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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (246633)	3/6/2014 11:33:35 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542224

Before you prejudge an issue, you might wish to read something beyond right wing sources. Here are two. No doubt there are more. You will recognize the authors of the first piece as the current president of the Federal Reserve and her husband, whom I believe is a Nobel Prize winner for economics work. Not certain. The second comes from an institute at Yale. I've included the summary and the url for the Brookings piece but only a link for the Yale piece. I was unable to copy and paste from a pdf into SI. But it's available to skim online. My point is that this issue is quite complicated. No doubt there is much other research. But to conclude, based on one right wing paper, that reducing welfare payments will reduce out of wedlock births, or that is even a large social good, is sloppy thinking. Just to be a bit blunt. -------------------------------- An Analysis of Out-Of-Wedlock Births in the United StatesBy: George A. Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen Around 1970, the United States experienced a reproductive technology shock. The legalization of abortion and dramatic increase in the availability of contraception gave women the tools to control the number and timing of their children. Over the ensuing 25 years, however, there have been huge increases in the number of single-parent families headed by unmarried mothers. The usual economic explanations welfare benefits and the declining availability of good jobs explain only a small fraction of the change. In our view, it was the technology shock itself that, by eroding the age-old custom of shotgun marriage, paradoxically raised out-of-wedlock birth rates instead of lowering them. If so, cuts in welfare benefits will have little effect on out-of-wedlock births, serving mainly to lower the standard of living of the country's poorest children. Better family planning education, birth control advice, and requirements forcing fathers to pay child support are more promising policies to reduce out-of-wedlock births. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/1996/08/childrenfamilies-akerlof -------------------------------- A Yale University study indicating that the use of family caps does not reduce the rate of out of wedlock births.. http://www.econ.yale.edu/growth_pdf/cdp877.pdf