One nagging question that persists from yesterdays post is why would unmarried African-Americans have more kids than married ones? There are all sorts of class arguments that I've seen on the web that don't quite make sense to me. Among them--the black poor see welfare as an incentive. But welfare has been cut dramatically in recent years (five years and then your cut off for life, I believe plus a work requirement in many states) and the roles have been plunging. Furthermore, that analysis conflates the black poor with the black unmarried. There may be a high degree of overlap but those two are not the same. Any explanations? As always, I ask that we not take this chance to simply verify whatever prejudices we already have. This doesn't mean I want people to be all PC. I just don't want tautology. I know there are some folks with experience in sociology and econ lurking around here. I'd love to hear their thoughts.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
I think one economic concept you're looking for here is "opportunity cost": the cost of doing X can be measured by what you'd have to forego if you did X. For example, the cost of going to college is not just (1) the dollar cost of tuition but also (2) the opportunity cost of lost earnings from the job you would hold, but you can't because you're attending college.
If you have a job, the opportunity cost of having a child includes time away from work for pregnancy and child care, possibly impaired career prospects, etc. Those costs can be quite large.(*) If you are unemployed or your employment prospects are poor, those costs may not be so large.
Among my relatives and peers, the folks who have a lot of kids tend to either be doing it for religious/ideological reasons, or because they have poor impulse control/lack of foresight that keeps them from putting on a condom even when they know better. The religious ones tend to be married.
Granted, my peer group is mostly white, so there may be some cultural differences I'm missing out on.
My second theory is based on being a new dad, and that is that once you have one kid, you're so exhausted and sleep deprived that the capacity for rational thinking and forethought is radically diminished, so you're less likely to be diligent about birth control. Sex being (mostly) free, poor people have more sex than the rich or middle class, who have flatscreen TVs and PS3s and theater tickets and such. But you can't get pregnant by a PS3 (yet), so the poor end up pregnant more.
Generally speaking the following are trends that reduce the reproductive rate:
* Urbanization
* Women's rights in general
* Reproductive rights particularly access to birth control
Might be worth comparing employment rates of married and unmarried African-American females.
I think the data you're looking for might be in the American Community Survey (part of the Census). You can check it out here: http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DatasetMainPageServlet?_lang=en&_ts=233745491925&_ds_name=ACS_2006_EST_G00_&_program=ACS
Two possibly relevant tables are B09008: "Presence of Unmarried Partner by Household Type for Children Under 18 Years of Age", and B23007: "Presence of Children Under 18 Years by Family Type by Employment Status," although I can't find those broken out by race.
If that data isn't available from the ACS (haven't looked long enough to say for sure), I'd guess it is from the 2000 Census (the most recent one).
I'd make a combination cultural/economic argument. Illegitimacy has always been somewhat higher in the (urban) African American community than among whites, probably because the legacy of slave rape destigmatized it during slave years. Then in the 1960s, when we made public housing and welfare benefits available for unwed mothers (along with making those benefits more generous), the incentives changed most in the poorest communities, which thanks to discrimination, were likely to be black. The marginal cases who got pregnant out of wedlock because public benefits had reduced the cost of doing so then effectively slightly destigmatized it for the next, less marginal girls, until you reached a tipping point where you have poor urban communities where marriage is basically unknown. Once the communities had reached a new equilibrium, removing the original bad incentives wasn't enough to tip it back--although I'd expect that overtime, we will see a resurgance, as women demand more permanence and support from men. My impression is that the same phenomenon has occurred among some groups of poor rural whites, which would tend to bolster this theory.
This is just speculation on my part -- I don't know what the research on this says. But one thing to keep in mind is that marriage rates tend to be increasingly correlated with income, with the richer folks more likely to get married, and stay married, than the poor. Therefore, I would assume that the unmarried African-Americans who are having kids are poorer than their married counterparts.
And if they are in fact poorer, it would make sense, counterintuitively, for them to have *more* children than their more well-off counterparts, not less. The reason? If you're a fairly well-off person, you probably expect to send your kids to a good preschool program, to college, etc. But that is an expensive proposition, and therefore you're likely to have more kids. Ta-Nehisi, I noticed that you said you'd love to have more kids, but can't afford more. I don't know your economic situation, but I'm guessing that when you say you can't afford more kids, you mean it would be difficult to afford high-quality preschool, child care, college, and the like.
Whereas, if you're poor, you're less likely to be assuming that college will be in your kid's future. In addition, you may not be as inclined to think that something like a very high-quality preschool program is essential. So, for you, kids are in fact a less expensive proposition than they would be for a richer person.
Gary Becker, the University of Chicago economist, has a whole theory about economics of the family that relates to this (and his theories are not race-specific at all, btw -- they're very generic). He uses terms for it that are kind of offensive, especially to folks who don't speak economics-speak -- he talks about parents "investing" in children, and the tradeoff between child "quality" and child "quantity." But basically it's the same thing I just said above -- which is, if your goal is turn your kid into a well-educated, middle class adult, it's going to be a lot more expensive, so you'll tend to have fewer kids. But if that's not your goal -- perhaps because no one in your family or neighborhood ever went to college and you don't think that's a particularly realistic aspiration -- kids are not as costly, so you'll probably have more of them.
I'm sure there are many other reasons unmarried African-Americans have more kids. If they are indeed poorer than their married counterparts, they probably have less access to birth control and abortion. Also, if a poor woman takes time out from the working world to have a kid, it's not likely to hurt her job prospects as much as it would for a middle-class woman in a high-powered career, because a lot of poor women are in dead-jobs that don't allow for advancement anyway. Whereas for professional women, it's another story.
Another way of putting it -- each individual, and each family, has a time budget, divided between time they can spend working for a market wage, and time they can spend doing other things. If the wage they can command on the market is high, they'll tend to spend relatively more time working, and less time time doing those "other things." Conversely, if they can't command a high wage, they're spend more time on "other." So this is a reason why poor people of all races tend to have more kids than the rich. Family time is "worth" more to them than work time, because the wages they can command on the marketplace are so low.
Another bit of anecdote: My wife taught for two years in a rural Mississippi town where the school board had found a work-around for desegregation, so that the public school was 99.99% black and 100% poor. In that town, the boys only saw two roads out of poverty: sports or drugs. And the girls only saw one: get pregnant by a guy with prospects, so he'd take care of you when he made it, if he made it. She heard fifth grade girls strategizing about who to get knocked up by and what financial benefits might accrue. Alas, welfare was one of the things they talked about.
This was more than ten years ago, but we drove through that town recently, and it didn't look like anything had changed for the people stuck there. Absolutely heartbreaking.
One more thing I want to emphasize -- marriage is, increasingly, becoming something that educated, affluent folks tend to do at much higher rates than poorer folks. It didn't used to be this way, but it is now.
For example, college-educated women are now more likely to get married than less highly educated women (it used to be the opposite). Also, there are fewer cross-class marriages than there used to be -- people are now much more likely to marry people of the same socio-economic class and with a similiar level of educational attainment.
Here's an interesting article about this phenomenon:
http://tinyurl.com/5kawmp
I grew up in a predominantly white/hispanic, rural, very poor town, and when I graduated from high school there was suddenly an explosion in teenage pregnancy. Out of a class of 70 girls, something like 15 ended up getting pregnant by the time they graduated.
I don't have any studies to back this up, but my hunch is that pregnancy is almost like a social, well, disease definitely isn't the right way of putting it, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to see if there is some phenomenon where births out of wedlock spread disproportionately among peer groups. I've seen a study that shows that obesity spreads among peer groups -- I would be shocked if pregnancy didn't also.
If that's the case, it may be that originally there were a variety of external factors like welfare, poverty, etc., but once it caught hold it was a simple matter of catching hold and continuing.
I suppose I should just blog about this on my own site and get it over with, shouldn't I?
But in the meantime, here's one last (I hope) comment.
First, here's a link to a post that summarizes a paper which reports that people are more likely now than in the past to marry within their own socio-economic group (this phenomenon has a name, "assortative mating"):
http://tinyurl.com/6qmu9l
Second, that Economist article I linked to above is interesting and informative, but it pushes the argument that marriage *causes* better outcomes for kids and better outcomes for the people in the marriage. However, I am unpersuaded that that is, in fact, true. I tend to side with the scholars who say that what's going on here is correlation, not causation. The people who get married in the first place tend to be wealthier, healthier, etc., already. So the fact that married folks and their kids tend to be better off is. I think, a selection effect -- not a causal effect of marriage itself.
I've written about some of the research that looks at this question on my blog:
http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/the-economic-im.html
There are likely some typically race-based cultural differences that affect the (sexual and power) relationships between young men and women and contribute to the different rates of pregnancy outside marriage. The problem is that it's hard to describe those cultural differences specifically and concretely because the broader culture often discourages objective talk about sex, about power, and about connections between them.
Also, since most of us grow up in a singular cultural context, personal experience doesn't offer much guidance. Any statements we make about comparisons between black and white cultures probably involve talking about at least one culture that's not our own, and thus are likely to be polluted by stereotyping.
So we resort to the language of economics and talk about "investing" in the "quality" of children. But the language of economics is ill-suited to the description of culture, and especially ill-suited to the discussion of personal behavior. Most individuals understand their own actions in a cultural context, rather than an economic one. Since what we're ultimately talking about is individual (or small group) actions--having unprotected sex, or not--I really don't think the language of economics is going to help us all that much. But it's so much more dispassionate (and safer) language to use, that I understand why we choose it.
Kathy G's posts are good stuff, though I'd say that I don't think we have to choose between correlation and causation. People who are already well ahead of the curve in SES tend to get married (or what a friend calls "unlegally wed", like you and Kenyatta) at higher levels, but once you are married, it also makes it easier to invest in kids--two can live cheaper than one, and making joint decisions about the family is easier than two people arduously negotiating their children's future in the joint space between two separate lives.
Another way of putting it is that for you, the opportunity cost of having another kid is high--you have to take money and time that you're investing in your son's future to devote to the second kid, whom you don't love as much as long as it remains theoretical. So unless you have a lot of resources, this is daunting.
For a very poor family, where most of the financial investment in the kids comes from outside (public schools, medicaid, etc), and whose goals may not require the same kind of intensive one-on-one parental coaching, there's less of a cost to the second child. I think Gary Becker's formulation is a little callous, though still arguably true--a kinder way of looking at it is that in poor families, because they are able to give their first child very little, the second child doesn't take much away from the first.
Kathy,
Your quite right about the affordability of kids. That's exactly what I'm thinking of. And please, comment as much as you want here.
Fearitself,
I'm not against a cultural explanation. I'd love to hear one, but I want it backed up by evidence. Also see the post above this one which shows that the birth rate for poor black women has actually been declining for about 40 years now.
I haven't gotten around to reading this book yet:
http://www.amazon.com/Promises-Can-Keep-Motherhood-Marriage/dp/0520248198/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215704813&sr=8-1
But Kathryn Edin's Making Ends Meet does a great job of cutting through the crap around welfare, so this one's probably good too.
From what I hear, the book shows that if:
1) you are a woman in a poor community, where
2) it is not very certain that the men you know
will be able to provide very much, and
3) your own earning are not likely to follow a
middle class upward trajectory through life, and
4) you want to have a child for the same reasons
most other people want to have a child,
then the sensible thing to do is to just go ahead and have a child.
Which makes sense to me. "Out of wedlock" childbearing is only a problem if you assume that there's a better alternative.
I should add that having unprotected sex, of course, isn't the only individual/small group action that matters. Deciding to carry the pregnancy to term and deciding not get married after pregnancy are actions that matter, too. My point is simply that these decisions are powerfully influenced by cultural as well as economic factors. We shouldn't ignore those cultural factors just because they are harder to talk about.
Ta-Nehisi,
I, too, would prefer that cultural explanations be backed up by evidence. I just don't have any, because I grew up in a specific (mostly white) sub-culture where there weren't a lot of teenage births. I just don't know first-hand what the sex/power relationships among young people in other sub-cultures is like.
Indeed, I'm loathe to generalize from my own experience even so far as to describe those relationships in my own sub-culture, since I don't know how representative my own experience was. For example, while I know there were few teenage births in the high school I went to, I have no idea how many teenage pregnancies there were, and I couldn't tell you how easy or hard it was for a pregnant teenager to get an abortion.
What frustrates me is that I feel that the most powerful explanations for phenomena like the birth of children outside of marriage will be found in culture, but that cultural differences are the hardest ones to describe accurately and specifically.
Re: culture
I just moderated this panel out in Aspen, in which four kids who'd come up in just horrible situations talked about how they'd made it out. The biggest barrier they identified was, essentially, the lack of knowledge of the greater world in their respective environment. Many of them talked about living in areas where people did not discuss going to college, it just wasn't seen as a possibility. Though I dropped out of college, I grew up with two parents who'd gone to college and brothers and sisters and cousins who were also expected to go.
To the extent that culture describes the norms and practices of a very specific group, I think it plays a huge roll in outcomes. If you're raised around people who, in general, have certain practices that are ultimately detrimental to upward mobility, it's likely you'll have those same practices and those same bad outcomes.
My only problem is when we get to general. For instance, when speak of A culture of black pathology or even a culture of poverty, I get worried, because it obscures very real differences among groups. In Hanna Rosin's piece in this month's Atlantic we see that the stable and working poor, who aren't in public housing, are quite different from the poor who took Section 8 vouchers and moved into the neighborhood. My father was raised around poor people who couldn't see college as a possibility. But my mother was raised in a single parent home, in the projects of West Baltimore, by a mother who told her kids that college was the only acceptable outcome. Go figure.
I like Tom from the Bx's explanation of "there's nothing better for a woman in a poor community to do". Particularly as it fits with some, ahem, poor white-trash relatives of mine.
No reason to defer having kids + the ability to have kids = kids.
Is there any actual proof that unmarried black women are actively seeking to have more children? Because pretty much every case of unmarried whites having kids outside marriage I've ever seen came down to one of the following:
1) 'Oops, the Condom Broke'
2) 'I'm not on the pill because
A) I can't afford it.
B) Pill? What's the Pill?
3) The guy wouldn't use a condom and the woman made the mistake of taking the chance on pregnancy and lost the gamble
4) 'Wait, SEX LEADS TO BABIES????'
5) 'Stupid Thing X was supposed to prevent pregnancy! Why didn't washing myself with bleach stop it???'
6) 'We didn't use a condom because our sex ed class taught us condoms are wicked!'
7) Can't get any birth control and/or abortion where they live, lack ability to go looking for it for any of a variety of reasons.
IE, most pregnancies out of marriage seem to happen not by choice but through poor sex education, ignorance, or foolish gambling you won't get pregnant this time. And it mostly happens to younger women, who haven't had time to come to know better.
Whereas, married people are more keenly aware of the burden having a child can be, and more deliberate and cautious to avoid it.
Anyway, my own theory here is that the greater rate of pregnancy in the unmarried pretty much comes down to unplanned pregnancies.
I say go back to the source. You want to know why more unmarried black people are having kids but not getting married? Beyond economic/SES issues, which I'm skeptical about, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the black church. I mean, your earlier posts about Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton's standing among the younger set (and not that I disagree) I think are dead-on assessments of the disconnect between younger black people and the black church -- where most of these marriages would be occurring.
Here's an interesting article (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2248/is_n114_v29/ai_15622119/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1) addressing how black churches outreach to youth, and there are a couple of numbers on sexuality/parenting. Not many churches, and this goes beyond black churches (although we're talking about black pregnancy here) openly discuss sexuality, parenting and marriage with young people. And the church historically has held much influence over shaping black communities. By and large the black community's most visible leaders prior to Obama have almost always been religious leaders, with maybe one or two scholars and/or writers thrown in.
I got the link to this post from my Facebook feed, and the title jumped at me. I tried to backtrack a little bit and see where you were coming from, but this is one of those posts that starts me breathing heavy so I hope I'm not jumping off on a tangent. But my response is a little "all over the place" so bear with me.
Your post caught my eye because it means something to me. Technically, I'm a statistic; a "black" woman who has a child out of wedlock, who's sister has a child out of wedlock, and who has a niece who has a child out of wedlock. I myself have Ivy-League parents who've been married since 1962. I'm also a "black" woman who has spent considerable amounts of time in the Food Stamp Office, the Housing office trying to get Jiggetts or One-Shots or Section 8, and has been denied welfare.
My first issue is with statistics. I have found, through various researches into various topics that statistics aren't always exactly what they appear to be. Take for instance, who is "black"--and admitted favorite pet peeve of mine. I found out that regardless of what you claim to be (me, myself, claim to be "other" or "black/white/Native/Hispanic") but the government has me pegged as black. Rather than rehash, I wrote about it here.
http://thebearmaiden.blogspot.com/2008/02/googled-phrase-validity-of-racial.html
So, if the statistics about who is "black" are questionable, well, that would lead me to question a lot of other "facts" as well...
And aside from that, the phrase "out of wedlock" covers a very very very broad category of folk who have decided not to get married. And there are all sorts of reasons why that may be so. My dad says "contrary to what your mother thinks, the only reason to get married is to have children" but I wonder about that... personally, I think that to have children is probably the worst reason to get married. But to say a child is born out of wedlock is no way an accurate indication that the child in question is not being raised in a two-parent home. Now, my kid doesn't happen to be in a two-parent home, but that's because I had the good sense not to compound the accidental pregnancy with a marriage to someone that was off his rocker. My sister also. Now my niece on the other hand... she's young--only 21. She still may marry the babydaddy but at a much later date when they have both matured. In the meantime, they live blocks away from each other and the baby is very secure in who "mama" and "daddy" are and spends time with both independently, and with each parent.
I think Sean Bell's family was another good example of why you should question "statistics". First off, it has been rumored that they are not really "black" but Shinnecock, and secondly, even though Nicole Bell technically had kids out of wedlock, it was very obvious that hers was a committed and loving union.
so there's that...
but my other beef is with Welfare and Foodstamps and who's on it and who's not. The majority of Welfare recipients in this country are white, and from my experience sitting in those offices I would guess that the fastest-growing population segment would be Latino... but that in itself is misleading as "Latino" conjures up one vision. The reality of "Latino" is a lot of indigenous folk from Mexico, Peru, Nicaragua who are more Mayan or Incan than "Latino".
And let me tell you how hard Welfare is to get... and how most AfricanAmericans, long scarred from years and years of being abused and disrespected by Welfare, would rather die--or hustle, than sit in the Welfare office for hours on end, waiting for someone to give you something. It ain't worth it. You have to be mighty desperate to sit there... you can't get up to go pee, or get water, lest your name be called. They assign you numbers, but the numbers are random and not in order so you have no way of knowing when your time will come. You're not allowed to bring food or drinks upstairs to wait... it's awful. And then if your rent is high or you make over the "maximum income allowance" you're screwed.... EVEN if your MIA is still not enough to cover your rent. That was my experience. I cried in the welfare office... my rent was 3 mths past due and in New York you know how high rent is... what little I had coming in wasn't enough to pay it after more immediate needs like carfare and food and light and gas... the snooty supervisor turned on her heel and huffed "I simply cannot help you".
So... rambling coming to an end...
1.) statistitics aren't what they appear to be; depends on who did the research and why
2.) "out of wedlock" doesn't mean "single parent", doesn't mean "living in poverty"
3.) no woman in her right mind has a baby expecting Welfare to pay for it--cuz they don't. Hence the declining birthrate.
And whatever else you can draw from my ramble....
peace out
A comment and a question. Looking at the birth rates among Amish and Hasidic Jews argues that culture can and does trump other motives (as if we didn't know that).
Are there statistics to show whether it's common for unmarried mothers to have multiple children and different fathers? If a woman has children by multiple men, it's possible that she's following a rational strategy of diversification in hope of a lucky hit.
I worked for a family planning nonprofit organization that took its show on the international road. One of the principles behind their work is that the more educated a woman is, the more she will be apt to know about and actually use family planning, birth control, nutrition, etc. I don't see why that rule of thumb would work any differently here in the United States.
Someone probably already said this, but I'd chalk up the higher rate of births in general as a) poor impulse control, and b) lack of stigma for out of wedlock birth amongst peers in this group. I'm going off the assumption that in general an unmarried woman with a child is more likely to be low income than a married woman with a child. This applies across racial lines, I think.
I know people hate broad generalizations and we can all find exceptions, but my my comment above is based on living amongst lower-income urban folks for my entire adult life and from personal experience related to my job, which entails almost daily interaction with lower-income folks as well as somewhat detailed knowledge of their personal lives.
Again, I don't necessarily disagree with cultural analysis, but you need to grapple with the statistics above. The main one being that for four decades now the birth rate for out of wedlock black mothers has been declining, not increasing. It was always shockingly high--but the Times article indicates that it was high even in the 50s when there was plenty of stigma around being an unmarried spouse.
A cultural explanation is fine--I think I outlined one myself above. But it really needs to grapple with the complexity of the actual math. We may think it's "hard" to discuss culture. But for those overly invested in culture, it may well be just as "hard" to see that culture--as solitary explanation--just doesn't cut it.
Some people seem to think that poor women have children by mistake. It ain't so. I have known many poor single mothers and every one of them had kids because she wanted to. And from what I hear the social science research backs this up.