Has the land of opportunity be rezoned, poor need not apply?

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<p>

For any individual family (particularly one in the lowest quintile), if they have talent, diligence, and patience, they can move into the upper quintiles more easily in the US than in any other country.

</p>

<p>Despite being unable to claim a detailed knowledge of other countries, being a patriotic American I’ll be happy to agree with that assessment, and with pride - because I think it’s a good thing to be able to say that. But it’s kind of beside the point. My concern is that it’s harder to move up in America today than it was 30 years ago - which is to say, we’re becoming more and more like those other countries every year - that’s the problem. </p>

<p>I also disagree with your conclusion that declining numbers of people changing their economic status does not show the changing difficulty of moving up. People will always want to improve their economic lot. If the difficulty of doing so doesn’t change, the numbers won’t change, either. (Remember, I’m not a believer in the “people as a whole are worse today than they were then” theory.)</p>

<p>Of course, it’s not a one-way street. Economic mobility necessarily includes people moving down as well as up. And that’s where I think the increased gap between the rich, middle class, and poor has aggravated whatever other factors are affecting this equation. A person has to fall farther to drop out of the upper quintiles, just as a person has to climb higher to climb into the higher ones. At the very top, we’ve seen highly compensated business executives commonly receiving huge severance compensation, even when they’ve done nothing special during the tenure with a company. Lowered capital gains, estate and dividend taxes tend to ensure that the rich stay rich. The middle class typically has at least home equity to cushion a temporary downturn in economic fortunes such as illness, layoff, etc., and the gap in wealth between homeowners and renters gets larger every year. Meanwhile, the “safety net” for the the poor has dwindled and they have virtually nothing to fall back on in the event of an economic bump in the road. </p>

<p>Again, it’s not a question of whether or not an individual can succeed financially in America regardless of their origins. There will always be superstars among us. My concern is the raising of the threshold that must be met for a person to do that. If the challenge is low enough so that regular, hard working, good choice making people can move up some without doing anything spectacular, while lazy, bad choice making people will move down some, I think that’s a good thing. The statistics which show that fewer people are moving in either direction now than were 30 years ago are, to me, grounds for concern.</p>

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<p>

“when you’re talking about millions of people, the individual choices tend to balance out”</p>

<p>I completely disagree with this statement. You are assuming that individual choices that affect income are independent of one’s initial quintile. I do not assume this. Please provide data that prove your assumption.

No, I’m not assuming that. In fact, I assume that the lowest quintile has a higher percentage of people who have made bad decisions which adversely affected their economic status than the higher quintiles do. What I assume is that the lower quintiles do not have a higher percentage of those people today than they had 30 years ago. If you assume otherwise, please provide data to prove your assumption. ;)</p>

[pafather]

<p>I am not saying the following source is authoritative with the precise numbers; it was simply the first one that came up using Google searching for “percent unwed mothers trend”. But numerous studies have shown a DRAMATIC increase in unwed births over the past few decades. These are obviously not all to poor mothers in the lowest quintile. I do not have time to find the data right now.</p>

<p>“The percentage of births to unmarried women has steadily increased in the past few decades, from 5.3 percent in 1960 to 32.2 percent in 1995 and more slowly to 35.7 percent in 2004 (preliminary estimate).”</p>

<p>“Women who give birth outside of marriage tend to be more disadvantaged than their married counterparts. Unmarried mothers generally have lower incomes, lower education levels, and greater dependence on welfare assistance than do married mothers.1”</p>

<p>“Children born to unmarried mothers are more likely to grow up in a single-parent household, experience instability in living arrangements, live in poverty, and have socioemotional problems.6”</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Driscoll, A. K., Hearn, G. K., Evans, V. J., Moore, K. A., Sugland, B. W., & Call, V. (1999). Nonmarital childbearing among adult women. Journal of Marriage & the Family, 61, 178-187; Moore, K. A. (1995). Executive summary: Report to Congress on out-of-wedlock childbearing. (Full report available from DHHS Publication No. 95-1257-1). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Also available on the Internet at <a href=“NCHS - 404 Error - Resource Not Available”>NCHS - 404 Error - Resource Not Available; Terry-Humen, E., Manlove, J., & Moore, K. A. (2001). Births outside of marriage: Perceptions vs. reality. In Child Trends Research Brief. Washington, DC: Child Trends. <a href=“http://www.childtrends.org/Files/rb_032601.pdf[/url]”>http://www.childtrends.org/Files/rb_032601.pdf&lt;/a&gt;
Lichter, D., Graefe, D., & Brown, J. 2003. Is marriage a panacea? Union formation among economically disadvantaged unwed mothers. Social Problems, 50, 60-86. </p></li>
<li><p>Aquilino, W. S. (1996). The life course of children born to unmarried mothers: Childhood living arrangements and young adult outcomes. Journal of Marriage & the Family, 58(2), 293-310.
Haveman, R., Wolfe, B., & Pence, K. (2001). Intergenerational effects of nonmarital and early childbearing. In L. L. Wu, & B. Wolfe (Eds.), Out of wedlock: causes and consequences of nonmarital fertility. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Demo, D., and Cox, M. (2000). Families with young children: A review of research in the 1990s. Journal of Marriage and the Family. 62 (4) 876-895.
McLanahan, S. and Sandefur, G. (1994). Growing up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. </p></li>
</ol>

<p><a href=“http://www.childtrendsdatabank.org/indicators/75UnmarriedBirths.cfm[/url]”>http://www.childtrendsdatabank.org/indicators/75UnmarriedBirths.cfm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College, wrote a paper which includes the following on this subject:

Contrary to what most people would probably guess, the most rapid single jump in the rate of childbearing by unmarried women occurred not in the 1960s and 1970s, but between 1940 and 1958 . The number of births per 1,000 unmarried women tripled in that period, from 7.1 to 21.2. Between 1958 and 1971, the rate of childbearing by unwed mothers rose more slowly. It receded from 1971 and 1976, but then almost doubled again by 1992, when there were 45.2 births per 1,000 unmarried women.
The increase in rates of unwed motherhood (the percentage of unmarried women having babies – a different figure than the ratio of births in and out of wedlock) was not very noticeable in the postwar period, because the age of marriage was falling and the rate of marriage was rising, which meant that there were lower proportions of unwed women in the population. In addition, rates of childbearing by married women soared, which held down the proportion of illegitimate to legitimate babies in spite of the fact that the proportion of unwed women who had babies had tripled.
Between 1960 and 1990, by contrast, birth rates to unmarried women only increased by a factor of 1.73, not quite twofold. But the non-marital birth ratio – the proportion of total babies born that are born out of wedlock – increased by more than 500 percent, from 5.3 percent of all births to 28 percent. Three factors combined to produce this dramatic statistic. First, the birth rates of unmarried women rose did rise, though by nowhere near 500 percent. Second, the numbers of unmarried women increased dramatically, so that the absolute numbers of births to unwed mothers rose sharply. And third, births to married women fell, increasing the relative proportion of unmarried births to married ones. In some cases, the fall in marital fertility was so large that unwed births became a larger proportion of all births even when rates of unwed childbearing were flat or falling. For example, the probability that an unmarried African-American woman would have a child actually fell from 9.8 to 9.0 percent between 1960 and 1990; but because married-couple childbearing decreased among African Americans even more sharply, the proportion of black children born to unwed mothers rose.
**Things get even more confusing when commentators equate the number of out-of-wedlock births with the number of single-mother families. During the 1990s, for example, unlike the 1970s and 1980s, the majority of the increase in unwed births occurred not to mothers living singly but to parents who were living together without being married. In other words, the rate of actual single motherhood went down in the 1990s. A higher proportion of out-of-wedlock babies had fathers in the home than in the two previous decades. **The 1990s also saw a 20 percent decline in births to teenagers, so that more unwed mothers were in their 20s and 30s rather than their teens.

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<p>To put it another way: it’s complicated. Coontz starts off her paper with this comment:

One of the problems that editors, reporters, and the general public face today is the way we are barraged with the out-of-context snippets of information sometimes called “factoids.” The word suggests little fragments of data, broken off from their original planetary moorings, zinging merrily through space, and occasionally hurtling down into our atmosphere, leaving behind a fleeting arc of light. And that’s very much how information gets delivered nowadays – often quite purposely, by people with a particular ax to grind. Without historical perspective, it is all too easy to mistake little streaks across the historical radar screen for major vehicles of social change.

Back in the 60s and 70s a theory was popular among leftist philosophers that the problem with socialism wasn’t the theory, it was the darn people. All we had to do was make people better, and socialism would work just fine. It was around that time that I decided that people were likely to remain pretty much the same, when taken as a large group, and if you want to change the way things are you should start somewhere other than by figuring that the system would work fine if people were just different than they are. I’m sticking with that philosophy for now.</p>