One of the most common memes in today’s intellectual center, agreed upon by both liberals and conservatives, is that family structure is a major factor behind rising inequality in the United States. Family structure, by which most commentators mean “single mothers,” is also used to explain black poverty and stagnant upward mobility. Marriage thereby becomes the solution to a host of social ills — which benefits the wealthy, because the less we discuss financialization, globalization, de-unionization andthe shift in tax burdens, the better.
But the focus on marriage is deleterious for two reasons. First, by obscuring the true causes of inequality, it leads to an endless cycle of blaming the victims of economic change for their plight. Second, nearly all of the proposals that pro-marriage proponents advocate will end up harming women by trapping them in bad marriages.
While it is often stated as a universally acknowledged fact that family structure is an important driver of inequality and mobility, there are reasons to believe the causal link is reversed. Molly Martin, for example, finds that, “family formation probably reacts to prevailing economic conditions.” As her chart (below) shows, changes within family structure have been a bigger driver of inequality than those between family structures. That is, the primary change in inequality has not been between two-parent households and single-parent households, but rather some two-parent households taking more and more money, and others being left behind. (Her data only covers the bottom 96-to-98 percent of the income distribution, which means family structure can tell us even less about the rise of the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent.) READ MORE
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