Rediscovering the family.

This dogged attachment to a failed ideology distorts their analysis in other ways. They claim that "no one really knows" why working wives are 40 percent more likely to divorce than their stay-at-home counterparts. In fact, Gary Becker won a Nobel Prize in economics for explaining why: A married couple in which both spouses work outside the home has sacrificed the specialization of labor (i.e., breadwinner and homemaker) that gives real economic gain to their marital bond. Elsewhere, Warren and Tyagi simply assume that high levels of divorce are a given, rather than recognizing this as a consequence of the misguided "no-fault divorce" revolution of the late 1960s. The authors argue that "no one saw [this new situation] coming," a statement belied by even a casual look at Phyllis Schlafly's written work from the 1970s. The authors also ignore the role played by federal social engineering in securing this change, from the last-minute addition of the word "sex" to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which destroyed the "family wage" regime) to the creation of massive federal tax subsidies for non-parental day care in the early 1970s.

Most of the policy ideas proposed in The Two-Income Trap also fall wide of the mark and well short of the "surprising solutions" promised in the book's subtitle. To solve the suburban "bidding war" for homes, they would institute vouchers within public-school districts, although this would do little to solve public education's deeper problems. To shelter two-income families from excessive debt, the authors turn to a fairly conventional liberal agenda that includes "publicly funded, universal pre-school," more government-subsidized day care, and strict new regulation of the credit and banking industries.

Curiously, though, Warren and Tyagi sometimes hint at an alternative, far less statist approach. They admit, for example, that "even now, a generation after the Women's Revolution, the surest way for a woman to regain her financial footing after a divorce is to find a [new] husband--and to do it quickly." Alas, it turns out that a woman still needs a man! And, near the end of the book, they do finally acknowledge that keeping one parent full-time at home "isn't a bad solution" to the problems they outline. Moreover, the book does offer unexpectedly fresh discussions of "deadbeat dads" (it turns out there aren't very many of them) and the credit-card industry (where the current business strategy is to get financially troubled families "to borrow [still] more money"). So I welcome this book as a flawed but hopeful product. Reason seems to be making a comeback, even among the feminists.

Mr. Carlson is president of the Howard Center and a fellow at the Family Research Council. His latest book is The "American Way": Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity (ISI).

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