Bob Herbert in today’s Times on out-of-wedlock births in the black community:

One of the main reasons out-of-wedlock births have skyrocketed in recent decades is because it has become so difficult for poor and poorly educated young men to earn enough to support a family.

And later he has statistics to back up his claim:

“The marriage rates of all native-born young males and young black males (22-32 years old) in the U.S. are strongly correlated with the annual earnings of these young men. The higher their annual earnings, the more likely they are to be married. Among native-born black males, those men with earnings over $60,000 were four times more likely to be married than their peers with annual earnings under $20,000.

In Herbert’s world, all you have to do is raise the income of these “poorly educated young men” and marriage rates will increase. More likely, if these same young men took responsibility for their actions and got married, their incomes would increase.

Also missing from the Herbert analysis is the role of women in this whole childbirth thing. As the father of two kids, I do remember that my wife was involved in some small way. Out-of-wedlock births in the African-American community won’t go down until women in the African-American community decide that marriage is something of value.