This question is posed, and not answered, in the podcast in which Loury, McWhorter, Steele, and Steele discuss the latter’s Michael Brown documentary.
UPDATE: transcript of the conversation
Conservatives want to blame the War on Poverty and welfare programs. This story is exemplary normative sociology–the study of what you want the cause of a problem to be. The problem is that the dissolution of black families preceded the War on Poverty.
Loury points out that the black family was stronger in 1930 than in 1960. What happened in the meantime?
My thought is that what happened was the Great Migration of blacks from the rural south to the urban north. One can imagine that this produced a cultural shock that could have weakened marriages through a number of channels.
1. Lowering the status of the black matriarch. Your rejected your grandmother’s rural ways, so she could not apply moral pressure on you to follow marital norms.
2. Greater inequality among black males, weakening marriage. The poorer males are undesirable husbands, and the richer males have leverage to disdain monogamy.
3. Communities no longer church-centric, so that there is less social pressure to follow marital norms.
4. Availability of many more opportunities to have sex outside of marriage.
Trying to tell this migration story leads me to ask why a similar drift toward family breakdown did not occur among Italians, Irish, and others when they migrated in large numbers to the U.S. Perhaps they just had the good fortune to undertake these migrations in an earlier era. People who arrived between 1880 and 1930 had a very hard life, with little time to pursue sex outside of marriage. Also, this was before Freud and others had convinced people of the need to be less repressed about sex.
You are neglecting a major factor – Margaret Sanger and her intention to make abortion widely available to that specific demographic.
Thanks for your comment. I didn’t know who she was so I read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger
Everyone should read about her.
And yet in 1965, only 24% of black children were born to single mothers. High relative to whites of that era, but if it had stayed put blacks would have a lower rate then whites today. Wouldn’t we all give our left arm to get the black illegitimacy rate back down to 24%.
P.S. The best way to test your Great Migration hypothesis is to see if the illegitimacy rate differs between the south and the north. I can’t find such data easily, but I sort of doubt we will see a strong difference based on other data I know.
Yes, agree. And, the more interesting question is how we got from 24% to 70%+.
The host can say what he wants about normative sociology, but I’m thinking that the war on poverty (in addition to other factors) added a lot of gasoline to an already out of control fire.
In any event, none of this will ever be solved, reformed or improved. It’s all navel gazing. Let’s just cut the welfare checks and move on to something else.
I suspect the simple fact that a single women can earn a subsistence wage is enough to make a lot of the men at the bottom redundant, regardless of whether it comes from welfare or low tier work. And of course we should be honest that women at the bottom aren’t exactly catches either.
You propose that “cut the welfare checks and move on” is an option we will be allowed to select. We all know it isn’t.
“cut the checks” usually means pay out the money. Which is, at least, what will keep happening.
Any politicians who want to “cut welfare” are unwelcome in both Dem and Rep parties, now.
More and better family help is possible.
My fault for being ambiguous, so sorry. Tom G interpreted me correctly. “Cut the checks” is accounting speak for hold your nose, pay it off and move on.
In an ideal world, we would tie such welfare payments to limiting reproduction. But, that’s never going to happen and it has nothing to do with skin tone. Have a nice day.
What happened to the black family is the same thing that happened to every family, especially families in the left half of the bell curve where most blacks are. Is it that much worse than the illegitimacy rate for 85 IQ whites? It didn’t seem like Fishtown families had faired that much better then the black family.
I do think it’s a bit of an accelerant if you’re part of some subgroup where illegitimacy is so common as to lose social stigma, so that’s a double whammy for blacks, but the primary problem is still that Fishtown is their median.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/18/chart-of-the-week-the-black-white-gap-in-incarceration-rates/
Excellent link, than you!
1) I’m sure that convicted felons make excellent role models and fathers. And, I’m sure that they are just itching to be involved in their kids lives. If only they were given the chance already!
2) most crime is intra-racial. If you want to understand the disparate incarceration rates, have a look at the disparate victimization rates. That pretty much explains everything.
3) the only folks that deny these facts are the silly HEEs with their motivated reasoning. They will do anything to demonstrate their anti-racist bonafides, even if doing so harms the law abiding black community.
I mean I agree that blacks appear to be naturally violent even relative to IQ, but I’m not sure that’s the primary story behind why they don’t want to be fathers.
2 words: decline of ‘shotgun marriage’ hurt blacks the most. Ironically shamed by right/white wing culture vultures.
“Recent events have shined a spotlight on police brutality and racial injustice. Americans also need to recognize and address the injustice that takes place every day in our classrooms. On national tests last year, only 18 percent of black 4th-graders scored proficient or above in reading; the figure for white 4th-graders was 45 percent. For 8th graders, the percentages were 15 and 42 percent. It’s sobering that more than half of white students fail to meet the proficiency bar. But the figures for black students should outrage anyone who cares about social justice. These dry statistics translate into greater struggles in high school, lower college attendance and graduation rates, a higher likelihood of incarceration, and generally bleaker futures. ” https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2020/06/06/how-reading-instruction-fails-black-and-brown-children/?sh=215882784ebe
“We analyze how exposure to teacher collective bargaining affects long-run outcomes for students, exploiting the timing of state duty-to-bargain law passage in a cross-cohort difference-in-difference framework. Among men, exposure to a duty-to-bargain law in the first 10 years after passage depresses annual earnings by $2,134 (3.93 percent), decreases weekly hours worked by 0.42, and reduces employment and labor force participation. The earnings estimate implies that current duty-to-bargain laws reduce earnings by $213.8 billion annually. Effects grow with time since law passage, are largest among nonwhites, and are not evident for women. Duty-to-bargain laws reduce male noncognitive skills, supporting the labor market findings.”
Lovenheim, Michael F., and Alexander Willén. 2019. “The Long-Run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 11 (3): 292-324.
The Great Migration improved life for Black families. Per Wikipedia:
“Between 1940 and 1960, the number of blacks in managerial and administrative occupations doubled, along with the number of blacks in white-collar occupations, while the number of black agricultural workers in 1960 fell to one-fourth of what it was in 1940.[34] Also, between 1936 and 1959, black income relative to white income more than doubled in various skilled trades.[35] Despite employment discrimination, blacks had higher labor force participation rates than whites in every U.S. Census from 1890 to 1950.[36] As a result of these advancements, the percentage of black families living below the poverty line declined from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960 and to 30 percent by 1970.”
But in 1959 Wisconsin became the first state to pass a collective bargaining law for public employees. Union membership among public school teachers increased across the country as more states passed similar laws. And the quality of schooling, particularly in urban areas, declined, and with them levels of reading mastery. The seeds of the Black family issue were planted by public sector unions and the War on Poverty only fed a malignant tumor. If Black lives really mattered this is where reform efforts would be focused.
There was a brief period during the immigration lull and the high water mark for industrialization when factory owners in northern cities could make a lot of money off encouraging The Great Migration. You could say that it was the heyday for mediocre IQ individuals with US citizenship.
As soon as robots, Mexicans, and East Asian trade replaced blacks they turned out to be a terrible long term investment for northern cities. Baltimore, Detroit, and so many other places used to be world class before the Great Migration. Now they are ruin porn.
Dead on.
In 1960 the major city with the world’s highest per capita incomes was Detroit.
Most people have mediocre IQs, that is the near definition of mediocre.
Freud did not “convince people of the need to be less repressed about sex.” He thought repression was a necessary phenomenon of human psychology and would never go away.
The anti-repression stuff came from others later.
No effect from AFDC – paying women for having children provided no man was in the house? Hard to believe. Non-marital births in Sweden seemed to result from the same thing.
Relevant excerpts from Erol Ricketts, “The origin of black female-headed families”:
https://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc121e.pdf
“The data show, contrary to widely held beliefs, that through 1960, rates of marriage for both black and white women were lowest at the end of the 1800s and peaked in 1950 for blacks and 1960 for whites. Furthermore it is dramatically clear that black females married at higher rates than white females of native parentage until 1950. [… .] Interestingly, the data show that rates of black female-headed families declined to their lowest level in 1950, only to rise sharply thereafter. [… .] the proportion of black women who were ever married in 1960 stood at its second highest level since 1890, and it was considerably higher in 1960 than it had been in 1940 (Figure 1). The proportion of black female-headed families was also lower in 1960 than in 1940, and the proportion of urban black female-headed families in 1960 was lower than it had been in both 1930 and 1940. [… .] It is clear from the data that 1950 is a watershed year for black families; thereafter black female-headed families grow rapidly and blacks become more urbanized than whites. [… .] What is strikingly different in 1950 is that blacks overtake whites in their level of urbanization. After 1950, blacks become more urbanized than whites, and they continue to urbanize. Whites de-urbanized after 1970. Blacks moved to the cities after World War 11, en masse. And it is after this move that severe family-formation problems began to emerge. The data suggest that the clues to recent family formation problems among blacks are to be found in the circumstances of black urbanization after 1950.”
There are two mistakes of scope here.
One it to make the scope too large. The federal-level war on poverty began later, but state and local programs in more progressive places were a few years ahead of the curve, in much the same way that many disastrous ‘Warren Court’-like legal reforms in criminal law took place in progressive states years before there was a Warren Court to nationalize the policies.
In particular family law is strictly state-based, and underwent a (de facto) rapid, radical, and effectively nationalized change in most states in the early 50’s. Even ‘no-fault divorce’ laws were only making official what the family court judges had already been doing in some places since the 50’s. A kind of famous example of this in Family Law is that Oklahoma was about the only state to actually write the true policy into black letter law in 1953, but most states jumped on the bandwagon as a pack in the early 70’s. (The speed of the change at that time, at the mid 20’s point in the just-recently-electorate-dominating baby boomer life-cycle when many started to want divorces for the obvious reasons, was probably even greater and faster that the speed about the change in public sentiment and laws regarding sexual orientation).
The opposite mistake in scope is to go too small, to restrict to merely black Americans. But the family has deteriorated in lots of places and for lots of population groups, pointing to causes that are widespread in their economic, legal, and cultural impact. The large majority of baby boomers spent their childhoods raised by their married biological parents. In America that is true for slightly fewer than half of their grandchildren, with major drops for every group, and in some communities, it is true for hardly any young men or women at all. So you should ask instead, “What happened to the nuclear family in general” in the ‘WEIRD’ countries.
Echoing inside my head is something I once heard a woman say, “I can handle having a child but I can’t handle having a husband.”
Once upon a time, for most people a gender-specialized match was an economic necessity. The man needed a wife for cooking, cleaning, washing, etc. and a woman needed a man for cash. Those days are gone.
Most women don’t need men for cash to have children only thanks to massive redistribution programs, both legal and social-pressure kind. A good clean example is Sweden, where most women work in household-substitution jobs: preschool and elementary school teachers, childcare workers, personal assistants, care workers, local government workers etc. All this is paid out of taxes, and while nominally all these women pay taxes too it’s obviously impossible to have an economy with just teachers and childcare workers paying for each others’ services.
You bring up an interesting point. How many of women’s cash-providing jobs are “household substitution”, jobs that wouldn’t exist if most families had two parents and one paying job? Certainly most child care workers and most pre-K teachers (not all; for stay-at-home moms, a few mornings a week of “pre-kindergarten” is respite care). But I think many of the other jobs you mention would exist anyway.
A full-time nanny costs about $36-38,000/yr ($18-19/hr, 40hrs/wk, 50wks/yr).
The median American woman’s income is $45,000/yr, with an average income tax between 16-21% depending on what state you live in. Which comes out to…between $36,340 and $38,640.
lol
Why do black men do worse on IQ tests relative to black women? I would start there. I first came across this fact in a piece by Thomas Sowell: “Studies had shown that females predominated among high-IQ blacks. One study of blacks whose IQs were 140 and up found that there were more than five times as many females as males at these levels” (quote from https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2002/10/01/race-and-iq-n1000028). Those numbers sound quite extraordinary. Among whites, the standard of deviation in IQ is higher among males than females, and they have about the same average. Black males do not have a higher standard of deviation than black females. How much lower is the average IQ of black men compared to black women? Steve Sailer, using data provided by Charles Murray from the military’s AFQT, says about 2.4 points, compared to 0.8 points among whites (see https://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/12/do-black-women-have-higher-iqs-than.html).
If women are hypergamous, then even a small difference in average abilities will have a big effect. A smaller number of marriageable men relative to women means men have more mating options than women, and this leads to a bad outcome: fewer men than women leads to women being more promiscuous and less picky. Marriage and stable relationships become less common.
The same dynamic happens when a lot of black men end up in prison. But mass incarceration did not happen between 1930 and 1960. I also still do not understand why black men became so much more prone to commit violent crime between 1955 and 1975–the fact that in my opinion lead to mass incarceration, contra what you hear from the Left…
Sweden has indeed seen a major increase in out-of-wedlock childbirth, thanks to its welfare state.
But to my knowledge (which is sketchy), Sweden has seen no increase in violence and no decline in school performance.
Kind of like Austria, where many families live in public housing but there is no increase in crime that I know of.
There is a missing link in here somewhere. I am not skilled enough to find it. I do suspect that the oft-reviled Charles Murray and the oft-ignored Thomas Sowell will have the most answers.
Seems like Sweden has seen a general increase in crime, at least since the mid-1970s. I’m not going to speculate on the cause, and (aside from being worse than other Scandinavian countries) I’m not sure how it compares.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden
Isn’t Charles Murray’s Losing Ground the definitive analysis of this issue from a conservative/libertarian perspective? I read it thirty years ago, but I believe Murray identified AFDC as the primary incentive for the breakdown of family structures for poor people, both black and white. AFDC started in 1935 to support families where fathers were “deceased, absent, or unable to work.” Many states enacted so called “man-in-the-house” rules, which disqualified families if there was any adult male present in the household. So the timing is right to support Loury’s point that the black family was stronger in 1930 than in 1960.
There are very different questions involved here.
1. What explains the average difference between blacks and other groups on a number of socio-cultural measures?
2. What explains the change in black family behavior since the 1930s?
It is always assumed that the second is the primary question. But to the extent cultural norms and inherited trains primarily explain the first, we have a confusion of methodologies.
Finally, I suppose the more important question is
3. What reasonably plausible social or governmental interventions would put the black family back on the road they supposedly deviated from after WW2? If the answers are too expensive, too unpersuasive to the cultural elite, or require too severe enforcement, you might as well be talking about lightspeed travel.
Charles Murray proposed that all aid to unwed mothers would cease, except for Medicaid so that children’s health is preserved.
Food stamps, Section 8 vouchers, utility bill help, and all cash grants would cease.
Murray felt that this would change incentives about marriage quite quickly.
If mothers were literally going hungry after this, Murray implied that private charity would step in.
What Murray did not account for was what would be the reaction of the men who rely on these women. These men are in general not shy about violence.
Murray may have curled up in his easy chair in a rich suburb of Virginia, and fantasized about a civil war where the ex-welfare recipients stormed city hall and were turned back, thereupon swearing to clean up their act and go back to school.
However — As pointed out above, no American politician would take this risk. In fact when Mayor Jacob Frey was facing a mob of protestors last May in Minneapolis, he had a choice between ordering the police to shoot back or ordering the police to evacuate. Not much question what he was going to do.
It’s not that hard to feed oneself in the current environment. Even people living on a few dollars a day in Africa manage it. Many of the poor in America even do work some kind of menial job, we already did welfare reform based on Murray in the Bill Clinton era.
The big ticket items for the poor have always their free healthcare, free education, etc. For instance, according to this heritage report 60% or so of welfare is healthcare alone. Cash aid is one 16.4%. Notably absent from this report is the money spent on public education which the poor defiantly don’t cover with their own taxes.
https://www.heritage.org/welfare/report/understanding-the-hidden-11-trillion-welfare-system-and-how-reform-it
If you’re going to leave that stuff in place, there is no welfare reform really.
You could double cash welfare and still save a ton…if you fired all of the nurses, school teachers, and social workers who draw their livelihood from servicing the poor on the government dime. Now that would cause a riot.
Poor old Jerry Pournelle. At least he no longer has to watch how fast the situation is deteriorating.