Hannah Neeleman is a mother of eight, a beauty queen, a former Juilliard ballerina, and one of the most popular "momfluencers" on social media. She lives on a Utah ranch with her husband, JetBlue airlines heir Daniel Neeleman, and puts out both copious content and pasture-raised meat under the moniker Ballerina Farm. For years, their photogenic Mormon family has been amassing Instagram and TikTok followers—along with ample scrutiny and scorn from certain sorts of progressive-leaning, extremely online women. And these sorts were served a feast last month in the form of a London Times profile, which posited not-at-all-subtly that Hannah was being controlled and coerced by Daniel.

The profile was a little weird and the responses to it weirder. But they are also emblematic of something that goes way beyond Ballerina Farm: an inability to imagine women having different values, different politics, and different ambitions. And a refusal to accept that women may be happy leading all different sorts of lives.

Trad-Wife Tragedy

Times writer Megan Agnew clearly had an opinion about the Neeleman family's dynamics and framed her article to maximize the chances of readers coming away with the same opinion. That's not a journalistic crime by any means—the best profiles often inject some of the writer's own insight. But, to me, Agnew's insights felt shoehorned, and not entirely convincing. The quotes and anecdotes she wielded could betray a patriarchal arrangement in which Hannah is a not-so-enthusiastic participant. Yet there were lots of ways to read them that didn't support such a conclusion, and that's not to mention all the quotes and anecdotes that Agnew necessarily left out.

The internet, of course, ran with the tragic interpretation—Hannah as a put-upon waif of Dickensian (or at least Lifetime movie) proportions, all thwarted ambitions and rural isolation. A husband on a "sexist conquest" who stole her dreams, "trapped" her with eight kids, and now wouldn't even let her get a nanny or give her a trip to Greece for her birthday.

A consensus was emerging that Hannah needed to be freed.

But freed from what? Hannah has a life that many dream of, it seems. She may not be a professional ballerina, but she still has a highly successful career and a level of fame she likely never would have earned from ballet. She has a beautiful home, a wealthy husband, and eight healthy children whom she gets to raise in a spectacular setting an hour from where she grew up in a family that looks a lot like the one she has now (Hannah was one of nine children).

The interpretations of one journalist who spent a few hours with the family and a cornucopia of strangers' speculation aside, signs suggest Neeleman is happily living the life she wants to be living. It is highly weird to act like the fact that she once dreamed of being a pro ballerina means she's unhappy in any other lifestyle or that she didn't have other ambitions, too (especially since she has also talked about how she always wanted a big family).

Could Hannah be secretly miserable? Sure. But so could anyone.

Poor Little Political Wives

Reactions to Hannah Neeleman conjure that classic second-wave feminist trope: false consciousness. Sure, she says she is happy, fulfilled, and in control of her own destiny—but internet feminists know better. Clearly her claims are either an act (perhaps produced under the duress of a manipulative husband) or the result of being raised in a Mormon household. The poor dear can't even see how oppressed she is!

The Ballerina Farm discourse echoes recent reactions regarding Usha Vance, wife of Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance.

Usha and J.D. met at Yale Law School. Usha also has an undergraduate degree from Yale and a master's degree from Cambridge. Until recently, she was a lawyer with one of the country's top law firms. At the Republican National Convention, she appeared confident and excited as she talked about her husband's candidacy and about their life together, which includes three children. Vance has, on numerous occasions, credited Usha for helping drive and shape him.

By all indications, Usha is an intelligent and accomplished woman who backs her husband's political career. Yet Vance, too, received the Hannah Neeleman treatment following her husband joining the Donald Trump ticket.

People began sharing images in which Usha was not smiling or looked sad as if this was proof that she disapproved of her husband's career, or worse.

Some surmised that J.D. must be an "abusive control-freak" whom Usha only stays with because this sort of thing was supposedly normalized by her Indian upbringing. Her "body language projects subservience." J.D. and/or the Trump campaign made her quit her job.

The comments about Usha Vance echoed a 2016 election-era refrain: "Free Melania." There were a lot of people then convinced, or at least opining, that Melania Trump wanted no part in her husband's political schemes and was a tragic figure trapped in a loveless and controlling marriage.

I won't pretend to know exactly what's going on between the former president and first lady. But the idea that Melania couldn't leave if she wanted to defies logic. The Melania who is literally trapped is a fiction, invented to further demonize Trump and/or deny that she is culpable in the creation of the life they both lead.

Voting for Harris Is 'in Everyone's Best Interest'

Shades of the same attitude driving this weird anti–fan fic about Usha Vance, Hannah Neeleman, and Melania Trump were detectable during a white women for Kamala Harris call last week.

During that call, author Glennon Doyle posited that the reason many white women are afraid to publicly support Harris and/or other Democratic candidates is fear of being disliked, chastised, or looked down upon. White women don't want to make neighbors "uncomfortable," and they "desperately need to be approved of and liked," Doyle said.

Meanwhile, Shannon Watts, who organized the call, suggested that the reason why many white women vote Republican is because they believe "that it is in our best interest to use our privilege and our support systems of white supremacy and the patriarchy to benefit us."

Voting for Harris is really what's "in everyone's best interest," said Watts.

This sort of rhetoric was common when Hillary Clinton was running for president and again after the election, when it came out that a majority of white women voters cast their ballots for Trump. Is there no room for imagining that some women might just be conservatives and/or dislike the Democratic candidate?

Can't Women Be Individuals?

In the construction of victimhood narratives around Hannah Neeleman, Usha Vance, and Melania Trump, there is an element of projection that is pre-political. Maybe it's rooted in jealousy, anxiety, revulsion, or anger. But for whatever reason, some people seemingly want to believe these women are unhappy. Perhaps it helps them get over their jealousy, or feel better about their own life choices, or feel there's still justice in the world—who knows? But it's clearly not based solely on the evidence laid before us.

The other thread underpinning some attitudes toward Melania Trump, Usha Vance, Hannah Neeleman, and any women who won't vote Democrat is a denial of conservative women's agency.

And while this thread has implications for politics, it also seems born of a realm outside of them. It's the inability—displayed here by the left, but also visible across the political spectrum—to imagine people genuinely believing in things different than what you believe.

In the political realm, this manifests as a conviction that support for different candidates and different policies doesn't come down to a million different factors and values and vibes but stupidity, brainwashing, coercion, and cowardice. Men get this treatment sometimes, too, but it's much more commonly aimed at women.

On the left, this manifests as utter disbelief that women like Hannah Neeleman and Usha Vance could be happy co-pilots in the lives they and their husbands are leading. Or as an insistence that the only reason women would oppose Harris is because they're trying to suck up to or benefit from white supremacy and patriarchy. On the right, we sometimes see it manifested as an assertion that female politicians, high-powered working women, feminist activists, etc., only speak out against conservative policies because they're bitter about their own lives.

Both sides do this at a peril to their own persuasive efforts. You won't win people over by telling them, "You may think you're happy, or expressing true convictions, but you're actually just a cog in cultural Marxism or white supremacist patriarchy."

What makes this especially weird coming from the left is that left-leaning women tend to do this under the mantle of feminism.

But it's not actually feminist to paint all women with one brushstroke. Women are not and will never be a monolith—not in their politics, their professional leanings, their preferred relationship styles, or anything else. Women are happy in as many different types of arrangements as men are, and as capable of choosing for themselves. Conversely, not every woman bristles at the kind of things that make some feminists bristle, including having a horde of children or moderating one's career plans to make this possible.

The sooner self-proclaimed feminists can see women as individuals—including sometimes very flawed individuals—the sooner we'll all be seeing women leading more free and full lives, in all their weird and messy and dazzling forms.

The post From Usha Vance to Ballerina Farm: Denying Conservative Women's Individuality appeared first on Reason.com.

This piece was first published in Slate on 6/21/24.

The U.S. Supreme Court today broke from its recent embrace of gun rights, leaving in place a federal criminal law that makes it a felony for anyone subject to a civil domestic violence restraining order to possess a gun.

As an advocate for survivors of domestic violence, today’s outcome comes as a relief. Indeed, it is the result my organization, the ACLU, asked the court to reach.

Even so, liberals shouldn’t take the decision as cause for great celebration. That’s because, while there is no doubt in my mind that preventing perpetrators of domestic violence from obtaining guns will help prevent further violence, this case was not about whether the respondent should have been able to buy a gun. The question was whether he should be sent to prison for having one.

As a feminist, I care about both gender-based violence and the violence of imprisonment. Gun laws, in particular, have helped to fuel mass incarceration and contributed to disproportionate imprisonment of Black people and other people of color.

Funneling the problem of gender-based violence into the criminal legal system may not sound so bad if the alternative is no response at all. That’s the problem the court faced in United States v. Rahimi. But that’s a false choice, constructed via decades of reliance on criminal legal responses to violence in America’s legislatures, executive branches, and state and federal courts.

The Supreme Court itself has played a part in creating this dilemma. In 2000, for example, the court heard a case brought by a survivor against a college classmate whom she alleged had raped her repeatedly. She was able to sue her attacker because of a novel provision of the Violence Against Women Act that empowered survivors to seek a civil remedy from those who harmed them.

The court, however, made quick work of VAWA’s civil provision, finding that Congress lacked the power to create any such remedy at all. But it left in place criminal provisions carrying lengthy terms of imprisonment. Stripped of its civil provision, the original VAWA became known not as an innovative law but a regressive one—and part of the notorious 1994 crime bill.

A second decision in 2005 doubled down. After her estranged husband violated a restraining order and kidnapped her three kids from her yard, Jessica Lenahan (then Gonzales) contacted police multiple times over 10 hours asking them to help retrieve her children. Police refused, saying there was nothing they could do—until the father arrived at the police station and opened fire. Only then did the police act, killing Lenahan’s husband and finding the children already dead in his truck.

Lenahan sued the police, but she didn’t fare any better in the courts. Looking to history and tradition, the Supreme Court couldn’t find any right to have her restraining order enforced. What it did find was a “well established tradition of police discretion.” This history, the court noted without irony, meant that the state was free to both disregard survivors like Lenahan who asked police for help and bulldoze over survivors who asked the state not to interfere in cases of domestic assault.

Viewed in the context of the court’s history with domestic violence, survivors should think twice before embracing today’s decision as a victory for women. It can be understood not as a departure from the VAWA and Lenahan decisions, but a continuation of them: In all three cases, the only winner was the carceral system.

Our nation’s prioritization of the criminal legal system to the exclusion of all else is particularly troubling given that many people who experience domestic violence opt not to pursue criminal charges, knowing that they may encounter disbelief and hostility from law enforcement or find themselves subject to abuse charges when they report being victimized. Others worry that the criminal legal system will magnify the harms they are experiencing by jeopardizing their family’s economic security or inflicting further violence through incarceration. As feminist legal scholar Aya Gruber has written, hyperfocus on the criminal legal system has “diverted feminist energy and capital away from addressing the underlying conditions that make women, especially marginalized women, vulnerable to personal and state violence.”

But we can advocate for alternate pathways to meaningful safety.

There is not strong evidence to support the deterrent effect of after-the-fact criminal sanctions for gun possession, yet such punishments are where Congress has focused. The civil licensing regime that prohibits selling guns to people in Rahimi’s position, for example, exists only as a piggyback measure off of the underlying criminal law.

As the ACLU pointed out in a friend-of-the-court brief, that add-on has prevented more than 77,000 gun sales since 1998. Congress would be wise to decouple gun sales from criminal law and to focus more on prevention—particularly given the likelihood that the court may soon void other criminal gun laws, with staggering ripple effects on rules governing gun sales.

Other efforts may include imagining new civil remedies for harms once considered exclusively criminal. The civil process, unlike the criminal one, can offer survivors agency: the decision whether and when to seek relief and the option to discontinue the case if that best serves their needs. To ensure equitable access to courts, attorney’s fees and other incentives to represent survivors can be built in.

Reimagining safety is possible, but only if we reject the idea that prison is the best—or the only—way to address domestic violence. Survivors deserve better than what the carceral legal system has left us. We all do.

"At the core of every story we want to tell is a person," says Lee Gentry, founder of Night Visions, a firm that provides custom AI content to adult entertainers and agencies that run OnlyFans accounts. "We've been focusing very, very carefully on persisting the human form and getting that as accurate as possible."

Throughout recorded history, human beings have used emerging technologies to depict both sexual interactions and nude bodies—usually women. Shortly after the invention of movies, stag films were produced and traded in an underground market. Later, films with fleshed-out storylines would be shown in theaters, including the notorious porno-chic picture Deep Throat. VHS was quickly adopted by lower-budget adult film producers. DVD and widespread internet access further lowered barriers to both distribution and consumption of sexual content.

Historically, most of these films were made by men, for men—women directors and producers such as Ann Perry and Candida Royalle were outliers. But more recently, women have been able to take control of the distribution of their own images. Most of the erotic images and videos made today are made by the subjects themselves and distributed directly to consumers via clip sites and fan sites such as OnlyFans.

As you read this, adult performers are racing to stay ahead of the emerging technology—which includes Sora, a model with the ability to generate minute-long videos—by creating their own chatbots and on-demand image services.

***

When I started performing in adult films in the mid-2000s, there was a focus on authenticity and availability. Consumers not only wanted to know that our orgasms were real; they wanted to know our personalities—something social media made possible. Real-time feedback from subscribers (or followers, or "friends," depending on the platform) told us which facets of our selves got the most traction. We, along with most users of social media—especially those who would go on to become influencers—began to lead with our most likable parts.

But where Hollywood and recording celebrities were offered verification on social media such as Twitter and Instagram, adult industry personalities were often left to fend for ourselves. This opened the door to a flood of imposters.

More than once in the early 2010s, fans came up to me at conventions to thank me for spending hours conversing with them over Facebook about their problems. They were grateful for my time and advice. It had meant so much to them. But I didn't have a Facebook account—and even if I did, I was far too busy for that. There was no way I could have done my job, had any kind of life outside of work, and spent those hours with the people who felt the need to unload their secrets and struggles into a chat window with a porn star.

But that's what users of fan sites expect today: an immediate response to messages, regardless of time of day. That, plus the work of creating custom content, pay-site content for mass distribution, and safe-for-work social media promotion, is often too much for a single creator.

Night Visions, Gentry says, is "positioning ourselves as a kind of a consensual form of concept capture." His company generates still images, based on text input, of the various content creators and adult performers who are signed up with the service. Due to the size of the company (four team members and a few contractors and advisers) this means a manual know-your-customer process that Gentry does himself.

As in professional porn studios, consent is key. Content creators coming from a background in the adult studio system, though, are keenly aware that bad actors can and will take our images and reuse them for anything from populating the more unsavory tube sites to scamming fans into sending money for fake dates or gift cards. Many of these issues are international, which makes it nearly impossible to put a stop to such practices. It's a game of Whac-A-Mole where your brand integrity and someone else's life savings are on the line.

An individual producing deepfakes may not even realize he's crossed a line. Imagine a customer who wants to see, as Gentry suggested in his demo during our conversation, a creator named Violet in a wedding dress on a beach. This customer wants to see it right now, and is willing to pay a premium. But he's in a specific kind of mood, and he isn't hearing back from Violet. Regardless, she'd need time to find the wardrobe and locate a photographer. The customer might—without considering the rights of the creator—have an AI photo generator make it for him. He might even post his creation on a forum. His desire is sated, he thinks nothing of his actions, and the creator whose likeness is used gets nothing.

***

The line between public figure and private person is already blurry in the age of social media. "Ultimately the question of whether someone is a public figure is going to be case by case," says attorney Simon Pulman. "The argument that would be made is that any kind of content creator—whether they're on YouTube or TikTok—by putting yourself into the public sphere, you are probably a public figure in some respect."

The U.S. government, true to form, has been slow to tackle the issue. January saw the introduction in Congress of H.R. 6943, which references a Department of Homeland Security report from 2020 describing more than 100,000 nonconsensual deepfake nudes. The adult workers whose bodies were used for these deepfakes are not mentioned. "Are adult performers going to get the same protections as others?" asks Pulman. "They should, but we all know how certain things are viewed by certain parts of the country."

The adult industry does utilize Takedown Piracy (a subscription service used widely by adult film producers which can digitally fingerprint AI-generated videos, search the internet for them, and send Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices) and the more altruistic Operation Minerva (which serves victims of "revenge porn" and deepfakes by giving them lower cost access to that same anti-piracy technology). But creating an authorized option is often the best way for adult entertainers to avoid such exploitation.

In May 2023, Forever Voices launched the AI companions of the Twitch streamer Amouranth and the adult star Melissa Stratton. This is around the time Eva Oh started receiving inquiries from AI companies looking to offer various synthetic versions of herself. In mid-August, I received my own inquiry from Forever Voices. After a messy incident in which the founder of Forever Voices was arrested on suspicion of arson, the company folded, and the Amouranth and Stratton links no longer work. Oh's deal and mine both fell through before our synthetic clones launched. Adult superstar Riley Reid's Clona, launched in October, is slowly bringing creators onboard; a total of three are using it at this time.

When I spoke with Eva Oh, she played me a voice message from her own synthetic clone, which she designed with the help of a third party who wants adult creators to be able to take AI technology into their own hands. Even in the five months since I heard my own voice from the test file I'd been sent by Forever Voices, the technology has improved. Oh's clone emphasizes words, and pauses—as though it is thinking—in the same way Oh pauses to think on her podcast #teakink. Oh intends to use her clone to scale her ability to mentor both other people in the trade and those outside who are interested in expanding their sexual knowledge, and she plans to keep its scope PG to PG-13 so she can access marketing tools that are unavailable to R- and X-rated products. Her digital double is there, in effect, for the type of people who reached out to a fake Facebook account to speak with an adult star.

Oh says the people who message her are varied. "It might be a 50/50 split between people wanting to do sex work better or from nothing, and people totally not interested in doing the job at all, and just trying to find other ways to live their lives."

***

Sex workers, due to the constant practice of marketing ourselves, may be better suited than most to create personal artificial intelligences. Creators of AI clones must ask themselves, "Who am I? Who do I want to present? What little compartment of mine do I want to sell?" This is something adult creators were doing long before the internet took off.

They're also more used to working with and around blurred lines between their real personality and their online persona. About her own AI, Oh says, "It's not me anymore, but yet it exists. What am I going to start to think is me? And what am I going to start to do with that?"

Where Hollywood stars have historically been thought of as playing characters in films, and only began to casually divulge their personal lives much later—while audiences maintained separation between their roles in film and TV and the actors as human beings—adult workers have historically been thought to be the fantasies we inhabit on screen or in session. When I played Melodie Gore's roommate in Vivid Alt's 2007 release Man's Ruin, I received messages years later inquiring about what it had been like to live together.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard had a handful of comments on pornography in Simulacra and Simulation, including: "Pleasure in the microscopic simulation that allows the real to pass into the hyperreal. (This is also somewhat the case in porno which is fascinating more on a metaphysical than on a sexual level.)" He could have expanded those thoughts into an entire book. We exist at the cutting edge of both technology and the spiraling rabbit hole of representations Baudrillard described.

For Oh, full charge of her AI representation is less a form of ownership than a form of creation. During our call, she spoke of her AI as something separate from herself that she will lose control over, sounding oddly like a mother speaking about her children.

While Oh is focused at this moment on creating the chatbot, she knows her next step—video—and has higher hopes for what she might be able to do with the technology: art. Oh has been imagining an installation set in a dystopian world, where, much like in 1982's Stephen Sayadian film Café Flesh, human interaction has fallen by the wayside. As the emcee in Sayadian's cafe says, "Hey, what the heck folks, this is art, this is entertainment." In Oh's vision, what we can call the hyperhuman—the human seeking to engage directly with other humans—is not only an outlier but something that may become startlingly rare as AI technology becomes more ubiquitous.

The post The Future of Porn Is Consensual Deepfakes appeared first on Reason.com.

Surely, by now, you've heard about the "man vs. bear" discussion happening all over social media. If you haven't stumbled upon this conversation, which is highlighting issues about sexism, violence against women, and women's safety,  here's a quick rundown, courtesy of USA Today:

If you were alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a bear or a man?

— Read the rest

The post Man or Bear? Team bear over here, especially if they're as adorable as these bears caught on the Fairview Critter Cams! appeared first on Boing Boing.

Less than a month after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos created for in vitro fertilization treatment are children, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has signed a law protecting access to IVF treatment in the state. 

In February, the Alabama Supreme Court handed down a controversial ruling, deciding that frozen embryos would count as children under a 19th-century Alabama wrongful death statute. Justice Tom Parker used extensive quotes from the Bible and Christian theology to justify his decision. "The doctrine of the sanctity of life is rooted in the Sixth Commandment," which prohibits murder, Parker wrote. "All human beings bear the image of God," he continued, "and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory."

IVF is an infertility treatment involving the fertilization of multiple eggs with the goal of inserting them afterward in a woman's uterus, where they may hopefully implant and grow into a healthy baby. As Reason's Ronald Bailey put it shortly after the ruling was released, "Since the implantation of any specific embryo is far from guaranteed, IVF often involves creating several embryos that are stored in liquid nitrogen that could be made available for later attempts at achieving pregnancy." Parents often have to choose whether to leave their remaining frozen embryos in storage (at a cost) or to have the IVF clinic discard them.

The ruling caused near-immediate chaos, with three IVF providers in the state shutting down operations, citing confusion over the legal implications of the court's decision. The ruling quickly garnered widespread outrage, even among many who are avowedly pro-life.

"We want to make it easier for people to be able to have babies, not…make it harder….And the IVF process is a way of giving life to even more babies," Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told CNN in February. "What I think the goal is is to make sure that we can find a pathway to ensure that parents who otherwise may not have the opportunity to have a child will be able to have access to the IVF process."

Soon after the ruling was handed down, Alabama legislators moved quickly to introduce bills that would protect access to IVF treatment in the state. Senate Bill 159, which Ivey signed Wednesday, ultimately passed with a large bipartisan majority. 

"No action, suit, or criminal prosecution for the damage to or death of an embryo shall be brought or maintained against any individual or entity when providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization," the bill states. "No criminal prosecution may be brought for the damage to or death of an embryo against the manufacturer of goods used to facilitate the in vitro fertilization process or the transport of stored embryos."

"The overwhelming support of [the bill] from the Alabama Legislature proves what we have been saying: Alabama works to foster a culture of life, and that certainly includes IVF," Ivey said in a statement on March 6. "I am confident that this legislation will provide the assurances our IVF clinics need and will lead them to resume services immediately."

After the bill's signing, two of the three closed clinics announced that they would restart IVF treatments.

Alabama's IVF protection bill will likely assuage fears that access to fertility treatments could be seriously impacted by state-level court rulings. Even in a state where abortion is banned from conception, attacks on IVF remain incredibly unpopular—and stridently pro-life legislators still recognize the importance of safeguarding fertility medicine. 

The post Alabama Governor Signs Bill Protecting IVF Treatments appeared first on Reason.com.

America is celebrated for its economic dynamism and ample and generously paid employment opportunities. It's a nation that attracts immigrants from around the world. Yet Americans are bummed, and have been for a while. They believe that life was better 40 years ago. And maybe it was on some fronts, but not economically.

Surveys repeatedly demonstrate that Americans view today's economy in a negative light. Seventy-six percent believe the country is going in the wrong direction. Some polls even show that young people believe they'll be denied the American dream. Now, that might turn out to be true if Congress continues spending like drunken sailors. But it certainly isn't true based on a look back in time. By nearly all economic measures, we're doing much better today than we were in the 1970s and 1980s—a time most nostalgic people revere as a great era.

In a recent article, economist Jeremy Horpedahl looked at generational wealth (all assets minus all debt) and how today's young people are faring compared to previous generations. His findings are surprising. After all the talk about how Millennials are the poorest or unluckiest generation yet, Horpedahl's data show them with dramatically more wealth than Gen Xers had at the same age. And this wealth continues to grow.

What about income? A new paper by the American Enterprise Institute's Kevin Corinth and Federal Reserve Board's Jeff Larrimore looks at income levels by generation in a variety of ways. They find that each of the past four generations had higher inflation-adjusted incomes than did the previous generation. Further, they find that this trend doesn't seem to be driven by women entering the workforce.

That last part matters because if you listen to progressives and New Right conservatives, you might get a different story: that today's higher incomes are only due to the fact that both parents must now work in order for a family to afford a middle-class lifestyle. They claim that supporting a family of four on one income, like many people did back in the '70s and '80s, is now impossible. Believing this claim understandably bums people out.

But it's not true. One of its many problems, in addition to the data evidence provided by Corinth and Larrimore, is that it mistakenly implies that single-income households were the norm. In fact, as early as 1978, 50 percent of married couples were dual earners and just 25.6 percent relied only on a husband's income. I also assume that there are more dual-income earners now than there were in the '80s. While this may in fact be true for married couples (61 percent of married parents are now dual-earners), because marriage itself has declined, single-earner families have become relatively more common.

Maybe the overall morosity on the economy has to do with the perception that it's more expensive to raise a family these days than it used to be. Another report by Angela Rachidi looks at whether the decline in marriage, fertility, and the increase in out-of-wedlock childbirths are the result of economic hardship. She finds that contrary to the prevailing narrative, "household and family-level income show growth in recent decades after accounting for taxes and transfers." Not only that, but "the costs of raising a family—including housing, childcare, and higher education costs—have not grown so substantially over the past several decades that they indicate an affordability crisis."

So, what exactly is bumming people out? We may find an answer in the 1984 Ronald Reagan campaign ad commonly known as "Morning in America." It begins with serene images of an idyllic American landscape waking up to a new day. It features visuals of people going to work, flags waving in front of homes, and ordinary families in peaceful settings. The narrator speaks over these images, detailing improvements in the American condition over the past four years, including job creation, economic growth, and national pride.

I believe this feeling is what people are nostalgic about. It seems that they are nostalgic about a time when America was more united and it was clearer what being American meant. Never mind that this nostalgia is often based on an incomplete and idealized memory of an era that, like ours, was not perfect.

This is a serious challenge that we need to figure out how to address. One thing that won't help, though, is to erroneously claim that people were economically better off back then and call on government to fix an imaginary problem.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM.

The post The Economy Is Doing Way Better Than Many Believe appeared first on Reason.com.