George Will revisits Patrick Moynihan
In the mid-1960s, a social scientist noted something ominous that came to be called “Moynihan’s Scissors”: Two lines on a graph crossed, replicating the blades of a scissors. The descending line charted the decline in the minority male unemployment rate. The ascending line charted the simultaneous rise of new welfare cases.
The broken correlation of improvements in unemployment and decreased welfare dependency shattered confidence in social salvation through economic growth and reduced barriers to individual striving. Perhaps the decisive factors in combating poverty and enabling upward mobility were not economic but cultural — the habits, mores and dispositions that equip individuals to take advantage of opportunities.
This was dismaying because governments know how to alter incentives and remove barriers but not how to manipulate culture. The assumption that the condition of the poor must improve as macroeconomic conditions improve was to be refuted by a deepened understanding of the crucial role of the family as the primary transmitter of the social capital essential for self-reliance and betterment. Family structure is the primary predictor of social outcomes, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan knew in 1965. […]
Academic sensitivity enforcers and race-mongers denounced him as a racist who was “blaming the victim.” Today, 72?percent of African American children are born to single women, 48 percent of first births of all races and ethnicities are to unmarried women, and more than 3?million mothers under 30 are not living with the fathers of their children.
In 1966, Sargent Shriver, head of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” was asked how long it would take to win the war. He replied, “About 10 years.” The conventional wisdom was John F. Kennedy’s cheerful expectation that a rising economic tide would lift all boats. America now knows that bad family structure defeats good economic numbers.
Today, a nation dismayed by inequality and the intergenerational transmission of poverty must face the truth that political scientist Lawrence Mead enunciated nearly 25 years ago: “The inequalities that stem from the workplace are now trivial in comparison to those stemming from family structure. What matters for success is less whether your father was rich or poor than whether you knew your father at all.”
“America” may know it, but the Left not only refuses to acknowledge it, but will viciously attack anyone that dare whisper it.
Among the reasons for the Left’s stance towards observable facts is the Left’s obsession with controlling others whether it is through indoctrination in government schools (with concurrent efforts to block or ban school choice) or separating children from parents. The relative independence of functional two-parent families is loathed.
The Left dominates the so-called social sciences not to merely observe, but to get into the drivers seat of policy making.
“The role of social science,” [Moynihan] would write, “lies not in the formulation of social policy, but in the measurement of its results.” Not in postulating what will work but in demonstrating what does work. And, increasingly, what does not work.
The Left has never forgiven Moynihan for that.
The Left has never forgiven Moynihan for that.
Quite. It’s always fascinating to bring him up in any conversation about the plight of American blacks. The vast majority of time the Left simply refuses to acknowledge the existence of his name and his study. I’ve had people simply ignore it and move on quickly to other diatribes. Moynihan is effectively a non-person, having been erased from history.
Moynihan would be labeled a “far-right conservative” these days.
Related thoughts from David Brooks(!)
Blind squirrels, stopped clocks and all that.
Brooksy, you ignorant slut: Nonjudgmentalism IS a bad value. #idiocracy
Growing up without a father, I want to say a little about the “nonjudgemental” thing.
For me, the problem is that many probably well meaning teachers expected little from because I did not have a father. I was put in lower reading and math groups and not pushed very much. Best thing that happened to me was changing school districts one year and through miscommunication was put in higher groups.
Later, although my grades were good I always had to push to get into advance placement type programs.
I don’t know if this means anything or not, I just always had the feeling that people were thinking “poor and fatherless kid, don’t expect much”. My main motivation was that I knew I did not want to be poor and dependent.
the takeaway here is that family structure matters quite a lot
1. the crucial role of the family as the primary transmitter of the social capital essential for self-reliance and betterment… a role that the state wants all to itself, hence the use of “feminism” to separate fish from their bicycles and children from their fathers.
2. America now knows that bad family structure defeats good economic numbers. America who? We always knew this stuff; the revolutionaries in academia and elsewhere will BROOK NO RIVALS in their quest to dominate the human soul and so they had to erase this truth with an avalanche of RACIST! BLAMING THE VICTIM! and other lies.
3. Evan Sayet. Nuff said.
True nothing new. I was thinking of the film/play “the Dead End” and part of the problem with main kid (and other kids) was he had a broken family and his sister knew marriage was the path out of poverty.