Shorter Douthat: No, it's because poor people are so damn rich any more.

Update: Welcome Alicubini!

Image by Waldo3610.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, comes out swinging, to show everybody how a Harvard guy goes about writing David Brooks's March 10 column, which should like obviously be better than the way Brooks wrote it, in answer to the question raised (at least in the perfervid imaginations of the American right) by Robert Putnam's new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (partly Putnam's fault for refusing to name the "upper-class villains"),

whether the social crisis among America’s poor and working class — the collapse of the two-parent family, the weakening of communal ties — is best understood as a problem of economics or of culture.

It can't be economics, says Ross, because everybody's economic situation just keeps getting better and better. I bet you didn't realize that:

lower-income Americans have more money, experience less poverty, and receive far more safety-net support than their grandparents ever did. Over all, material conditions have improved, not worsened, across the period when their communities have come apart....

In a substantially poorer American past with a much thinner safety net, lower-income Americans found a way to cultivate monogamy, fidelity, sobriety and thrift to an extent that they have not in our richer, higher-spending present.

Which makes me wonder (because I've got my own inner Jesuit that thinks like that), in that case where's the problem? I thought the lax morals of our poor were supposed to be impoverishing them. If they're better off than ever, maybe monogamy and sobriety aren't such a big deal. Here Douthat is revealing that he doesn't care about poverty at all: to him, fornication and insobriety are things society needs to stop regardless of whether they have any bad economic effects or not. They constitute a strictly cultural crisis without any economic component at all. The economic argument is just an excuse for making us listen.

In fact he's built his conclusion into the question-begging way he put the issue: defining the "social crisis" as the loss of two-parent families and communal ties is a way of silently ruling out the other possibility, in the hope (because we know there's some kind of crisis) that we'll just swallow it without noticing that fly in in the soupspoon. He really thinks they ought to be poorer, like our virtuous grandparents, and they ought to be more virtuous as well. And it's not just them but everybody who's having too much sex:

The post-1960s cultural revolution isn’t the only possible “something else.” But when you have a cultural earthquake that makes society dramatically more permissive and you subsequently get dramatic social fragmentation among vulnerable populations, denying that there is any connection looks a lot like denying the nose in front of your face.

(As Loomis points out.)

Then again, take a look at the Monsignor's evidence for how much better off everybody is nowadays:

Between 1979 and 2010, for instance, the average after-tax income for the poorest quintile of American households rose from $14,800 to $19,200 [in 2010 dollars]; for the second-poorest quintile, it rose from $29,900 to $39,100.

Meanwhile, per-person antipoverty spending at the state and federal level increased sixfold between 1968 and 2008 — and that’s excluding Medicare, unemployment benefits and Social Security. Despite some conservative skepticism, this spending did reduce the poverty rate (though probably more so after welfare reform). One plausible estimate suggests the rate fell from 26 percent in 1967 to 15 percent in 2012, and child poverty fell as well.

These trends simply do not match the left-wing depiction of a working class devastated by Reagonomics.

Wow, poors, $14,800 to $19,200, that's a lot! Unless you think of it as taking place over a 30-year period, in which case it amounts to 0.87% per year, or a yearly increase, by the time you get to 2010, of about $3.21 a week.

Using the same calculations, the 2nd quintile rose at an annual 0.9%, or $6.77/week; the 3rd quintile ($42,600 to $57,000) 0.98%, $10.68/week; the 4th ($55,700 to $80,000) 1.2%, $18.48/week.

But Quintile 5's after-tax income ($98,100 to $181,600) rose at an annual rate of 2.1%, more than twice as fast as those of the bottom three, for an increase in the last year of $73.33/week, and the top 1% ($337,700 to $1,013,100) four times as fast at 3.7%, $721.86/week, which is going to buy you some nice stuff.

The point being that unless you are in the top 20% of earners these increases don't add up to anything you'd notice from year to year; they're barely ahead of inflation. They don't enable you to upgrade your car or renovate the bathroom or eat more fresh vegetables, let alone pay for the Big Wedding that is now regarded as normal even though most people can't afford it; which is why the "left-wing depiction" isn't one of "devastation" (Ross's straw man) but of stagnation. Not that things are getting worse, but that they're failing to get better, over the past two generations; that people are having babies at inappropriate times and not finishing school because they can't see, from their own personal standpoint, how anything else would do any good or what kind of future is available. As noted by one of Putnam's subjects mentioned in Jill Lepore's New Yorker review:

He graduated from high school only because he was given course credit for hours he’d worked at Big Boppers Diner (from which he was fired after graduation). In 2012, when David was eighteen, he got his girlfriend pregnant. “I’ll never get ahead,” he posted on his Facebook page last year, after his girlfriend left him. “I’m FUCKING DONE.”

And the after-tax incomes of the poor would be a lot lower if not for that government spending, in particular the Earned Income Tax Credit, SSI benefits, and SNAP, without which their incomes would have been in significant decline during the period. Although most government means-tested spending does not in fact put any money in their pockets, because it isn't cash: it's Medicaid and Part D of Medicare, housing assistance, and No Child Left Behind. By the way, Douthat's source for the six-fold increase in government means-tested spending, Scott Winship, doesn't note the huge role played in that increase by medical inflation, up 272% from 1991 to 2011, compared to a rise of 196% in cash assistance and 135% in food/housing/education spending over the same 20-year period (all took substantial hits, incidentally, in the 2011 Obama budget, so the numbers are rather lower now). The increase in service to the poor (in a population 50% greater than it was in 1968, so covering maybe 60 million people) is thus nowhere near six-fold and most of it isn't part of their incomes in any case. As usual Douthat is simply spreading disinformation, without perhaps knowing clearly what any of these numbers mean.

Reuben Thomas Finighan, who worked on Putnam's research team during the preparation of Our Kids, puts the answers to the questions it really raises, in a way Putnam himself might think sounded a little too partisan, but a lot more directly than the Monsignor:

Soaring income inequality is a primary cause of the growing opportunity gap.

The team’s research suggests that the most important prescription is to restore working-class income. Even small increases in income appear to have substantial positive effects on opportunity indicators, from marriage stability to SAT scores.

The next most promising intervention is early childhood education, which has been shown to have positive effects on academic performance, criminal behavior and lifetime income, with an attractive rate of return.

Other levers include social norms, such as shifting the stigma from unwed parenting to unplanned parenting; reducing incarceration rates through softer sentencing for non-violent crimes, such as many of those associated with the war on drugs; and replacing failed community ties with formal mentoring and coaching programs, for both children and their parents.

Low-income children face myriad disadvantages and these call for an equally diverse set of responses. Yet the main message is clear.

Americans' incomes must once again be made more equal.

Note the place where he touches on sexual morality is in giving up moralizing and shifting from the god-bothered to the practical (from weddings to contraception and presumably abortion as a backstop). Good.