Poverty and the Breakdown of Marriage
In 1965 the Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan released the now-famous Moynihan Report which showed that the number one cause of black poverty was the breakdown of the married, two-parent biological family. The Democrats did not recieve this news well. They pilloried Moynihan and called him a racist. Then they went into, in Moynihan’s words, denial mode. 40 years later and out of wedlock childbirths have more than doubled and the Democrats are still in denial mode. The scientific debate is over, even among liberal sociologists. But the silence is deafening. Here is some information that the GOP should be repeating like a broken record.
Link from PBS’s First Measured Century series.
Here are some articles to get you up to date.
- Marriage and Caste. John Edwards is right, there are two Americas. The rich America is married, and the poor America is not.
- Why We Don’t Marry by sociologist James Q. Wilson. Phenomenal article. Debunks the theory that there is no economic connection between welfare and illegetimacy because inflation adjusted welfare benefits declined. If you consider all benefits, from food stamps, to medicaid to public housing, benefits did keep up with inflation. It also notes that rural women leave welfare faster than urban women because in small towns it is hard to dissappear into a community of other single mothers. In other words, social mores matter. Finally, it also rebutts William Julius Wilson’s theory that out of wedlocks increased because of a lack of jobs.
- Dan Quayle Was Right by sociologist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. This article was originally published in the left-leaning Atlantic Monthly. Tour of the research that demolishes the niave theories of the 1960’s and 1970’s that divorce and single motherhood would not harm children.
- How Welfare Reform Worked by Kay S. Hymowitz. Another tour of the research focusing on welfare. The experts went on records making predictions about rising child poverty, and they were wrong.
- Getting Hitched. Contrary to popular myth, the fathers of out of wedlock childbirths have stable relationships with the mother, high school graduation, and no criminal record. There is no reason - other than loose sexual mores - for them to drift away rather than marry.
- Five Easy Questions About Black Poverty. Article refuting some of the theories that the breakdown of marriage is caused by some other factor, such as a lack of jobs.
- The Moynihan Report Interview with Democrat Patrick Moynihan, who first raised this issue in the 1960’s, only to be attacked by his own party. 40 years later the rate of out of wedlock childbirths has more than doubled and people who speak the truth about marriage and poverty are still attacked.
- Marriage and Poverty. Article by economist Walter Williams.
- Victories in the Marriage Debates by Maggie Gallagher. Some of these articles document how luminaries in the field have come around to the importance of family. This article discusses a more schollarly survey of the research and shows the shift as researchers came to the realization that children need married parents. It also discusses the ongoing denail by the overwhelmingly left-wing scientists. They will dismiss the effect of family structure on poverty by correctly observing that while the statistical trends are there, it is not necessarily the case. But in other contexts, for example, the relationship between growing up in poverty and having a bad life, they do not use the “not necessarily” defense. Instead they recognize the strong connection and want to fix it.
- Raw Census Data on Poverty Rates and Family Structure.
Books
- The Marriage Problem by James Q. Wilson. Author of one of the articles above, this is a survey of the research about family and poverty.
- Life at the Bottom. The culture of poverty has no color lines. Theodore Dalrymple surveys the self-destructive lifestyle of the white underclass in England.
- The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass by Myron Magnet. Surveys the damage that 1960’s style liberalism did to the poor in America.
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