March 19, 2018
We all know about the skills shortage. Employers just can’t find workers with the skills necessary for the jobs that are available. As a result, jobs go wanting and many workers remain unemployed.
Samuelson gives us yet another example of the skills shortage in his column titled, “Don’t deny the link between poverty and single parenthood.” Apparently, Samuelson was irked by a column in the NYT last month that told readers “Single mothers are not the problem.”
The piece argues that there are not enough single mothers to explain child poverty. Therefore as Samuelson puts it:
“[…]let’s put the Times essay in context. Its policy agenda is candid. ‘We should stop obsessing over how many single mothers there are and stop shaming them,’ write sociologists David Brady of the University of California at Riverside, Ryan M. Finnigan of the University of California at Davis and Sabine Hübgen of WBZ Berlin Social Science Center.”
Samuelson tells us:
“Let’s look at the census figures.
“In 2016, 40.6 million Americans had incomes below the government’s official poverty line, which was $24,339 for a family of four, including two children. Of those below the poverty line — 12.7 percent of the population — nearly 5 million were moms or dads heading single-parent families; another 8.7 million were children under 18 in these single-parent homes.
“Do the arithmetic. Together, single-parent families and their children totaled almost 14 million people, which is roughly a third of all people in poverty. If, magically, a third of America’s poor escaped poverty, the change would (justifiably) be hailed as a triumph of social policy. If we included the children in poverty in two-parent families, that would add more than 7 million to the total (3 million parents and 4 million children). The total of 21 million would equal about half of all people in poverty.
“To read the Times essay, the effect of all of this on poverty would be negligible. Poverty would still be roughly the same. This is preposterous. But that’s the impression that the Times leaves its readers.”
Okay, so Samuelson has discovered that there is a higher poverty rate among single parent families. And, if we had no single parent families then we can assume, other things equal, we would have lower poverty rates.
There are two simple problems with this story. First, a counter-factual where we have no single parent families is nonsense, and not serious analysis. People (usually women) end up as single parents for all sorts of reasons, some of which may be better than others. Perhaps the mother was just not compatible with the father. Maybe the father was abusive to either the mother or the kids or both. Perhaps one of the parents is in jail, or maybe they are dead.
All of these things happen, which is why a counterfactual of zero single parents is not what any serious person would consider. If Samuelson had read the piece he was criticizing he would see the counterfactuals it presented:
“If single motherhood in the United States were in the middle of the pack among rich democracies instead of the third highest, poverty among working-age households would be less than 1 percentage point lower — 15.4 percent instead of 16.1 percent. If we returned to the 1970 share of single motherhood, poverty would decline a tiny amount — from 16.1 percent to 15.98. If, magically, there were no single mothers in the United States, the poverty rate would still be 14.8 percent.”
In other words, Brady, Finnigan, and Hübgen were trying to construct a serious counterfactual where we assumed that the US had the same rates of single parenthood of other wealthy countries or we went back to where we were fifty years ago before the supposed breakdown of morality led to more single parents. Their point was that in these real-world type counterfactuals, the change in single parenthood doesn’t make much difference.
Apart from the arithmetic point, which is pretty straightforward: we have the implied policy, which is that the government should encourage parents to stay or get married. It is sort of amazing that people like Samuelson, who are skeptical of the government’s ability to do things like provide health care and education, somehow think it will be good as a matchmaker. There are probably few places where questions of the government’s competence would be more appropriate.
To be clear, there is little doubt that children with two loving parents will do better in life than children with just one parent. However, if someone finds themselves as a single parent, the idea that the government will find them a spouse who will be a good parent for their child or children is more than a bit far-fetched. I suspect most single parents understand their kids would be better off with a second parent. That is not the problem here.
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