I feel like your analysis has a huge blind spot. Your analysis seems to assume that the social structure can be explained in terms of economics and government policy. Those things are clearly factors. But whatever money, jobs, and municipal resources you think are lacking in Baltimore, it’s exceedingly wealthy compared to villages in Bangladesh. But Bangladesh manages to have mostly intact local communities, low crime rates, limited gang violence, etc. And that’s because it follows traditional social norms with respect to marriage, fatherhood, and child rearing.
The poverty rate for children in single mother households is four times higher than for children in married couple households. For millennials who graduate high school, work full time, and then get married before having children, 97% live above the poverty line.
There’s only a handful of census tracts in the US where low income Black men enjoy similar upward income mobility to low income white men. They have certain features you’d expect: higher overall incomes, lower racism among whites. But they are also conspicuous in having high numbers of fathers present: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c... (“And, intriguingly, these pockets — including parts of the Maryland suburbs of Washington, and corners of Queens and the Bronx — were the places where many lower-income black children had fathers at home. Poor black boys did well in such places, whether their own fathers were present or not.”). This result is a no-brainer to my dad, or pretty much everyone in Bangladesh, but is deemed a “pathbreaking finding” by the likes of Harvard sociologists.
So why do people refuse to acknowledge the possibility that the breakdown in marriage and fatherhood is part of what causes the breakdown of the local community? To be clear, there’s lots of factors in play and they are coupled. The kid who gets sent to Rikers for stealing a backpack probably doesn’t become an attentive, involved father. Mass incarceration, loss of middle class jobs, etc. There are lots of things need to be solved.
But at the same time, the blind spot around family structure—refusing to label it a problem that also needs to be solved along with the other things—is actually destroying lives. That’s especially true for lower-income Americans. Upper middle class people still adhere to traditional norms in their own lives: they graduate school, get married, and raise children in wedlock, in that order. It’s lower income Americans, not just in Baltimore but across rural America, where those norms have deteriorated the most. And it’s those communities, especially the women and children, that bear the brunt of these social changes.
The poverty rate for children in single mother households is four times higher than for children in married couple households. For millennials who graduate high school, work full time, and then get married before having children, 97% live above the poverty line.
There’s only a handful of census tracts in the US where low income Black men enjoy similar upward income mobility to low income white men. They have certain features you’d expect: higher overall incomes, lower racism among whites. But they are also conspicuous in having high numbers of fathers present: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c... (“And, intriguingly, these pockets — including parts of the Maryland suburbs of Washington, and corners of Queens and the Bronx — were the places where many lower-income black children had fathers at home. Poor black boys did well in such places, whether their own fathers were present or not.”). This result is a no-brainer to my dad, or pretty much everyone in Bangladesh, but is deemed a “pathbreaking finding” by the likes of Harvard sociologists.
So why do people refuse to acknowledge the possibility that the breakdown in marriage and fatherhood is part of what causes the breakdown of the local community? To be clear, there’s lots of factors in play and they are coupled. The kid who gets sent to Rikers for stealing a backpack probably doesn’t become an attentive, involved father. Mass incarceration, loss of middle class jobs, etc. There are lots of things need to be solved.
But at the same time, the blind spot around family structure—refusing to label it a problem that also needs to be solved along with the other things—is actually destroying lives. That’s especially true for lower-income Americans. Upper middle class people still adhere to traditional norms in their own lives: they graduate school, get married, and raise children in wedlock, in that order. It’s lower income Americans, not just in Baltimore but across rural America, where those norms have deteriorated the most. And it’s those communities, especially the women and children, that bear the brunt of these social changes.