Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 28, 1995 TAG: 9502280067
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The problem is no one seems to know what to make of this statistical artifact - not even Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose discovery it was.
Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration, was scrounging for ammunition to help the president make the case for full-employment legislation. He was looking, he explains in the January/February issue of American Enterprise magazine, ``for correlations between employment and some of the conditions associated with poverty. Of these, family structure seemed the most obvious, and in no time I had a room filled with charts showing the closest of correlations.''
His focus was the jobless rates of nonwhite males (age 20 and over) and the marital-separation rate of nonwhite females. He found what he was looking for.
Year after year, the lines tracked each other. When joblessness fell between 1952 and 1954, so did the number of women living apart from their husbands; when unemployment surged around 1955, and again in 1958, so did marital separation.
``It was an amazing thing,'' he told me the other day. ``I'm speaking of correlations of 0.91 or 0.94 - a sort of statistical perfection that just doesn't happen in nature.''
And then something completely unexpected cropped up. Sometime in the early 1960s, the correlation grew weaker until 1963, then evaporated. The erstwhile parallel lines of unemployment and marital separation actually crossed one another - the separation rate moving upward while the jobless rate moved sharply down.
And to this day, Moynihan says he doesn't know why - or what, precisely, it means. Nor does James Q. Wilson who, fascinated, dubbed the crossed lines ``Moynihan's Scissors.''
It was, quite possibly, something powerful and new, a fuller understanding of which might illuminate social policy for decades to come. But all Moynihan could make of it was that his ``simple faith that employment would produce social stability was undone.'' For the liberal Moynihan, that's roughly equivalent to Newt Gingrich announcing that he no longer believes there's a useful link between crime and punishment.
Moynihan, by the way, is not suggesting that we don't need full employment - ``Please, no more of that,'' he pleads - only that full unemployment has, for him, lost its almost magical ability to explain the social conditions associated with poverty. He still believes that the growth in the percentage of American children born into marriageless families is a portent of trouble ahead. But, though he is one of the smartest men in government, he's no longer confident that he knows - or is capable of figuring out - what to do about it.
Worse, the phenomenon is no longer confined to America. Just since 1960, the out-of-wedlock birth rate has at least trebled in Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, France, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. (The Japanese rate remains virtually unchanged.)
Moynihan, remember, is the man who got in trouble 31 years ago for his warning that the black family's out-of-wedlock birthrate (then around 25 percent) would soon produce all sorts of progress-halting social ills. And now that virtually everybody agrees he was right, he's in the awkward position of saying he doesn't know what to do about it.
In his American Enterprise piece, he quotes from the work of James S. Coleman:
"Modern societies are in the midst of a transformation in their very basis of organization ... as the institutions of primordial social organization crumble."
Those crumbling primordial structures manifestly include the family, in America and beyond, and full employment won't set things right.
What will?
- Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB