Money in the Bank

"Marriage Is Money in the Bank" writes Kim Trobee of Focus on the Family, pouncing on the study mentioned below. You there, the single mom struggling to make rent, you want to know why you're poor? It's your fault. You rejected traditional profamily values and got divorced. You brought this on yourself.

Let me be clear: I've got no problem with social scientists measuring the apparent. We assume we know a lot of things that may not actually be true, and investigating those assumptions is, in many ways, social scientists' job. They help us to know whether or not we really know what we think we know.

Sometimes this kind of research produces a "No duh" result, confirming what we had already assumed to be true. Such results are less interesting — less newsworthy — than the occasional surprising results that make us rethink those assumptions, but they still tend to make headlines. Scarcely a week goes by that newspapers don't trumpet some such confirmation of the known: studies telling us that divorce is economically and emotionally difficult; that overeating without exercising makes us fat; that getting enough sleep is a good thing; that kids who read more do better in school. The reporting of such findings tends to be shallow and lazy, and making fun of it is, in many ways, CJR Daily's job.

Jay Zagorsky, the Buckeye sociologist who conducted this study on the long-term wealth effects of marriage and divorce, seems to do a lot of this kind of research. He's conducted similar studies into the wealth effects of dieting, obesity and smoking. Again, I respect such studies per se, but I hate the way they get rolled up and used as a club by scolds and defenders of "traditional values."

The religious right is particularly guilty of this. Through no fault of Dr. Zagorsky, his study will be used by these folks the way such studies always are — the same way they have used earlier studies by people like William Julius Wilson and Pat Moynihan. Such studies are used as evidence to support their claim that poverty is primarily the result of loose morals, and therefore primarily the fault of the poor. The cause and effect relationship between family stability and poverty, as they see it, is unidirectional.

This claim has policy implications — implications that have been embraced by the Bush administration. There's no use trying to assist/empower the poor unless they also improve their morals. Therefore things like WIC, or food stamps, or TANFF, or an increased minimum wage, or Section 8 vouchers, or Head Start, or even the EITC are counterproductive because they subsidize the immoral behavior that caused these poor people to become poor. What they need instead are faith-based assistance, traditional values, and pro-family (whatever that means), pro-marriage policies.

And on the far right end of the religious right — among groups like Bev LaHaye's Concerned Women for America — this new evidence that divorce is, indeed, costly will be used to reinforce their particular Blame the Women approach. If you're a middle-class woman, they say, then America's problems are your fault because you're out working instead of staying home raising your kids. If you're a single mom receiving TANFF, they say, then America's problems are your fault because you're staying home raising your kids instead of going out to work.