The Washington Post's George Will
writes about the deteriorating American family and its deleterious consequences on this, the fiftieth anniversary of Patrick Moynihan's Labor Department monograph about pathology in "The Negro Family." Will writes:
The assumption that the condition of the poor must improve as macroeconomic conditions improve was to be refuted by a deepened understanding of the crucial role of the family as the primary transmitter of the social capital essential for self-reliance and betterment.
Will quotes Moynihan as follows:
A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority . . . that community asks for and gets chaos.
Next, Will quotes political scientist Lawrence Mead:
The inequalities that stem from the workplace are now trivial in comparison to those stemming from family structure. What matters for success is less whether your father was rich or poor than whether you knew your father at all.
As we all know too well, the broken family/absentee father is now endemic among the large fraction of our citizenry who are not college graduates, regardless of race.
