Link: Getting Poverty Wrong by Steven Malanga, City Journal 21 March 2008.
Malanga argues that the solution to poverty is getting people to marry before they have children. He cites Census poverty statistics which show that a far larger proportion of children who live in single-parent families are in poverty, and that relatively few in two-parent families are in poverty.
All true, as far as it goes. But it doesn't go very far.
First and foremost, federal poverty data only show us a small -- and uneven -- fraction of the families who live on incomes insufficient to meet their most simply defined needs.
Small fraction: the federal poverty figure is merely a statistical report with very little relevance to anything other than last year's figure. The Census Bureau doesn't claim otherwise. It doesn't relate meaningfully to the cost of living anywhere in America. People, particularly people with young children, can have incomes two, three and even more times the federal poverty threshold and still not have enough income to meet their family's most narrowly defined needs -- and we're not talking about wants or frills, just basic needs.
Uneven fraction: The cost of living varies so widely from place to place; an income which might be barely sufficient in a rural county in Alabama where rents are low would be wholly insufficient in a major city where rents are triple those in rural Alabama. Yet the Census data applies a single yardstick to both situations.
Malanga says, accurately, that with two adults in the family, few families fall below the FPL. But that doesn't mean that their income is sufficient to meet family needs. (You might look at any of the recent Self-Sufficiency Standard studies -- Florida and Colorado come to mind, or see if there is one for your own state or one you know well -- and compare the costs for a family of 3 with two young children to a family of 4 with the same children; adding the spouse increases the costs by a tiny fraction -- some food, an old car, a bit more for health care, and offset by tax benefits. It certainly looks as if two adults can live almost as cheaply as one, at the no-frills level.) Marriages suffer when money is extremely tight, and I've heard it said more than once that a mother can manage a tight budget better alone than when she has to continually negotiate it out with a partner or husband.
The statistics about how many of our families, of whatever composition, have incomes which place them above the federal poverty line but below the level where all their most simply defined needs are met -- food, housing, transportation, health care, childcare -- plus an allowance of 10% of that subtotal for everything else, plus the taxes due on that income, offset by EITC, CCTC and CTC's where applicable -- are shocking. The people in this group don't have a spare dollar for entertainment, or a meal out, or savings, or debt repayment, or any minor or major crisis that comes along. What sort of stresses does that create? How can even a fairly healthy marriage be sustained through long periods in this situation? This can explain a good share of our divorce rate and likely the lower likelihood that a low-income couple will marry.
Malanga says,
Part of this shocking difference owes to what City Journal contributing editor Kay S. Hymowitz has called the “marriage gap” in America (“Marriage and Caste,” Winter 2006). Hymowitz describes how better-educated, higher-income men and women are now more likely to delay having children until they’re married, while lower-income, less-educated men and women are more likely to cohabit and have children out of wedlock.
But even these demographic facts don’t completely explain the widely varying poverty rate between married and cohabiting parents. Studies that adjust for parents’ educational levels still find that a family headed by two unmarried parents is twice as likely to wind up in poverty as one that married parents head. Something about the marriage certificate—a sense of long-term commitment, family stability, perhaps—makes an economic difference. Research shows that married workers exhibit more job stability and make greater wage gains than cohabiting parents, a sort of “marriage wage premium,” as some economists dub it.
I think he might have cause and effect backwards. Who is marriageable, and who is not? Would you advise your child to commit, for life, to someone whose "prospects" in our society were dim, or to go it alone?
Until we do something about wages -- and I'm not talking about "minimum wage" or "living wage" command-and-control measures; I'm talking about more radical reform -- we aren't going to see this problem get any better, no matter how attractive we try to make marriage look. And until our schools figure out how to educate all our children well, and we invest the dollars that costs, we aren't going to have young adults who in a potential partner's eyes are good marriage material.
I know how to fix the wages problem. I don't yet know how to fix the education problem, but even fixing the wages problem will go a long way to fixing the education problem over the longer run. But I don't want to wait that long.
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