Quote:
Originally Posted by unsunghero
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This makes sense to me in modern time.
But from Brookings.edu:
“Efforts by social scientists to explain the rise in out-of-wedlock births have so far been unconvincing, though several theories have a wide popular following. One argument that appeals to conservatives is that of Charles Murray, who attributes the increase to overly generous federal welfare benefits. But as David Ellwood and Lawrence Summers have shown, welfare benefits could not have played a major role in the rise of out-of-wedlock births because benefits rose sharply in the 1960s and then fell in the 1970s and 1980s, when out-of-wedlock births rose most. A study by Robert Moffitt in 1992 also found that welfare benefits can account for only a small fraction of the rise in the out-of-wedlock birth ratio”
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Well sure, there might have been a delayed effect. It's not like as soon as those policies are enacted people start getting divorced immediately.
I agree it's probably not the primary factor, but it's certainly a measurable factor. Welfare certainly doesn't encourage women to *stay* married. I think social attitudes and norms around marriage are much more responsible, but they're also much harder to quantify because you basically have to just poll people, whereas the relationship between divorce and welfare disbursement is easily measurable in an excel file.
Also out-of-wedlock births and children being raised by a single mother aren't the same thing. There were lots of out-of-wedlock births in the 1930s, and people would usually have shotgun weddings to raise the child. That's a different issue than divorce\estrangement rates.