I was reading a book of old (early 1990's) George Will's articles and speeches. He was very concerned about the high crime rate and the rapidly growing number of children without a dad. He was right to be concerned. That was the peak of American crime.
It was nearly a decade before Levitt and Donohue showed that the crime Will was railing against was the by-product of mothers who didn't wan't their children. The criminals were born before legalized abortions became widely available.
It is more than two decades since the crime rate began falling dramatically. Now our main crime is caused by a specific group of permanent black underclass males.
I wondered what was happening with the children born without a dad. The census shows that 1.5 million such babies are born in America every year. 1.4 million are born to women who didn't graduate college. Nearly 1.0 millions of those didn't try to go to college. Women who have children after graduating from college are married in 9 out of 10 cases. That is the great 'inequality' in our society. Graduate from college and your kids have two parents. Don't go to college and most likely the women who have children will be single.
A few women (70,000) who are well educated and successful also have children without a dad after age 40. That seems to be no problem for the society. Maybe that data should be used to argue for gay marriages and their offspring.
While this out of wedlock data may be alarming there is one piece of the data that was surprising and unrelated to the permanent black criminal class. About the same number of black children are born without a legal dad as are hispanic children. Yet the hispanic children are not growing up to be a permanent criminal underclass. The hispanic community seems to provide extended families and evangelical community churches.
This suggests that the black community has a serious cultural problem that, in addition to producing children without dads, is producing a disproportionate number of criminals.
I didn't expect to find that in the data.
There were two facts that stood out but were not surprising. There are only 3,000 Asian-American women giving birth each year without being married to the father. And Utah has the lowest proportion of single women giving birth, of any state, in the U.S.