Since then, many officials, from mayors through presidents, have done so, and recently the large Washington audience at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual Francis Boyer Lecture did so. Wilson, who has recently retired from UCLA, gave Washington, a proudly practical city, a demonstration of the unity of theory and practice. He offered a theory about why America is materially better off but spiritually worse off than it was not long ago. And he suggested programmatic responses, one of which has the potential to make “family values” a matter for practical rather than merely rhetorical treatment by the political class.
Wilson’s worry, and much of the nation’s, is that America is being poisoned by a subculture that is both cause and consequence of many children’s being born to unwed girls, raised in neighborhoods where there are more male sexual predators than committed fathers, and who matriculate, as it were, into gang life for protection and self-advancement. It is a subculture “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.” It is dominated by “young, marginally employed, sexually adventuresome, socially aggressive young men who reject the idea of hard work and social conformity that made their elders successful.” As “bastardy has become more common, children more criminal, and marriages less secure,” policymakers have tried this and that. “Much has happened but little has changed.”
However, Wilson does note one change: more than half the public, and 70 percent of Americans under 35, think no shame should attach to having children out of wedlock. That fact is surely related to this one: social pathologies have multiplied during a burst of wealth-creation without precedent in world history. America’s poverty problem is not one of material scarcities but of abundant bad behavior. Wilson, seconding William Galston, says there are three simple behavioral rules for avoiding poverty: finish high school, produce no child before marrying, and no child before age 20. Only 8 percent of families who conform to all three rules are poor; 79 percent of those who do not conform are poor.
In recent decades there has been some pertinent social learning. We have learned that the trajectory of a child’s life is largely determined in the earliest years. “The human personality emerges early; if it is to be shaped,” Wilson says, “it must be shaped early.” The best predictor of a child’s flourishing is the fervent devotion of two parents. Wilson warns that if the work requirements of the 1996 welfare reform are implemented, young mothers will be told to spend much of each week away from their children who, “already fatherless, will now not even be raised by their mothers.”
Wilson’s ameliorative ideas for American families include making adoption easier in order to minimize foster care. (“The average foster child lives with three different families, and ten or more placements are not rare.”) Another idea is to require unmarried teenage mothers to live with their babies in a home supervised by experienced mothers. A third idea is this: given that religiosity and decency are correlated, and given that it is a reasonable surmise that the former causes the latter, and given the remarkable success of a religious-based program like Alcoholics Anonymous, and given the evidence that religious programs in prisons reduce recidivism-given all this, large cities should have “the religious equivalent of the United Fund” to deliver services for the underclass through churches.
However, the most intriguing idea suggested by Wilson, which he credits to Richard and Grandon Gill, pertains to parents outside as well as inside the underclass. It would offer the equivalent of the GI Bill for a parent-usually a mother-who will postpone a career until children reach school age.
No parent, Wilson says, can “have it all,” and in the clash between family and work, the former must be favored. “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 products of spontaneous arrangements.” Hence a GI Bill-style educational entitlement that would enable a parent who stays home with a young child to finish school, attend college or graduate school, or take technical training courses after the child’s most formative years.
The original GI Bill’s benefits were entitlements of a sterner sort than we have become used to. They were linked to services rendered-services of the most serious sort, involving war. A new version of that entitlement would compensate a parent who forgoes earnings in order to render the vital social function of putting children on the path to social competence.
Politics has come to seem demoralizingly disconnected from practicality because leaders have been unable to connect their rhetoric with programs. They have failed to find ways for government to get a grip on the nation’s principal problem-the coarsening of the culture that is produced by the brew of toxic behaviors associated with family decomposition. With reference to “family values,” Wilson and the social scientists he cites are pointing to a way for the political class to reacquire relevance.
