Facts vs. the GOP: Why America is living through a new era of segregation

[applegrove]

Facts vs. the GOP: Why America is living through a new era of segregation

by Sean McElwee at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/14/facts_vs_the_gop_why_america_is_living_through_a_new_era_of_segregation/?utm_source=huffpost_politics&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=pubexchange_article

"SNIP.....................

There are numerous factors that help explain why blacks have lower levels of upward mobility, but a surprisingly unpersuasive one is family structure. Conservatives like to tout the research of Raj Chetty and others who find that, “The fraction of children living in single-parent households is the single strongest correlate of upward income mobility among all the variables we explored.” But this observation comes with a caveat — children in two-parent households fare worse in areas with large numbers of single parents. There is reason to believe the causation is reversed. Rather than single-parent households causing low upward mobility, low upward mobility and rampant poverty lead to single-parenthood.

Two researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research — Melissa Schettini Kearney and Phillip B. Levine — find that single motherhood is largely driven by poverty and inequality, not the other way around. They write,

The combination of being poor and living in a more unequal (and less mobile) location, like the United States, leads young women to choose early, non-marital childbearing at elevated rates, potentially because of their lower expectations of future economic success.

A report by the British Rowntree Foundation had a similar finding: “Young people born into families in the higher socio-economic classes spend a long time in education and career training, putting off marriage and childbearing until they are established as successful adults.” Women in the slow track, in contrast, face “a disjointed pattern of unemployment, low-paid work and training schemes, rather than an ordered, upward career trajectory.” This is largely due to “truncated education.”



.......................SNIP"

[Anansi1171]

1. Huge K&R!

[Jim Lane]

2. It's always valuable to ask: Does this correlation indicate a causation?

If A is correlated with B, yes, it might be that A causes B. But it might be that B causes A, that C causes both of them, or that the correlation is a complete coincidence.

[Trillo]

3. "low paid work and training schemes,..."

"training schemes." But the solution to "training schemes" is more education. Doublespeak.