Study of men’s falling income cites single parents

Submitted by Mastodon on Thu, 2013-03-21 01:03

Article here. Excerpt:

'WASHINGTON — The decline of two-parent households may be a significant reason for the divergent fortunes of male workers, whose earnings generally declined in recent decades, and female workers, whose earnings generally increased, a prominent labor economist argues in a new survey of existing research.

David H. Autor, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that the difference between men and women, at least in part, may have roots in childhood. Only 63 percent of children lived in a household with two parents in 2010, down from 82 percent in 1970. The single parents raising the rest of those children are predominantly female. And there is growing evidence that sons raised by single mothers “appear to fare particularly poorly,” Professor Autor wrote in an analysis for Third Way, a center-left policy research organization.

In this telling, the economic struggles of male workers are both a cause and an effect of the breakdown of traditional households. Men who are less successful are less attractive as partners, so women are choosing to raise children by themselves, producing sons who are less successful and attractive as partners.'

Like0 Dislike0

Comments

For literally millenia, women with no prospects at all for making money have been able to find husbands since men have been both willing to and expected to support them financially. Now, even if a man doesn't earn as much as a woman (not no money at all-- just not as much), he suddenly gets much less attractive as a mate. (And women have throughout history been characterized as the more giving and sentimental of the two sexes. Go figure!)

But the plus side of this development is that increasingly women now have to pay for their own kids. Well, they produce them, they ought to be primarily responsible for paying for them, esp. given that they have multiple classes of birth control available to them, including abortion. Really, there's no excuse for a woman to have "unwanted children" anymore. And this sudden drop-off in funding for their reproductive aspirations is helping to get the overall repro rate lowered. That's a good thing.

Like0 Dislike0
Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2013-03-21 02:55