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Megan McArdle has had two good posts (here and here) the past couple of days on whether welfare reform worked.
Her first post is a good rebuttal to a recent claim by Ezra Klein that welfare reform hasn't really helped poor families. Decreasing dependency, as she shows, has been a success worth the effort.
In the second post, it wasn't her focus to draw our attention to the out-of-wedlock childbearing rates of women in their 20s and 30s when she included the following chart. Rather, her point was to show that the group targeted by welfare reform - teens who were having babies and then not working - has seen a drop in unmarried childbearing since welfare reform. Cleary, that's a good thing.
The other numbers are what are even more astonishing, in my view. Of course, one can argue that unmarried mothers who are older and have been working to some degree can provide a better life for their children. This is undoubtedly true.
But it's also true that a growing number of children born in the lower middle class are born to unmarried mothers. Charles Murray's latest research has shown just how dramatic the rise in single parenting has been among lower middle class homes in the past generation.
Some important percentage (I don't know what it is) of the births out of wedlock among the 20- and 30-somethings in the chart above are to women who, though not in poverty, will raise children who will start out life at a serious disadvantage.
This population by all accounts is growing enough to present a real challenge to policymakers. With welfare, we could change incentives in welfare programs. With a growing group of broken homes sitting above the boundaries of official poverty, the policy levers at our disposal are much fewer.
This problem, and not poverty per se, will be the big social policy challenge of the next generation.
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