NYTimes | Let’s
imagine for a moment that there are no political pressures distorting
our discussion of poverty and that we can look at it as a technical
problem, not a moral one.
Maybe we would find that most explanations – left, right and center – are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing.
Before
we take this thought experiment further, we should consider the
ramifications of new research that provides insight into urban social
disorder, worklessness, the rising salience of education and the
shortcomings of government policy.
David
Autor, an economist at M.I.T. best known for exploring the costs to
American workers of automation and trade with China, has recently
expanded the scope of his research on unemployment to look at the
consequences for men who grow up in a fatherless household.
In a paper published last year, Autor, working in collaboration with a fellow M.I.T. economist, Melanie Wasserman, found
that “the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned
downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition; employment rates;
occupational stature; and real wage levels.” The trends have been much
worse for men than women because “the absence of stable fathers from
children’s lives has particularly significant adverse consequences for
boys’ psychosocial development and educational achievement.”
Autor and Wasserman cite data
showing that “after controlling for a host of individual and family
characteristics, growing up in a single-parent home appears to
significantly decrease the probability of college attendance for boys,
yet has no similar effect for girls.” The authors add that when raised
with a nonresidential father, “boys perform less well academically than
girls.”
