"The mother at home is making huge economic contributions to society"

Patrick Fagan is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Research on Marriage at the Family Research Council. Fagan came on the show to discuss his new paper, The Family GDP - How Marriage and Fertility Drive the Economy.

You mentioned the breakdown of the family as a cause of the economic slowdown. Is that an overstatement?

No, it's not.

We're drawing on the research of Nobel Laureates who worked out a fair bit of this, but we're digging even deeper.

Our rate of economic growth is slowing down, which has all sorts of consequences.

Talk to us about the married parent, weekly worship and  children. How do these things flow together?

The intact family is...hands down the one that buys houses, the married family is the one that saves.

Married families are the ones that overwhelmingly pay taxes.

There's a whole lot of industry based on kids growing up.

Our average IQ is dropping over the past few generations.  A result of the breakdown of the family.

Why does worship makes a difference?

If you go  to church, you're thinking about right and wrong...you're trying to figure out how to get along with your wife and kids.

That translates into all sorts of good actions. For employers it turns into a guy who shows up for work and works hard.

Talk about the benefit of having a dependent wife at home.

The husband and wife work out how they're going to run the family economy.

Unless the married mother is earning pretty high income, the family is actually losing money.

If she's poor, the family loses money if she goes out to work.

The economic productivity of a household goes up, if the mother is at home making her contribution to the economy.

The mother at home who cooks dinner gives much more nutritious food at a much lower cost than if a family were to go out and eat.

What is the economic impact of mothers who homeschool their kids?

The mother at home raising the kids is essentially raising the long-term producers.

Let's say she raised four kids. These are four highly productive people.

Over sixty years who's making a bigger impact on the economy?

The mother at home is making huge economic contributions to society.