Choosing Welfare Benefits Over Marriage

10/10/13


Hanna Rosin takes a look at lower class usage of "fiance" to refer to partners in long-time unmarried relationships.

Lavelle asks Big Toya to marry him, but she turns him down flat, because she doesn’t want to lose “her freedom, her food stamps or her subsidized apartment.” But he persuades her to let him call her his fiancée anyway.

That succinctly sums up the impact of the welfare state on lower class marriages. You might guess by their names that they are black. But marriage rates among lower class whites have plummeted as well.

Rosin found that welfare-over-marriage story in a book by Kathryn Edin: Doing The Best I Can: Fatherhood In The Inner City. Edin has written a related book: Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage.

We have lost the benefits of the selective pressures of the Malthusian Trap. See Gregory Clark's book A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World for a pretty good exposition on how those selective pressured worked to create an intelligent and prudent middle class in England. Now selective pressures are running in the opposite direction. This is the most important long term trend in the United States. Will offspring genetic engineering reverse the trend? Starting when?

source: parapundit