Social Security pays women a higher average ratio of lifetime benefits to lifetime taxes than men. But that doesn't mean Social Security gives women an incentive to stay in the labor force. In fact, it does the opposite.

We're about to enter a very long campaign in which where an apparently squeaky clean Mitt Romney is going to be demonized for his success and dragged through the gutter. Meanwhile, Obama took cash from a true denizen of the gutter.

What’s important now is not to let what happened to Fishtown be ignored. For whatever reasons, the culture that used to characterize working-class America — indeed, that made working-class America the spine of America’s civic culture — has come apart. Recognizing that this has happened is the indispensable first step in figuring out what to do next.

Our understanding of white America is subject to a number of outdated assumptions that need rethinking.

As critics see it, the loss of our common culture is a result not of cultural changes but of shifts in policy and the economy. There are two problems with this line of argument.

Marriage is less central and divorce is more common, especially for the vast majority of those who separate.

This debate was held against the background of things going Mitt Romney’s way: he continues to be ahead, tenuously in some polls and by growing margins in others, in South Carolina as well as nationally, even as he finds himself the target of sustained attacks by the pro-Newt Gingrich superPAC and, in a sudden surge, by Rick Santorum.

Brad Wilcox and Kathryn Sharpe of the University of Virginia have taken a fascinating fresh look at sectors of the economy most influenced by marriage and fertility.