Derek Thompson says that single parenthood is the most important correlate of poverty:

Things get really interesting when you zoom into the marriage picture. Among what you might consider “modern families” (e.g. the 61 million people married and living together, both working), there is practically no poverty. None. Among marriages where one person works and the other doesn’t (another 36 million Americans) the poverty rate is just under 10 percent.

But take away one parent, and the picture changes rather dramatically. There are 62 million single-parent families in America. Forty-one percent of them (26 million households) don’t have any full-time workers. This is something beyond a wage crisis. It’s a jobs crisis, a participation crisis—and it’s a major driver of our elevated poverty rate.

Tell me, what are the government policies that are going to compel people to put off childbearing till marriage, to seek to get married, and to work hard to stay married? They don’t exist. These are cultural matters beyond the ability of the government to influence strongly. Perhaps tax policy could be tweaked to promote family formation, but if the prospect of living in poverty is not enough material incentive to get you to put off childbearing, or child-making, until marriage, and to encourage you to marry, then the prospect of saving money on taxes is not likely to move your personal needle.

Many — most — of us have been acculturated to believe that marriage is a prime goal, and that childbearing should wait until marriage. This is not to say that we believe sexual activity should wait till marriage, or that marriage is forever. The point is, marriage is important in our culture, and restricting childbearing to marriage is important in our culture. Marriage and marital childbearing are still fundamental to middle-class morality. More to the point, they are fundamental to middle-class material security.

But what happens if you grow up in a culture — the black inner-city, say, or for that matter, among rural blacks — where almost nobody lives in a two-parent family? Where “normal” is never-marriage, and having babies out of wedlock? I don’t mean to single out the black population. As we all know, the Hispanic and working-class white population is well on its way down the same path. But American blacks got there first, and have been the most devastated by having adopted this culture.

I got the Thompson link from Sully’s site, where it appears in a blog post titled, “Another War We Can’t Win?” (the War On Poverty, it means). This is an apt title. How can you win a war if you can’t even name the enemy? We can’t talk forthrightly about destructive sexual and social values, because to do so would require making value judgments about sexual freedom and its exercise, and that’s not something we do publicly (though we certainly do it privately). It’s like with education reform: most people know that an “education culture” — that is, a culture that sees education as a primary good — is a necessary condition of good schools like a “marriage culture” is necessary to have a strong society. But nobody knows how to say of the poor, “You have bad values, values that are crippling your children and their prospects for thriving. You need to change.” So we talk around the problem, and blame factors that no doubt contribute to the problem, but which aren’t the main problem — this, because the main problem, dysfunctional culture, is not one the wider society (and certainly not the government) can do much about.

It’s a war no outsiders can win on behalf of populations suffering the most from the conditions the government is trying to fight, at least without real support from those populations. In the fight for good schools, I’ve talked to teachers who are on the front lines in poor schools, and who keep fighting to save the kids who can be saved. But the near-total indifference to education on the part of the parent (there are rarely parents) of these kids, and of the culture that forms them, is nearly impossible to overcome, they say.

Culture is the framework you carry in your head that explains the world, and tells you how to act in it. A culture that normalizes out-of-wedlock childbearing and fails to normalize educational achievement is a culture whose people are doomed to poverty, no matter what the government does. Everybody knows that. Not everybody admits it.

UPDATE: Look, I’m not looking to cast aspersions on some people for the sake of making myself feel good. I’m trying to understand the nature of the problem so it can be determined what, if anything, can reasonably be done about it. You are not doing anything meaningful about it by throwing money and policy at it as some sort of guilt offering. If it works, great, let’s do more of it. If it doesn’t, then let’s stop doing it, or at least save our money until we figure out something that might work.