Two Nations
December 04, 1997
We live in a nation confident of its wealth and proud of its power, yet convinced that this wealth cannot prevent and this power cannot touch a profound corrosion of our cultural soul. We are materially better off than our parents but spiritually worse off.
The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago. But despite this great wealth we inhabit, as Disraeli said a century ago, “two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.” The two nations of which he wrote were the rich and the poor. But the great production and more even distribution of wealth that we achieved have altered the principle on which our nation is divided. Our money, our generosity, and our public spending have left us still with two nations, but separated by law and custom more than by wealth or favor. As Disraeli said, these worlds are “ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”
The American sociologist, Elijah Anderson, has put the matter more bluntly: In our big cities, the middle-class, both white and black, thinks of itself as the outcome of the great tradition of Western culture, but nearby, there is a second culture of young, marginally employed, sexually adventuresome, socially aggressive young men who reject the idea of hard work and social conformity that made their elders successful. For some, decent jobs are hard to find, but for at least as many the effort to find and hold such jobs as exist has disappeared.
In one nation, a child, raised by two parents, acquires an education, a job, a spouse, and a home kept separate from crime and disorder by distance, fences, or guards. In the other nation, a child is raised by an unwed girl, lives in a neighborhood filled with many sexual men but few committed fathers, and finds gang life to be necessary for self-protection and valuable for self-advancement. In the first nation, children look to the future and believe that they control what place they will occupy in it; in the second, they live for the moment and think that fate, not plans, will shape their lives. In both nations, harms occur, but in the second they proliferate–child abuse and drug abuse, gang violence and personal criminality, economic dependency and continued illegitimacy.
For decades our society has tried to make one nation out of two by changing everything–except the family. We have transferred money from the young to the old to make retirement easier and from rich to poor to make poverty bearable. Congress has devised community action, built public housing, created a Job Corps, distributed Food Stamps, given federal funds to low-income schools, supported job training, and provided cash grants to working families. States have created new approaches to reducing welfare rolls and bureaucrats have designed affirmative action programs. We are still two nations.
Consider our efforts to rebuild families by training mothers to finish school and get jobs. When the programs were evaluated, not much had happened. The effects on the mothers were modest. Most stayed on welfare and new pregnancies were not reduced. Even tougher programs have slight effects. When Florida imposed a two-year time limit on welfare, there was a small increase in employment but no reduction in welfare payments.
Our frequent bursts of good intentions have had little discernible effect on the central problems of our time. Bastardy has become more common, children more criminal, and marriages less secure. Much has happened but little has changed. The rate at which teenage girls produced out-of-wedlock births was 13 percent in 1950, 30 percent in 1970, 67 percent in 1990, and 76 percent in 1994.
The family problem lies at the heart of the emergence of two nations. We wish people to work and to learn more in school. But there have been times in our history when unemployment was high and public schools barely existed. Yet in those days we were not two culturally opposed nations. Boys did not carry guns on the street, people were not shot to get expensive sneakers, drugs did not dominate our urban life, and students who had gone to school could actually read and write. Today, we are vastly richer, but the money has not purchased public safety, racial comity, or educational achievement.
The reason, I think, is clear: it is not money but the family that is the foundation of public life. As it has become weaker, every structure built upon that foundation has become weaker. When our cultural framework is sagging, the foundation must first be fixed.
The evidence as to the powerful effect of this familial foundation is now so strong that even some sociologists believe it. Children in one-parent families, compared to those in two-parent ones, are twice as likely to drop out of school. Boys in one-parent families are much more likely than those in two-parent ones to be both out of school and out of work. Girls in one-parent families are twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to have an out-of-wedlock birth. These differences are not explained by income. Children in one-parent families are much worse off than those in two-parent families even when both families have the same earnings.
When the Department of Health and Human Services studied some thirty thousand American households, it found that for whites, blacks, and Hispanics and for every income level save the very highest, children raised in single-parent homes were more likely to be suspended from school, to have emotional problems, and to behave badly. Another study showed that white children of an unmarried woman were much more likely than those in a two-parent family to become a delinquent, even after controlling for income.
There is little point in dwelling on these facts; almost every American already understands them. Perhaps because of this understanding, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act is popular. But it not obvious why our fears about families should make that law seem a solution. If implemented as intended, it will tell young mothers to be working, away from their children for much of each week. These children, already fatherless, will now not even be raised by their mothers.
But though changing welfare is popular, stigmatizing illegitimacy is not. Over half the public, and 70 percent of those under age 35, think that no shame should attach to having an out-of-wedlock child. The stigma that once constrained bastardy has all but disappeared. Because of this, no one should be surprised that no matter how public policy has changed and the business cycle has moved, illegitimacy in the last three decades has increased.
William Galston, a senior White House adviser to President Clinton now teaching at the University of Maryland, has pointed out that you need only do three things to avoid poverty in this country–finish high school, marry before having a child, and produce the child after the age of twenty. Only 8 percent of families who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.
What is to be done? Social science, which for decades denied the importance of the family, may now have a partial answer. Everything we have learned in the last decade about the future of children suggests that the course is largely set in the earliest years. I doubt that many parents would disagree. If you wish to make a lasting difference in a child’s life, start very early and intervene quite massively. So popular has this idea become that it has been the subject of television specials and White House pronouncements. The results of these enthusiasms have so far been quite modest. But if early family life is crucial, little will result from installing V chips in television sets or giving tuition tax credits to the families of college students.
Let us begin with a few fundamentals. Children are not raised by programs, governments, or villages; they are raised by two parents who are fervently, even irrationally, devoted to their children’s well-being. Though the benefits of two parents are beyond dispute, many children–in some communities, most children–are raised by one parent.
There is, however, evidence that early, intensive intervention can help even the children of single moms. It comes from small, experimental programs that have been competently evaluated. In Ypsilanti, Michigan, the Perry Preschool Project increased the chances that low-income children of welfare mothers would graduate from high school, gain employment, avoid teen pregnancies, and reduce criminality. In North Carolina, the Abecedarian Project found that poor children who received infant day care and family aid services did better in school tests.
These programs are much more intensive than what typically occurs in Project Head Start. In general, they involve both child care, parent training, and home visitations. We are not certain why they are effective or for what kinds of children they are most effective. There are indications they work best for the most disadvantaged children and least well for better-off ones.
We are also uncertain whether one feature of these programs, infant day care, helps or hurts every child. The most recent studies suggest that overall day care does not weaken the attachment between mother and child. But there is evidence that if the mother is doing a poor job of raising the child, some forms of day care may make matters worse.
We don’t know whether programs that were successful in the 1960s or 1970s will be equally successful today in cities that have been devastated by drug abuse and gang warfare. And we don’t know whether large-scale efforts will produce the same gains as small-scale experiments.
But even after allowing for what we don’t know, the striking feature of the best of these small programs is that they produced large and lasting effects on children. They do not make children brighter, but they make them nicer. They may do this by forging stronger bonds to parents or inculcating a greater confidence in the future. And they do so more effectively than almost any program that tries to change grown children by altering their school experience, providing them with counseling, or sending them to special training programs.
Social science has also begun to suggest that a subject about which social scientists are notoriously reluctant to write–religion–has a significant effect, independent of economic status, in keeping children out of trouble.
Evidence has begun to accumulate that in the inner city, church going males are less likely to commit crimes than are others of the same economic status. There is evidence, suggestive though not yet conclusive, that religious programs in prison reduce criminal recidivism for prison inmates more than what one would find among similar inmates in the same prison.
We do not know whether fostering religion in a child or supporting the youth-saving work of churches will produce the same effects that we now observe in the simple connection between religiosity and decency. But religiosity and decency are correlated; in time we may learn that the former causes the latter.
Let me suggest five things that might be done to enhance family life and thereby reduce the size of the underclass. Each idea is directed at one critical step in family life.
First, the new born child. The infants of unmarried mothers require a home and truly adult care. Suppose that unmarried teenage mothers and their babies were required to live in a home under the supervision of experienced mothers. Some might be the mother’s own mother, but many would not because their neglect has fostered their daughter’s willingness to produce an illegitimate child. These young mothers would live in homes paid for with public funds but managed by private groups. No alcohol or drugs would be allowed. Boy friends could only visit during approved hours. Every mother would attend school. Learning effective child care would be the central goal; staying off the street would be the central constraint. We would aim at teaching, not self-esteem, but self-respect.
One version of this is now in effect in Massachusetts. Called the Teen Living Program, it enrolls 120 teenage mothers in small residential homes. One is run by the Salvation Army, others by the YWCA, and another by the Crittenton association. A girl can enter in the third trimester of her pregnancy. The average entering girl is fifteen; the average age of a child in it is two years. The girls can leave when they are eighteen and claim regular welfare benefits, but if they leave before they are eighteen, no such benefits are available. While in the program, the young mothers pay into the homes a portion of their welfare benefits and all of their food stamps.
The young mothers are selected because their own mothers cannot provide suitable shelters owing to child abuse, drug problems, or the like. Most fathers are older than the girls and they rarely visit. Some of the girls don’t like the rules and leave these homes, but others stay to the limit and come back as alumni. The homes work hard at teaching girls how to be mothers, how to deal effectively with other people, why it is important to get an education, and how to cope with the temptation of drugs.
The program costs $38,000 per mother, and because the program is new, we don’t know whether it makes a difference. These two facts–high costs and unknown results–would doom this program for policy wonks. But it has one great attraction: It directs our energies at infants in the critical years of their lives, when a chance–perhaps the best chance, possibly the only chance–exists for saving them from reproducing the life of abuse and dependency that they would otherwise inherit.
Second, adoption. There are more parents seeking an adopted child than there are children to be adopted. Research shows that adoptive parents do a better job in raising children than do foster parents. Yet foster care survives, at high cost, while adoption languishes. The reason is the usual combination of bureaucratic inertia and misguided ideology. Most social service bureaucrats have no incentive quickly to place an abandoned child with adoptive parents, many are devoted to the discredited doctrine of family preservation at all costs, and some oppose transracial adoptions.
Foster care–which in many states cost over $17,000 a year per child–makes little sense. And a good thing, too. The average foster child lives with three different families, and ten or more placements are not rare. Children do this to escape natural parents who are criminals, drug users, or child abusers. Meanwhile thousands of American parents try to adopt children from abroad in order to avoid the miasmic sloth in which domestic adoptions are sunk.
There is an alternative, and Kansas has embraced it. It contracts with private firms to manage child care under a fixed price model that gives each firm a powerful incentive either to restore the child to its natural parents or to find an adoptive home, and to do it quickly.
Third, the child just before school. If the lessons of the Perry preschool program can be generalized to many children, some combination of day care and home visitations may produce the same lasting benefits. We ought to find out.
Fourth, parents who are married. Many need or want to combine a career with a child. To help, I suggest a plan designed by Richard and Grandon Gill. It would offer to a parent (typically, a mother) who wished to work the equivalent of the G.I. Bill of Rights. If you postpone your career and care for the child first–at least until it reaches school age–you will receive an educational benefit. It would enable you to finish high school, or attend college or graduate school, or take technical training courses. People–chiefly, mothers–would be paid a public subsidy for discharging a vital social function. The gains to the recipient’s earning powers that flow from greater education would partially compensate the economy–and through higher taxes, the government–for the cost of the subsidy.
Fifth, restoring the force of religion. Religion, independent of social class, reduces deviance. It lies at the heart of programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, an extraordinary success that no government could have produced and no business could have sold. Hundreds of churches and synagogues across the country already try to produce better people out of discarded humans. Many provide aid to unmarried mothers, picket crack houses, recruit boys into anti-crime activities, and require men to acknowledge the paternity of their children.
It is hard to raise money for religious programs. The government worries about church-state issues that the Supreme Court, without historical warrant, has imposed on it. And when the government does give money to churches, it often attaches to every federal dollar its full litany of rules, demands, and oversight. Business firms do not ordinarily give money to churches at all. Many would rather spend it on associations that attack capitalism.
There are good preachers and bad preachers, church programs that work and ones that do not. We have no way of finding out which is which save by intense personal inquiry.
Read the Introductory Remarks for James Q. Wilson
What we need are privately funded groups that would evaluate the fiscal soundness and programmatic intensity of church efforts, distribute to firms and foundations lists of apparently worthwhile programs, and help raise money for ones that pass this initial screening. We need in each large city the religious equivalent of the United Fund, but one that, unlike the Fund, is focused chiefly on solving the problems of the underclass with church-related activities. Corporate funds would support the healing role of churches.
The policies I have described cost money and have unknown effects. How can I tell the guests of the American Enterprise Institute to spend more money on things about which we know so little?
In a rational world we would take money back from failed programs. Despite the absence of any evidence that federal spending helps schools, we spend over six billion federal dollars a year on schools. Federal job training programs have, at best, modest effects; cut back on them. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute has calculated that in 1992 we spent $290 billion on persons with low incomes–$5,600 for every man, woman, and child in the lowest fifth of the nation’s income ladder. Money exists, but this is a political world, and wasted money is rarely recaptured. But even if more money is required, recall the message of John DiIulio: if you find a man with a knife in his back, you don’t make him better just by pulling the knife out. The American people have rejected the welfare state, not because it costs too much, but because it has not helped people.
Our goal is not to enlarge the welfare system but to change it. All about us lies the wreckage of the therapeutic state. It has created, not self-respect, but social dependency. When asked what the government should do to change family structure, Senator Moynihan answered this way: if you expect a government program to change families, you know more about government than I do. Governments can transfer money; they cannot build character. Our best hope is to transfer the money to private agencies–churches, voluntary associations–that have shown in the past a capacity to change people.
The tougher question is what will work. Will anything I have suggested make a difference? I do not know. In my defense I remind you that these policies are consistent with what every parent already knows and what social science belatedly recognizes. The human personality emerges early; if it is to be shaped, it must be shaped early. Investing in early childhood is the most important investment any society can make. We have known that for centuries, but only in modern times have we led many parents–and by money subsidies, encouraged some parents–to avoid making this investment.
No parent, whether father or mother, can “have it all.” Choices must be made between family and work. The first must take priority over the second. This choice affects women more profoundly than men because women are closer to their children. The vast majority of all single-parent homes are female headed. This is not the result of a legal arrangement but of human choice. If we care about how children are raised in their early years, and if, as is now the case, how they are raised is left to overwhelmed women or institutional arrangements, the only way we can restore the balance is by committing money to the task of inducing actions that were once the product of spontaneous arrangements.
Religion shapes lives in every culture that has ever existed, and does so more powerfully than the mass media or government programs. Throughout the Western world, political and intellectual elites have abandoned interest in, or acquired a deep hostility to, the force that has given meaning to Western life. To a degree, this was understandable. The Enlightenment, of which we all are part, was created by thinkers who wished to end religious warfare and sectarian authority. But we have done more than end religious warfare; we have tried hard to end religion itself, thereby subjecting much of mankind to a new form of warfare–the hopeless struggle of lonely souls against impulses they can neither understand nor control.
This is a feature of almost all of the western world, and it helps explain why crime rates and illegitimate births have been rising rapidly almost everywhere and not just here.
We live today with the advantages of three centuries of political and intellectual emancipation, but those advantages were purchased at a price. Most of us do not feel that price because we have transformed the teachings of the Enlightenment into personal wealth, political power, social advantage, or intellectual accomplishment. Those who have done so are part of one nation, proud of what freedom has allowed us to achieve.
But there is a second nation, growing more rapidly than the first. It is the nation that has paid heavily the high price of freedom. It is armed to the teeth, excited by drugs, preoccupied with respect, and indifferent to the future. Its children crowd our schools and fill our streets, armed and dangerous.
Cultures grow up out of the countless small choices of millions people. To restore a culture, we must do it retail, not wholesale. We are not fighting the Second World War, we are trying to retake a captured city where the struggle goes on person by person, block by block, building by building.
That struggle may be lost. When a culture changes, policy can rarely change it back. But I am an optimist. America has been told that it would be destroyed by slavery, alcohol, subversion, immigration, civil war, economic collapse, and atom bombs, and it has survived them all. Most people wish to be part of one family and one nation. If we wish to be one nation again, we must make the second one part of the first. We have tried almost everything to do this except for the one thing that matters most–rebuilding the family. However difficult, it is what there is left to try.
James Q. Wilson is the recipient of the 1997 Francis Boyer Award.