Stetson

“If the mothers who are not married are not married precisely because the men with
whom they have fathered children would not meaningfully contribute positive
resources to the raising of their children, then the observed marriage gap in children’s outcomes is not a good approximation for what their children would gain
from parental marriage.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

“But at some point – a point I think we are well past, given the body of research – the
weight of the evidence is so strong that the most reasonable conclusion is that even
if there were some unobservable differences between single and married parents,
the thing staring at us from the data is overwhelming: having a second parent in the
home, with the added resources (money, time, etc.) that second parent brings, is, on
average, beneficial for children’s outcomes.”
― Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

“The United States used to be, like China, an engineering state. But in the 1960s, the priorities of elite lawyers took a sharp turn. As Americans grew alarmed by the unpleasant by-products of growth—environmental destruction, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests—the focus of lawyers turned to litigation and regulation. The mission became to stop as many things as possible. As the United States lost its enthusiasm for engineers, China embraced engineering in all its dimensions.”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future

“The survival of an ethnic caste-ideal does not alter the general picture of collapsing ethnic boundaries. The immigration of new ethnic diasporas might mitigate ethnic decline somewhat, but—given ecological constraints—
only for a limited period. Over the longue duree, this thesis would suggest that racial boundaries, as with ethnic boundaries, will continue to weaken, thereby generating a symbolically fluid, highly privatized, post-ethnic social environment. The only foreseeable force that could reverse the decline of dominant ethnicity in the United States is an intellectual crisis in which the cosmopolitan paradigm is jettisoned. This
would entail the American cultural elite losing faith in liberty and equality
as the ultimate standards of social progress. In effect, these Enlightenment ideals would need to be superseded as the definition of the Good in America. Such an about-turn would represent a civilizational cataclysm,
rupturing a progressive narrative that is hundreds of years old, a truly post-“modern” development that is nowhere in sight.”
― Eric P. Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America