Sometimes, a crisis lasts so long, or proves so impervious to remedy, that it becomes normal. We are now 44 years removed from Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous Labor Department report on how family disintegration was stifling black progress. Moynihan expressed alarm that, in 1963, 23.6 percent of African-American births were to unmarried women, compared with 16.8 percent in 1940. He called for “a national effort” to stabilize black families. In a way, Moynihan was the Paul Revere of the nonmarital-birth crisis; yet at the time of its release (1965), his report sparked a huge controversy and drew accusations of racism. Over the ensuing decades, policymakers have been reluctant to address out-of-wedlock births — even as the problem has gotten much, much worse.

How bad is it? In 2007, nearly 40 percent of all births in the United States were outside marriage, compared with 34 percent in 2002 and 18.4 percent in 1980. That’s according to the latest National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) data, which were released earlier this year. “All measures of childbearing by unmarried women rose to historic levels in 2007,” the NCHS reports. Nonmarital births represented 27.8 percent of non-Hispanic white births, 51.3 percent of Hispanic births, and a staggering 71.6 percent of non-Hispanic black births. Though we can take small comfort from the long-term decline in nonmarital births among teenagers, the nonmarital birthrate among older teens (ages 18–19) has recently ticked upward. Meanwhile, birthrates among unmarried women in their 20s and early 30s have been soaring. Teenagers accounted for 50 percent of all nonmarital births in 1970 but only 23 percent in 2007. By comparison, women in their 20s accounted for 42 percent of all nonmarital births in 1970 and 60 percent in 2007.

Perhaps the most disturbing trend is among Hispanics, who remain America’s “largest and fastest-growing minority group,” according to the Census Bureau. In 1980, only 23.6 percent of Hispanic births in the United States were to unmarried women. By 1990, that figure had reached 36.7 percent. By 2000, it had reached 42.7 percent. In 2006, 49.9 percent of Hispanic births were outside marriage. A year later, for the first time ever, more than half were. The Pew Hispanic Center says that “69 percent of first-generation Latino children live in married-couple families, compared with 73 percent of second-generation children and just 52 percent in the third generation or higher.” This suggests that many Hispanic immigrants are assimilating into an underclass culture — the type of culture that has long hampered the mobility of America’s urban poor.

In contemporary America, nonmarital births are inextricably tied to broader socioeconomic divisions. “In 2007,” write Brookings Institution scholars Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill in their new book, Creating an Opportunity Society, “the least educated women were six times as likely as the most educated women to have a baby outside marriage.” American Enterprise Institute social scientist Charles Murray has been crunching the numbers to illustrate how nonmarital childbearing among whites varies by income group. His preliminary findings indicate that the proportion of nonmarital births among the white underclass is likely “in the region of 70 percent,” while among the white working class it “may be above 40 percent.” Among middle-class whites, the ratio “is approaching 20 percent.” As for the highest earners, the white overclass, “their ratio is probably about 4 or 5 percent, tops.”

Such disparities are fueling a sharp divergence in family environments and exacerbating inequality. University of Chicago economist James Heckman puts it bluntly: “American society is polarizing.” The children of more-educated women are growing up in much better family environments than the children of less-educated women, with “the quality of parenting” being “the important scarce resource” in disadvantaged households. Heckman reckons that “about 50 percent of the variance in inequality in lifetime earnings is determined by age 18.” Furthermore, “most of the gaps at age 18 that help to explain gaps in adult outcomes are present at age five.” This suggests that the family resources and attention devoted to a child during his or her earliest years are crucial — which, in turn, means that children from stable two-parent marriages “appear to be at a major advantage compared to children from other unions.”

Unfortunately, as sociologist Paul Amato of Penn State and economist Rebecca Maynard of the University of Pennsylvania have noted, the share of American children living with married parents dropped from 85.2 percent in 1970 to 67.8 percent in 2000. Absent this change, Amato and Maynard calculate that the child-poverty rate in 2000 would have been 26 percent lower (11.6 percent, as opposed to 15.6 percent). In his 2008 Father’s Day remarks at Chicago’s Apostolic Church of God, Barack Obama observed that “children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of schools, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”

All of this is worth remembering whenever you hear a politician lament the uneven distribution of America’s economic pie. In the mid-1990s, Urban Institute economist Robert Lerman published an exhaustive analysis of how changes in family structure between 1971 and 1989 had affected income inequality and child poverty. “On the basis of projections of simulated marriages and marriage-induced earnings effects,” he estimated that the decline in marriage rates over that period “accounted for nearly half the increase in income inequality and more than the entire rise in child poverty rates.” The impact on African-American kids was especially harsh. As Lerman explained, the portion of black children living below the poverty line grew from 40.5 percent in 1971 to 43.3 percent in 1989; but if black marriage patterns had stayed constant from 1971 onward and spurred the customary growth in family incomes, the black child-poverty rate in 1989 would have been only 29.1 percent. In other words, “one-third of poor black children would have escaped poverty.”

A related study by sociologists David Eggebeen of Penn State and Daniel Lichter of Cornell found that if black family composition had remained consistent from 1960 to 1988, the black child-poverty rate in 1988 would have been 17.2 percentage points lower. More recently, Sawhill and her Brookings colleague Adam Thomas concluded that if marriage patterns had held steady at 1970 levels, the overall child-poverty rate in 1998 would have been 4.4 percentage points lower. Subsequent research by Sawhill and Haskins determined that “the poverty rate among families with children could be lowered by 71 percent if the poor completed high school, worked full-time, married, and had no more than two children.”

In their new book, Sawhill and Haskins point out that the poverty rate among married-couple families is about five times lower than it is among female-headed families with children. “The growth of single-parent families and smaller households along with the increased tendency for high earners to marry each other can explain roughly half of the increase in inequality between 1979 and 2004,” they write. “The remainder is the result of rising wage inequality.” (Perhaps the best examination of rising wage inequality can be found in The Race Between Education and Technology, a 2008 book by Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who demonstrate how the combined effect of “skill-biased technological change” and “a sharp decrease in the growth rate of the relative supply of educated workers” since the early 1980s put the college wage premium on steroids.)

So what caused the surge in nonmarital births? And what, if anything, can be done about it? In 1940, fewer than 4 percent of all U.S. births were to unmarried women. Over the next two decades, that figure increased only slightly, rising to 5.3 percent in 1960. The real explosion in nonmarital childbearing started in the 1960s and 1970s. The share of births outside marriage climbed from 10.7 percent in 1970, to 18.4 percent in 1980, to 28 percent in 1990, to 33.2 percent in 2000, and to 39.7 percent in 2007.

Experts continue to squabble about precisely why this explosion began when it did. Some point to the incentives created by Great Society welfare programs; others emphasize the cultural shift triggered by the sexual revolution; still others (most prominently, Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson) blame the flight of manufacturing jobs from urban areas. While job loss may have played a small role, it seems clear that political and cultural changes made nonmarital childbearing both more economically feasible and more socially acceptable.

For example, as American social attitudes underwent a transformation, “shotgun marriages” (that is, marriages prompted by a pregnancy) plummeted. In a 1996 Quarterly Journal of Economics article, three Berkeley economists — George Akerlof (a 2001 Nobel laureate), Janet Yellen (now president of the San Francisco Fed), and Michael Katz (a former chief economist at the Federal Communications Commission) — compared nonmarital births during two periods: 1965–69 and 1985–89. They estimated that “if the fraction of premaritally conceived births resolved by marriage had been the same from 1985 to 1989 as it had been over the comparable period twenty years earlier, the increase in the white out-of-wedlock birth ratio would have been only a quarter as high, and the black increase would have been only two-fifths as high.”

Census Bureau data show that in 2007, 54.7 percent of men and 51.2 percent of women age 15 or older were married, compared with 69.3 percent and 65.9 percent, respectively, in 1960. University of Maryland sociologist Steven Martin has found that “from 1970 through the 1990s, educational attainment became an increasingly important predictor of marital stability,” with divorce rates plunging among the more educated but remaining “high and steady” among the less educated. Meanwhile, women with more education were having fewer children: America’s total fertility rate shrank from 3.65 in 1960 to 1.84 in 1980, before bumping up to 2.10 in 2006. Thanks to the collision of these factors and the leap in birthrates among unmarried women, the nonmarital birth ratio ballooned.

Reversing the growth of that ratio was a principal objective of the 1996 welfare-reform bill. The legislation probably did have an impact on nonmarital births, albeit a modest one. After barreling upward for decades, the nonmarital birth ratio hardly budged in the late 1990s. “We did have an unprecedented pause for about four or five years,” says Heritage Foundation scholar Robert Rector, a key intellectual architect of the 1996 bill. Indeed, between 1995 and 2000, the nonmarital birth ratio increased by only 1 percentage point. To offer some perspective, the ratio had increased by 3.6 percentage points between 1970 and 1975, by 4.1 points between 1975 and 1980, by 3.6 points between 1980 and 1985, by 6 points between 1985 and 1990, and by 4.2 points between 1990 and 1995.

The slowdown from 1995 to 2000 was driven by non-Hispanic blacks, whose nonmarital birth ratio fell from 70 percent in 1995 to 68.7 percent in 2000. Over that same period, the ratio among Hispanics jumped from 40.8 percent to 42.7 percent, and the ratio among non-Hispanic whites swelled from 21.2 percent to 22.1 percent. The slight dip in the nonmarital birth ratio among blacks was accompanied by a significant drop in black child poverty. Columbia social scientist Jane Waldfogel attributes the anti-poverty gains among blacks to a booming economy, the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and welfare reform.

Alas, to the extent that welfare reform had a depressive effect on nonmarital births, the effect proved ephemeral. Between 2002 and 2007, the overall nonmarital birth ratio spiked by 5.7 percentage points, and the ratio among non-Hispanic blacks rose by 3.2 points. Welfare reform had established incentives for state governments to curb nonmarital births. But Rector contends that, with the exception of Oklahoma, the states failed to respond aggressively. He calls this “the largest disappointment that I had with welfare reform.”

So what should the states be doing? Beefing up their welfare-to-work programs? There is no evidence that doing so would spur a reduction in nonmarital childbearing, says Rector. One possible strategy would be for states to pursue more vigorous enforcement of their child-support laws. A 2005 study concluded that “greater success in enforcing child support, thereby shifting more of the cost of childbearing from unmarried women to their partners, may help reduce nonmarital childbearing significantly.” Yet one of the authors of that study, Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan, told me that the impact would most likely be minimal.

Indeed, the best we can hope to achieve through policy tinkering is slow, incremental progress. But there are concrete steps that federal and state officials should be taking. For starters, they should soften or eliminate the marriage penalties that are implicit in all means-tested welfare programs, such as food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). After conducting a survey of state TANF programs in 2006, welfare expert Robert Moffitt, an economist at Johns Hopkins, and three co-authors wrote that “if a male has financial resources, TANF provides the greatest disincentive to form and/or maintain a biological family, and the least disincentive, if not an incentive, to form an unrelated cohabitor family.” Even though some states have embraced “policies to encourage and favor marriage, the TANF eligibility and work-rule structures in these states appear to work against such policies.”

Beyond reforming TANF and similar offerings, Rector proposes a vast expansion of marriage-education programs, which he believes should be voluntary, narrowly targeted initiatives designed to assist potential mothers long before conception. Based in high schools, these projects would ideally bring in sympathetic spokespeople — such as current and former single moms — to meet with at-risk women and talk to them about their life goals, the tremendous challenges of raising children, and the benefits of delaying childbearing until marriage. “Low-income single mothers are not hostile to marriage,” Rector stresses. He argues that government-funded family-planning clinics should be required to offer referrals to marriage-training programs. (Most of the women who have nonmarital births utilize those public clinics.)

Amato and Maynard note that many such marriage programs already exist, yet “surprisingly few have been rigorously evaluated.” During the Bush (43) years, however, the Administration for Children and Families (part of the Department of Health and Human Services) spearheaded three “large-scale” marriage-education projects — Building Strong Families, Supporting Healthy Marriage, and the Community Healthy Marriage Initiative — all of which came “complete with rigorous evaluations.” (Each project has at least two more years to go before wrapping up.)

There are, of course, severe limits to how much government can alter longstanding social trends. Ultimately, achieving a deep reduction in the nonmarital-birth ratio will require a major cultural swing. Real progress will take decades, not years. As McLanahan observes, the nonmarital-birth problem is being compounded by “partnership instability” and “multi-partnered fertility,” both of which poison family environments and weaken the marital prospects of unwed mothers. “In order to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty,” she writes, “we will need to find a way to persuade young women from disadvantaged backgrounds that delaying fertility while they search for a suitable partner will have a payoff that is large enough to offset the loss of time spent as a mother or the possibility of forgoing motherhood entirely.”

The task is daunting, and we should be realistic about what public policy can accomplish. But we must also keep in mind that the nonmarital-birth crisis is, well, a crisis — one that has unfolded in slow motion over the past five decades, with tragic consequences.