Two Classes in America, Divided by ‘I Do’

No huge surprise that divorce is correlated with bad outcomes for low-income kids, but according to the Pew Economic Mobility Project the magnitude is quite large:

I got some pushback on yesterday’s post about Nordic family structure, well summed-up by RS who wrote “unmarried biological parents in northern Europe are more likely to stay together to raise the kid than married parents in the US. Jencks, Ellwood, and more recently Cherlin have written about this.”

Why do so many people think grammar schools are a way of improving social mobility? It’s not because the social research says they are. I suspect instead that plain error is involved.

There’s no doubt that shifts in family structure play a role in both inequality and in its inter-generational transmission. The gap in resources (but in terms of money, social capital, and parental attention) available to a child of two high-earning professionals, and those available to a kid raised by a lone working-class mom is much bigger than the gap that would exist if the inequality in earnings weren’t intensified by the difference in family structure.

It is one thing for a document to be written by committee. It is quite another for it to be written by a committee whose members flatly disagree with each other. This, though, seems to be the case with the coalition’s social mobility strategy. Whilst this contains much to applaud, it has two massive gaps.This first is evident in this bizarre paragraph:

In an interview with Christian Broadcast Network's David Brody this week, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul evaded the question of whether he would ever support same-sex marriage, indicating that he recognizes the political climate has changed on the heated issue.

The UK is a very affluent country which enjoys a high standard of living and has one of the most successful economies in the world. For most Britons, when they think of people living in poverty, the images that come to mind aren’t often of the communities that surround them.  

It’s true that surveys indicate that gay marriage is wildly popular among DC whites and moderately unpopular among DC blacks, but I think it’s a bit misleading to really see this as a “racial divide.” Nobody would be surprised to learn about a community where college educated people had substantially more left-wing views on gay rights than did working class people.