By George Will
Wednesday, July 05, 2017
The Bronx, the only one of New York City’s five boroughs
that is on the American mainland, once had a sociological as well as
geographical distinction. In the 1930s it was called, as Daniel Patrick
Moynihan noted, “the city without a slum.” It was “the one place in the whole
of the nation where commercial housing was built during the Great Depression.”
In the third quarter of the 20th century, however, there came, particularly in
the South Bronx, social regression that Moynihan described as “an Armageddonic
collapse that I do not believe has its equal in the history of urbanization.”
Of the several causes of descent, there and elsewhere,
into the intergenerational transmission of poverty, one was paramount: family
disintegration. Some causes of this remain unclear, but something now seems
indisputable: Among today’s young adults, the “success sequence” is insurance
against poverty. The evidence is in “The Millennial Success Sequence,”
published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family
Studies and written by Wendy Wang of the IFS and W. Bradford Wilcox of the
University of Virginia and AEI.
The success sequence, previously suggested in research
by, among others, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution,
is this: First get at least a high-school diploma, then get a job, then get
married, and only then have children. Wang and Wilcox, focusing on millennials
ages 28 to 34, the oldest members of the nation’s largest generation, have
found that only 3 percent who follow this sequence are poor.
A comparably stunning 55 percent of this age cohort have
had children before marriage. Only 25 percent of the youngest baby boomers
(those born between 1957 and 1964) did that. Eighty-six percent of the Wang-Wilcox
millennials who put “marriage before the baby carriage” have family incomes in
the middle or top third of incomes. Forty-seven percent who did not follow the
sequence are in the bottom third.
One problem today, Wilcox says, is the “soul-mate model
of marriage,” a self-centered approach that regards marriage primarily as an
opportunity for personal growth and fulfillment rather than as a way to form a
family. Another problem is that some of the intelligentsia see the success
sequence as middle-class norms to be disparaged for being middle-class norms.
And as AEI social scientist Charles Murray says, too many of the successful
classes, who followed the success sequence, do not preach what they practice,
preferring “ecumenical niceness” to being judgmental.
In healthy societies, basic values and social
arrangements are not much thought about. They are “of course” matters
expressing what sociologists call a society’s “world-taken-for-granted.” They
have, however, changed since President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed
“unconditional” war on poverty. This word suggested a fallacious assumption:
Poverty persisted only because of hitherto weak government resolve regarding
the essence of war — marshalling material resources.
But what if large causes of poverty are not matters of
material distribution but are behavioral — bad choices and the cultures that
produce them? If so, policymakers must rethink their confidence in social
salvation through economic abundance.
Reversing social regression using public policies to
create a healthy culture is akin to “nation-building” abroad, an American
undertaking not recently crowned with success. Wang and Wilcox recommend
education focused on high-level occupational skills, subsidizing low-paying
jobs, and “public and private social marketing campaigns,” from public schools
to popular media, promoting marriage toward the end of the success sequence.
Success is, of course, more complex than adherence to the
sequence. Much cultural capital often is unavailable to poor people. In J. D.
Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir
of his rise from Appalachian poverty to Yale Law School, he recounts his
experience in the recruiting process with prestigious law firms, during which
he learned, among many other things he did not learn at home, “use the fat
spoon for soup” and “your shoes and belt should match.” These may seem trivial
matters; to upward mobility, they are not.
Much more important, however, is the success sequence. In
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s day, as in ours, it was said that problems were so
daunting that old principles must yield to new realities. Perhaps, however,
unfortunate new realities are the result of the disregard of old principles.
Hawthorne recommended consulting “respectable old blockheads” who had “a
death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue since yesterday
morning.” Ideas like getting an education, a job, and a spouse before begetting
children.
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