Large causes of poverty are not matters of material distribution but are behavioral

An older piece but relevant. From What if Major Causes of Poverty Are Behavioral? by George Will.

The Bronx, the only one of New York City’s five boroughs that is on the American mainland, once had a sociological as well as geographical distinction. In the 1930s it was called, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted, “the city without a slum.” It was “the one place in the whole of the nation where commercial housing was built during the Great Depression.” In the third quarter of the 20th century, however, there came, particularly in the South Bronx, social regression that Moynihan described as “an Armageddonic collapse that I do not believe has its equal in the history of urbanization.”

Of the several causes of descent, there and elsewhere, into the intergenerational transmission of poverty, one was paramount: family disintegration. Some causes of this remain unclear, but something now seems indisputable: Among today’s young adults, the “success sequence” is insurance against poverty. The evidence is in “The Millennial Success Sequence,” published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies and written by Wendy Wang of the IFS and W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia and AEI.

The success sequence, previously suggested in research by, among others, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, is this: First get at least a high-school diploma, then get a job, then get married, and only then have children. Wang and Wilcox, focusing on Millennials ages 28 to 34, the oldest members of the nation’s largest generation, have found that only 3 percent who follow this sequence are poor.

A comparably stunning 55 percent of this age cohort have had children before marriage. Only 25 percent of the youngest baby boomers (those born between 1957 and 1964) did that. Eighty-six percent of the Wang-Wilcox Millennials who put “marriage before the baby carriage” have family incomes in the middle or top third of incomes. Forty-seven percent who did not follow the sequence are in the bottom third.

I recall my father telling me about the success-sequence, even though it was not so described back then, all the way back circa 1970. The empirical evidence for the magic elixir of bourgeoise values has been widely known for fifty years. At least I assume it was widely known back then. My father was an operations engineer in far off Sweden remote from any topical discussions in the sociological field in the US. We had been overseas in remote locations for twenty years. For him to know the empirical evidence for the success-sequence hypothesis would seem to argue that it was widely known.

Yet we continue to ignore the hypothesis and when confronted, choose to pretend that there is no evidence.

In healthy societies, basic values and social arrangements are not much thought about. They are “of course” matters expressing what sociologists call a society’s “world-taken-for-granted.” They have, however, changed since President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed “unconditional” war on poverty. This word suggested a fallacious assumption: Poverty persisted only because of hitherto weak government resolve regarding the essence of war — marshalling material resources.

But what if large causes of poverty are not matters of material distribution but are behavioral — bad choices and the cultures that produce them? If so, policymakers must rethink their confidence in social salvation through economic abundance.

Poverty is a consequence in large part due to behaviors. Behaviors are in a large part due to genetic selection. Some cultures do a much better job of fostering pro-social, pro-prosperity behaviors.

Three traumatic truths substantially ignored by governments and Mandarin Class. Far more financially lucrative to the Mandarin Class and with many more opportunities for moral preening, to seize from some to give to others than to allow pro-social and pro-prosperity behaviors to improve the lot of everyone.