Helping to Solve the Income Inequality in a Big Way

We hear about the greed of the fat cats and the income inequality issue all the time, especially in election years. This is an election year.


Of course, what isn't being discussed nearly enough by those seeking office and other so-called leaders are the effects of (1) insufficient education/knowledge, (2) globalization/competition, (3) demographics/aging, (4) indebtedness/government and private, and (5) technology/productivity.


While we'll skip the discussion of those five important topics herein, they are each and all real, impactful and vital factors which will continue to change the way we live and work. And perhaps our future American standard of living as well, depending on whether and how well we react to each of them.


The discussion issue du jour is single parent families and their "contribution" to income inequality. So let's face that issue in head-on fashion and look at what we may not know and what isn't being acknowledged as a primary contributing factor to income inequality by our pundits and political "leaders."


Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families is subtitled 'Intellectuals fretting about income inequality are oddly silent regarding the decline of the two-parent family' says this in part:


"Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can't change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn't some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?

Yet in the current discussions about increased inequality, few researchers, fewer reporters, and no one in the executive branch of government directly addresses what seems to be the strongest statistical correlate of inequality in the United States: the rise of single-parent families during the past half century.

The two-parent family has declined rapidly in recent decades. In 1960, more than 76% of African-Americans and nearly 97% of whites were born to married couples. Today the percentage is 30% for blacks and 70% for whites. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for Hispanics surpassed 50% in 2006. This trend, coupled with high divorce rates, means that roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage in Europe (12%). Roughly a third of American children live apart from their fathers.

Does it matter? Yes, it does. . . .

                

                  

In an essay for the Institute for Family Studies last December, called "Even for Rich Kids, Marriage Matters," University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox reported that children in high-income households who experienced family breakups don't fare as well emotionally, psychologically, educationally or, in the end, economically as their two-parent-family peers.

Abuse, behavioral problems and psychological issues of all kinds, such as developmental behavior problems or concentration issues, are less common for children of married couples than for cohabiting or single parents, according to a 2003 Centers for Disease Control study of children's health. The causal pathways are about as clear as those from smoking to cancer.

More than 20% of children in single-parent families live in poverty long-term, compared with 2% of those raised in two-parent families, according to education-policy analyst Mitch Pearlstein's 2011 book "From Family Collapse to America's Decline." The poverty rate would be 25% lower if today's family structure resembled that of 1970, according to the 2009 report "Creating an Opportunity Society" from Brookings Institution analysts Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill. A 2006 article in the journal Demography by Penn State sociologist Molly Martin estimates that 41% of the economic inequality created between 1976-2000 was the result of changed family structure. . . .

Why isn't this matter at the center of policy discussions? There are at least three reasons. First, much of politics is less about what you are for than who you are against . . . .

Second, family breakup has hit minority communities the hardest. So even bringing up the issue risks being charged with racism, a potential career-killer. . . . 

Finally, there is no quick fix. . . . The change must come from long-term societal transformation on this subject, led by political, educational and entertainment elites, similar to the decades-long movements against racism, sexism—and smoking.

But the first step is to acknowledge the problem."

Summing Up

The first step to problem solution is problem identification.

After identification comes discussion, study and consensus on how to solve the problem.

Then comes leadership and targeted efforts, often over a long period of time, which will rectify or at least minimize the problem.

If we're doing the wrong things, we're generally doing them poorly.

But if we aren't even ready and willing to recognize the problem, its solution won't appear.

That's my take.

Thanks. Bob.