Single Mothers and Poverty

"Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

The fact that the  “bourgeois culture” these norms embodied has broken down since the 1960s, we argued, largely explains today’s social pathologies—and re-embracing that culture would go a long way toward addressing those pathologies.

The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants."

This is from Amy Wax, right before she realize how dangerous a position extolling the virtues of hard working serious people from the last century was.

When the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution formed a bipartisan panel of prominent poverty scholars to write a “Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty" in 2015, its first recommendation was to “promote a new cultural norm surrounding parenthood and marriage.” By "new" they meant "old." They meant what Amy Wax was saying.

But Brady, in a NYT article, referenced his own study published  in The American Journal of Sociology, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, which demonstrates that reducing single motherhood here would not substantially reduce poverty.

"Single-mother families are a surprisingly small share of our population. Among households headed by working-age adults, 8.8 percent of people lived in single-mother households in 2013," he wrote.

It is a curious article in which the solution to poverty seems to be to give poor people money which, I suppose, would work. The problem is partly that most people think that poverty in itself is a problem but is also part of a constellation of problems for which money is only a superficial solution.

Apparently the disparity between the study by Brady and the other studies more worried about single parent families is, according to one article, "the sociologists' calculations were based on a different database of incomes and a different definition of poverty — and that these changes inflated the total number of designated poor."

So we can't even define the topic of poverty. Or single mothers.

But we sure know what "bourgeois" means.

Just for reference:

In 2016, 40.6 million Americans had incomes below the government's official poverty line, which was $24,339 for a family of four, including two children. Of those below the poverty line — 12.7% of the population — nearly 5 million were mothers or fathers heading single-parent families; another 8.7 million were children under 18 in these single-parent homes.
Together, single-parent families and their children totaled almost 14 million people, which is roughly a third of all people in poverty.

In 2010, 72% of black births were to unmarried women, up from 38% in 1970; for Hispanics, that rate was 53% in 2010, up from 37% in 1990; for whites, 36% in 2010 and 6% in 1970.