Maxine Eichner’s The Free-Market Family: How the Market Crushed the American Dream (and How It Can Be Restored) is thought-provoking reading for any scholar or policymaker serious about addressing the considerable pressures on US families today. The book starts with an aspirational notion of the American dream that “ensures every person, regardless of age, gender, and socioeconomic status, the opportunity to develop to their fullest potential” (p. xi). Eichner ties the failures of the present system to the rise of free-market policy that leaves US families to fend for themselves in the private market (p. xvii). She argues that the “result is that people in [other] countries work fewer hours, lead saner lives, and have healthier families. We have a higher GDP that does nothing to improve our lives, individually or collectively” (p. xix).
Part I compares an array of outcomes relevant to family well-being and demonstrates that US children suffer in the areas of academic achievement, mental health, and chances for economic mobility, and US adults work far more hours, are more stressed, have more mental health problems, and are less happy than those in other countries. Chapter 2 provides a particularly good overview of the strain on US families and how this compares with more “pro-family” countries, connecting to larger trends (increasing economic inequality and insecurity) that shape the American present. This is not necessarily a new story, but one that centers the family and work-life balance, which is quite different from, say, Jacob Hacker’s account in The Great Risk Shift (2006). Eichner provides enticing examples of pro-family policies from Finland, which offers a year of paid parental leave, free and high-quality universal daycare, free college tuition, limited working hours, and 30 days paid vacation per year (p. 22).
Eichner persuasively emphasizes the stress that the American lifestyle imposes on families: “We need to pay attention to the costs of having our lives so thoroughly dominated by the economic treadmill we’re all running on…the toll that feeling constantly tired and stressed, and having little time to savor quiet moments and routines, takes on our lives”—especially the effects on parents and their ability to nurture their children (p. 67). Part I synthesizes evidence from numerous studies from psychology, sociology, child development, and neuroscience, carefully documenting the toll the American way of life takes on families. Eichner also offers examples from lower-, middle-, and upper-class families drawn from 39 interviews she conducted to help put faces on the data (p. 227). The book makes frequent and helpful comparisons to model Western European countries; for example, in chapter 6 Eichner offers an extended and revealing hypothetical example of how single parenthood might differ in Denver versus Finland (pp. 120–28).
Although many examples in the book focus on the problems of upper-middle-class families (p. 14), Eichner is careful to specifically address challenges for lower-income and poor families in chapters 4 and 6. In chapter 5, Eichner pits pro-family policy against free-market family policy on four critical criteria, showing that the latter fails to give kids what they need to thrive—from care during the first year of life, to high-quality child care, and early childhood education, all with negative results (p. 97).
Part II consists of two chapters that swiftly cover the shift from agrarian society to industrial wage labor, ultimately leading to the development of the American welfare state in the early twentieth century (chapter 8) and the dismantling of that welfare state in favor of “free-market family policy” in the 1980s and 1990s (chapter 9). Eichner tells the story as one of loss, in which “the United States shift[ed] from the goal of ensuring that all families with children get the resources they need to the current free-market family policy” (p. 191).
The third and final section provides concrete recommendations for how to build “an economy that supports, rather than undercuts, the well-being of families” (p. 195). Rather than GDP, Eichner argues, the appropriate measure of a healthy economy is instead “ensur[ing] that all Americans have the resources—material, caretaking, educational, and leisure—they need to flourish” (p. 196). Eichner offers specific recommendations by further enumerating the elements of a “pro-family policy.” The recommendations are sweeping and ambitious (see pp. 199–212 for the full list), including but not limited to paid parental leave; child benefits; generous government spending on daycare and prekindergarten, reducing economic inequality and insecurity, and building a stronger social safety net; and various labor market regulations (paid vacation, limits on work hours, and rights for part-time workers) that “ensure that workers can combine their paid work with meaningful family lives” (p. 199). In offering these recommendations, Eichner gives concrete examples of current policy in other countries such as Denmark, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
The final chapter provides rebuttals to potential objections to pro-family policies—that they make the United States less competitive, are too expensive, and interfere with freedom (p. 214). In a compelling conclusion, Eichner dispatches all three concerns in short order: “Can we afford this? Of course we can. Far less wealthy countries have adopted these programs” (p. 220), and finally, “Real freedom is enhanced rather than curtailed when citizens can access the resources they need without devoting their entire lives to the market” (p. 225).
The book’s greatest strength is making a clear case for a particular vision of pro-family policy making—one that Eichner argues is eminently attainable in a nation as wealthy as the United States. The book makes very clear that different policy choices could lead to happier lives. For political scientists, the book is a call to study the important issues of work–life balance that Eichner raises and to interrogate the politics that stand in the way of pro-family policy. These issues should be front and center in the discipline as among the most pressing political problems of our time, and they deserve particular attention from those studying inequality and public policy. Political scientists might go further to pursue more systematic analysis of the politics and interest groups that maintain “free-market” rather than “pro-family” policy and an interrogation of the politics behind state-level efforts to secure paid parental and family leave.
One shortcoming of the book is insufficient attention to gender. For a book centering families, caregiving, and work–life balance, women are surprisingly absent. This must be intentional: Eichner is making a universalist appeal about the family unit. But given the disproportionate burden of childrearing and caregiving on women—and the disproportionately negative impact on their careers—the lack of attention to gender equity is surprising (and in striking contrast to, for instance, Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers’s 2003 book, Families that Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment, on comparative family policy). Feminism and the women’s movement are hardly mentioned, even when describing the massive shift of women into wage work just as “free-market policies” began to prevail.
Free-Market Families is both stridently liberal while at times coming across as conservative, concerned by the fact that “the stability of our family structures is under siege” (p. 14). Despite occasional caveats, Eichner is unapologetic in this emphasis. After providing an array of findings in which children from “unstable” and unmarried families fare worse, Eichner concludes, “In sum, we have good reasons to treat the decrease in marriage rates and the rise of fragile families as concerns to be addressed rather than variations on family forms that we should celebrate” (p. 87). Many of the findings she cites certainly bear consideration; that said, the model of the family endorsed at times seems out of step with the plethora of family arrangements today.
Also missing is sufficient attention to the structural racism inherent in the US system. Although not the focus of the book, in chapter 8, Eichner presents an idealized version of agrarian families in colonial America, essentially erasing slavery (p. 166). In the chapter on fragile families, Eichner shows how economic instability and single parenthood led to less-than-ideal parenting from a mother whose son ends up incarcerated (pp. 139–40). This is an entirely individualistic account, with no attention to the well-documented structural racism of the criminal justice system.
These limitations originate in the initial framing of the book, which dwells less on the historical accuracy of the American dream and whether it was ever meant to apply to all Americans. The book is less about why differences exist between the United States and European countries and more focused on recognizing that they do and making an affirmative case for a vision of pro-family policy in America today (pp. 26–27).
Overall, The Free-Market Family is a compelling read, amassing and synthesizing an impressive array of studies to focus attention on families, children, well-being, and flourishing—all topics political science would do well to make as central as Eichner does in this interesting book.
