Marriageability, etc.

Megan McArdle had a little piece yesterday on the chicken-and-egg debate about single parents and marriage, in which the Right says, “only through returning to a culture of marriage will poor folk improve their lot in life,” and the Left says, “only through improving the economic fortunes of poor men will women judge them worth marrying,” or something like that.  (Mona Charen wrote a column, too, both based on the same panel discussion on the topic.)  Which is as good an excuse as any to trot out some of my thoughts on the issue.

Here’s the key mistake that the Left makes, at least when it comes to black families:  they are constructing a Golden Age in which even poor men were able to support their families to an acceptable living standard, until the de-industrialization of the 1970s.  In reality, especially in the case of black families, men’s ability to support their families has always been, at best, limited.  This notion that, until the 70s, every black man who wanted, could walk into the local factory and get a job that paid well enough to support a family?  In some alternate universe, maybe.

Here’s the part where I ask you to go back and read some of what I wrote previously.

Back in February 2014 (in my pre-Patheos days), I wrote about a book called The Promised Land, about the migration of sharecropper families to the north from the 40s to the 60s, and the troubles they faced both in the South and the North.  He doesn’t set out to write a book on The Problem with the Black Family, but a lot of what he describes is pretty relevant:  black families, or at any rate, sharecropper families, were troubled, for multiple reasons, long before the Welfare State came along, but black men and black women married and hoped for the best anyway.

I addressed the topic again in March of this year, when everyone was talking about Putnam’s book Our Kids.  At the time I hadn’t read the book (I later did) but wrote based on summaries that were appearing everywhere — in which I said, there’s more to it than just men no longer being able to be the breadwinner; I cited a previous book I had read that talks about poor women saying of the men in their lives, they’re good enough to have sex with, and to “date” but more trouble than they’re worth as (live-in) companions, even disregarding the question of finances.  Given the speculation about the “future of work” — that is, the impact of automation, and emerging attitudes that it’s better for a person to be on the unemployment rolls than paid an “undignified” wage (which I disagreed with here — arguing that all work is dignified, and it’s better to provide wage supplements than unemployment benefits/welfare) — it is particularly concerning to say that men are, in fact and not just perception, actually not worth marrying unless they have a good job.

Then I found a graphic that showed marriage rates for black families were nearly as high as for white families up until the late 40s, until they started tumbling, well in advance of the post-industrialization that’s claimed to be the cause (but, interestingly enough, coinciding with the migration northwards to those factory jobs), and I found some supplemental data in a later post, in which I attempted to push back on two pieces of narrative.  First, the Golden Age in which men supported their families in a respectable fashion, based on an easily-found factory job, was the product of a very specific time and place, the immediate post-war period.  After all, it wasn’t that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, when whole families, including children, lived in slums and worked long hours.   And yet, at the same time, marriage rates were higher, but not all these marriages were the loving model of the Ingalls family (or Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry‘s Logan family); after all, the entire motivation for Prohibition was the image of the working-class man drinking all night at the tavern and leaving wife and children to suffer.

And, by the way?  The new bit is to say that “a strong economy is necessary for high marriage rates” by pointing to the drop in marriage rates during the Great Depression, as McArdle does in the linked post.  But here’s the thing:  this is apples and oranges.  During the Great Depression, birth rates dropped, too, as people neither married nor procreated.  In the present case, it’s only marriages, not childbirth, that’s declining.

So where does that leave us?

How about this:

Boys are falling behind, black boys in particular.   Fatherless boys are at a particular disadvantage.  And boys grow into men.  Shouldn’t we be concerned about these boys/men for who they are themselves, regardless of whether or not this will make them better partners for women and regardless of whether women will then choose to marry them?

At the same time, in so many neighborhoods, it feels like starting from scratch to even talk about marriage, when no one has any lived experience of it, from an experience of a parent or an aunt or uncle or family friend.  But, as much time as schools spend talking about “affirmative consent,” could they not at least spend a little bit of time talking about marriage?

And you know what I’d really love to see?  Let’s put married couples on a completely even footing with single moms in terms of welfare benefits.  And at the same time, let’s take away the idea that you can’t get married until you can afford the reception, with local churches and community centers sponsoring new traditions like community celebrations of weddings and marriages.