Family Structure, Inequality, and Opportunity
There’s no doubt that shifts in family structure play a role in both inequality and in its inter-generational transmission. The gap in resources (but in terms of money, social capital, and parental attention) available to a child of two high-earning professionals, and those available to a kid raised by a lone working-class mom is much bigger than the gap that would exist if the inequality in earnings weren’t intensified by the difference in family structure.
That said, it was strange to read this from Sawhill & Haskins:
Actually, some other advanced economies offer more opportunity than ours does. For example, recent research shows that in the Nordic countries and in the United Kingdom, children born into a lower-income family have a greater chance than those in the United States of forming a substantially higher-income family by the time they’re adults. [...]
[A] more important reason for our lack of progress against poverty and our growing inequality is a dramatic change in American family life. Almost 30 percent of children now live in single-parent families, up from 12 percent in 1968. Since poverty rates in single-parent households are roughly five times as high as in two-parent households, this shift has helped keep the poverty rate up; it climbed to 13.2 percent last year. If we had the same fraction of single-parent families today as we had in 1970, the child poverty rate would probably be about 30 percent lower than it is today.
Now guess where they have more single-parent families than the United States?
Among 14 countries analyzed in the report by the National Center for Health Statistics, the percentage of all live unmarried births in the USA — 40% in 2007 — ranks somewhere in the middle. That’s up from 18% in 1980. The sharpest rise was from 2002 to 2007, the report found. Countries with a higher proportion of births to unmarried mothers include Iceland, Sweden, Norway, France, Denmark and the United Kingdom; countries with a lower percentage than the USA include Ireland, Germany, Canada, Spain, Italy and Japan.
Now I can think of some reasons you might say that notwithstanding the success the Nordic countries have had in creating a low-inequality, high-opportunity society despite low marriage rates that marriage promotion policies are still the right solution for the United States. But it does seem to me that if you’re going to write about why the U.S. falls short of Nordic levels of inequality, you can’t just turn around and start talking about marriage without even mentioning actual out-of-wedlock birthrates in Nordic countries. “We should have really high taxes like Denmark” is not a great political slogan for an American politician, but the facts are what they are—high opportunity countries are also highly egalitarian countries, and highly egalitarian countries get that way largely through high taxes and high levels of social services.
78 Responses to “Family Structure, Inequality, and Opportunity”
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November 2nd, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Unmarried parents are not the same as single parents. Intuitively, that statement seems like it holds true more often in Northern Europe than it does in the states. (No time to look for evidence right now, but it seems likely.) My hunch is the two cited passages are describing related but quite distinct issues, which means the second one does nothing to invalidate the former.
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:54 pm
I’ll try to find the studies, and I’m sure many of your readers have seen them, but Nordic out of wedlock births are very different than in the US. A significantly higher percentage of these births occur in couples who stay together and live in a traditional marriage type relationship. In the US, a much higher percentage of out of wedlock births occur between people who don’t have any type of long lasting relationship
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Adding…
Which is not to say I think the former should go unchallenged; the idea that we can’t create social structures that give single parents some economic freedom without resorting to incentivizing marriages they don’t want to be in is ridiculous.
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Erhm, Matt…. Unmarried =/ single parent
Out of wedlock births in scandinavia is typical in couples. Several of my close friends are about as stable families as one can imagine with several children each without being married. This is very very very common, especially amongst the higher middleclass.
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Francis Fukuyama’s book The Great Disruption had the figures on the huge difference between out-of-wedlock births in American versus Scandinavia. Most out-of-wedlock births in America are to women who don’t live with the father, while in Scandinavia, most out-of-wedlock births are to women who live with the father and are in more or less de facto marriages.
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:59 pm
If you really want to understand why a high illegitimacy rate is a much bigger problem in America than in Norway, you have to study the anthropology of paternal investment in different parts of the world.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Don’t forget when you’re comparing marriage country-to-country that an increasing number of countries allow ALL couples to marry, and that the USA most emphatically does not.
In addition to every other way that skews some statistics, keep in mind that it also means that a considerable number of children are, ipso facto, born out of wedlock and remain so in law.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:03 pm
hat the USA most emphatically does not.
They do where I live. Not all of us choose to live in bible thumping hillbilly hellholes like VA.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:05 pm
We probably should encourage couples to not get married so they stay together longer. A friend of mine in California has been with his girlfriend for 17 years now, has three kids, and a house. They never got married, but they do have “togetherness rings.” And they are a wonderful, stable family. When you consider that the average marriage lasts only eight years, there’s really no point in encouraging marriage. And when you combine marriage and divorce statistics, it’s clear that the younger you get married, the more likely your marriage will end in divorce. So here’s to living in sin.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Here are the 2007 statistics:
From 2005 to 2007, the number of babies born in the United States to married women declined 0.3 percent. In contrast, the number born to unmarried women grew 12.3 percent.
The illegitimacy rate was up in 2007 among all ethnicities. From 2005 to 2007, the black out-of-wedlock rate grew from 69.9 percent to 71.6 percent. Among whites, it was up 25.3 percent to 27.8 percent over those two years.
The fastest increase is found among Hispanics, up from 48.0 percent to 51.3 percent. According to Rutgers sociologist David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project, that’s compared to just 19 percent in 1980. He writes, “…Hispanics seem to have assimilated into the American culture of secular individualism more than the reverse. … These trends contradict earlier expectations that Hispanics might bring this nation a new wave of family traditionalism.”
The growth in Hispanic illegitimacy is especially important because Hispanics keep increasing as a share of all new births, married or unmarried, up from 14.3 percent in 1990 to 23.8 percent in 2005 to 24.6 percent in 2007.
Thus, from 2005 to 2007, the number of babies born to unmarried white women dropped 2.0 percent, while the number of babies born to unmarried Hispanic women grew 15.2 percent.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Excuse me, my mistake, the last sentence should read:
“Thus, from 2005 to 2007, the number of babies born to married white women dropped 2.0 percent, while the number of babies born to unmarried Hispanic women grew 15.2 percent.”
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Wow, they just don’t marry in Iceland, do they? I think it would be important to look at the rate of unmarried cohabitation in Nordic countries. If two people live together, combine their income, and raise children together, one suspects that their children will have many of the same benefits conferred onto children whose parents are married.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:16 pm
I agree with “sp6r=underrated” above, without any statistics at the hand to back up the claim – but my anecdotal experience is that a fairly high number of the out of wedlock children are actually growing up within very stable families.
But there is a further element which is extremely important: The lack of a serious cultural stigma attached to illegitimacy. Which comes first, the high number of children born out of wedlock or the lack of stigma is a open question, but I am certain this cultural component is critical in explaining why being born out of wedlock does not significantly impact one’s chances i life.
In Iceland at least a further elememt is the strength of family networks.
Ultimately though I think neither the stability of families formed by unmarried couples or cultural attitudes would not manage to do much if there was not also a strong social safety net, universal healthcare, good schools and daycare.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:17 pm
My bigger beef with this piece was the idea that giving money to poor people is a bad idea. See the post at familyinequality.com.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Yes, yes, yes, but the point is that the Swedes are marrying within their own species, OK?
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Where’s your spouse going to go?
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:21 pm
My bigger beef with this piece was the idea that giving money to poor people is a bad idea.
It would be a bad idea if being poor was primarily an issue of culture. The dramatic success of immigrants of Asian and Caribbean decent indicates that poverty is primarily a cultural phenomenon.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:26 pm
I love how the automatic assumption is that poverty levels and inequality increased because children were born to single-parent households. Do these people ever consider that the increase in poverty and inequality is what led to the increase in children born to single parent households? It’s like the thought never enters their mind, even though there is a strong causal relationship.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:34 pm
PhillyGuy marvels:
I love how the automatic assumption is that poverty levels and inequality increased because children were born to single-parent households. Do these people ever consider that the increase in poverty and inequality is what led to the increase in children born to single parent households?
No, because the inflection point in the out-of-wedlock birth rate happened exactly in the early to mid-1960s when welfare payments were boosted substantially in Northern states, and welfare departments became much less persnickety about whether the mother was married or not.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Do these people ever consider that the increase in poverty and inequality is what led to the increase in children born to single parent households? It’s like the thought never enters their mind, even though there is a strong causal relationship.
It would be, if the most likely explanation wasn’t that poor people are poor because of a lack impulse control and an inability to delay gratification. The reason they are poor and the reason they got knocked up are closely related.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:36 pm
I agree with the majority of people on here, you cannot conflate unmarried with single-parent in countries that have very low religiosity.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:37 pm
MY is more correct than most of his commenters, who appear to have the causality backwards. More children are born “out-of-wedlock” in Scandanavia because the individual and social costs of illegitimacy or other contingent factors/differences are very low and the social safety net very inclusive.
As an example, health insurance. I would assume getting a company or group plan to cover a child not “officially” your own could be very difficult in America. IOW, the relative weak safety net encourages marriage and punishes those with marginal coping skills.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:37 pm
In his youthful innocence/ignorance and his infatuation with the Blue-Eyed Utopias, Matt seems determined to make all over again the basic intellectual mistakes of early 1960s liberals, who assumed that because high welfare payments and a tolerance of out-of-wedlock childbearing were working well in Scandinavia, they would work well in the U.S.
And, indeed, they worked pretty well in Minnesota. In other parts of the U.S., not so much …
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:39 pm
PhillyGuy beat me to the punch. How much of single parent (households) caused by poverty, rather than the other way around? I suspect in the US a significant reason for not getting married, is not having a decnt income from the propective couple. We probably (to seriously oversimplfy) have two classes of single parents, economic ones, and cultural ones (which are not uncommon among the well to do).
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Another thing to consider is the existence of opposite-sex civil unions or domestic partnerships.
This statistic about unwed mothers has frequently been used as proof that gay marriage will destroy straight marriages, and relatively recent data from Scandinavia is often trotted out to prove it. The problem is, they tend to call straight people in civil unions “unmarried” since they can marry, and gay couples “married” because it skews the data the way they want it to read.
Factor in civil unions or domestic partnerships where they are available, and you tend to find that a lot of these “unwed” mothers aren’t quite as single as people want to claim.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Given the naming practices in Iceland, how can anybody tell who is married, and which kid is the offspring of a married couple?
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Japan is quite an outlier!
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:46 pm
The Northern Europeans don’t get married because they get no special status or privileges or security by marrying, nor are they or their children disadvantaged by lack of marriage.
This is fricking terrific, and yes, and not merely an indication of an egalitarian society but an active cause of egalitarianism.
Perhaps the poor in America could become marginally better off in stable relationships, but those children will never come near the advantages of being a Bush or Cheney child. The way to equalize opportunities is to make the parents irrelevant to outcomes, not make them even more important.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:47 pm
In summary, Negroes and Spics just plain suck.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Increases in AFDC payments and the reversal of FDR’s anti-unwed mother bias in the 1960s had a disastrous effect on African Americans, rapidly driving up the illegitimacy rate. It’s important to note that this impact didn’t just fall on the next generation of African American boys raised without fathers around. Instead, it was felt immediately in rising crime rates.
When the government (e.g., Nelson Rockefeller’s state of New York) started paying a decent amount of money to unwed mothers and providing them with cheap public housing apartments, this immediately reversed the polarity of male-female relationships among poorer blacks. Instead of mothers being dependent upon husbands to bring in most of the income, and thus giving women an incentive to nag their boyfriends into getting a job and marrying them in return for sex, women were now breadwinners, and breadwinners precisely by getting pregnant. Women didn’t need to nag men to marry them or to get jobs, and male behavior rapidly declined, with the marriage rate falling and the crime rate rising.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:52 pm
the facts are what they are—high opportunity countries are also highly egalitarian countries, and highly egalitarian countries get that way largely through high taxes and high levels of social services.
But Denmark has *never* had a high level of social inequality! They freed the serfs early and they industrialized late, and they have historically had a culturally homogeneous and literate population, with a strong popular interest in education, democracy and lifelong learning (see the whole Folkehøjskole movement). All this had very little to do with the specifics of the tax rate and a hell of a lot to do with the unique social, cultural and historical circumstances of Denmark specifically and its close relationship to other Nordic countries generally. It’s much more reasonable to argue that Denmark has been able to assess high taxes and provide high levels of social services precisely because they’ve had a relatively egalitarian society, and that those democratic services have reinforced the egalitarian aspects of society, which makes higher tax rates more acceptable.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:56 pm
The rise in welfare in the 1960s afforded many African Americans the opportunity to resume a cultural pattern widely seen among their distant cousins in Africa, where women tend to do much of the work of feeding children. (There are numerous exceptions to this, but the general tendency is clear.) American intellectuals have, over the decades lost all interest in studying the cultural inheritance from Africa of African-Americans, but it’s a key to understanding why African-Americans didn’t respond to welfare increases in the same fashion as Swedes did.
Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of UC Davis wrote in “Mother Nature:”
“Many fathers are only sporadically in residence with the mothers of their children; and fathers, when they are on the scene, may be unpredictable regarding which children they invest in, and how much. A substantial number of women conceive at a young age, often prior to marriage or formation of any stable relationship… relatively few fathers provide a great deal of care.”
While this may sound like inner city black neighborhoods in the U.S., she’s actually describing “large areas of sub-Saharan Africa.”
The anthropologists Jack Goody and Ester Boserup first explored how continental differences in raising food affected family structure. Boserup noted in 1970:
“Africa is the region of female farming par excellence. In many African tribes, nearly all the tasks connected with food production continue to be left to women.”
James Q. Wilson summarized their findings:
“In Europe, where animal-drawn plows were used to farm rich land, intensive agriculture made monogamy important… In these places, men did much of the agricultural work … In much of Africa, by contrast, farming was done by handheld hoes used to work small plots of land that were often rather infertile. Women were widely used to do the hoeing and carry in the produce.
“Many husbands found that they could use extra wives to wield even more hoes, and so marrying several women made sense economically… the conditions they describe may have had important consequences for the kinds of families that had to endure the travails of slavery in the Western Hemisphere.”
This tropical farming system causes African cultures to tend toward polygamy and/or matrilineal-matrilocal family structures. These tendencies can still be seen among African-Americans.
They are not widely seen among Swedish-Americans, however.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Correlation.
It’s the same thing as causality when you work in the Billy Bob School of Negrodynamics.
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:02 pm
The big question for the future of America is how strong is paternal investment and “de-facto marriage” among Latinos, since the Census Bureau forecasts that their population will swell from 35 million to 132 million over 2000 to 2050. With the Latino illegitimacy rate growing from 19 percent in 1980 to 51 percent in 2007, and being higher among American-born Latinos than among immigrant Latinos, they appear to be assimilating toward underclass African-American norms.
However, the raw statistics about Hispanic out-of-wedlock birth rates might be somewhat overstating the problem, since single Hispanic fathers might tend to invest more on average in their illegitimate children than single black fathers. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any studies of this crucial issue.
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Steve Sailer trying to fit round pegs into square holes:
No, because the inflection point in the out-of-wedlock birth rate happened exactly in the early to mid-1960s when welfare payments were boosted substantially in Northern states, and welfare departments became much less persnickety about whether the mother was married or not.
Um except the article uses 1968 as the base year for children living born in single-parent household. Right around the same time as the US economy was shifting from manufacture-based to service-based economy. Care to wager that children born to single parent household grew especially strong during the 1980s and the era of trickle down economics? Look, the data is pretty clear. It’s laughable to ignore all other factors that went in to creating our tremendous income inequality and simply point out to growth of single-parent houselhold. It’s the symptom of the problem, not the cause.
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Another idea to consider is what Toffler suggested; that families became streamlined as the economy transforms. In some families there really is no parent. The child raises itself. Are we seeing the results of mass migration within the US?
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Re: It’s important to note that this impact didn’t just fall on the next generation of African American boys raised without fathers around. Instead, it was felt immediately in rising crime rates.
Which is why I am extremely skeptical that changes in welfare policy had anything to do with the soaring crime rate of the 1960s. Human nature does not turn on a dime. It takes a while for social changes to percolate through human beings. A generation at least. The 60s crime rates are best explained by the fact that the Baby Boomers entered their peak crime prone years (late teens and 20s) in that era.
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Human nature doesn’t change fast, but incentives do. In 1959, if a girl wanted a baby and a place of her own, she needed a husband with a job. (FDR, no fool, was adamant when he started AFDC that it would primarily be for widows, not for never-wed mothers.) In 1969, northern state governments would give her a public housing project apartment and a decent-sized AFDC check for having a baby out of wedlock. So, why pressure a young man into marrying her and getting a job?
Now look at the incentives from the young man’s point of view. Why get tied down with a crummy job and one woman when you could hustle on the streets a little and mooch off welfare moms?
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:26 pm
If you want to see the percentage of children born out of wedlock in the U.S. over time, I graphed them here:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/04/abortion-crime-graphs-steven-d-levitt.html
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Perhaps the conclusion to be drawn from a comparison between the US and Nordic countries is that generous welfare benefits do much to strengthen families, even in the absence of support for traditional marriage. That, at least, is the conclusion I recently drew in reviewing Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s recent book “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.”
Douthat and Salam, noting the correlation between declining marriage rates in the US and increasing income inequality, argue that we ought to change the tax code to bolster traditional families. We all know that growing up in a broken family is strongly correlated with poverty, crime, and all the rest — social conservatives like Douthat and Reihan, however, miss the larger point that economic equality tends to produce stable families, rather than the other way around. Certainly the Nordic example shows that embracing a strong family-values agenda is by no means a prerequisite for income equality.
To read the full review of Douthat and Salam’s book, follow this link to the Innocent Smith Journal.
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Can PhillyGuy or someone else explain how poverty and/or inequality would cause single parent families?
Since it’s cheaper to live together and share household expenses than to live separately, it’s very easy for me to see how single parent families cause poverty, but not the other way around.
November 2nd, 2009 at 7:04 pm
There are rights to inheritance that you get with marriage in Scandinavia (or in Sweden, at least). You see fair number of non-young long-term couples getting married for this reason.
November 2nd, 2009 at 7:32 pm
The classic explanation of the relationship between economics and marriage is the first great work of American social analysis, Ben Franklin’s 1751 essay “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” in which Franklin (who was one of his candle-maker father’s 17 children) points out that a higher percentage of Americans than Europeans can afford to marry, and marry at an earlier age because wages are higher and land is cheaper in America. This led him to call for restrictions on immigration.
During the Housing Bubble of 2005 to 2007, the number of births to married women declined, but the number of births to unmarried women rocketed upwards, probably because home prices were becoming unaffordable, discouraging marriage among the prudent and encouraging child-bearing among the imprudent.
November 2nd, 2009 at 7:48 pm
I also have a graph that will make everything clear.
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Shorter Matt:
They do it better in Spitzbergen!
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:21 pm
To sum up:
Scandies don’t marry and do have kids. However, that behavior is not concentrated in the lower class. They also tend to live together in stable relationships. They also tend to be strongly education-oriented, and don’t commit much crime. They also have long traditions of social cohesion and equality that pre-date their welfare state, although this is weakening (as is the welfare state) under the influx of immigrants, especially of non-Europeans.
Americans increasingly don’t marry and do have kids. How that behavior is concentrated in the lower class. Those unmarried parents tend not to live together in stable relationships. They tend not to be education-oriented (as in not high school graduates) and commit much crime. They don’t live in a society of social cohesion or equality, and attempts to create a welfare state have ended in tears. Our immigration is high, too, but comes mostly from places with strong marriage/family traditions, although this is not an uhhh impregnable defense against cultural decline.
The parallels are eerie, aren’t they? No wonder MY jumped all over them. Who is that idiot Sawhill who prefers to look at actual data instead of venting preconceptions?
Finally, where does the “economic argument” come from regarding single-parenthood. It seems like there are exactly 0 benefits from having kids that you can’t afford. Is the thought that the return of the welfare state will restore those economic benefits and encourage lots more single-parent kids, who then won’t be poor so we’ll be just like the great Northers?
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:21 pm
The latent racism of many comment set aside, I was shocked by the following sentence: “The way to equalize opportunities is to make the parents irrelevant to outcomes”… hum I don’t want to use the F word but really it some kind of mustachio-ed dictatorship comes to mind! Not mentioning that it would be counterproductive since many precisely work hard for their children to enjoy a better life than theirs.
More generally, I always find it hilarious when Americans decide that it would be a great idea to imitate successful European countries. The Netherlands is often mentioned as such an example, but those who do often forget that the 4th largest city in the country (Utrecht) is half the size of New Haven… In other words it’s a scale issue. When comparing with Europe you should never take Iceland or Norway alone, you should always take the EU as a whole, otherwise, may as well consider Vermont, Connecticut or the Orange County on their own.
Sweden, Belgium and Finland are not richer because they are better, but because they keep the poor on the other side of the border in Portugal and Romania.
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:42 pm
#35:
Um except the article uses 1968 as the base year for children living born in single-parent household.
Because obviously that article is the only source available to find out statistics about out-of-welock birth rates.
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Can PhillyGuy or someone else explain how poverty and/or inequality would cause single parent families?
Since it’s cheaper to live together and share household expenses than to live separately, it’s very easy for me to see how single parent families cause poverty, but not the other way around.
I have a hard time seeing how a middle class single-parent household would fall into poverty, just because it’s cheaper to pay rent for dual-income household. I would think it’s much easier to fall into poverty if you have a crappy job that doesn’t pay your living expenses.
As far as how poverty create more single parent households, here’s how it works. First of all, economic instability puts tremendous pressure on family life which results in higher rates of divorce, with results in more single parent households. Women from poor households tend to have kids earlier for a whole variety of reasons, such as there is no incentive to delay childbirth to promote your career (as there is no career to promote), they’re not as educated about contraception, and since there is generally very little social mobility in U.S. the expectation is they’ll remain poor so might as well get on with the child rearing.
Not to say that being born to a single parent household isn’t a serious handicap. It certainly is, but being born in a poor single parent household is much, much worse. The single biggest predictor of how you’ll end up in is the SES of your parents.
Look it’s pretty basic. The way our economy is structured right now, there are only so many jobs that can support a family. Not enough for the population, especially one with stagnating college graduation rates. It would be great if we figured out a way to get more two-parent households, but the increasing inequality of the job marketplace is putting a tremendous strain on family life in this country. That’s the price of cheap goods and an economic system focused on “growth” at any cost.
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:02 pm
they’re not as educated about contraception
Just because the government, or your church, or your parents, tell you something doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to do your own research and reach your own conclusions.
The fact that you think the “lower classes” are simply incapable or reaching their own conclusions just shows your innate classism.
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Mr. Yglesias, of course, fails to realize that “unmarried” parenthood in Sweden is quite a different proposition then “unmarried” parenthood in the United States. In Scandinavia (and to a certain extent in Latin America as well) most unmarried couples with children do stay together while the kids are being raised, and generally approximate to what we would consider common law marriages. The problem in America is not couples with children staying together without benefit of clergy, it’s the fact that too many irresponsible men feel free to live out Hugh Hefner’s dream by promiscuously sleeping with women and then abandoning them after they get pregnant. The problem isn’t with long-term, stable unmarried couples, it’s with absent baby-daddies who consider themselves too cool for commitment.
Re: In his youthful innocence/ignorance and his infatuation with the Blue-Eyed Utopias, Matt seems determined to make all over again the basic intellectual mistakes of early 1960s liberals, who assumed that because high welfare payments and a tolerance of out-of-wedlock childbearing were working well in Scandinavia, they would work well in the U.S.
As usual, professional race monger Steve Sailor is full of pigsh*t. The increase in single-parent households and the collapse of American fatherhood is not because of welfare, it’s because of the toxic legacy of Roe v. Wade, as the estimable Dr. Akerlof has pointed out.
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Just because the government, or your church, or your parents, tell you something doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to do your own research and reach your own conclusions.
The fact that you think the “lower classes” are simply incapable or reaching their own conclusions just shows your innate classism.
What the fuck are you talking about? Just because I recognize that low-income earners in this country face some inherent disadvantages or the fact that there is indeed a distinct class system in this country, that makes me somehow classist? What’s you explanation for higher poverty rates among single parent households….that they’re morally bankrupt and if we could only get everyone married off, inequality would magically disappear? Please….
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:25 pm
what’s you explanation for higher poverty rates among single parent households
Girls don’t think though the long term consequences of letting their boyfriends fuck them bareback.
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:30 pm
they’re not as educated about contraception
Without health insurance they are priced out of the contraception market. A woman with good health insurance can get an IUD with 99% efficacy and 5 years of worry free birth control for 10 dollars. Try getting that without health insurance. And compare that to the option for the poor: a box of condoms with a paltry 75% efficacy and costing ten bucks for, depending on your virility, less than a month’s worth of birth control.
Which of course ties us back to the health insurance debate.
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Without health insurance they are priced out of the contraception market
Not really.
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/health-center/index.htm
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:00 pm
47:It is an injustice obvious to all that a child’s prospects and possibilities are in large part determined by the circumstances, whims and will of “parents”, who are considered to have far-reaching and nearly inalienable property rights to another human being. I can think of no rational ethical system that could begin to justify such ownership and complete control of humans by humans. No one really tries, but usually escape the question by claiming that, say, 15-yr-olds, aren’t really human beings.
It is an unspeakable universal horror of human existence.
I would liberate children by allowing them to make the choices for themselves they are capable of making. They are not a class different in kind.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Conservative political economics are like a Fibonacci sequence: one part unfounded assumptions, two parts empirical science, three parts theory, five parts moralizing and eight parts telling the rich what they want to hear.
Thus, the rich deserve to be rich because they are smart and work hard. The poor deserve to be poor because they are stupid, lazy, promiscuous and unmarried. The theory predicts no such conclusions and the data don’t support it, but logic and facts mustn’t interfere with a good opinion.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Children born to unwed mothers end up in a married households much of the time. Most women eventually marry or monogamously cohabitate. I’m not sure the effects of being born out of wedlock are felt by those who eventually get into a traditional family early in life. This doesn’t count those living in multi-generation households (grandma babysits).
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:39 pm
“Too bad, kid, you chose the wrong parents” is an infinitely despicable attitude for a society to have toward a newborn, and I do so despise that society and most of its members.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:47 pm
The poor deserve to be poor because they are stupid, lazy, promiscuous and unmarried.
What do you think the main reasons are?
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Girls don’t think though the long term consequences of letting their boyfriends fuck them bareback.
Bareback is strictly a gay term. The correct expression in this context is raw dog.
November 3rd, 2009 at 1:09 am
What do you think the main reasons are?
Since you’ve already decided to your own smug satisfaction that “a lack impulse control and an inability to delay gratification” will do, why ask, pigfucker?
November 3rd, 2009 at 1:57 am
“a box of condoms with a paltry 75% efficacy and costing ten bucks for”
If the efficacy is that low, I must be one hell of a lucky guy. And so are my friends, too. Look, I’ve had virility tests from donating sperm. My condoms worked because I used them properly, not because of a low sperm count. And they’ve worked fine. A little education can work a long way. I didn’t have that, but my first experience did. She didn’t know how to roll it on with her lips, but at least she could tell me how to do it. And chose the right size. And choosing too large a size is the one more likely to create a fracture in the condom. And that’s exactly what males will do. But having been to Asia, I can assure you that a condom too small ain’t gonna break. You’ll have trouble getting hard, but it’s not breaking. But the problem is that men don’t want to seen buying the small size. So they always err on a bigger size. Properly used, a condom is more than 99% effective. If you broke it, you’re using the wrong size and most likely being too optimistic on the tool you’re using.
That said, I’m glad to see Hector saying some very responsible thoughts on this. Although that phrase “Common Law Marriage” scares the hell out of me. I’ve been married twice against my will twice under Colorado’s law. And I’m damn lucky those women were too stupid to realize it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be living in my house. I’d have lost it though a divorce from women I never knew I’d married. Common Law Marriage is the most evil thing ever invented by society. Marriage must imply consent from the two people involved, not government dictate. Yet in Colorado, living with a person of the opposite sex for one month is marriage. Without specific contracts to avoid that, you’re married whether you like it or not. I have a friend who didn’t want to marry his girlfriend and she pulled it on him. She convinced him to marry her on the basis that they already were married anyway. He went to his lawyer on that, and his lawyer couldn’t help him. He really was already legally married and didn’t even know it. Might as well go through the wedding at that point.
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:14 am
@jmo
Perhaps you should ask, or even just read about the reasons why young poor women choose to be single mothers instead of assuming that they are too stupid to know that sex makes babies. I’d dig up some links to enlighten your egregious ignorance but I’m lazy. I have a horrible suspicion that you think of yourself as intelligent. Far too many of the commenters here seem to have that delusion.
Anyway, try using common sense. If the only work open to you is tedious and meaningless and unfulfilling, then there’s no reason to wait till you’re in your thirties to have children as middle class women often do. And if the father has nothing to contribute, then he has nothing to contribute, and there’s no need to keep him around.
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:25 am
I would add that Colorado’s Common Law Marriage rule does get invalidated when the person gets married to someone else. I had that situation happen when my female roommate got married to a good friend of mine. And so that Common Law marriage ended beautifully. The other one was just dumb luck. She didn’t realize she could take my house from me from an informal arrangement allowing her to live there until she got her shit together. She could have taken me for everything even though I simply tried to help her. And there was never any sex, but Colorado law doesn’t require that. Now that I know Colorado law, I’ll take in an abused woman from the cold, but only for three weeks. After that, your ass is on the street because I don’t want to marry you. Sorry, but it’s the law.
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:57 am
Re: Now look at the incentives from the young man’s point of view.
But where’s the incentive for the man to be criminal? Crime really does not pay, except for a handful of mafia godfathers and other top-rank crime lords. A job makes much better income (and is safer) than any normal street punk can make from petty thievery. Most guys do get jobs long before they marry, or think about doing so, after all. And the whole gay population does not live a life of crime! No, the problem is that the jobs vanished, leaving crime as the only alternative, and the women distinctly (and sensibly) uninterested in marrying unemployed and perhaps unemployable men.
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:30 am
Impulse control and ability to delay gratification are necessary but not sufficient. You also generally need to be raised right and a hell of a lot of luck. We all make some big mistakes – including those of us with excellent impulse control — and overcoming these generally takes money, family, or luck.
That said, I’m not sure what Matt is trying to prove here. Maybe northern europe’s better safety net means less (or even no) negative consequences for single motherhood (though I echo the commenters who argue the situations are not comparable). But even if that’s true there, things are tough, even brutal here I’m the US for non-wealthy single moms and having someone in the trenches with you with the same level of commitment and responsibility makes a huge difference. I’m all for improving the safety net to take some luck out of what is now an incredibly cruel equation, but that simple fact won’t change anytime soon in the US.
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:44 am
Re: Yet in Colorado, living with a person of the opposite sex for one month is marriage.
OK, that is ridiculous. In times past it took seven years of cohabiting for Common Law Marriage to apply. Of coyurse there’s a very easy way to avoid your Common Law Marriage law: don’t live with a person of the opposite gender. (By the way, what would happen in a Three’s Company situation? I doubt Common Law marriage would create polygamous unions)
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:13 am
Our research shows that if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class in the United States, you need to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time and marry before you have children. If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent, and your chances of joining the middle class or above rise from 56 to 74 percent.*
*Brookings
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:45 am
[...] got some pushback on yesterday’s post about Nordic family structure, well summed-up by RS who wrote “unmarried biological parents [...]
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:45 am
[...] got some pushback on yesterday’s post about Nordic family structure, well summed-up by RS who wrote “unmarried biological parents [...]
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:48 am
jmo @17: [Giving money to poor people] would be a bad idea if being poor was primarily an issue of culture. The dramatic success of immigrants of Asian and Caribbean decent indicates that poverty is primarily a cultural phenomenon.
No, it indicates that culture is sometimes sufficient for groups to exit from poverty. That is all it indicates, absent more information.
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:56 am
Citing the current state of things in Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries is all well and good. But the important thing is the trend, and it is not encouraging if you are a secular, tolerant inheritor of the traditions of Western civilization. If you disagree, let’s make a wager: If I’m wrong I’ll buy you a falafel at my favorite corner stand in Picadilly. If you’re wrong, you can buy me drink at your favorite gay bar on the West End. Oh wait, if you’re wrong, there won’t be any gay bars anywhere to be found.
November 3rd, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Finding a good job can be pretty troublesome. Especially when you have high expectations.
Here are some tips that helped me land the job of my dreams:
* You need to have a professional written resume. If you are not an expert, you could consider hiring one.
* Think about all the jobs you are qualified for. This may lead to discovering additional jobs you could land.
* Don’t neglect any source of jobs : internet, newspaper, radio and other media. Ask your friends that have similar jobs if there may be an opening in their company.
* Don’t just send the resume by email and wait for an answer. You need to call them and have them confirm the job opening and receiving your resume.
Finding a job is pretty much a job in itself and it’s all about how well can you market your abilities.
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:39 pm
[...] post is from here. Visit the link to read more.Another thing to consider is the existence of opposite-sex civil [...]
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:47 pm
poor people are poor because of a lack impulse control and an inability to delay gratification
Even assuming that those factors are more important than, say, class-segregated education leading to a lack of marketable skills, where do those things come from? The ghost in the machine? Childhood poverty leads to permanent cognitive impairment and the socioeconomic status of parents correlates quite strongly with the socioeconomic status of children.
Mental characteristics aren’t as exogenous as we used to like to think. If this interferes with your self-satisfied economic Calvinism, tough cookies.
Crime really does not pay, except for a handful of mafia godfathers and other top-rank crime lords.
If you come from low SES, non-crime doesn’t pay either. Crime may offer a slim chance to make it big, but the non-criminal jobs available to you offer no chance at all.
Also, you’re reckoning without optimism. Most people expect to do better than average, and people engaging in risky undertakings are especially likely to believe that (and vice versa).
And once you’re in, you stay in — your criminal record keeps you from getting non-criminal jobs, but might actually improve your status inside your criminal organization. Even if you second-guess your decision, you don’t have an opportunity to reverse it.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:49 pm
[...] post is from here. Visit the link to read more.Another thing to consider is the existence of opposite-sex civil [...]
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Re: Oh wait, if you’re wrong, there won’t be any gay bars anywhere to be found.
Why not? Are you suggesting that crime will proliferate to the point that gay bars will all be driven out of business by wild yobbish mobs? That was not the case in the past when such establishments were in fact illegal: in fact they tended to be “protected” by local crime bosses as long as they paid their protection money. More to the point, people hate anarchy and long before things fall apart to that extent, a reaction against lawlessness will put a stop to the slide. This is not a theory, as it has happened repeatedly throughout history.