Allan Carlson
The New Welfare State and Family Decay in America
Allan C. Carlson (born Des Moines, Iowa, 1949) is a scholar and professor of history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. He is the president of the Howard Center, a director of the Family in America Studies Center, the International Secretary of the World Congress of Families and editor of the Family in America newsletter. He is also former president of the Rockford Institute.
Carlson earned his B. A. from Augustana College and his Ph.D. in European History from The Ohio State University. He served as a member of the Lutheran Council in America’s Government Affairs Office from 1975-1978. In 1979 he became a lecturer and assistant-to-the-president at Gettysburg College. He joined The Rockford Institute in 1981, where he remained until he joined with John A. Howard in splitting off from that organization and forming the Howard Center in 1997. In 2003 Carlson served on the faculty of Oriel College, Oxford.
His articles and treatises have addressed the underlying causes of population decline, the effects of taxation and regulation on the size and well-being of the family, as well as historical efforts to implement a family wage in the United States. He has observed that the post World War II baby boom in the United States was largely a “Catholic phenomenon.” “[T]he 1945–1964 era produced a “heroic” flowering of Catholic family life in America. Although fertility rose for all American religious groups, it rose far more rapidly and stayed high longer among Catholics…. The total marital fertility rate for non-Catholics averaged 3.15 children born per woman in the early 1950s and 3.14 in the early 1960s. For Catholics, the respective figures were 3.54 and 4.25.”
Carlson has also criticized the impact of feminism on women’s roles in society as disastrous and continuing to take its toll on the family.