The number of children living with a never-married mother has increased by a factor of 13. The teenage suicide rate has tripled. Twelve million people, including 3 million teenagers, contract sexually transmitted diseases each year. S o far, just trends. But there are correlations in the data, too.
Married people are happier and healthier than divorced or unmarried people.
Seven out of 10 delinquents are from father-absent homes. The presence of stepparents improves the numbers a little, but not much. Even the most expertly parsed data are not self-explanatory, of course. Myers forcefully criticizes economic inequality in contemporary America, advocating increased progressivity and a ceiling on executive compensation. The most obvious of these is marital instability.