Maybe Bristol Palin is Right
No, not that anyone should pay her $15,000-$30,000 to talk to teenagers about why they should be abstinent. (Short version: “As with my mother, I wasn’t, and look what I’m doing now. Uh, well…”)
But, via Andrew Samwick, a study from the Pew Foundation (PDF) using PSID data finds that:
Among children who start in the bottom third of the income distribution,
only 26 percent with divorced parents move up to the middle or top third
as adults, compared to 42 percent of children born to unmarried mothers
and 50 percent of children with continuously married parents.
Or, in ratio terms, it is only 19% more likely that the child’s eventual economic status will be improved if the mother marries someone and stays married until the child is eighteen, compared to a 61.5% improvement in the expected well-being of the child if the mother remains unmarried for the entire eighteen years.
Meanwhile, twice as many children have parents who divorce before the child is nineteen (14%) than are raised by unwed mothers (7%).
There may also be elements of selection bias in the data: a woman who opts to raise a child on her own instead of getting married is more likely to instill that independence of spirit in her child than someone who enters into what turns out to be a bad marriage.
The other interesting table in the study shows how severely income inequality increased across a generation.
Note that the bottom tier improves the least, that the 50th percentile grows much slower than even the 75th, and that the percentage change in the Mean is greater than the percentage change at any tier except the 90th percentile.
So much for the rising tide having lifted all boats—clearly, it capsized a few.
Hmmm. If the divorce rate is 50%, then if you are born to married parents, your chance of moving up the ladder is 38%, compared with 42% if your mother never marries. Maybe we should subsidize single mothers not to marry. Or institute a marriage tax. 😉
I know: lies, damn lies, and statistics. 🙂
But seriously, a marriage tax might be a good idea. (A tax on getting married, that is.) It would probably lower the divorce rate. (Whether by selection or cognitive dissonance.)
When I started the first grade in 1958, of the 25 students 23 had two parents in an intact first marriage, 1 a remarriage, and 1 divorced parents with no remarriage.
It was a small town with very few above what would then be considered very lower blue collar middle class.
All 25 graduated from high school, probably half from college and I do not know any who would not be considered “middle class.”
Prove anything? No. Did we have a better chance than many of the children today? Yes.
(I have a phrase I use in both business and social contexts, “drilling holes in the bottom of your own boat.” May apply to this topic.
“Marriage Tax” This is already implented in the Tax Code. Married couples pays more taxes if they both work..
I wonder if where you grew up is more of a controlling factor that the status of your parents.
I mean a tax on the event of getting married. 🙂
“There may also be elements of selection bias in the data: a woman who opts to raise a child on her own instead of getting married is more likely to instill that independence of spirit in her child than someone who enters into what turns out to be a bad marriage.”
Oooh, ouchy, ouchy!
We need more information here. What are the relative abortion rates?
The woman who can/could have an abortion to prevent being a single mother but does not have one is likely to be more committed to that independence and child raising than the woman who can/could have an abortion and does so.
The incentives for the woman who is married while pregnant (or in a position to be so as a result of the pregnancy) are different in some manner.
“So much for the rising tide having lifted all boats—clearly, it capsized a few.”
No: or at least not necessairly. “capsizing” would imply a decline in absolute living standards. What we’re seeing in those figures is a decline in relative living standards. These are not the same thing at all.
TBogg’s take on this (http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2010/05/18/getting-banged-in-the-back-of-a-camaro-is-the-new-meritocracy/) is worth reading.
I appreciate that a first stab at any thought problem is likely to need lots more polishing. That said, one error we whould keep in mind and try to avoid is narrowing focus early in the discussion. I have in mind the “independence of spirit” notion. Why that, rather than any other of dozens of qualities that might be examined? Learning how to squeeze a penny really hard, learning to distrust in an environment where trust can be costly, learning that hours of endless work are one’s natural lot in life… We don’t know that single moms instill such a spirit (however one might define it), or that it would help kids prosper later in life.
It’s an interesting statistical result, one with all sorts of political and emotional baggage attached. That political and emotional baggage is likely to lead to lots of WAGs and WAGs of a not very helpful nature.
Seriously, these data may indicate one of the deleterious effects of divorce. It would be interesting to see data on divorce before the child is 11, instead of 19. I would not be surprised to see a greater effect.
kharris
this is a blog. a place for WAGs and wags. smile.
in my opinion squeezing a penny and “independence of spirit” are, um, correlated if not caused. as for endless work. well, depends how organized you are.
Min
or maybe not. it’s one thing to speculate irresponsibly. it’s quite another to look for statistical proof in support of an agenda.
i never much believed in divorce (as if that matters), and can attest to deleterious effects… seen them with my own eyes, don’t need no damn statistics. but i have also seen marriages that were deleterious effects all by themselves, where divorce seemed to be the humane solution.
Have to disagree. Not all blogs are equal. This one has been listed among “expert opinion” blogs in the past. Love to know if the main posters these days consider it merely a vehicle for personal opinion. I hope not. They don’t generally seem to see it that way. Either way, publishing the first thing that comes out of the fingers is a poor standard, for TNR, WSJ or blogs, expert or personal. I cannot join you in rooting for lower standards. Nor can I join you in the belief that single parents at the low end of incomes would have easier lives if they were just better organized.
coberly, you really need to cool it with the nasty implications. You have, in the past, accused me of racism, of self-serving views of data and the like. Here, you move from arguing that any damned bit of speculation that shows up on a blog is OK immediately to the insinuation that Min is “look(ing) for statistincal proof in support of an agenda.” Getting pretty big for your britches.
http://www.psychpage.com/family/divorce/childrenadjust.htm
Not a bad site for explanation of the role of short term and long term conflict between family members (parents) and possible combinations of situations.
Right. Knowing where to find your condoms is a sign of organization.
Oh, I thought he was suggesting that I was speculating irresponsibly. 😉
kharris
i’m all for expert opinions. sometimes though i think the experts are dangerous. so i’m willing to settle for ‘”lower standard.” especially since not all lower standards are created equal.
and i am sorry to say, having been a low ender my whole life, people who are better organized have easier lives. consider it my expert opinion.
kharris,
still with the mistaken identity. i have never accused you or anyone else of racism. i believe we are all “racists” at the core of our genes. it’s the way Darwin runs the world. but some of us have been educated to be nicer than others.
min,
not at all. i was defending speculating irresponsibly. i thouht it was fun. it was looking for statistics in support of an agenda that i was worrying about. part of my mindless hatred of expert knowledge.
I didn’t check all the answers here, I just scanned, but surely the problem here is being an unmarried increases the chance of poverty enormously. So if you all start at the bottom, the chances of moving up are automatically higher.
P.S. I realise the study was about the bottom third, but I suppose what I wanted to say is single motherhood, pushes you down from where you would otherwise have been. So the chances of popping up are obviously higher.
jamesvincent
i suspect you are right… about the regression to the mean. but if i understood the article, it was saying your chances of popping up are better if mom doesn’t remarry than if she does.
because i did not, do not, take the statistics very seriously, i thought a little idle speculation was in order.
welcome aboard.
and it is apparent that i misread the statistics. it was comparing moms who never marry with moms who stay married, and moms who get divorced. it did not mention moms who get divorced and remarry.
probably my low i.q., or maybe the writing was excessively convoluted trying to use statistics to support a point if not an agenda.
that said,
it strikes me as unfortunate that some people would rather be offended by something i say than to offer a correction or another point of view.
kharris is excessively concerned with the quality of my logic, while apparently oblivious to her own. at least, i find it difficult to go from “avoid narrow focus early in the discussion” to ruling out speculations she doesn’t like… “independence of spirit.” Apparently we are to avoid narrow focus that includes some hypotheses, but embrace narrow focus that excludes those hypotheses.
or perhaps i just don’t have the expertise to avoid the Scylla of WAG’s while avoiding the Charybdis of “narrow focus.”
meanwhile i have to watch out for nasty implications that Ms Harris arrives at all on her own. I had not realized I was being nasty to Min. I thought I was offering another opinion. But I guess having another opinion is a nasty implication if you don’t like the other opinion. Kind of a narrow focus, if you ask me. But we already know about my intellectual limitations, not to say personality failures.
On the other hand, without even any further guidance from Min, aided by the blinding realization that if other people don’t understand what I am saying, maybe I don’t understand what they are saying, I went back and saw that Min was not necessarily calling for more statistics in support of an agenda, but merely offering another WAG, which of course I am delighted to entertain.
I think I need to get better organized.
P.S. I’m not actually new, I just had problems setting my usual tag to the login here. People from over at Mark Thoma’s blog will know me well. (Reason)
P.P.S. I never knew that kharris was a ms. I will in general say, that blog discussions should avoid getting personal if possible, but people are people.
Don’t get down on yourself coberly. It’s ok to be always wrong, and invariably, someone will come along and point out your tremendous capacity to error.
Keep trying to be organized. It’s all we can hope for.
If economics confuses you, it’s because it’s supposed to. The worker bee does not need to understand the workings of the hive. She (the economist) is in charge of that.
jamesvincent
i do not know kharris status re m/r/s, but the question was raised once and not answered. got tired of the he or she, so i thought i’d commit myself to one of the choices to see if i was wrong about that too.
Cedric
actually, the only way i know to ever to be right is to start out by being wrong. i enjoy it. and my sense of humor is not as dry as yours, but it probably confuses more people.
This study begs a few hours of fun with a red pen.
I’ll throw out a few points.
The three groups referenced are A)mothers married from birth to adulthood of the child, B)mothers unmarried at the time of the child’s birth without reference to subsequent marriage, C)Mothers married at the birth of the child and during the five year period of income study, but who divorce, after the income study but before the child reaches 19. Left out are those married but divorced prior to the reference income period and those for whom the study has an unclear marital history.
One problem I note early. This compares childhood family income in a two-adult family for the continuously married and the later divorced, with childhood family income in a single-parent family, and adjusts this by dividing by the square root of the number of family members. So, for our divorce family, the study income is pre-divorce, while an average of something like half of childhood would be experienced for post-divorce household income. This seems like a categorical bias. Also, for unwed mothers, we are talking about a single parent family, (22% of blacks and only 1% of white children in the study–this is some old data). So almost all a kid has to do is form a two adult family to outperform this (which some percentage will, causing a bias in the data). I’d like to see a split showing how the performance of single-adult households from children of unwed mothers compares.
Also, assuming that there has been relative improvement in the wages of women and African Americans over the roughly 3 decades between the income samples, the relative proportion of those individuals in the income samples will have affected the results.