Get Married: An Interview with Brad Wilcox

Demographer Lyman Stone projects that, on the current course, as many as one in three young adults in the United States might never marry and as many as one in four will never have kids. That’s a lot of kinless Americans. Given the importance of marriage and family for what Jefferson called “the pursuit of happiness,” this would be a tragedy. So let’s find new ways to make it easier and more appealing for young adults to get married.

Patrick T. Brown: Brad, thanks for joining Public Discourse—where you’ve published before—to talk about your new book. Let’s start with the bad news: we all know marriage is in decline, with many potential causes at play, from general economic forces to Hollywood-induced cultural changes to public policy decisions. If someone asked for an elevator-pitch-length ranking of the most important forces behind the diminution of marriage in American life, what would you tell them?

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