If you live in the First World, there is a simple and highly effective formula for avoiding poverty:
1. Finish high school.
2. Get a full-time job once you finish school.
3. Get married before you have children.
Researchers call this formula the “success sequence.” Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill got the ball rolling with their book Creating an Opportunity Society, calling for a change in social norms to “bring back the success sequence as the expected path for young Americans.” The highest-quality research on this success sequence to date probably comes from Wendy Wang and Brad Wilcox. In their Millennial Success Sequence, they observe:
97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the “success sequence”—that is, who get at least a high school degree, work, and then marry before having any children, in that order—are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years (ages 28-34).
One common criticism is that full-time work does almost all the work of the success sequence. Even if you drop out of high school and have five kids with five different partners, you’ll probably avoid poverty as long as you work full-time. Wilcox and Wang disagree:
…This analysis is especially relevant since some critics of the success sequence have argued that marriage does not matter once education and work status are controlled.
The regression results indicate that after controlling for a range of background factors, the order of marriage and parenthood in Millennials’ lives is significantly associated with their financial well-being in the prime of young adulthood. Simply put, compared with the path of having a baby first, marrying before children more than doubles young adults’ odds of being in the middle or top income. Meanwhile, putting marriage first reduces the odds of young adults being in poverty by 60% (vs. having a baby first).
But even if the “work does all the work” criticism were statistically true, it misses the point: Single parenthood makes it very hard to work full-time.
A more agnostic criticism doubts causation. Sure, poverty correlates with failure to follow the success sequence. How, though, do we know that the so-called success sequence actually causes success? It’s not like we run experiments where we randomly assign lifestyles to people. The best answer to this challenge, frankly, is that causation is obvious. “Dropping out of school, idleness, and single parenthood make you poor” is on par with “burning money makes you poor.” The demand for further proof of the obvious is a thinly-veiled veto of unpalatable truths.
A very different criticism, however, challenges the perceived moral premise behind the success sequence. What is this alleged moral premise? Something along the lines of: “Since people can reliably escape poverty with moderately responsible behavior, the poor are largely to blame for their own poverty, and society is not obliged to help them.” Or perhaps simply, “The success sequence shifts much of the moral blame for poverty from broad social forces to individual behavior.” While hardly anyone explicitly uses the success sequence to argue that we underrate the blameworthiness of the poor for their own troubles, critics still hear this argument loud and clear – and vociferously object.
Thus, Eve Tushnet writes:
To me, the success sequence is an example of what Helen Andrews dubbed “bloodless moralism”…
All bloodless moralisms conflate material success and virtue, presenting present successful people as moral exemplars. And this, like “it’s better to have a diploma than a GED,” is something virtually every poor American already believes: that escaping poverty proves your virtue and remaining poor is shameful.
Brian Alexander similarly remarks:
The appeal of the success sequence, then, appears to be about more than whether it’s a good idea. In a society where so much of one’s prospects are determined by birth, it makes sense that narratives pushing individual responsibility—narratives that convince the well-off that they deserve what they have—take hold.
Cato’s Michael Tanner says much the same:
The success sequence also ignores the circumstances in which the poor make choices. Our choices result from a complex process that is influenced at each step by a variety of outside factors. We are not perfectly rational actors, carefully weighing the likely outcomes for each choice. In particular, progressives are correct to point to the impact of racism, gender-based discrimination, and economic dislocation on the decisions that the poor make in their lives. Focusing on the choices and not the underlying conditions is akin to a doctor treating only the visible symptoms without dealing with the underlying disease.
Strikingly, the leading researchers of the success sequence seem to agree with the critics! Wang and Wilcox:
We do not take the view that the success sequence is simply a “pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps” strategy that individuals adopt on their own. Rather, for many, the “success sequence” does not exist in a cultural vacuum; it’s inculcated by an interlocking cultural array of ideals, norms, expectations, and knowledge.*
This is a strange state of affairs. Everyone – even the original researchers – insists that the success sequence sheds little or no light on who to blame for poverty. And since I’m writing a book called Poverty: Who To Blame, I beg to differ…
* To be fair, Wang and Wilcox also tell us: “But it’s not just about natural endowments, social structure, and culture; agency also matters. Most men and women have the capacity to make choices, to embrace virtues or avoid vices, and to otherwise take steps that increase or decrease their odds of doing well in school, finding and keeping a job, or deciding when to marry and have children.”
[to be continued]
READER COMMENTS
BC
Feb 22 2021 at 11:39am
Re: causality of success sequence. It’s not completely obvious that having children before marriage is not indicative of poor decision making more generally, which would mean that the success sequence is not strictly causal. One could force poor decision makers to get married before having children but other poor decisions could still keep them in poverty. Even burning money, if people were actually doing it, could be associated with poorness through selection effect rather than causality. After all, don’t many (most?) lottery winners end up poor? Winning a lottery is an instantaneous positive shock to wealth that doesn’t necessarily persist due to selection effect, so a similar selection effect could apply to burning money, notwithstanding the instantaneous negative shock to wealth.
Having said all that, many people that question causality of the success sequence seem to simultaneously hold the opposite view when the context is subsidized childcare or abortion. They might readily agree that single parenthood is indeed a barrier to economic success when the context is childcare subsidies for those single parents. Similarly, when the context is whether limiting abortion access would have an outsize negative impact on the economic prospects of would-be single mothers.
JFA
Feb 22 2021 at 12:26pm
I think you and Caplan are mostly in agreement, in that poverty is avoidable if people make good decisions that do not obviously impose an undue burden on them, i.e. finishing high school is not that hard, getting a full-time job is not that hard, using birth control is not that hard. Is it more difficult for some than others? Absolutely, but if the burden of reducing your chance of being poor is so low, then Bryan’s conclusion is that you are to blame if you are poor. I’d broadly agree with that, but I think it can be significantly more nuanced than Bryan would ever admit.
David Henderson
Feb 22 2021 at 12:31pm
You write:
Excellent point, well stated.
robc
Feb 22 2021 at 2:09pm
But isn’t the opposition to subsidized childcare or abortion primarily deontological?
drobviousso
Feb 22 2021 at 1:33pm
I’m not a social conservative, but I can’t help but notice that they keep getting their points backed up for them by social science. And its not like the social scientists are all socons. The last quote makes me thing that Wang and Wilcox are admitting their results are admissions against interest.
Floccina
Feb 22 2021 at 2:03pm
How cheap could a person possibly live if they were in a group of people with good character the kind of people you do not mind living very close to? If there were demand from people who try hard to pay their rent on time and keep the property up, how low could the rent be for very small simple apartments? You can buy food for a about $3/day per person. $3 a day for electricity seems doable. The PPACA makes health insurance affordable. Schooling is paid for by the tax payers.
john hare
Feb 23 2021 at 4:19am
As a theoretical exercise you might consider six couples in a three bedroom house. “Hot bunking” as on WW2 submarines with two couples time sharing each bedroom. One set working day shifts and one working nights. Twelve people all at entry level wages would bring in $4k per week or $16k per month which should make almost anywhere affordable. In reality, get serious as there is almost no way this would work for very long. But still an interesting thought experiment to see how far toward normal one couple one house it would take before becoming workable.
In the real world, my fiancé and I are building cheap and small on a lot that has problems for normal construction. Looking at $50k debt moving in. But I do concrete work and design with a business partner that is a general contractor. You would be amazed at the good things wealthy people get rid of during a remodel. The double front door with glass side panels we are going to use came from pre-dumpster salvage.
River (Frank) Bellamy
Feb 22 2021 at 3:01pm
I’m curious why you think marriage plays into this. I think the legal institution of marriage as it exists now is bad social policy, and the expectation of monogomy is at least not ideal for me. But I do think that raising kids goes much better when there are multiple adults sharing the financial, logistical, and emotional burdens involved. Do you think marriage is just an easy-to-measure proxy for having multiple adults firmly committed to parenting, or do you think marriage interacts with poverty in some other way? Would you expect unmarried adults who do firmly commit to coparenting to look like married or unmarried parents in terms of likelihood of being poor?
Dylan
Feb 22 2021 at 3:08pm
I recently reconnected with a childhood friend that I hadn’t spoken to for a couple of decades. She was adopted as an infant into a poor family. When I knew her, she was the kind of girl that everyone thought was going far. Smart, incredibly studious, funny, delightful to be around, and talented in multiple ways. Got a good scholarship to a decent, if not brand name, liberal arts college. Didn’t date at all during school, because she was too focused on getting good grades. After graduation, met a guy, started dating, got married a couple of years later and then had 2 kids. She doesn’t live in absolute poverty by any means, but certainly appears to be lower middle class.
It was kind of shocking to me at first, but then I thought back to a bunch of friends of mine from high school and earlier, and was amazed at how many similar stories I have in my friend group. Almost every friend I had that was lower middle class when they were a kid, are still that way now, even though every single one followed the success sequence and exceeded those basics.
The friends from wealthier backgrounds were by and large a lot less responsible. More drug use, less studying, poorer grades, more dropping out of college. Yet, they all seem to have landed upper-middle class or better lifestyles. Of my friends that are wealthier and have children today, it is much less common for them to be married.
I know that is all anecdotal, but it still remains a hard thing for me to shake.
alvinccente
Feb 22 2021 at 4:48pm
Replying to Dylan – My experience is in some respects different than yours. I agree that the kids that grew up in upper-middle class homes themselves stayed in the upper middle class. However, all the ones I know with kids had them while married and in most cases are still married. My understanding is that the upper middle class is more likely to be and stay married statistically than those lower economically.
As far as your lower-middle class acquaintances, I think the idea of the success sequence is that it avoids poverty, not that it guarantees wealth. In the words of Kipling: “Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.”
Dylan
Feb 23 2021 at 6:28am
My sample is obviously skewed. Many of the couples I know with children live in northern Europe, where cohabitation with children is relatively more common than in the U.S. For a long time, most of the couples I knew in the U.S. did not have children at all, but that seems to be changing as they move into their late 30s and early 40s. Most of the ones in the U.S. are married before having children. Haven’t noticed much of a correlation between the materially successful ones and the less successful in that regard.
I realize the success sequence doesn’t say anything about becoming wealthy, and I’m not using my acquaintances to push back on that per se, more just that my experience causes me to question the link between the qualities Brian mentions and material success. If anything, the self-selection aspect of my friends should be heavily biased towards success. Even though they came from lower income backgrounds, they went to a good public school in a mostly wealthy area. I mostly met them in honors classes or extra curricular activities. And, I tended to not be friends with people that weren’t responsible and hard working. Yet, the only friend I can think of that came from a less well-off background that has done pretty well for himself, is the one that flunked out of college in his freshman year.
alvincente
Feb 23 2021 at 1:40pm
Dylan – I think you are raising very interesting issues, but not exactly the ones Bryan raised in his post. What is the relationship between the class one is raised in and the class one winds up in? In the case of people Bryan is discussing, they are perhaps raised in a world antagonistic to education, marriage, and full-time employment, so winding up in poverty is in a strange way, their comfort zone (perhaps. . . ). In the case of your lower middle class friends, it could also be that the habits and lifestyle of that class are ingrained and they naturally gravitated towards that class, as, again, their comfort zone. (All this of course mere speculation.)
Mark
Feb 22 2021 at 4:11pm
This argument feels kind of quaint because these days, the big controversies are about big universal social programs like Medicare For All and Universal Basic Income, not poverty relief. I think most people today accept (even if they won’t openly admit) that it’s easy not to be poor in America so the poor don’t deserve a lot of special aid, but it still requires a lot of luck to be rich so the rich should be taxed to fund universal social programs. To persuade people to be against redistribution, there needs to be a “success sequence” for becoming a millionaire that’s more compelling than cutting avocado toasts.
robc
Feb 22 2021 at 4:29pm
It is a bit out of date, I first read it in the 90s. But that just makes it even easier.
https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Americas/dp/1589795474/
John Alcorn
Feb 22 2021 at 4:29pm
Does the best research about ‘the success sequence’ carefully check selection effects (e.g., personality; see BC’s comment above)?
One-size-fits-all high school might be ‘the failure sequence’ for a subset of students who don’t fit mold. Radical vouchers for human-capital formation, valid for mentorships, internships, apprenticeships, training programs, etc., as alternatives to high school, might make a dent in poor decision-making in adolescence.
Philo
Feb 22 2021 at 8:02pm
The Success Sequence is not, in itself, one of the “narratives that convince the well-off that they deserve what they have,” as Brian Alexander alleges. It applies to the badly-off/poor, not (directly) to the well-off/rich, suggesting that the vast majority of the poor deserve what they (don’t) have. It does relieve the well-off of the alleged duty to support the poor, but that does not show that the former deserve what they have: some or all of them might be undeserving for some other reason.
Philo
Feb 22 2021 at 8:08pm
Obviously, all of us, including poor young people, make choices in a social context. Our generous welfare programs are an important part of that context, encouraging poor young people to make bad choices. A small but palpable part of the responsibility for their poverty must fall on those who support these programs.
Tom DeMeo
Feb 23 2021 at 3:07pm
“How, though, do we know that the so-called success sequence actually causes success?”
I’d put it differently. I think you are just identifying a sequence of important personal successes, then claiming it is necessary for achieving success.
I see nothing to take from this. Should we make it easier to achieve these successes? Could that impact how nourishing they are, like you might see if you admitted a struggling student to a top university?
Come back when you’ve got some good insights about what to do with this.
Simon
Feb 23 2021 at 3:54pm
Tried this but got stuck on the second step. Any additional hints?
Joel Pollen
Mar 1 2021 at 1:04pm
You mean you are literally unable to get a full time job? That is hard to believe, unless you have:
(A) a significant criminal history
(B) a serious physical disability, or
(C) some severe character flaw that is apparent to anyone conducting a job interview.
If (A), then I’ll admit that the success sequence may not work for you, at least not right away.
If (B), likewise, but there are probably other ways for you to avoid poverty (public and private aid programs, getting help from extended family, certain employers that work with seriously disabled people, etc.)
If (C), then again, the success sequence alone won’t work for you, but at least we can agree that the problem is not something exogenous to you, like an oppressive society or unfair laws.
I think that the phrase “get a full-time job” as it appears in the success sequence has a different, and more literal, meaning than what many people mean when they say “I can’t find a full-time job.” If you’re saying that, I’m guessing you mean either “I can’t find a full-time job that isn’t repellent to me in some way,” or “I’m applying to jobs in a specific field that I am interested in and/or theoretically qualified for, and I have not been offered one.” While this is a real problem to have, it’s not what the success sequence is talking about. It’s obviously nice to have a job as a statistician if you have degree(s) in statistics, but you can probably still avoid poverty by working full-time at Lowe’s or a Wal-Mart distribution center.
Kailer
Feb 24 2021 at 12:21pm
There is a difference between being to blame for your conditions and being responsible for your conditions. It very well may be true that many poor people are blameless for their conditions, but they are still responsible for their conditions. Responsible in the sense that they are the only ones in the position to do anything about it. There’s also a difference between steps being straightforward and being simple. The success sequence is straightforward, but not necessarily easy.
Midge
Feb 26 2021 at 11:39am
Eve Tushnet’s objection pretty clearly focuses on why poor women struggle with the “marriage before babies” portion of the success sequence, and why success-sequence reasoning creates pressure on poor women to abort their children, something she, as an observant Catholic, considers a grave moral evil. She points out,
and
Tushnet observes that the poor women she sees already feel considerable moral obligation to the success sequence, but that’s not the only moral obligation they feel: they also feel a moral obligation to sacrifice material well-being so that another might live if they do get pregnant out of wedlock, while modern sexual mores can make it seem downright irresponsible to avoid sex — and consequently some risk of pregnancy — before marriage.
Tushnet summarizes,
and it’s in that context she criticizes the “bloodless moralism”:
She’s pointing out the outcome measures are also a proxy for another “moral quality” many people understandably find repugnant: the ruthlessness to exterminate your own unborn babies if they have the bad fortune to arrive ahead of schedule in the success sequence. Is that a moral quality we ought to tacitly endorse? Why or why not?
Alvincente
Feb 26 2021 at 1:47pm
Midge, you are presenting a false dilemma. I’ve not read Ms. Tushnet so I am going by your comment – but it is simply wrong that sex before marriage means either babies or abortion. I believe that most young middle-class women do have sex before marriage, but they don’t have either babies or abortions. As Prof. Caplan points out, reliable birth control is cheap and easily available. It is easily available to lower-class women for very little money, or in many cases free through either insurance or various govenment benefits. There may well be cultural or personal reasons why young lower class women get pregnant before marriage, but it’s not because that’s the only alternative to celibacy.
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