Review of Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege (long version)

Dall-E: Prompt: A tired, bedraggled middle-aged male academic rushes into an office to deliver his manuscript, which is way too long and very late — pen and ink cartoon

I posted a long version of my review essay on Melissa Kearney’s book, The Two-Parent Privilege on SocArXiv, here: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jt9ad.

Contemporary Sociology invited me to write this review essay, but I haven’t submitted it to them yet, so I don’t know if they will accept it. This is much too long; in the next few days I will endeavor to cut it way back and submit it then. Feedback welcome.

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The Two-Parent Privilege: Take the Money, Leave the Norm Intervention

Abstract

This is a review essay about Melissa Kearney’s book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. The book ignores the vast body of sociological research on its topic, and breaks no new ground in research methodology or empirical findings. Nevertheless, it is an opportunity to consider the historical intellectual stream from which it emerges. I offer a sociological response to its evidence and argument. I conclude that, although this book is by no means the worst representative of the marriage promotion genre, the idea of retooling the norms of those on the receiving end of our inequality machine to fix their problems is at best a misuse of resources, and at worst a harmful misdirection from the social problems we face.