This piece originally appeared in National Affairs.
At the heart of the turn toward family policy in the developed world lies the breakdown of the family as a social institution. Policymakers across the globe are belatedly recognizing what social conservatives have been insisting for decades: that the family plays an indispensable role in bringing children into the world, forming their character, and knitting them into a broader communal and civic fabric. Without stable, functioning families, everything from crime rates to welfare spending will rise, and Americans' quality of life will deteriorate.
When asked to identify the forces undermining the family, many social conservatives reflexively turn to the culture and the economy. The culture, they argue, valorizes career success, independence, and exotic experiences, and presents marrying and raising children as just one among many equally valid lifestyles. At the same time, spiraling costs for housing, health care, and education; the two-income trap, which punishes single-breadwinner households; marriage penalties; and more are eroding the family's economic foundation.
Yet a sober analysis suggests that these cultural and economic changes don't tell the whole story. Countries with cultures and economic systems as divergent as those of the United States, Saudi Arabia, Norway, and China are all struggling with similar issues of family formation, marital stability, and fertility. What explains their shared problems are a series of technological innovations — ranging from the automobile and chemical contraceptives to robotic automation and social media — that have disrupted their cultures' underlying institutions and incentives. By altering the technological substrate of society, these developments have had a profound effect on families.
Social conservatives have become increasingly aware of this effect, at least in particular cases. They agree that advances in embryo selection, artificial wombs, and genetic editing raise obvious bioethics alarms without solving the underlying challenges families face. Children's access to smartphones and social media have yielded a similar consensus, with conservatives mobilizing to strengthen parental controls, push for age-verification technologies, ban smartphones from schools, and stand against early exposure to pornography, unrealistic beauty standards, cyberbullying, and other harms inherent to unfiltered internet access. These piecemeal efforts, though eminently worth pursuing, are not sufficient on their own.
Today, advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, energy, aerospace, and the like are on the cusp of unleashing changes at least as unsettling as those of the past 150 years. If conservatives wish to restore the family as the foundation of our civilizational order, they must develop a comprehensive theory of technological change. Without a coherent set of principles and policy prescriptions on the subject, new technologies will continue to heap disaster on the American family. But if properly guided, such innovations can help uplift the family and usher it into a new era of flourishing.
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