Here are a few key paragraphs:<\/p>\n
. . . \u201cOur Kids\u201d is attuned to culture\u2019s feedback loops, and it offers grist for social conservatives who suspect it would take a cultural counterrevolution to bring back the stable working class families of an earlier America.<\/p>\n
That idea makes some people on the left angry. As they see it, it\u2019s money and only money that Murray\u2019s Fishtown and Putnam\u2019s hometown lack and need. And it\u2019s unchecked capitalism and Republican stinginess, not the sexual revolution, that has devastated working-class society over the last few decades. Fight poverty, redistribute wealth, and you\u2019ll revive family and community \u2014 it\u2019s as simple as that.<\/p>\n
Their argument gets some things right. The American economy isn\u2019t performing as well as it once did for less-skilled workers. Certain regions \u2014 like Putnam\u2019s Ohio \u2014 have suffered painfully from deindustrialization. The shift to a service economy has favored women but has made low-skilled men less marriageable. The decline of unions has weakened professional stability and bargaining power for some workers.<\/p>\n
And yet, for all these disturbances and shifts, lower-income Americans have more money, experience less poverty, and receive far more safety-net support than their grandparents ever did. Over all, material conditions have improved, not worsened, across the period when their communities have come apart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Now, I\u2019ve read leftist\/progressive authors often enough to agree that Douthat characterizes\u00a0their\u00a0prescription correctly. \u00a0In their telling, working class men have become unmarriageable because they can\u2019t find jobs, simple as that. \u00a0Ironically, these authors, recognizing this problem, have only minimal interest in actually helping young men \u2014 they\u2019re pretty incidental to the project of helping single and teen mothers or increasing welfare benefits. \u00a0I suppose they\u2019ve just written off the men. \u00a0(And it\u2019s not about redistribution or such proposals as a \u201cminimum income\u201d if that doesn\u2019t actually result in these men holding jobs of some kind or another.)<\/p>\n
But let\u2019s break apart the issue: \u00a0there are two components of this \u201cunmarriageability\u201d: \u00a0first, the bigger question of whether men contribute to the household, and, second, whether their presence actually makes the financial situation worse. \u00a0And, in fact, for women without a job, getting married to a man who is also unemployed takes their welfare benefits away (doesn\u2019t it?), without bring any income into the family. \u00a0Even if he moves in without the marriage license that would eliminate her eligibility, he won\u2019t be paying his own way. \u00a0But men who work at low-paying jobs are likewise considered to be \u201cunmarriageable\u201d; the requirement seems to be that he be able to measureably improve her financial situation over and above what she can get from welfare or from her own job (supplemented or not by additional welfare money, like food stamps).<\/p>\n
Fundamentally, this seems to be saying that the only use of a man is as a financial contributor to the household \u2014 both in the opinion of progressives and of poor women themselves.<\/p>\n
And this just feels wrong. \u00a0Is there not, among poor women, the same desire for companionship as motivates middle-class women to marry, even when they don\u2019t need their husbands\u2019 financial contribution? \u00a0Consider the futuristic scenario in which anyone who chooses not to work, doesn\u2019t have to, because automation will have changed the very concept of work: \u00a0do we imagine that in that scenario, no one will bother marrying?<\/p>\n
No, of course not. \u00a0Because the unmarriageability of poor men extends beyond the mere fact that they are unemployed. \u00a0I read a book quite a while ago called \u201cPromises I Can Keep\u201d about poor single mothers (this was right when I started blogging and it was one of my few kindle book purchases, which meant that I didnt\u2019 get very far in summarizing the book after I read it, as I\u2019m simply not accustomed to kindle-reading, but here\u2019s my summary, parts one<\/a> and two<\/a>, for what it\u2019s worth), and the stories these women told \u2014 well, you know how women often joke that they have four boys, rather than three, because their husband is just another kid, because he likes his \u201ctoys\u201d (e.g., the Lego Tower Bridge from last Christmas)? \u00a0Well, these women considered the men in their lives, whether dating relationships (which as often as not included children), or live-ins, to be as much trouble as their actual children. \u00a0It\u2019s not just a matter of whether they contributed, or had the potential to contribute, to the household financially, but that didn\u2019t contribute in any way at all (not with the household chores, not with the childcare), and they were more trouble than they were worth, if they spent their time drinking, gambling, partying, in gangs, or just plain cheating on them.<\/p>\n
A while back I read another book<\/a>, specificially on black families and the \u201cGreat Migration\u201d from southern sharecropping to northern cities, which essentially portrayed poor black families as, for the most part, troubled, even in the pre-Great Society, pre-welfare for single mothers days, not the romanticized Logan family of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. \u00a0Essentially, poor black men were just as unmarriageable then, but poor black women married them anyway.<\/p>\n
So what happened? \u00a0Did the rise of the welfare state and changing cultural norms free women from men they didn\u2019t want to have anything to do with, anyway?<\/p>\n
One last thought: \u00a0here\u2019s a graph on changing marriage rates from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research<\/a>.<\/p>\n
![\"pct](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2015\/03\/pct-women-married-historically-300x251.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n