Ruth Institute Blog

Monday (July 5th) I listened to a broadcast on the Diane Rehm Show of an interview with James T. Patterson, author of Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life from LBJ to Obama. That title was already on my long (long…) wish-list of books I’d like to buy if I had a few thousand bucks to spare (and a few years of leisure time I could spend to read them) so of course I listened with interest. But if what I heard was any indication of the kind of self contradictory ‘logic’ to be found in his book, then it’s probably no longer one of the must-have titles on my list. (So don’t take this as a review of Professor Patterson’s book, which I haven’t read. This is just my reactions to some of the assertions he made in his interview.)

For those of you who don’t know, The Moynihan Report (officially titled The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, and authored by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965 when he was Assistant Secretary of Labor while Lyndon Johnson was President) was what turned out to be a very controversial attempt to begin a national dialog on what could be done to reverse, or at least stop, or even just slow down the disintegration of black families that was already progressing rapidly in America at the time. Unfortunately, the report came out at about the same time the Watts riots ushered in a time of severe racial turmoil in America. The report ended up being dismissed as racist, Moynihan became politically marginalized, nothing was ever done about the issues discussed in the report, and the strength of American families (of all races) has continued to decline ever since.

Surprisingly, Patterson does not believe that this was a tragic Moment Lost, as Moynihan later called it.

For the record: I do not like the solutions Moynihan is said to have favored (government jobs and more entitlements) in fact I think that would have made things even worse. But the report was deliberately short on solutions. It was supposed to initiate a period of public discussions and studies that would then lead to solutions, hopefully by consensus. Who knows what might have been accomplished if that had occurred?

Patterson, on the other hand, says he doesn’t think anything would have made much difference. And this is where I think the self contradictions begin…

At about twenty-three minutes into the broadcast Professor Patterson asserts that decisions to get married and have children “…are decisions beyond the capability or the competence of outside forces to do very much about.”

But then he immediately starts talking about the kinds of “outside forces” that could influence those decisions:

“Better sex education maybe can make a dent here and there”, he says. OK, I would agree that “a dent here and there” would even be optimistic. But then he proceeds to refer to some of the social dynamics that were definitely driving the rise of out-of-wedlock births already by pointing out that at the time the “…stigma that was so strong about getting knocked up… is long since gone” and that the “…shotgun marriage no longer exists.”

Well, those certainly sound to me like “outside forces” that were indeed affecting people’s decisions whether or not to get married, as well as when and under what circumstances they would be willing to have children. In fact, is it not true that social stigma (or the lack thereof) still has at least some affect on such decisions?

But so far we’ve only discussed the sort of social norms that influence sexual and childbearing behaviors, nothing that would contradict when Patterson then suggested that there is “…really very little the government can do about the fact that there are so many illegitimate children.”

Well of course we only had to wait a short time for a listener to call in to tag Professor Patterson on his injudicious use of the term “illegitimate” to refer to children born out-of-wedlock, but the first caller after he made that statement took issue with the actual substance of the allegation by pointing out that the policy of AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) has always been that assistance is not available to any family in a household where an able-bodied man resides.

At that point even Ms. Rehm had to ask if that policy ever made any sense and exclaim that “It turned the family against itself!” To which Patterson could only concede that “It created pernicious incentives” and admit that “…clearly, if you wanted to get aid, you had to be a single parent.” He even acknowledged that all along there were those who “…argued it was because of this welfare program – which grew enormously in the late sixties and early seventies – that you had so many women with children born out of wedlock, because there was a kind of an incentive to do so.”

So now we’re to the part where I always get confused on this issue. It seems to me that if the government can enact regulations that create “pernicious incentives” to have more children out-of-wedlock, the government could just as easily create disincentives to having babies before you’re married, or at least remove the motives for doing so. But what do I know? People like Professor Patterson have probably forgotten more than I will ever know and accomplished more in academia, politics, and government before I was born than I will ever accomplish in my entire life.

Still, I just can’t get over the notion that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist, or social scientist, or a political wonk, or any kind of egg-head to understand that if you subsidize a certain behavior you will get more of it. And that if you find yourself at the bottom of a hole you might already not be able to climb out of, the first thing you should definitely do is stop digging! You don’t need to be a genius to understand any of that, it’s just common sense.

Even if we just can not bring ourselves to stop providing ‘entitlements’ to fatherless households, couldn’t we at a minimum also stop penalizing those impoverished families where Dad is still doing everything in his power to take care of his loved ones? Maybe then the dilapidated ghettos our public housing projects have become would begin to transform, ever so slowly, back into the kind of places described by Jane Galt in her article A Libertarian View of Gay Marriage that Dr. J linked to in her thread of the same title.

Maybe I’m just dreaming though. But I sure hope not. When Patrick Moynihan wrote his report the out-of-wedlock birthrate for blacks was already over 23%. Now it’s around 70% for blacks and at 40% for America overall. And if I remember correctly, Moynihan himself once estimated that if the out-of-wedlock birth rate for any population went too far over 25% the trend would begin to feed on itself and you would be past the point of no return. We had better pray he was wrong. Otherwise the most we could ever hope to do is salvage a remnant from which to rebuild society after our culture implodes.

We are not playing games here people…