjectives of negativity piled on to people to the point where there’s no way that this non-custodial parent has a prayer of being a part of those children’s lives and that the pain and suffering of the volleyball effect is just unbelievable. We’ve seen tons of studies that clearly show that that’s not the right way to handle things, but that’s in fact, in very large form, maybe anecdotally how it does happen.

[00:55:55.140] – Carbone

Yes.

[00:55:56.040] – Grumbine

At what level does the breaking up of the nuclear family in America start producing diminishing returns here? What is our safeguard? How do we keep fabric of society together?

[00:56:08.160] – Carbone

Well, let me pick up on that to talk about something that I think is one of the original contributions of our last book. And then let’s go into how we fix it. So we talked about one of the reasons that you see this divergence where upper-middle-class couples are, if anything, becoming more likely to marry at the very top end – and as you go further down the scale, less likely to marry at all – is because of that experience of watching friends or themselves go through divorce.

And we argue in the book that the thing about divorce is, first of all, I don’t care why divorces occur. Two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women, more so as you go further down the socioeconomic ladder. [laughs] The one group of men who initiate divorce are the Jack Welch types who are trading in one wife for a new model. Or Donald Trump. Donald Trump initiates divorces.  Really, really well-off men initiate divorce.

Beyond that group, it tends to be women who initiate divorce. Or men who are married to women who are crazy. That happens too. But when you look at the timing, even if this is a couple who’ve been rocky for a while, the timing of the divorce tends to be at a low point for the man, because that’s the point where the woman decides, “I’m not putting up with this anymore.”

So if she’s the one who initiates divorce, practically, that means she goes to court, pays the initial filing fees, which are bureaucratic and time-consuming. And no judge should grant the divorce in the modern era without asking are their children born into the marriage and providing some opportunity for both parents to remain involved, which can then set up a lot of conflict.

And you see in the literature a lot of – when they interview people about why they don’t marry each other, the parents of their children. It’s often, “I saw my friends go through a divorce. We don’t want that. We don’t want conflict involved in the divorce.” You think about what happens if you don’t get married but have children together. Breakup occurs the same way. When it happens, typically, the mother kicks the father out. He leaves. She gets the kids.

Now, if he wants to see the kids, he has to do one of two things. He has to go to court, and he bears the burden paying the filing fees, going to court and the court, if it’s going to give him custodial rights, is often going to impose a child support kind of thing, or he can negotiate with the mother. So what you see in the African-American community in particular, if you look at poor African-American communities where marriage rates are really, really low, the norm in the community is the father should be involved with the kids.

To be involved with the kids, he has to stay on the mother’s good side, and he should contribute where he can. If they work it out, she doesn’t seek a child support award unless she’s on welfare or some kind of government benefits – there are all kinds that require her to seek the child support payment. But if they’re on good terms, and she’s not getting government benefits, then they work it out, and he contributes what he can, and she lets him see the kids if he contributes.

Now, this is the mother-centric system, but it’s a system that essentially says to fathers, you should be involved, but you’ve got to win over her corporation. But there’s no formal system. And the formal system tends to exacerbate conflict. So part of the reason not to get married in a community where you see marriages don’t last is because the divorce system for both men and women is identified with very high conflict. And both would like to avoid that.

But practically, if you don’t get married, it becomes a more mother-centric system. So I like to say I don’t know any feminist law professor – however feminist – who thinks it’s OK to have a child with a man and then kick the man out of the child’s life absent egregious misconduct. That’s just not the norm. But I know lots of working-class women who do things like that because they got pregnant accidentally. They don’t know or trust the man all that well. They were sleeping with more than one man.

The guy they like, tell him he’s the father. There’s all kinds of secrets. And it’s a system that deals with this very differently than in upper-middle-class households that plan their children. And so the divorce system is bad for everyone. But again, what tends to exacerbate the conflict is when your life is going along in a particular way with a set of assumptions and then gets disrupted.

I had dear friends who were perfect for each other, and he had an automobile accident. He became a different person after it. He wanted different things out of life. He was frustrated with his existence and he remade himself. But the marriage didn’t survive for reasons that maybe weren’t either party’s fault in any sense, but there was no way for them to get through that period together.

Well, if you have a roller coaster economy, I’ve heard a lot of stories like yours. We interviewed somebody recently about what happened in the financial crisis between two people who worked on Wall Street, both worked on Wall Street. And isn’t that a pretty story?

[01:01:13.490] – Grumbine

Yeah, so I guess closing this thing out. The economics of family are much more complicated discussion than apparently are frequently given the kind of light of day. And I think it’s worth people investigating and digging and reading your books and more importantly, just sort of taking a look at trends and things that have happened to kind of understand the precarity that we’re bringing into this next generation.

I think that’s very key here. The other thing I think that is of some great interest to me also is as we watch so many people lose their lives, we watch Wall Street continue to consume more and more, continue to grow. It creates this wealth gap that creates envy, that creates all kinds of different behaviors.

From people self-seeking, striving for things that maybe are not necessarily as important as they seem, but because that’s what is put forward, that is what they invest their time in. They invest their energies. And I guess looking forward, I guess this is the close – to look forward. Where are we headed right now? And what, if anything, should we be paying attention to to be a part of the right side of change?

[01:02:34.580] – Carbone

Sure. So I started off by saying how in the 19th century we reinvented the family to empower the new upper-middle-class. And then over 100 years, it became extended to the rest of the society. So start by looking, what’s the new urban middle-class model? Well, it’s a system that emphasizes employability instead of employment.

The right time to form a family – [laughs] in your 40s for some people – is where: you’ve finished school, you’ve cycled through the first three or four jobs, you’ve figured out who you’re going to be when you grow up, you then have a partner who complements your idea of what you want your life to be about. And the two of you have the maturity, flexibility and trust to trade off, to get through a downturn, to trade off child care arrangements, to let one spouse go back to school, to move to another city in search of employability.

Well, if that’s the model, I mean, there’s no question 80 percent of the population can’t get there and you have enough of a financial cushion or at least the ability to get a good job, that you can keep food in the mouths of the kids if you get a traffic ticket or break a leg. How do you extend that to the rest of the population? Well, employers have stopped providing security and they’ve stopped investing in workers.

They give workers employability that is experience and skills, but not training and not a promise of lifelong employment. So you need to get that by yourself. How do you do that? Well, start thinking of what it would mean to empower workers the way we empower employers. The corporate world wants flexibility, the ability to move plants abroad, to a different state, to automate, to sell one unit and buy another unit, to reinvent the iPhone.

Then have the iPhone replace the PC. We build in disruption in the corporate model. What would it mean to provide stability and security for people? Well, I think first you need to work out the wrinkles in the economic system. Countercyclical fiscal measures are more effective than monetary theory by itself. Start there. Now you want a floor. You want a floor that if you lose your job because Wall Street blew up the global economy, that doesn’t mean your kids starve.

And so you need something, some kind of minimum income, but you need a position in society that has respect. You need to be able to retool. My favorite proposal is a go-back-to-school-free card. You’re laid off, you get unemployment compensation and free community college credits. But a job guarantee would build on that. It would do all those things. You have a place to go that you have eight hours a day where you go, you get up in the morning, you go to a job, you have some respect, you have a paycheck.

You also learn skills. The ideal jobs would provide you skills that then translate into private sector employment, not just a continued public sector employment. But you also want to provide all the missing pieces and public infrastructure.

I mean, the entire universal pre-K, the child care system is rifled with holes because, frankly, even lawyers have trouble affording full-time child care in a city like Washington, D.C. So the whole infrastructure of two parents who are employed throughout the life cycle isn’t there to meet a rapidly changing economy where employers are not loyal to employees.

Where they don’t provide training, where they complain about a lack of skilled workers, and where no one is really addressing the gaps between jobs as opposed to the lack of jobs in the aggregate. So a job guarantee, a counter-cyclically designed job guarantee, especially if coupled with training and infrastructure development, could work very nicely to address these issues.

[01:06:35.860] – Grumbine

That is a fantastic way to end this. June, I really appreciate you taking the time to be with me today. Let me ask you. You’re working on this new book. When can we expect to see that book released?

[01:06:47.170] – Carbone

Well, we have two projects. The first is called “Shafted: How Women Lose in a Winner Take All World.” And it’s really a story of how corporations now set workers against each other in mini Games of Thrones called the tournament in the corporate literature, and that that internal competition is negative sum. It increases CEO power at the expense of the well-being of the corporation itself.

So that, we hope, will be out in the next year. And then our longer-term project is called “The New Social Compact,” and it deals with the issues we’re talking about at the end of my last statement. It’s asking the question if you want to make the new model, the new model of worker flexibility, adaptability, accessible to a broader portion of the population, what does the state need to put in place?

How does it need to rethink social insurance, education and simply things like the job guarantee? We have one law review article out any day now, the second one in the works in a book probably two or three years from now.

[01:07:55.570] – Grumbine

Very good. All right, June, with that, I want to thank you once again for joining us here. This is Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. June Carbone. We’re out of here. Have a great one everybody.

[01:08:06.640] – Carbone

Thank you very much.

[01:08:13.600] – Ending credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham.  Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/real progressives.