All the stuff I’ve seen says morale is much higher in an all-volunteer force.

Still, as interesting as this discussion is, it is indeed thread drift, so let’s stay on marriage here.

Uhh, no.
http://johntreed.com/militarydraft.html

The current system is classist, racist, and also inefficient, because it tends to attract recruits who have no other options.

Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader were among many rich, white draftees.

(Humorously, the Army saw Nader’s Harvard Law degree and appointed him a cook).

You’re right that we don’t have the access, expertise, and time (at least in my case) to pour over the statistics in the depth needed to make solid cases for our two sides. However, I think the data we have traded are perfectly clear on one point: AFDC, WIC, Medicaid, housing assistance, Head Start, and similar programmes are effective in reducing poverty rates to historically low levels and keeping them there. If you’re right, and they do this despite the poverty-creating effects of `single parent homes’ — though I note that you still have absolutely no evidence to support this causal hypothesis — then this makes them still more impressive. It does not show that they have failed in any way.

Finally, you speculated another causal connection, between welfare programmes and `single parent homes’. Here are statistics refuting that connection:
* Between 1969 and 1992, the average AFDC family size went from 4.0 to 2.9 persons;
* In 1992, the average yearly AFDC family payment was $4,572, and food stamps for a family of three averaged $2,469, for a total of $7,041. In that year, the poverty level for a mother with two children was $11,186. Thus, these two programs paid only 63 percent of the poverty level, and 74 percent of a minimum wage job. Also, I believe this link notes that the aid increased $90 for each additional child, which is hardly a compelling economic incentive.
* Mississippi has the second highest rate of children born out of wedlock in the country. It also has the lowest welfare and food stamp benefits for AFDC mothers in the country. This correlation generally holds across the nation as well — states with higher-than-average AFDC benefits tend to have lower-than-average nonmarital birthrates.

Not only is there a negative incentive to have children while on AFDC/TANF, there is also a negative correlation between the size of AFDC/TANF assistance and the rate of `single parent homes’.

As you pointed out, the poverty rate has been essentially flat for 40 years. It has remained constant despite the significant increase in single parent households, which are much more likely to be in poverty. Assuming that the number of single family households remained constant for the last 40 years, ceterus perebus, would the poverty rate have decreased over this period of time? Could the increases that should have materialized from the significant social investment in fighting poverty have been offset by the increase in single parent households?

I think the analysis is more complicated than this since both the marriage rate and the constituents of the “war on poverty”–welfare in particular, are not independent variables. Any program that will pay you and your children more than minimum wage, yet still just at the poverty rate, as long as you do not work and do not get married to a working spouse is going to rationally discourage both work and marriage among a certain group of people.

Personally I think that, like the war on drugs, the trillions of dollars invested in the “war on poverty” to achieve flat results is nothing to crow about. It hardly makes the case that more of this type of investment is needed, since clearly it did not achieve the desired results after 4 decades.

The reliable statistics you quote — the ones from the US Census, the same source I quoted above — only show that there is a correlation today between poverty and `single parent homes’. I never denied this. What I’m calling suspect is the causal connection you want to claim between poverty and `single parent homes’. This causal connection is suspect because, over the past forty years, as the percentage of children in `single parent homes’ has more than doubled, the childhood poverty rate has stayed within a very narrow range. If there were a causal connection, then, all other things being equal, we would see a historical or long-term correlation between the poverty and `single parent home’ rates. This historical correlation does not appear to exist.

On the other hand, we do see a historical correlation between the poverty rate and the `big government’ social welfare programmes that were implemented under FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson — for example, in the dramatic and thus-far-permanent drop in the poverty rate between 1959 and 1965 (see the PDF graph I linked to a few comments back). These policies were specifically designed to counteract or eliminate classist features of our political and economic system, did (as far as I know) little or nothing to encourage biological parents to raise their children together, and there is statistical evidence indicating that they have been at least somewhat successful.

I would argue that both the vicious and lazy statements are biased. When treated as a foregone conclusion regarding a group of people, this represents a bias. Racism is a form of bias in which one assumes negative traits about a broad swath of people on the basis of one factor.

Just like many of the impoverished are in their situations due to circumstances other than laziness (youth being the biggest factor, and this lack of experience and/or marketable skills), so it could be argued that many of the wealthy achieved this state through traits other than viciousness–hard work, dedication, good luck, lucky sperm, whatever.

The statement is biased if not racist, but certainly founded in the same type of irrational calculus that drives racism. It simplifies a complex set of circumstances for a group and can thus be used to justify a variety of positions against the group that is, in this case, obviously vicious.

Your statistics do not provide any evidence against the “purported effect” of children born into single parent households, since it addresses only poverty and single parent households independently (which have, by your statistics, increased 141% over the period of time). Dig deeper into the correlation between poverty and marriage, and it confirms my “purported effect”:

From http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5056

For the most part, long-term poverty today is self-inflicted. To see this, let’s examine some numbers from the Census Bureau’s 2004 Current Population Survey. There’s one segment of the black population that suffers only a 9.9 percent poverty rate, and only 13.7 percent of their under-5-year-olds are poor. There’s another segment of the black population that suffers a 39.5 percent poverty rate, and 58.1 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor.

Among whites, one population segment suffers a 6 percent poverty rate, and only 9.9 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor. Another segment of the white population suffers a 26.4 percent poverty rate, and 52 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor.

What do you think distinguishes the high and low poverty populations? The only statistical distinction between both the black and white populations is marriage. There is far less poverty in married-couple families, where presumably at least one of the spouses is employed. Fully 85 percent of black children living in poverty reside in a female-headed household.

Whether marriage actually keeps people out of poverty or the traits that lead to getting and staying married help keep people out of poverty, the statistics indicate an undeniable correlation. Is this the case with everyone? In this case, I would not jump to an instant conclusion for all couples since I don’t think that marriage is a panacea for all people any more than I think that all rich are vicious or all poor are lazy. But to claim that there is nothing to the marriage argument in light of these statistics seems to be quite a stretch.

The statement you offer isn’t an exact parallel to mine. One exact parallel would be `I take it as obvious that the Black members of our society are among the most violent, and achieved their Blackness by violent acts.’ This is clearly ridiculous. Another would be `I take it as obvious that the most violent members of our society are Black, and are that violent because they are Black.’ This is racist because it’s asserting that being Black causes or leads to violent behaviour — that a propensity for violence is a feature of a certain race.

By contrast, I asserted that being vicious caused or lead to the wealth and financial success of the wealthiest people in our society. The causal link is running in the opposite direction, from the behaviour to the demographic, and I am not claiming to have identified any intrinsic trait. Rather, I am claiming that certain behaviours — in particular, certain vicious behaviours — are rewarded in our society. So I don’t think this statement is classist after all.

And your comment doesn’t really respond to the point I was making, that the virtues are not correlated with wealth and financial success in our society, and there is therefore a gap in your line of thought from marriage to economic success or stability.

Can someone please explain to me how such a sweeping indictment of the character of a group of people is not a racist comment.

What if I said “I take it as obvious that, since the percentage of violent crimes in this country is highest among a certain ethnic group (http://www.nc-f.org/findings.htm), that group constitutes the most vicious members of our society”. Would you think that to be a racist comment?

Is is conceivable that taking as a given that a certain strata of society exhibits such a deep, consistent and evil character flaw may lead to bias in your subsequent analysis?

I would not argue that our political and economic system has become significantly more unjust over the last 40 years. I would argue that our political and economic system has not changed much over the last 40 years, at least with respect to factors that are relevant to the poverty rate. This is consistent with the way the statistics suggest not much has changed with respect to poverty and child poverty.

By contrast, you claim that `single parent homes’ have a causal effect, and yet the purported effect does not seem to exist.

Statistics from the US census:

Women are several percentage points more likely than men to live beneath the poverty line.

Black and Hispanic people are more than twice as likely as Non-Hispanic and Asian people to live beneath the poverty line.

Non-citizen immigrants are roughly twice as likely as citizens to live beneath the poverty line.

And families headed by unmarried women are more than twice as likely as families headed by unmarried men, and more than five times as likely as families headed by married couples, to live beneath the poverty line.

This table is missing one crucial factor: growing up under the poverty line. This, as I recall, is even more strongly correlated with living in poverty as an adult.

Also, according to this graph (PDF), the poverty rate has remained between 10% and about 16% since 1965. Now, according to the tables available here, the percentage of children `living with one parent’ only has risen from 11.8% in 1968 to 28.4% in 2006. However, according to this table, the percentage of children living below the poverty line was in the mid-teens in the 1960s, rose to the low twenties in the 1980s, and is currently back in the mid-teens. Today, the poverty rate and percentage of children below the poverty line are in roughly the same place they were 40 years ago.

That is, the poverty rate and percentage of children living below the poverty line have moved together (which should not be a surprise) within a relatively narrow range over the period of time for which the percentage of children being raised in `single family homes’ has more than doubled.

I would not argue that our political and economic system has become significantly more unjust over the last 40 years. I would argue that our political and economic system today has not changed much over the last 40 years, at least with respect to factors that might are relevant to the poverty rate. This is consistent with the way the statistics suggest not much has changed with respect to poverty and child poverty.

By contrast, you claim that `single parent homes’ have a causal effect, and yet the purported effect does not seem to exist.