Critics of social welfare contend poverty produces unstable family structures. But maybe lower-income households favor flexible family structures to increase their wealth.
Opponents of government assistance for low-income families argue low rates of stable marriage are a root cause of poverty, while supporters of welfare programs counter that poverty causes the family instability which then impedes prosperity. But what if low-income households tended toward unstable family structures because flexible family arrangements were a positive adaptation to poverty? This article hypothesizes that flexibility is better than structure for households facing economic uncertainty. I present evidence that low-income households with “unstable” families have more wealth on average than low-income households with traditional family structures.
Are unstable families a cause or effect of poverty?
Poverty is strongly associated with unstable family structures such as unmarried cohabitation and single female-headed households. Unmarried parents are much more likely to separate than married parents, and single parents (especially single moms) are significantly more likely to experience poverty and remain in poverty longer than married parents.
These dynamics attract attention in policy debates because they are not only individual decisions. Unstable family structures possibly impact the wellbeing and educational outcomes of children. Furthermore, because families generally pass down values and behaviors, the intersection of family and poverty implies the potential for generational and community patterns of poverty.
The debate over poverty policy is fueled by an unresolved question of whether unmarried cohabitation and female-headed households are a cause or effect of poverty. On one hand, children growing up without stable role models appear more likely to experience poverty and later struggle as parents. On the other hand, the stresses of scrambling for resources may be a barrier to stable marriage, rather than the other way around. Therefore, liberals promote policies to ease the economic stresses of low-income families while conservatives argue that welfare benefits targeting single parents deter the stabilizing institution of marriage.
But there is an assumption shared by both sides in this debate. Although one side blames unstable family structures and the other blames a lack of resources, both agree these nontraditional family structures are a bad thing for low-income families. But what if the flexibility and diversification inherent in nontraditional family structures improve the resourcefulness of households facing economic uncertainty?
Theory and model for a poverty culture indicator
The patterns of family structure associated with low-income communities may be the product of people following their individual self-interests in managing risk and uncertainty. Sociologists have long observed low-income communities exhibiting behaviors such as frequent movements among spouse-like relationships, female-headed households, and the indiscriminate sharing of resources.
Opponents of welfare policies used these observations to blame poor people for their poverty, leading to decades in which the “culture of poverty” was perceived as a racist topic social scientists avoided. However, the nontraditional family structures associated with the observed poverty culture may be positive, productive adaptations to economic uncertainty. But if poverty-culture behaviors were helpful to low-income households, why are they repudiated in the mainstream culture?
One explanation is, while these behaviors are associated with resourcefulness and resiliency for low-income households, they are associated with waste and irresponsibility for middle- and upper-class households. While sharing resources and engaging in flexible, short-term romantic partnerships may be resourceful under the economic uncertainty of poverty, they are likely not resourceful in the middle and upper classes, where stable family structure and individual savings are the best path to prosperity.
This theory predicts particular demographic characteristics will be associated with higher levels of wealth for low-income households and lower levels of wealth for high-income households. Evidence of these “poverty culture indicators” would point to characteristics of households that are resilient to poverty, serve as proxies associated with ubiquitous sharing, and present quantitative justification for behaviors prevalent in low-income communities and scorned in the middle and upper classes.
I propose a quantitative model to measure this phenomenon. My model measures the average change in wealth associated with (1) nontraditional family structures for the mid/high-income households, (2) traditional family structures for low-income households, and (3) nontraditional family structures on low-income households, each controlling for the effects of the others. If the first term detects negative wealth while the third term shows higher wealth than the second term, then the characteristic measured (the nontraditional family structure) would be associated with worse outcomes for mid/high-earners but better outcomes for low-earners.
The evidence: Non-married cohabitation and female-headed households associated with higher wealth for households below the federal poverty guidelines
As the the most comprehensive survey of American assets and debts, the Survey of Consumer Finances serves as the data source for my analysis, focusing on household-level data collected from 2001 to 2016.
To identify households in poverty, this analysis defines low-income families as living below the federal poverty guidelines for each survey year and based on the size of each household. Wealth (assets minus debts) is the outcome of interest, indicating which household characteristics are associated with resourcefulness, given low- versus mid/high-income environments. Research that only examines income levels cannot identify whether household characteristics are the cause or effect of poverty. However, measuring changes of wealth within income groups should indicate which characteristics are associated with low-income resourcefulness and are, therefore, possible effects of poverty rather than its cause.
If poverty-culture behaviors were a productive adaptation to poverty, then households should exhibit resourcefulness correlated with traits sociologists and social workers associate with the poverty culture, namely unmarried cohabitation and female-headed households. To isolate the proposed effects of the poverty culture, I compare households with these characteristics to similar households without these characteristics. Within the sample studied, heads of married-couple households are nearly 13 years older on average than heads of unmarried-couple households, and each year of age is associated with over $45,000 in wealth. Also, female-headed households are associated with an increased likelihood of being single – approximately one-quarter of the male-headed households in the sample were single while nearly one-half of the female-headed households were single. This association is important because singleness is associated with a decrease of nearly $800,000 in wealth. Because younger and single-adult households are likely to have significantly lower wealth on average than older and two-adult households, I control for differences in age on unmarried cohabitation and for single-adult status on female-headed households.
NonM_GPPR2FHH_GPPR2
Results appear in the above graphs. In each graph, the downward arrow indicates that the nontraditional family structure is associated with a loss in wealth for households above the federal poverty line and the upward arrow indicates that the same characteristics are associated with a gain in wealth for households below the poverty line.
These results support my hypothesis. When comparing households with similar potential time in the workforce, unmarried cohabitation is associated with lower wealth for mid/high-income households but is associated with higher wealth for low-income households. When comparing households with the similar numbers of wage-earners, female-headed households are also associated with lower wealth for mid/high-income households but are associated with higher wealth for low-income households.
Conclusion: The origins of cultural patterns in poverty
This research indicates that “unstable” family structures may not be the product of amoral, antisocial behaviors. Instead, they may be associated with resourcefulness in the face of poverty. This is not to say these flexible, nontraditional living arrangements are in the long-term best interests of low-income families. However, these findings demand less social stigma for poverty culture behaviors.
More importantly, these findings point to the origins of poverty as a social phenomenon. Social scientists have noted that lower-class families in preindustrial societies maintained stable family structures despite living in relatively greater impoverishment than the modern poor.
The research presented in this article suggests that capitalist societies are different because lower-class families have incomes that are precarious – on the verge of obsolescence in a way that preindustrial poor farmers were not. Today, low-income households face economic uncertainty that causes them to naturally and rationally favor flexibility over structure in their family relations.
Nathan Witkin is a second-year MPP student who practiced law and served as a mediator for 10 years before enrolling at McCourt to study public policy innovation. His ideas published outside GPPR include the interspersed nation-state system, interest group mediation, dependent advocacy, a police-community partnership model for citizen review boards, a novel framework for sovereignty in a globalizing world, co-resolution, consensus arbitration, executive bargaining, a theory of impact bonds, and an alternative explanation of gravity.