One idea of the American dream is upward mobility: People raised in a poor family can escape poverty and succeed. Harvard economist Raj Chetty has done better research than anyone on the factors behind upward mobility.
Again and again, he finds that one of the most important factors that helps children climb the ladder is when they are raised by married parents.
In a groundbreaking 2014 study, Chetty found depressingly low intergenerational mobility but also massive variation from place to place. Running all sorts of multivariate regressions, he found that the two most important local factors predicting upward mobility were social capital (strength of community) and the portion of children raised by married parents.
More precisely, a community with many single parents has less upward mobility, and this is the most important factor. As Chetty and his co-authors put it, “the fraction of children living in single-parent households is the single strongest correlate of upward income mobility among all the variables we explored.”
Now, Chetty has a new study that focuses on socioeconomic segregation and its contributions to economic immobility — that is, how poor children not knowing rich children keeps the poor children poor into adulthood. The ancillary finding is just as interesting:
Once again, the social science shows that if you want to fight inequality and immobility, you want children to be raised by married parents.
This isn’t a popular fact in the elite media. Having a father around is really important for children. Not having a father around is correlated with a number of adverse outcomes. But fathers and marriage are supposedly part of “tradition” and “patriarchy,” which makes them bad in the telling of liberal cultural tastemakers.
So these parts of Chetty’s research are ignored:
Much of the Left’s culture war involves tearing children away from their parents. Suggesting that fatherlessness contributes to social ills will get you raked by the Twitter Left. There are even left-wing culture war organizations dedicated to demoting the idea of marriage as the best environment for raising children.
So if you care about poor children and the American dream, you should find ways to make it more likely that their fathers will marry their mothers.
