Charles Murray writes:
A colleague phoned Monday with a question: In my WEEKLY STANDARD piece last week (“Bad News About Illegitimacy,” Aug. 5), why hadn’t I mentioned that Michigan and Texas changed their reporting procedures in 1994, thereby making their illegitimacy numbers for 1994 show an artificial jump? Not a problem, I replied. Take the Michigan and Texas numbers out of the calculation, and the figures for the rest of the nation are even worse than the national figures I described.
But what about the size of the increase from 1993 to 19947 he persisted. If things were even worse in 1994 without counting Michigan and Texas, they were also worse in 1993.
Well, he’s right. The headline in the fictional newspaper article that began my piece should have read, “Illegitimacy Even Worse Than Thought.” If we take the 48 states minus Michigan and Texas which had been drastically undercounting their illegitimate births as a more accurate representation than the official national total, then the United States exceeded 30 percent of births out of wedlock not in 1992, as I said, but in 1991. Blacks passed the 70 percent mark not in 1994, but in 1993. Whites did not pass the 24 percent mark in 1994; they were already within a whisker of 25 percent by 1993. More generally: All the reported increases of the last several years need to be jacked up a notch.
Everything else in the article continues to apply. The changing attitudes toward illegitimacy among the elites have so far failed to change behavior, and illegitimacy is seeping out of very low-income groups into the working class and middle class. There was big news this year about one of the nation’s most important social trends, and nobody noticed.
