A striking passage from Christopher Jencks’ foreword to Edin and Lein’s Making Ends Meet:
Some conservatives oppose all efforts to help single mothers balance their budgets, even when the mother works. They argue that making life easier for single mothers will just make them more numerous. For those who see single mothers as a major cause of the nation’s social problems, cutting their numbers is even more important than reducing material hardship.
Although liberals scoff publicly at these arguments, few really doubt that changing the economic consequences of single motherhood can affect its frequency. Imagine a society in which unmarried women knew that if they had a baby out of wedlock their family would turn them out, the father would never contribute to the baby’s support, the government would give them no help, and no employer would hire them. Hardly anyone, liberal or conservative, doubts that unwed motherhood would be rarer in such a society than it is in the United States today.
In a partially overlapping article, Jencks adds:
Those who want to discourage unwed motherhood could not create such a world, even if they wanted to. They cannot prevent parents from helping out daughters who become single mothers, keep employers from hiring such women, or stop men from marrying them. They can mount “just say no” campaigns to discourage unwed motherhood, but there is not much evidence that these campaigns help. Legislators who want to discourage single motherhood therefore tend to focus on the one policy lever they really control: government assistance for single mothers and their children.
Jencks then reviews the evidence on the effect of government assistance on single motherhood, finding little sign that variations within the observed range matter. But he also notes that the observed range is narrow. So per the logic of his first passage, why shouldn’t the intelligent conservative conclude, “Then we need to double down and really cut welfare spending”?
Meta-point: If the effect of X on Y is small, you can draw two drastically different conclusions. You can either say:
“What we do won’t matter much, so let’s not try.”
OR
“To really make a difference, we have to try a lot harder.”
People usually “resolve” this dilemma with wishful thinking: surrender when you barely care, “Charge!” when you do. The wise reaction, however, is to ponder the value of the goal and the cost of past efforts. If the goal is crucial and past efforts have been weak, trying ten times harder is a reasonable response. If the goal is of dubious value and past efforts have been energetic, trying ten times harder is crazy. For example, I would prudentially advise the typical lazy college student to literally work ten times harder, because the payoff of college graduation is huge, and their current level of effort is so trivial. By the reverse logic, however, I favor abolishing foreign language requirements, because even fluency (a pipe dream!) provides trivial benefits for most people, and the typical high school already requires 2 or 3 years of study.
READER COMMENTS
Hazel Meade
Jul 2 2019 at 5:22pm
I’m inclined to question the morality of a policy that is based on making the lives of people who are already in an undesirable situation worse in order to discourage people from getting into that situation. This is like saying “Let’s make Naxalone unavailable, because if people have a higher risk of dying of an overdose, they’re less likely to use opiates”.
In the case of single motherhood this is even worse, because those policies won’t just affect the single mother, but the children she is raising.
I suspect that in order to significantly affect the marriage rate of single mothers, you’d have to make things so bad that you would basically be traumatizing the kids as well. I.e. having society label them bastards and ostracize them. Making them so poor that the mother has to watch them suffer from malnutrition. You basically have to wind up sacrificing a percentage of kids to serve as a warning to women not to get pregnant before marriage.
Similarly, let’s take the situation at the border for example – i.e. let’s make prospective asylum seekers suffer so much that they are discouraged from coming here. Well, how bad does it have to get to accomplish that goal, and is that level of badness morally conscionable? I.e. Do yo have to let kids die in disease infested camps to serve as a warning to others not to migrate ?
Billy Kaubashine
Jul 3 2019 at 12:03pm
If there ever were an issue that was “NONE OF GOVERNMENT’S BUSINESS” it is unwed motherhood. With easy availability of contraception and the right to early stage abortion, unwed motherhood is the choice of the mother, and she should bear responsibilty for her choice.
Government should neither facilitate or complicate unwed motherhood. It should abstain.
Miguel Madeira
Jul 4 2019 at 9:57am
unwed motherhood is the choice of the mother
But “unwed sonhooh/daughterhood” is not the choice of son/daughter.
Billy Kaubashine
Jul 4 2019 at 11:04am
I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective.
Given the statistics (and the probabilities) I suppose some might make the argument that unwed son-hood/daughter-hood is a form of child endangerment. Still not sure it’s any of government’s business.
Phil H
Jul 5 2019 at 3:13am
While I guess this is right, I question the utility of the advice for the vast majority of students. I’ve never met a student who could actually improve his grade *only* by increasing his effort – every time, there is some hidden lack of knowledge or understanding that is holding the student back. Usually trivially easy to solve, of course, but it’s not just effort.
Comments are closed.