HarperCollins, in contrast to so much of the “curated” publishing industry, is promoting real discussion about real issues facing America and her long-term welfare. In February, it published Brad Wilcox’s Get Married!, a book not just enumerating but refuting many of the myths responsible for why Americans delay marriage and why American culture marginalizes it. HarperCollins has followed up with another excellent book: Timothy P. Carney’s Family Unfriendly.

These books form a valuable pair because the problems they address, while independent, are interrelated. The first problem is getting people to take the marital leap. More and more people either defer it, resort to counterfeits, or ignore it altogether. But even once they make that leap, many find an even greater hurdle facing them: turning the couple into a family—that is, having children. Moving from a couple to a family is, increasingly, a second great leap forward. But people have always been having children and raising families, even large families. Why, then, does this seem so daunting a challenge today? It’s the culture, stupid Carney’s book is a superbly written tour de force contending that multiple cumulative socio-cultural factors are responsible for the current family-unfriendly environment. Culture is like the atmosphere: it’s usually invisible but necessary—and when contaminants get into it, they spread in many unforeseen ways, often overlapping with each other while boosting their mutual toxicity. Carney insists that what ails family formation and support in the United States today is, at root, cultural. That’s important, because it saves us from spinning our wheels ineffectively in places that won’t ultimately effect change (e.g., government or economics). That’s not to say government or economics don’t play roles or that Carney lacks pro-family policy proposals in those areas. Rather, what may at first seem economic or political may, in fact, simply reflect prior cultural choices and philosophical prioritizations, which appear to emphasize the economic or political when they really reflect the antecedent values assumptions behind them. Take government-supplied child benefits. The elite orthodoxy is that if we just created comprehensive, universal government-provided childcare, our family formation issues would go away. If we’d just be Sweden! But, as Carney shows from the data, the numbers don’t bear this out. Even generous welfare states such as Sweden still face the challenge of not enough people having babies. Carney has a knack of driving points home with clarity: “Every hour in Germany, an average of 84 babies are born, and about 122 Germans die. This birth deficit has persisted since 1980 and is getting worse every year.” So simply being a generous welfare state does not fix the birth dearth.

France, on the other hand, does better. As does Israel. Why? Carney probes to find out things whose discussion–especially in our woke-inhibited public discourse–will see many people scurrying for their “safe spaces.” Happily, he is not deterred to raise them. For one, he suggests that–all things being equal–many women would actually prefer being with their children, at least in their first five years, rather than handing them over to daycare. If feminism is about what women want, as opposed to what feminists think women should want, might that not suggest the money we spend on childcare programs might better be diverted to a cash child subsidy that a woman can use as she chooses during those early childhood years? Maybe she needs more diapers or kid’s clothes. Maybe she’d prefer to spend some of that money on homecare so she can spend time directly with her child. Looked at from the perspective of what actually fosters families and family formation, one can ask–as Carney does–whether the mania for government-provided daycare is in fact not parents’ but the green eyeshade set’s “solution”:

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