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Were collapsing earnings responsible for the breakup of the Black family?

Nick Kristof wrote yesterday about the huge rise in single-parent households over the past 60 years, especially among Black families. This has been a subject of public discussion ever since the famous Moynihan Report was issued in 1965, which detailed the "pathology" of Black family life in the wake of hundreds of years of brutal treatment. Here's the basic data:

Moynihan was concerned about the rise of single-parent households at a time when "illegitimate" births (the usual name back then) had risen only from 18% to 25% among Black families. The real explosion was in the years after that. Between 1965 and 1990 the number rose to 70%.

But why? Kristof offers up the following:

I think the big driver for the rise in single-parent households is bad decisions by policymakers that led to mass incarceration and a collapse of earnings for working-class men.

There's no question that incarceration skyrocketed during the 1965-90 period, though it didn't get underway until the mid-70s. But was there a collapse in earnings for working-class men? Here's the data:

None of these is a perfect indicator, but taken together they suggest that working-class men, and Black men in particular, never suffered a collapse in employment or a collapse in earnings. Black men had higher unemployment and lower wages compared to white men, but the gap was steady over time.

Whatever happened, the timing doesn't fit mass incarceration as an answer, and there was never a big change in employment or earnings. Something else has been at work.

39 thoughts on “Were collapsing earnings responsible for the breakup of the Black family?

  1. Chondrite23

    It would be good to show the added context of the rate of marriages vs people just living together. I’d guess the charts above don’t distinguish between single moms and unmarried couples living together.

  2. Citizen Lehew

    Leaving aside any particular culture/history specific issues...

    Could the upward trend for all races be... LEAD POISONING causing everyone to get freakier, especially in areas with higher concentrations of lead, which then became the social norm?

    Or it could just be the general "I don't need a stupid husband" trends brought about by women's liberation?

  3. shapeofsociety

    Marriage seems to be less a function of men's earnings per se, and more a function of men's earnings *relative to women's earnings*. As women's earnings have increased, the economic incentive to get married has declined. Also, the stigma attached to illegitimacy has all but disappeared. Society used to be incredibly cruel and callous to illegitimate children and their mothers; nowadays you don't see any discrimination against them at all except in certain religious groups still clinging to antiquated norms.

    Women are having more babies out of wedlock mainly because they can. If they can earn enough money to keep their kids from starving to death and won't be ostracized for it, why put up with a guy they don't even like that much?

    Personally, I think it's good that we have more freedom and flexibility. There's nothing wrong with an unmarried women having kids if she has the income and support to make it work.

    1. ColBatGuano

      "Society used to be incredibly cruel and callous to illegitimate children and their mothers"

      And weirdly, Kristof seems to be lamenting that we don't do that anymore. Because I can't figure out what else he's driving at in the editorial.

    2. middleoftheroaddem

      shapeofsociety - the broad based reports, with the findings on single parent households are not positive.

      "Children from single-parent and stepparent families have higher poverty rates and lower levels of educational and occupational attainment than children who grow up with both their biological or adoptive parents"

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2930824/#:~:text=Children%20from%20single%2Dparent%20and,%3B%20Kiernan%2C%201992%3B%20McLanahan%20%26

      1. shapeofsociety

        Just because single mothers are more likely to be in poverty doesn't mean they all are. I said: "There's nothing wrong with an unmarried women having kids *if she has the income and support to make it work.*"

        Also, it's never been clear which way the causation actually runs. We have known since forever that the socioeconomic status of the family is by far the #1 predictor of kids' life outcomes. ANYTHING that is correlated with higher SES will inevitably be correlated with better outcomes, regardless of why it's correlated with high SES.

        Can you be clearer about what exactly you're proposing?

  4. tzimiskes

    I really didn't like that Kristoff article. I don't really have anything to say about the specific issue of black families but I find the idea of marriage itself as being so important the wrong question. There's no real doubt that high quality marriages are really good for kids, the question is whether a poor quality marriage between two people lacking the characteristics for a successful marriage is better than being in a single parent family. This is far less clear, someone with the self awareness and social skills to successfully maintain a marriage is fundamentally different from someone that can't do this. And it is also clear that conflict within a marriage is bad for kids, and these marginal marriages are going to be that type, not the high quality type.

    But what really bugged me is the quote in the article about how educated liberals talk left but act right ( or something similar). On a very surface level thus may appear to be so, but marriage among my peer group is vastly different from a traditional marriage. When I was growing up I remember at family holidays all the adults would sex segregate, the women would cook and clean and then go to another room to talk afterwards while the guys would watch sports in another room.

    Among my peers all the guys help with cooking and cleaning, and we all hang out together after the meal. There's a second room for kids a lot of the time, but the dads and moms alternate watching them. And it's not just holidays, with friends or other activities both parents usually are there, and while I meet more moms than dads on the playground it's not that big a discrepancy.

    Modern marriage is much different from marriage of fifty years ago. People need different sets of skills to navigate and maintain these marriages, it's not just two people living together but who have mostly separate lives. My impression is that women have adapted much more rapidly to these changes then men, the men that have adapted tend to have successful marriages while the men that insist on older marriages either don't get married or don't stay married. There seems to be some correlation with education, these men are more likely to learn how they need to change than people without these experiences.

    As a somewhat separate issue, a lot of women are attracted to more traditional men and don't really like what they see in men like me. Looking at acquaintances however, no matter how much they like the more traditional kind of guy they find after a few years they can't live with them. And that's my pet theory on the marriage gap, it's about women's roles changing more than men's roles with many men not making the changes necessary to maintain long term relationships. And this change has impacted dating a lot less than it has marriage.

    1. ColBatGuano

      "how educated liberals talk left but act right"

      This is what always bothers me about these op-eds (Brooks does it as well). By talking "left" does he mean we no longer force single mothers to disappear for several months so no one knows they're pregnant or that they aren't shunned by society after the birth? What exactly does he want liberals to do? Unless he's looking at some tiny sliver of radical feminists, no one is saying "Don't get married, it's better to have kids on your own."

      1. cephalopod

        I've often heard extreme dislike of programs designed to support marriage rates from married women who are liberal and educated ("They want to force women to stay with abusers!"). There is also a lot of support for programs designed to help single mothers economically as well. Perhaps liberal men dont talk about it much, but it does come up among women fairly often.

        But they aren't going that route themselves. For most educated, liberal women, single motherhood is a great choice for other women to make. They'll only do it themselves if forced to by divorce/death of spouse, or if they make it to 40 and still aren't married.

        1. ColBatGuano

          "There is also a lot of support for programs designed to help single mothers economically as well."

          Should we end those programs so that poor, single mothers are forced into marriages? See, I consider helping the poor a good thing.

    2. shapeofsociety

      Indeed. Traditional, patriarchal marriages seemed to work in the past because women didn't have the leverage or independence necessary to demand better. Now they do, and the old model simply doesn't work anymore, but a lot of people have a hard time accepting that.

  5. Art Eclectic

    How to asset and income limits around welfare and other public assistance programs impact those numbers? That seems like it would be a big driver to keep household income low enough to qualify - thus rewarding single parent homes.

  6. Justin

    Don't know how or why, but the family thing just has to be a main driver of poverty and dysfunction. I see it in my own extended family.

    1. Justin

      Gangs reemerged in the Northeast in cities such as New York during the 1950s and 1960s with rising Latino immigration and a rising population of Black Americans migrating from the American South.[20] Although New York built large, urban high-rise public housing in the 1940s, much of the public housing was built in low-rise form and in outer areas during the 1950s and 1960s; the effect of this was to mitigate much of the gang-on-gang violence that other American cities suffered in that period.[20] Although spared gang warfare, New York saw gangs nonetheless form among the youth of the Latino and black population. In 1957 there were 11 murders perpetrated by gangs in Manhattan.[21][20] By the end of the 1960s, two-thirds of gangs in the city were black or Puerto Rican.[20]

      The reemergence of Midwestern gangs also occurred after the rapid increase in the black population of northern American cities.[18] During the 1910s and 1920s, the Great Migration of more than one million black people to these cities created large, extremely poor populations, creating an atmosphere conducive to gang formation.[16] The significant and rapid migration created a large population of delinquent black youth, forming a pool of potential gang members, while black youth athletic groups fueled rivalries that also encouraged gang formation.[22] A final factor encouraging gang formation was the Chicago race riot of 1919, in which gangs of white youth terrorized the black community, and in response black youth formed groups for self-protection.[22]

      However, the actual formation of Midwestern black gangs only began after World War II, concomitantly with the Second Great Migration.[22] It was in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s that black gangs such as the Devil's Disciples, the Black P-Stones and the Vice Lords were formed.[22] By the late 1960s, the construction of public housing in Chicago allowed gangs to consolidate their power in black neighborhoods, and the Vice Lords, P-Stones, and Gangster Disciples controlled the drug trade of the area.[22] These and others emerged as "super gangs" with more than 1,000 members each by the 1970s.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_in_the_United_States

      1. Perry

        Gangs are the primary method of distributing illicit drugs. Drugs fueled the increase in gangs (especially black and hispanic gangs) but what fueled the huge increase in drug consumption during the 60s-present? Wouldn't it be interesting if someone studied that?

        https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/buyers/socialhistory.html

        Consumers of all types of drugs are most likely to be white working class people. Differential penalties for use of crack caused a race-based disproportionate sentencing and impact on families in the 1980-1990s. That was reviewed and eliminated in 1995 but it contributed to a perception that minorities were more likely to be drug users.

        Drug use is increasing after the pandemic. Both alcohol and drug use have a negative impact on children and families. Focusing on the factors among white working class people that contribute to drug use seems to me to be a good place to start with strengthening families and increasing the marriage rate. Marijuana is not exempt from this simply because it is legal.

        The militaristic police war on drugs didn't work. Perhaps we might try a social service and education oriented approach this time? Oh, wait, the Republicans own the schools and are defunding social services in the red states, where drug use by white working class people is highest and marriage rates are lowest and divorce and child abuse rates are highest.

    2. shapeofsociety

      We know that family breakdown is associated with poverty and dysfunction, but it's never been clear which one causes which.

  7. Citizen99

    Interesting that the percent for Black families start to climb rapidly around 1970 but then leveled off in the 1990s. Could it be **cough** lead?

    1. shapeofsociety

      In the past decade it's been pretty level for all races. It may be that it just "capped out", with the people who would have been in substandard marriages in the past now unmarried, and the quality marriages remaining.

  8. bmore

    Idk long term reasons for the trends, but currently, with insurance "deductibles" of well over $5000, it may be more cost effective for some single women to stay on Medicaid until they have completed their family with their partner. I know of several young women who did this.

  9. Crissa

    People in jail aren't counted as unemployed. People unemployed for long periods are also not counted, Kevin.

    There's also the thing that only single mothers got welfare from the feds, until more recently.

    1. Aleks311

      Re: People unemployed for long periods are also not counted

      Not true generically. People who say they are not employed but are looking for work in response to the household survey will be counted as unemployed not matter how long they haven't had a job. The BLS unemployment numbers are not derived from the number of people collecting UI benefits, if that's what you are thinking.

    2. Pittsburgh Mike

      Yeah, I think the inability to collect AFDC if you were married, or even living with a man, was a big contributor. Those rules ended in 1996 with Clinton's welfare reform (TANF). And you'll notice that the increase in the percentage of single parent families levels off very suddenly in the mid-1990s.

  10. Amil Eoj

    Surely these data suggest that the null hypothesis (that there is no significant difference between specified populations) can't be rejected?

    Setting aside changes in categorization, it looks like the "Non-White"/"Black" rate has gone from ~18% to ~70% since 1940, while the "White"/"Non-Latino White" rate has gone from ~2% to ~29%.

    Proportionately, then, the former has risen about 4x while the latter has risen about 15x.

    IOW, no separate explanation is required for the rise in the Black non-marital birthrate over this entire period. If anything, one would need an explanation for the (proportionately far greater) rise in the non-Black non-marital birthrate.

    Obviously, one would still need an explanation for the large difference in the two 1940 baseline rates but, surely, that is quite a different matter.

    What am I missing?

    1. Brett

      You beat me to it. The black single-parent increase doesn't look remarkable against the other increases - the percentage doubled, but the percentage of white single-parent households more than tripled.

  11. Pittsburgh Mike

    I've always suspected that the giant increase in single parent families was due to AFDC being mostly inaccessible by Black people, especially under Jim Crow, until the passage of the 1965 Civil Rights act.

    Furthermore, receiving AFDC meant you had to be single with no man living in the household; it was originally targeted at widows. That only changed with Clinton's TANF replaced AFDC, which passed in 1996.

    And if you look at the graph Kevin provided, you'll see that the rise in single parent households really starts accelerating in the mid-1960s, and levels off very abruptly in the mid-1990s.

    TL;DR -- before 1965, if you were Black, you couldn't get AFDC. Then for the 30 years between '65 and '96, you could only get it if you were a single mother. That only changed with Clinton's hated welfare reform, which maybe wasn't such a bad idea in hindsight.

  12. illilillili

    https: //www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/earnings/median-annual-sex-race-hispanic-ethnicity
    seems like an important piece of the picture. Not the full picture, but a little part of it.

  13. skeptonomist

    There was a kind of collapse of earnings for working-class men (and women), as real wages fell badly from the 70's through 90's:

    https://skeptometrics.org/BLS_B8_Min_Pov.png

    This overlaps with the great rise in unemployment from 1970 to 1984. The drop in real wages presumably does not show up in family income because women were rapidly entering the workforce at that time. These things affected all races and as Amil Eoj says the rise in unwed mothers occurred in all races. Working people were left behind as GDP gains went to the highest incomes.

    That this alone accounts for the very great rise in unwed mothers seems very doubtful. Lots of things were changing. But it is very unlikely that attitudes on the part of the "liberal elite" were responsible, as Kristof implies.

  14. bluebee

    I am a South Side of Chicago native. I think your stats may conceal the relevant specifics within the general case.

    In Chicago, and other major industrial centers, it was deindustrialization that devastated black communities. Black neighborhoods did not start out as centers of unemployment - blacks were there because they were massive recruitment campaigns. But then the factories moved and the communities went through extreme decline. The persistence of poverty and desperation in what are called urban ghettos is what your generic stats neither reveal nor explain. It is the result of deindustrialization. The rise of gangs is also related to this.

  15. cephalopod

    Don't you have to look at what young men are doing, not all men? I would bet that the vast majority of fathers who are having children outside of marriage are under age 30. You have to know what is going on with their incarceration and unemployment/underemployment rates.

  16. Justin

    And don’t forget rap music! ????. Seriously, though. The gang culture makes it impossible for these young men to succeed even if they are not in a gang themselves. When your role model is a thug. You become a thug.

  17. jdubs

    These graphs dont look at the right subgroup or the right data.

    You need to focus on black men and women 18 to 45(?) and look at employment/participation rate vs unemployment.

    I dont know if that info gives a different narrative, but the charts used here arent looking at the right things.

  18. Anandakos

    I think that Citizen Lehew's last option is largely the cause, but without his obvious disapproval. We men are pretty useless to women these days. We make messes, both in the lived environment and emotional relationships. We can be violent, and we're larger physically. We beat up on the kids with disturbing regularity.

    Now that women have opportunities for wealth creation on their own, they're relagating us to the role of drones in the bee Queendom.

    The stats saying that kids do better with two parents is MOSTLY the result of the financial stability of two earners. Gay couples of both biological sexes generally produce the same level of security and therefore life outcomes, though children of the "unrepresented" biological sex may feel "left out".

  19. coral

    Child poverty was sharply reduced with the enhanced child tax credit payable monthly at the beginning of the Biden administration. Unfortunately it was not renewed, so it was ended. My experience is that poverty, and the types of low-income jobs that the working poor often have, is a source of great stress within families and households.

    Rather than blame people for not being in high functioning happy marriages, we should have regular child payments monthly for parents, enforce and enhance regulations on workplaces so they are more parent friendly (guaranteed number of hours weekly, paid family leave, set work schedules, to name a few).

  20. GenXer

    Ironically, desegregation destroyed black communities. It was and is still the correct course morally, but the impact can't be denied.

    Under segregation, black communities HAD to stick together because all African-Americans were under equal restrictions and risk. That meant that more prosperous AAs stayed in black communities and built them up. Essentially, this black middle class carried black neighborhoods economically. The situation was an artificial, forced community tied together mainly by segregation laws. When legal segregation ended, the black middle-class (the businesspeople) quickly moved out of black neighborhoods and into previously all-white neighborhoods. This was the dream of integration. However, the most poor and least-educated black Americans did not have the resources to move, and so they remained trapped in what were now devastatingly impoverished black neighborhoods.

    I watched a documentary recently on the history of a famous black neighborhood in Houston. All the older residents talked about how prosperous and unified the neighborhood was in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, black businesses started moving out, the neighborhood economy cratered, and the neighborhood became a wasteland of gangs, drugs, and decaying abandoned buildings. That right there is the impact of the flight of the black middle class.

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