John Fund‘s latest column at National Review Online looks back at a controversial report Daniel Patrick Moynihan prepared in 1965, just as Lyndon Johnson was launching his “Great Society” programs.
After analyzing reams of relevant social-science research, Moynihan concluded that the decline of the two-parent family was fueling the growth of poverty and unemployment, and leading to rising crime rates in black neighborhoods and schools without discipline.
“At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time,” Moynihan argued. Families that consisted solely of single female parents weakened the role of black men as authority figures in the lives of children. Moynihan also warned: “The steady expansion of welfare programs, as of public assistance programs in general, can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.”
Sadly, as soon as Moynihan’s report was leaked to the media, it came under withering assault from his fellow liberals. Civil-rights leader Floyd McKissick angrily attacked it: “My major criticism of the report is that it assumes that middle-class American values are the correct values for everyone in America. . . . Moynihan thinks that everyone should have a family structure like his own.” Facing such criticism, President Lyndon Johnson, in his famous June 1965 speech on poverty, ignored Moynihan’s call to support policies that promote family stability. What a lost opportunity.
Monynihan issued his warning as the out-of-wedlock birth rate among blacks hit 25 percent. Today, the problem Moynihan identified has grown much larger and sprawls across many more demographic groups, as scholar Charles Murray showed in Coming Apart, his 2013 book on poor white neighborhoods. In 1965, the out-of-wedlock birth rate among whites was just 3 percent. Now it is 29 percent, well beyond the tipping point Moynihan was alarmed by in the black community 50 years ago. The number of out-of-wedlock births has hit 72 percent among blacks and 53 percent among Hispanics.
Unfortunate choices often have puzzling and bad consequences. One of the legacies of the Moynihan Report is a graph called “Moynihan’s scissors.” One line sloping downward depicted the reduction in minority unemployment rates in the very prosperous 1960s. The other line — sloping upward — depicted the simultaneous increase of the number of new welfare recipients. …
… We cannot ignore culture. “The poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994,” the economist Thomas Sowell has noted. “Behavior matters and facts matter, more than the prevailing social visions or political empires built on those visions.”
