'Soul Mates' Goes Where Politicians Fear to Tread
A new assessment of the cultural trends among racial and ethnic groups that can keep people poor.
This election year expect to hear a lot about the antipoverty agendas of both parties. Democrats have made income-inequality a major campaign theme, and Republicans are eager to expand their appeal among voters who are struggling financially.
This year also marks the 20th anniversary of the 1996 welfare-reform legislation passed by a GOP-controlled Congress and signed by President Clinton. The law placed time limits on receiving federal assistance, strengthened work requirements and gave states block grants to craft their own relief programs. It succeeded on its own terms. Over the next decade welfare caseloads shrank nationally by 60%, poverty among children and single-mom households fell, and the employment rate for single women increased. Even subsequent economic recessions have not returned poverty rates to pre-welfare-reform levels.
A debate over how to continue these trends and improve on them is worth having, but that debate should also acknowledge that there are limits to government benevolence, however well-intentioned and expertly executed. A group’s culture—its habits, behaviors and attitudes toward work, marriage and parenting—is likely to play the bigger role in reducing dependency long-term.
In their forthcoming book, “Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love and Marriage Among African Americans and Latinos,” two sociologists,W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia andNicholas Wolfinger of the University of Utah, tread where few policy makers dare. They assess the cultural trends among racial and ethnic groups that can keep people poor, lead them to welfare dependency and trap them there indefinitely.
The authors posit that religion and marriage hardly guarantee happiness and upward mobility for minorities or anyone else—churchgoing has not been found to reduce the likelihood of divorce for black and Hispanic couples, for example—but both institutions have been correlated with less-fragile relationships and better social outcomes for children. Furthermore, the remarkable decline of marriage in America over the past four decades has not affected all groups equally. Since the 1970s, the percentage of married blacks between ages 20 and 54 has fallen to 25% from 57%, write Messrs. Wilcox and Wolfinger. Over the same period, the higher marriage rate for Latinos (72%) and whites (70%) also fell, though less sharply to 47% and 49% respectively.
Poverty might help explain black marriage trends, since blacks are more likely to be poor, and low-income individuals are less likely to get and stay married. It’s also possible that the legacy of slavery, an institution that regularly broke apart black families, is somehow still shaping black relationships today. But as the authors note, neither explanation holds up well to scrutiny. It isn’t just the black poor but also the black middle-class that is less likely than their white counterparts to get and stay married. And if the legacy of slavery is responsible for the troubled state of the modern black family, how is it that black family life was “stronger in the first half of the twentieth century than it has been since the 1960s”?
As “Soul Mates” demonstrates, the more plausible explanation for these different social outcomes is different habits and attitudes toward sex, marriage and parenting. Male unemployment, criminal behavior and infidelity undermine all relationships, differ among groups and are higher among blacks. Black men are nearly twice as likely as white men to have been incarcerated. Around a third of black men lack full-time employment, compared with about a quarter of white and Latino men. A man who is unable to provide for his household is more likely to shun family life and lose the respect of his girlfriend or wife.
Black men are also more likely to have multiple sexual partners. One 2006 survey cited by the authors found that 29% of black women and 7% of white women reported infidelity or suspected infidelity in their relationships. This not only leads to distrust but also to multiple children with different women. “This is problematic because it creates complex financial, social and emotional obligations that run across households,” write the authors, “thereby making it more difficult for adults to maintain a single sustained relationship or marriage, and to invest in the children that come from these relationships.”
Our antipoverty debates don’t tend to focus on these kinds of issues, instead measuring progress mainly by how much money is saved or spent. But policy prescriptions that don’t take self-destructive behavior into account are missing a large part of the underlying problem and risk being counterproductive. Top-down federal programs that offer the same solution for every problem haven’t worked very well, and it isn’t because enough of them haven’t been tried over the past half-century. The best that we probably can hope for are government policies that don’t make matters worse and allow groups and communities to rebuild from within.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal