Technology for the American Family
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.
TECHNOLOGY AND THE HOUSEHOLD
The family — the forge of creation — is the foundation of society. As the site of the biological reproduction of the human race, this is obvious. Less obvious is the fact that in eras prior to ours, economic activity typically sat atop the organization of the family or household — oikos, as the Greeks called it. In fact, the art of managing household work — oikonomia — provided the etymological source of the term "economy."
Before the late 18th century, the arts of skilled making were usually practiced within the household, which included not only the space of family living, but also attached workshops, gardens, farmland, estates, and the like. While items produced might have been intended for market exchange, the processes of creating things like cloth, candles, food, and wine were largely contained within and ordered by the needs of the household. Production's situation within the home gave rise to the intrinsic connection between the family and technology.
As the Industrial Revolution spread through Europe and the United States, the world of the first oikos (household production) gave way to the world of the second oikos — rational or scientific production. New techniques were developed that unlocked vast new efficiencies and economies of scale. In the world of the second oikos, productivity largely exited the household and shifted to much larger-scale enterprises: the factory, the industrial farm, the office, etc. At the same time, households became sites primarily of consumption.
This transition was enormously disruptive to families. Labor's move from the home to the factory placed women and children at the mercy of men's bringing home money to purchase household necessities. At the same time, expanding space outside the household brought about new temptations. Gin palaces and saloons selling potent, mass-produced grain alcohol (itself an industrial product) tempted men to drink away their wages. The poverty, domestic violence, and social damage that resulted contributed to the first waves of feminism as well as the temperance movement.
The new technologies themselves changed the order and economic function of the family, and even rewrote much of its meaning. The automobile, home appliances, and power tools, combined with the expansion of the electric grid and the emergence of public utilities — all of these innovations released husbands and wives from their traditional reliance on children and close neighbors for care, manpower, and collective skill.
The family as an institution is amenable to many different kinds of social organization and technologies of production, but not every kind. What must society's underlying technological order feature for the family to survive? What kinds of technologies are conducive to its flourishing?
Surveying a broad array of thinkers who have contemplated these questions, from Thomas Jefferson and Matthew Crawford to Richard Sennett and Pope St. John Paul II, one arrives at two high-level conclusions. First, the technological order must support a real functional role for the family, one in which men and women are drawn together in a mutual reliance that sustains the raising of children. Second, technology must lend itself to the kinds of work that bolsters the virtues and gives people autonomy and control over their families. We will examine each of these in turn.
RE-FUNCTIONALIZING THE FAMILY
As noted above, the Industrial Revolution transformed family life and relations between the sexes in an unprecedented manner. But as historian Nancy Cott has shown, major reform movements of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, along with the new laws and labor policies they engendered, restored strength to the family by elevating protections for women and children while favoring married men in hiring and in the new social-welfare systems.
Since the 1960s, practically all of this progress has been unmade. Today, we find ourselves in a precarious situation, with a dearth of good jobs for marriageable men, appallingly low rates of married parenting (especially for those without a college degree), and other dire signs of weakness in the family as an institution.
Marriageability for men is anchored to their having access to productive work. Research suggests that the vast majority of women prefer a spouse with a steady job. A new study by Grant Martsolf and Brad Wilcox (unpublished at the time of this writing) finds that working-class men with jobs that offer good wages (defined as $60,000 per year or more), health benefits, and overall stability have significantly higher rates of family formation than their peers who lack these supports. Further research is required to determine the causal direction of these salutary effects, but the authors conclude that these "good job" characteristics help make family formation viable.
Throughout much of the 20th century, the bulk of the industries that once provided men with gainful employment either automated or migrated overseas. As a result, working-class men became less likely to hold a steady job and, in turn, less able to forge an enduring spousal bond. While it is increasingly common for both parents to work, this two-income trap fails to deliver broad social prosperity, as wealthier households simply bid up the cost of housing, education, and childcare.
A critical question for the family in an era of technological change is how do we make (or keep) jobs that make men marriageable and families stable? When important industries can be disrupted by a new autonomous technology, how should our society respond?
The stakes could not be higher. Take the example of truck driving — the single most common job category for high-school-educated men. Per Martsolf and Wilcox, driving a truck facilitates comparatively high family-formation rates for working-class men, especially in relation to post-industrial alternatives in the health-care, retail, and food-services industries. Firing a host of American truckers in the span of a few years would destroy millions of families — a massive negative externality.
When it comes to the social and economic effects of technology and trade, perhaps no authority is more often quoted than David Ricardo, the English political economist who framed the concept of comparative advantage in arguing for the repeal of the Corn Laws. Champions of a laissez-faire approach to the economy and technology often use Ricardo's work to insist that all of society will eventually benefit from their free advancement. And yet, in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Ricardo himself acknowledged the need to contain social disruption in cases of rapid economic change brought on by trade (or, as we would add, technology). To preserve justice and social concord, he suggested that policymakers implement a tax or a tariff on the new industry that declines over time, which would slow the rate of change and grant society more time to adjust.
Libertarians, progressives, and technological accelerationists might see Ricardo's call to slow down change in the name of justice as futile and perhaps morally wrong. But if the objective is social harmony, slowing change — even if it does not result in the stoppage of change — is not a failure. As Karl Polanyi put it:
Why should the ultimate victory of a trend be taken as a proof of the ineffectiveness of the efforts to slow down its progress? And why should the purpose of these measures not be seen precisely in that which they achieved, i.e., in the slowing down of the rate of change? That which is ineffectual in stopping a line of development altogether is not, on that account, altogether ineffectual. The rate of change is often of no less importance than the direction of the change itself; but while the latter frequently does not depend upon our volition, it is the rate at which we allow change to take place which well may depend upon us.
In cases of rapid technological shifts that displace workers, policymakers should mediate a period of adjustment to protect families. Even if we agree that an old industry has no future, we need to give society time to create coherent pathways for men in the old industry to find alternative forms of gainful employment.
Of course, the creative destruction that new technology generates can itself be a vehicle for introducing new industries that support marriage and family. The semi-tractor trailer is not some eternal reality; it was invented in 1898. But when an industry has become vital to the American family, through whatever accidents of history, conservatives must make the prudential case for slow, measured change.
At the same time, conservatives cannot adopt a purely static approach to technological and industrial development — especially in our era of global trade. America's success in adapting to the new patterns of work that these developments introduce will be vital to generating the economic growth that sustains family formation and flourishing in the long run. Conservatives, therefore, should push for policies that support economic dynamism while mitigating its disruptive effect.
An approach to technology-related job losses similar to that which exists for trade-related job losses could protect families and America's civic fabric while ultimately improving workers' willingness to accept automation in their industries. Ideally, such a framework would strengthen and broaden existing programs to help workers displaced by technology find new jobs. Reeducation opportunities for displaced workers should be part of the equation, as should regional development funds for areas hit with losses. Policymakers should also look to finance efforts to launch new small businesses and invest capital in those areas. This approach would not only support workers, but would also help push companies toward labor-enhancing rather than labor-replacing technologies, thereby strengthening productivity while supporting working-class wages.
RESTORING VIRTUE
Conservatives have always understood work — providing for oneself and one's family while offering something of value to others — as a source of dignity, self-worth, and self-efficacy. For a figure like Thomas Jefferson, certain kinds of work made certain kinds of men. "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God," he declared in his 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia, blessed with a "peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." Even Alexander Hamilton — whose 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures opposed Jefferson's vision of a republic of farmers — conceded the point, noting that "the cultivation of the earth...[is] a state most favourable to the freedom and independence of the human mind."
Philosopher Matthew Crawford has been the most prominent expositor of the conservative view of work and virtue in recent decades, but before him came thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Maritain, and even Karl Marx. In his 1981 encyclical Laborem exercens, Pope St. John Paul II wrote profoundly on advanced manufacturing's transformative power over man's interior world. "[T]echnology is undoubtedly man's ally," he wrote. "It facilitates his work, perfects, accelerates and augments it." And yet, he also warned that
technology can cease to be man's ally and become almost his enemy, as when the mechanization of work "supplants" him, taking away all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave.
If Jefferson and Hamilton saw how forms of labor can prepare one's mind and soul for virtuous citizenship, John Paul II saw their potential to beat one down and, at their most extreme, to enslave. He understood that the worker can become so diminished by the use of machinery that his activity ceases to have any of the natural and subjectively enriching qualities of work.
In his 1998 book The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett provided a vivid example of how technology can be used in the labor process to either humanizing or dehumanizing effect. That example involved an Italian bakery in Boston, which Sennett visited twice over the span of 25 years. During his first visit to the bakery in the 1970s, he observed that the bakers (all Greek men, despite the Italian style of the bread produced) had intimate knowledge, born of much experience, of bread and bread dough. Working together over hot ovens, these men produced hundreds of loaves daily through the use of genuine, collectively organized skill.
During his second visit to the same bakery over two decades later, Sennett observed that the staff had become ethnically diverse, which he appreciated. But the equipment by which the bakers made bread had changed significantly, transforming the very meaning of the term "baker." Thanks to developments in machines and automation, the entire baking process was now conducted via computer screen. The staff never touched the dough, and, despite their many hours on the line, knew effectively nothing about the bread that the machines were making. Unlike the workers of the previous generation, who had to be skilled bakers, this new generation of workers could have included anyone off the street; the quality of the bread produced would have remained the same.
With advanced robotics in the 1990s and the perfect replication of processes made possible by computers, increasing numbers of professions have become subject to automation. Now, with artificial intelligence and the promise of autonomous robots, still more work appears slated for replacement. Some predict a future without work — which would be catastrophic.
Good work teaches one to commit to a task, to delay gratification until completion, to show loyalty to one's fellow workers, and to appreciate the self-respect earned from a job well done. It also gives one a role by which to serve one's family and community. Sustained excellence in work over a course of years provides one with a sense of "endurance in time," as Sennett put it, in which achievement is cumulative and oriented toward a larger goal. Not too long ago, for most Americans, that larger goal would have been a well-deserved retirement, which might strike us today as overly materialistic. But in fact, it enabled workers to rise above pure materialism by making each day's labor a small chapter in the larger story of a coherent life.
Developing one's skills also has a direct bearing on the welfare of the family. High-skilled work provides better wages which, as we have seen, confer marriageability on men. Such ability can also be taken wherever one goes; one's boss has no ownership over it.
To no longer need a skill is to lack an obvious need for those who bear it. Conservatives, therefore, must be extremely cautious about inviting the wholesale eradication of human skill via technological change. Instead, they should favor the development and deployment of technologies that augment human skill over those that replace it.
Of course, automation never happens in a vacuum: It is applied to industries that are operating under various states of health. Sometimes political malfeasance and managerial failure, not technical progress, are the conditions in which automation becomes desirable. The trucking industry, which has become a flashpoint in recent years, is perhaps a case in point.
As Karen Levy has written, shipping companies have equipped their rigs with driver-surveillance systems, in part due to federal regulations. This move has transformed the industry from one animated by pride in independence and personal excellence into one in which drivers are something akin to cogs, contributing to a dramatic increase in driver turnover. As a result, trucking tends to be staffed by less experienced drivers who are more accident-prone than veteran truckers — and more willing to bear the indignity of comprehensive surveillance.
Technological advancement, in other words, may be only part of the impetus to automate an industry: Automation can also provide an absolutist solution to a complex web of failures that have led to a general underdevelopment of human capital. Thus, in addition to favoring incremental change, a conservative school of technology must be adept at knowing the difference between technical shortcomings and human ones. It must resist simplified, one-size-fits-all fixes in favor of technology that elevates the worker by augmenting his skills while cultivating the virtue and pride their use generates.
TECHNOLOGY FIT FOR A REPUBLIC
Technology doesn't just shape the family: Given that the family is the primary unit within which basic human capacities are practiced, the patterns developed there in response to technological advances tend to radiate out across all of society. Technological change, therefore, has the power to either enhance or undermine entire communities in which the family and its members participate.
Rapid technological change has upset centuries-old patterns in the span of mere decades. It's hard to think of a part of the human experience that has escaped unscathed. These new technologies have not emerged in response to the needs of families and local communities; they are instead driven by the scientific, military, and economic imperatives of far-off actors.
Until very recently, the power over and responsibility for life within a society rested in the hands of families and communities. Localized activities as fundamental as sharing family meals, educating children, assisting neighbors, discussing the affairs of the day, finding and marrying a spouse, tending to sick loved ones, and attending communal and religious functions formed the topsoil of human social life. Technological change occurred, of course, but it usually did so gradually, and in a way that was responsive to local authority and agency. A community forced to submit to alien customs and authorities was, to great thinkers like Aristotle and Montesquieu, an enslaved and subjugated one. Neil Postman channeled this sentiment in Technopoly when he wrote: "A family that does not or cannot control the information environment of its children is barely a family at all."
Yet such is the family's situation today. Postman wrote those words in the era of the television, the VCR, and FM and AM radio. Whatever challenges those technologies posed to families back then, the content was the same for all within earshot, and if the messages were unacceptable, parents could switch them off. Contemporary media technologies, by contrast, are individualized and secretive by nature, leaving most parents with even less authority over their household's knowledge and beliefs.
Conservatives today must reassert the authority of families and local communities over the technologies that shape their everyday lives. The aim should not be to impose one way of doing things on everyone, or to decide which technologies are right for all, but to restore power and responsibility to local actors.
Doing so will require favoring technology that enhances local and familial autonomy. Philosopher Ivan Illich's distinction between heteronomous and autonomous modes of production is useful here. According to Illich, heteronomous technologies are those that depend on ever-greater specialization for maintenance and repair, which strengthens control by external forces that have relevant expertise or access to monopolized parts. Such technologies reduce the autonomy of the individual, families, and communities. Autonomous technologies, by contrast, are adaptable, self-directed, and locally controlled. They use simple and accessible tools and technologies for maintenance. Because of these features, they tend to promote self-reliance and interdependence within communities.
An automobile with an internal combustion engine offers a good example of autonomous technology. These vehicles are reasonably simple machines that an individual can understand and maintain. They also use common parts and require common tools, enabling a local community to sustain their operation over time. One has to go into extremely remote or undeveloped societies to find a place unable to keep its automobiles running with the tools and fuels available.
But with companies increasingly integrating computers into every element of the modern automobile's operations, vehicles are becoming more heteronomous. According to one industry study, today, the average passenger vehicle that uses a combustion engine contains around 1,400 semiconductor chips, which control everything from the infotainment display to the vehicle's powertrain, electrical, and safety systems. Interfacing with and interpreting a car's data requires expert knowledge, software, and specialized machines, while increasingly complex electrical systems (along with the software running them) tend to create difficult-to-diagnose problems. Electric vehicles are even more heteronomous: Their integration of software and wireless internet access into the vehicle's battery operations enable companies like Tesla and BMW to deliver updates that modify vehicle performance from afar.
In practice, these innovations mean that families can no longer take responsibility for how they repair, maintain, or modify their vehicles, and can no longer rely on members of their community to assist them in doing so. Instead, they are subjugated to the whims of distant manufacturers and their dealer networks. It may not be long before some totalitarian government, or perhaps even a private corporation, exploits the intrinsic connectivity of contemporary automobiles for social control.
Conservatives should oppose mandates and incentives that push technologies reliant on distant power centers, especially when those technologies have second-order effects on the family's or community's way of life (as when Google offers free Chromebooks to public-school systems). They should fight electric-vehicle mandates and subsidies, as well as the growth in public conveniences and government services that require the use of a smartphone; and they should oppose the imperative to make even basic appliances "smart," which turns everyday tools into systems of surveillance while also making them more heteronomous.
Beyond resisting impositions, conservatives should work to expand local autonomy. Policymakers should encourage the development of autonomous technologies that improve the functionality, productivity, and self-reliance of households and communities. Chest freezers, efficient generators, Starlink internet, and computerized pattern-cutters are just some of the technologies that can carry the spirit of the homestead into the 21st century, granting families and individuals additional control over their lives. To this end, conservatives should fight for open-source software, open-platform designs, and right-to-repair laws, all of which push back against centralized control.
A dynamic economy and complex supply chains suggest that there will always be practical limits on individuals' and families' ability to determine which technologies they use. With employment and key government functions (not to mention communication with friends and loved ones, and even participation in civic life) requiring access to a smartphone, email, the internet, and more, most people today do not have a choice as to whether they use digital technology. Conservatives, therefore, must ensure that America's technology is a good fit for a republic of families.
On this front, it is particularly critical to give parents authority over their children's technological experiences. Some Big Tech companies have added parental controls to their products, but those features usually feel like an afterthought compared to the rest of the customer experience. Recently, however, Meta has introduced age-appropriate and even parent-managed accounts, representing a serious effort to cordon children off from the full global network. In light of this success, increased pressure from lawmakers could induce social-media companies into a race to outdo one another in implementing effective safety measures and parental oversight.
Promoting children's safety is only the tip of the iceberg. Intrinsic to the design of our political order is the idea of the informed and deliberative citizen. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman explained how this political ideal was fostered early in the United States by a unique technological framework — the dominance of print media — combined with widespread literacy. The resulting print environment fostered the ideals of discussion, deliberation, and careful argument that formed the core of America's young political culture.
Early internet pioneers worked to upload these values to the nascent web, but the medium and its mass adoption have forced us to reckon with radical new problems. Social-media platforms are, de facto, a kind of 21st-century town square. For First Amendment protections of free speech, worship, and assembly to matter in a digital civilization, they must apply in some way to this new domain — even if those domains are owned by private companies.
The biggest challenge republican liberty faces online is not overt censorship, but a hidden power that controls what citizens see, hear, and feel. Over the past 20 years, Big Tech firms have designed consumer internet architectures not to produce informed and deliberative citizens, but to capture attention and accelerate engagement. Hidden underneath the visible architecture of web platforms are algorithms that push user activity in certain prescribed directions using personalized feeds and deceptive interface designs. These systems seek to bypass thoughtful deliberation and instead generate emotional responses, impulsive decisions, and subconscious addictions. Achieving this velocity, in turn, relies on ever more minute exploitation of human psychology and the expansion of data surveillance.
The problem here is not only the manipulation of users, but also the paranoia induced by the overt understanding that one's experience of the internet (and, through the internet, of society, culture, and politics) is mediated by hidden influences. This lack of transparency and trust feeds into the worst impulses toward conspiracism. With a population reduced in competence, constantly under surveillance, manipulated by invisible powers, and left with few domains in which to exercise its will and reason, our republican experiment in self-government will be destined to fail.
Conservatives should support state and federal action to legislate toward a restored republican culture in the 21st century, requiring platforms to build robust tools that give users transparency and choices about the algorithms that construct their feeds. The Federal Trade Commission should continue to regulate against deceptive interfaces that reduce the agency and self-efficacy of citizens or exploit the psychology of addiction.
Another candidate for minimizing Big Tech companies' hold over the flow of information is middleware, as Francis Fukuyama and others recommended in 2020. Sitting between or atop the underlying data, middleware gives users the power to access, sift through, and interact with data as they see fit, akin to how one uses an email client. Such technologies would give users more control and responsibility over their digital lives; de-escalate fights over Big Tech platforms, censorship, and disinformation; and begin the long work of rebuilding a republican culture for a digital age.
Finally, as digital technology becomes more pervasive in our lives, we need to create more opportunities for in-person social interactions and physical connection. Research by figures like Jonathan Haidt has galvanized the American public into seeking a digital detox, the purpose of which is to force adolescents (for starters) into person-to-person encounters. Recovering life in person is critical to any effort to reinstitute a genuine civic life.
Binding people together to conduct joint projects will require more than simply being together, however: That will require us, ultimately, to generate common dreams toward which we can aspire.
FAMILY AND CULTURE IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Conservatives should take comfort in the fact that, while the political ordering of technology may be foreign to us, the means to do so are more familiar. The principles required to establish a technological order that supports the family are remarkably similar to those that conservatives already hold true and dear; we just need to apply them to dynamics, technologies, and industries that have, to this point, been uniquely exempted from them. Likewise, the policies we need to realize these principles are already available to us, but when they are enacted for the benefit of families, they become parts of a much broader vision.
Historical forces are converging to make this moment potentially opportune for the family to become the ordering principle of reform and renewal in the digital age. When one stands back to gain a wider view — with the myth of technological neutrality waning in power, realignments driving tech investors and conservatives together, the birth of new state and national movements to bring certain sectors of Big Tech to heel, the innumerably divergent reactions to artificial intelligence, and even a growing sense among conservatives that the revolutionary nature of technology demands a reevaluation of at least some of their understandings of culture, history, and politics — one sees symptoms of a technological regime that has fallen into chaos and confusion. Our technological order is in search of a reason to be.
What's more, a new model of the oikos is on the rise. High-speed internet, information technology, and smaller automated machines have made possible new forms of home production. In this third oikos, production is returning to the household, but this time it is woven into global supply chains, multinational firms, and just-in-time market production. Many white-collar workers are able to work from home via email, Zoom, and cloud-based collaborative applications. At the same time, many more kinds of home businesses — ranging from part-time cottage-industry Etsy shops to full-on niche industrial manufacturing using 3D printers, CNC machines, and CAD software— are starting to make sense. On the consumption side, the internet (soon to be married with drone delivery) is shifting value back into the home via online shopping, meal-kit and delivery services, platforms for in-home services ranging from plumbing to language tutoring, and improved options for home schooling and micro schooling.
We have only begun to grapple with the implications of this transition. Home production and flexible work schedules are making it easier for working moms and dads to care for their children and to consider having more. Research by the Institute for Family Studies finds that women who work remotely are about 40% more likely to be having children than women who work in person and are significantly more likely to have plans to marry. A reduced need to access the office or retail stores simplifies making housing and neighborhood decisions based on shared community or family presence.
Conservatives should champion investments in technologies that accelerate this transition. They should also attempt to clear away policy restrictions on home production, or even to give it an advantage over large-scale enterprises where prudent. These regulatory changes will then be reinforced by the new technologies that emerge once there is a market for them.
We must also adopt labor protections for remote work. If new technologies are used to globalize the workforce by hiring thousands of contractors in, say, India or China, then this turn toward a third oikos will fail to achieve its fullest promise. We must incentivize remote work within the United States while also adopting measures to protect the home from managerial overreach and disruption of family life. Conservatives should seek to understand the virtues of remote work and household production, and prudently shape labor law and tax policy to incentivize companies to adopt flexible work models that strengthen families and reinvigorate communities.
Given the challenges of restoring American manufacturing, we readily acknowledge that there are limits to this de-agglomeration, with the health of working-class families being dependent on living near to particular sectors of the economy. But the gains of the third oikos are nonetheless critical to preserve.
The future belongs to the family, because it is by nature the bearer and raiser of the next generation. The family begets the very beings who will come to witness, judge, and make the times ahead. As Hannah Arendt saw, futurity, innovation, and hope itself rest on the work of the family: "With each birth something uniquely new comes into the world." No other institution or program, not even a vast regime of technologically engineered fertility supported by an omnicompetent state, can possibly match the family's intrinsic natality and power to shape the generations.
The family and the future — procreation and innovation — are fundamentally connected. A technological project that seeks to subordinate or erase the family is doomed to suffer irremediable contradiction and catastrophic failure. A better path lies before us.
