Do blacks really have 70% illigitimate births?

[David_God_of_Frogs]

Yeah, that does kind of rest on the dubious assumption that people have babies to make money.

@Askia

@David

I think it’s one of the greatest underreported facts that a healthy marriage is as much of a predictor of economic success as an education is. (No cite, sorry, like I said, it’s underreported. I’ve heard it from two people involved in population studies, one liberal, and one conservative.)

See, I’d agree to that… but only because you qualified your statement by saying a HEALTHY marriage. Most people just throw the word “marriage” out there like it’s a cure-all panacea for the poor, when it’s not, it’s the series of successful elements that make up a healthy marriage that help ward off the debilitating effects of poverty.

Well, most unhealthy marriages do end up in divorce anyway. Nevertheless, I read something interesting yesterday on Xinhua (I know its a random source, it’s probably published elsewhere.)

For people who married and then divorced, there was a slow build-up of wealth during the early years of marriage and then a steady decline about four years prior to divorce.

“Many of these people may have separated before the divorce became official, which would help explain why wealth starts falling so early,” Zagorsky said. “Divorce is often a long and messy process, and you can see this in the four-year decline in wealth.”

Four years is a long time, and it suggests that wealth starts to decline as problems are brought to the surface, not later when people decide how to act on them.

[Rodgers01]

@MMI

Debaser

If it is government subsidization of unwed motherhood that is the problem, then it should be trivial to demonstrate that countries that are generous with benefits for mothers have far higher out-of-wedlock/single mother birthrates than the US.

Well, Scandinavia famously has both very high social welfare and very high rates of children born out of wedlock. (According to this article, a majority of children in Scandinavia are now born out of wedlock; up to 60% of first born children in Denmark are.)