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I'm no fan of marriage the institution but the results are clear. Policies that incentivize couples who would be married to not marry leads to worse outcomes for both parties at scale as well as any kids. It is regrettable that some may feel trapped in marriages that aren't working but the numbers don't lie. I don't want to make this a race thing because it's not but look at what happened to the urban blacks who had this kind of policy peddled hard at them starting in the 1960s. They regressed on tons of metrics that are closely tied to and both predict and are predicted by household stability. Your advocating for something that has been tried and failed.

(That said, perhaps the above would not be the case, or at least not to the same degree if women and men weren't treated differently with regard to child custody and men had the option of being single fathers)



What numbers are you referring to?


The well-known numbers that have been known since the Moynihan Report.


Come on, give its full title...


I didn't know what it was either. OP is likely referring to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For...

Commonly known as the Moynihan Report. It has its supporters and its detractors. I have no opinion on it since this is the first I'm hearing of it.


At the time, the title was the opposite of a slur. Now, it would paint the report in a different light.


[flagged]


Not so much chaff as a point that the thing itself is so outdated our very language has had time to radically change.


I will assume you've read the full document and are fine with the things it says, since you're so confident it's a well written/thought-out piece that just accidentally has an extremely outdated name.

I think it's a tough argument to make that single-mothers lead to resentful anti-social children, but, hey, maybe I should be more open-minded.

>...The primary unit may again become mother and child, the biologically given, and the special conditions under which man has held his social traditions in trust are violated and distorted.

E. Franklin Frazier makes clear that at the time of emancipation Negro women were already “accustomed to playing the dominant role in family and marriage relations” and that this role persisted in the decades of rural life that followed...

...Although the families studied were white, the pattern would clearly seem to be a general one, and apply to Negro families as well.

The first two stages end with the exhaustion of credit and the entry of the wife into the labor force. The father is no longer the provider and the elder children become resentful.

The third stage is the critical one of commencing a new day-to-day existence. At this point two women are in charge:

“Consider the fact that relief investigators or case workers are normally women and deal with the housewife. Already suffering a loss in prestige and authority in the family because of his failure to be the chief bread winner, the male head of the family feels deeply this obvious transfer of planning for the family’s well-being to two women, one of them an outsider. His role is reduced to that of errand boy to and from the relief office.”


>They regressed on tons of metrics that are closely tied to and both predict and are predicted by household stability.

Sure, Black people are also living a lot longer which seems like a good outcome in terms of quality of life. [1]

[1]https://spia.princeton.edu/news/life-expectancy-gap-between-...


is there data viewable online that you refer to?


Was there anything else happening to black americans in the second half of the 20th century?


Anything worse than the first half of the 20th century, when nuclear families were in tact?


More granular targeting of black communities by federal and state governments through the massive shift in economic policies perhaps.




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