Kicking. Squealing.
Paul Krugman, master baiter-and-switcher, writes on Charles Murray’s book (h/t Marginal Revolution):
Well, one thing oddly missing in Murray is any discussion of that traditional indicator of social breakdown, teenage pregnancy. You can see why — because it has actually been falling like a stone:
via Krugman's New York Times blog
That’s somewhat clever of Krugman, but it misses Murray’s more important point. Murray didn’t address the problem of teenage pregnancy because it is only one subset of the much larger issue: single motherhood or – to put a finer point on it – children being raised without fathers. And across all races, that figure has increased dramatically during the same time period of Krugman’s figure above:
Murray explicitly touches on the issue:
But we do know already that the collapse of these moral pillars of the welfare state must eventually have profound effects on policy…I have been among those who argue (as I have in this book) that the growth in births to unmarried women has been a social catastrophe.
…I am predicting that over the next few decades advances in evolutionary psychology are going to be conjoined with advances in genetic understanding, leading to a scientific consensus that goes something like this: There are genetic reasons, rooted in the mechanisms of human evolution, why little boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence not socialized to the norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of prisons and to hold jobs…These same reasons explain why society’s attempts to compensate for the lack of married biological fathers don’t work and will never work. (emphasis mine)
It seems to be the case that teenage pregnancy has waned for whatever reason. Perhaps social shaming has done its job, or perhaps economic reasons have limited the scourge. But the same mechanisms have not led to a decrease in the birth rate for single women of all ages. And it is precisely the fact that no stable father figure is around, rather than the actual age of the female giving birth, that is most salient to social policy.
“I have been among those who argue (as I have in this book) that the growth in births to unmarried women has been a social catastrophe.”
This is where mainstream conservatives get outflanked by more extreme conservatives (HBD types) who have a superficial commonality with liberals on this conclusion: Single motherhood doesn’t explain bad social outcomes.
Of course Murray is well aware of genes and IQ, so I wonder if he’s also aware of Judith Rich Harris, who’s found that peer groups matter far more than having one or two parents, and the former has much to do with the composition of the neighborhood: http://www.gladwell.com/1998/1998_08_17_a_harris.htm
Odd that Krugman thinks teenage pregnancy is a sign of social breakdown.
Most of history had more teenage pregnancy than we do now as a percentage, because a lot more teenagers got married and got knocked up. For example, in Jane Austen’s novel Emma , for example, Emma is perceived (and perceives herself) as being past the best marrying/procreating age (all the better her mind, since she feels no impulse to get married and would rather meddle in people’s lives like an old biddy).
Emma is 21 in the novel.
Teenage pregnancy was not the sign of social breakdown. It was natural.
Single motherhood was the sign, as Chuck illustrates.
Wait, I guess Krugman doesn’t miss a beat supporting feminist illogic (young motherhood is bad!).
Dain,
I think a good case can be made that peer groups do actually matter more, though I believe that the influence of peer groups increases when one less parent is around. Also, peer groups take on a certain characteristic when all of the kids making up the group are from single-parent households.
So peer groups matter a lot, but the input to those peer groups is the underlying question.
Astute catch on Krugman’s point, Chuck, and I think your thinking on the marginal value of EIC is a credible theory as to why the prevelence of SM increases as the SM ages into her twenties. I’m early into Murray’s book. He articulates the financial carrot for poor women to have babies in an abstract way, but not in itemized list way.
I have my sister’s BabyDaddy to thank for teaching me the SM family dynamics. After two babies, no marriage, a freezer full of WIC foods, part-time employment, EIC, and a purse full of BigGov goodies, my sister enjoyed financial security. As a low status, low income farm hand, his marginal income became dispensable and he was discarded. In later years he explained how he yearned to return to the household. He is a fine man, committed father, but he couldn’t compete with BigGov.
Infertile poor young women are a different species. I recently met a 21 year old with PCOS. Not only was she NOT demanding, but she sent me a thank you card.
I appreciated your recent post on BigGov interloping into the benefactor/recipient relationship. As a 35%-federally-taxed household, my husband and I would love to experience satisfaction for providing for the poor. Instead we feel raped, and that we’re contributing the the destruction of others’ character.
“Perhaps social shaming has done its job, or perhaps economic reasons have limited the scourge.”
My suspicion is that easier forms of birth control (IUDs, Plan B) and easier access to cheaper abortions are responsible for the decline.
Teenage pregnancy was a term introduced to shift the stigma from the term “single mother”. It’s not surprising one of their better propagandists would use it to deceive people.
From personal experience, single mothers breed at least one socially catastrophic type of person. More single mothers. Girls from intact families, and even more so those with ‘strong father figures’ are harder to get into bed and are more circumspect in general about what kind of peers they cavort with, as Chuck says. I’m sure the boys have their own pathologies that I haven’t noticed as well.
There is also the issue with some parents actively selecting their children’s ‘peer group’ rather than the typical single mother deliver and dismiss style of parenting. In general I expect people that actually planned their families to also take a more active role in their child’s life, in selecting the environment from which they select their peers, and generally spending more time with them rather than leaving them to be raised by other children.
The importance of the peer group is clearly a product of our industrialized society, where children will spend most of their waking hours with other children, which isn’t the case in the ancestral environment or pre-modern times where they would be spending them working alongside their parents and siblings.
Access to abortion is a factor. I worked in a charter school for grades 6-12 in an inner city area. There were pregnant kids in all grades. The sixth through eighth graders were getting abortions, period. Some of the ninth through twelfth grade kids got abortions, and some kept their kids. Mostly the Hispanic girls kept the babies.
How many teen pregnancies go unreported because they end in abortion before anyone, possibly even the father or the girl’s parents, even know? To assume that a sudden stroke of virtue has fallen on female teens is naive; the left’s push for easy access to permission-free abortion for minors is as much behind the falling teen birthrate as is the use of birth control or the onset of virtuous behavior.
Whorefinder’s right on the money here. What’s wrong with teenage pregnancy? Is it more dangerous? No, of course not. In fact, it’s the healthiest type of pregnancy there is.
The only problem that the left has with “teen pregnancy” is the same problem the Culture Of Death has with all pregnancies: they are “disempowering” for women.
This is something you always need to look for in disengenuous progressive ideology. They know they can’t tell women “don’t have babies, focus on your career”. That’s just too obviously genocidal and wrong. But they can get away with saying “don’t have a baby now. Wait. You can have a baby later. Focus on your career now.” On the margins, it means fewer babies and more women who wait too long and never have any babies at all.
http://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/resources/publications/aag/pdf/2011/Teen-Pregnancy-AAG-2011_508.pdf
The rates of teen pregnancy , birth, and abortion have decreased since 1991. However, 1991 was the high water mark for these. With respect to C. Murray’s studies, we’d look at the numbers since 1960. I don’t have those right handy.
Whorefinder has hit the nail on the head. How many of those teen pregnancies in the early ’70s were 18 and 19 year old women who married their high school sweethearts right after graduation?
What, Paul Krugman cherry picking information to make a disingenuous and misleading comment that totally misses the point? No way!
The first chart in this link is very, very interesting. Notice the rates of marriage vs. teen pregnancy.
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/05/1/gr050107.html
Also, teen pregnancy has been going down steadily since about 1957, with the exception of a short but steep upturn from 1988 to 1991.
[Single] mothers breed at least one socially catastrophic type of person. More single mothers. Girls from intact families, and even more so those with ‘strong father figures’ are harder to get into bed and are more circumspect in general about what kind of peers they cavort with. . .
As is my wont, I’m not going to find the numbers, but dysfunction breeds dysfunction. Broken families lead to more broken families. How many of us know kids from unplanned and unwanted pregnancies who themselves end up having unplanned and unwanted pregnancies? Apples don’t fall far from the tree. For example, my first child was unplanned, but as the wife and I were married, she was not unwanted. That is the key part of the dynamic. We were married so a kid wasn’t a bad thing. We’ve since had a purposeful second and are expecting a purposeful third.
Our experience used to be somewhat normal. Now it’s all singledom and solipsism. Krugman, Frum, et al. can try to spin us as historical, but society was much more stable, historically, when we were the norm.
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I don’t know how we can tease apart the effects of peer groups from things like race and ethnicity. I suppose young male NAMs may get into more trouble with their own kind than if they’re surrounded by Richie Cunninghams, but that just ignores the racial facts on crime.
Krugman and Rudd are both partly correct and partly wrong. The percentage of births of single mothers may have increased. However, the number of women becoming single mothers as a percentage of the total population of women has decreased significantly since 1990 and this is the key metric as far as social policy is concerned.
@abe lindsey,
the number of women becoming single mothers as a percentage of the total population of women has decreased significantly since 1990 and this is the key metric as far as social policy is concerned.
Wrong. What matters are the babies. “babies born” should be the denominator.