Effect of dwindling & non-existent male role models and more importantly, fathers.
You can see a direct correlation in outcomes when comparing children that emerged from two-parent households over those that emerge from single-parent households. But because that is an uncomfortable and pervasive problem to discuss, almost all social effort is focused on solving less tangible problems.
The fathers I did have ranged from absent, to addicts, to abusive. I realize nobody is perfect but there has never been a positive role model for me and this affected me terribly in my relationships for so long (I've been to jail for abuse). I'm only lucky in that I got out of that cycle at least somewhat, and I can probably only credit the massive improvement in my economic condition. My brothers have not been so lucky.
My dad worked in public housing and I used to do tutoring as a kid in the summer. It was sad as I saw the 10 year olds who I really related to grow up in negative paths, mostly because nobody cared.
In contrast my mother works in a Title 1 Elementary school[2], she spends much of her day dealing with children that are in chronically bad situations, it has been her observation that the biggest problem is that no one cares about the kids, not in a the parents hate them sense, but there is no one actively concerned with and thinking about and preparing for the child's future, there are all sorts of resources the school makes available to try and help these kids but it doesn't matter much because no one is invested.
When you have only one parent that one parent has is the sole person responsible for helping prepare that child, investing in that child, and guiding the child, and that kind of work is exhausting. It can be done my own mother is evidence of that, but when you have two parents now you don't have to be the point man on it all day every day you can share that burden with someone else, you have someone to help bear the burden when it is too much for you, and that shares the load.
That I think is an important part of what having a two parent household rather than a one parent household brings, even if finances aren't great it still means there is someone that can invest in the child.
But what doesn't get talked about with family (especially small kids) is that you're with them for 16 hours a day.
Emotions get messy. Someone is always upset about something. And the larger the family, the more probable that someone is upset at any given moment.
The nice thing about a two parent household is that (hopefully) one parent keeps a cool head while the other me be annoyed, etc.
It's so much of a help to have a partner that says "why don't you take five minutes" or "I think you were too hard on ..." And I can reciprocate the same support.
I don't know how single parents do it.
This was an op-ed by a politician, not any kind of analysis.
> "Economic transformation has been a big contributor. More than two-thirds of manufacturing workers are men; the sector has lost more than 5 million jobs since 2000. That’s a lot of unemployed men. Not just coincidentally, “deaths of despair” — those caused by suicide, overdose and alcoholism — have surged to unprecedented levels among middle-aged men over the past 20 years."
A society divided into wealthy elite homeowners living off investment cash flows, and poverty-striken underclass renters living off minimum wages, is not a very stable or healthy society.
Historically, an economic middle class is a relatively recent phenomenon. For ages past and across cultures, there were "rich" and "poor" and relatively few in between.
What created the middle class in the US was a government system that restricted the power of the elites to abuse that power. As Thomas Jefferson wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal". I.e. the rich, powerful, government, or otherwise privileged people ought not to have rights that the poor do not have.
I think the disappearance of the middle class today is largely due to favoritism and miscarriage of justice in government -- like failing to prosecute gross economic crimes adequately (embezzling, insider trading, monopolism, etc.). I don't think rich people are bad by definition, but I do think our government tends to show favoritism to them.
EDIT:
Lest I sound like I'm coming down on conservatives only, liberals in the US have also been hugely responsible for the disappearance of the middle class. The bipartisan post-WWII GI bill, signed by FDR, severely disadvantaged African-American veterans in how it was carried out - by disproportionately denying applications by African-American veterans for housing.
In the decades that followed, Democrat welfare programs provided significantly more total income to 2 divorced adults with kids than a family with 2 married, cohabiting parents -- thus encouraging men to move out so their family could have more welfare money, and (broadly speaking) causing an entire generation of children in poor (and especially African-American families) to grow up without a dad in the home. This lead to further poverty, crime, drug addiction, and ultimately devastation.
Clinton's "war on drugs" and his three-strikes rule only made the problem worse by merely prosecuting and imprisoning people in poverty instead of working to repair the root causes of their behavior. This resulted in many more fatherless families.
Upholding the rights of the poor is everyone's responsibility, especially those in government, regardless of their political affiliation.
The aggregate of individual moral/ethical choices manifests as social phenomena.
That's not entirely false, but it's misleading. The personal choices follow relevant distributions, which are themselves not aggregates. Also, such choices are made in circumstances and under constraints that are not up to individual choice.
No couples with a brain are marrying when doing so would render woman and child ineligible for state aid. The downside to this is that the man is free to leave and leave they do. That's the big one but many government policies have have had the net effect of decreasing stability in poor urban households (regardless of race, but we all know poor urban households do not represent a cross section of society).
I agree that a woman can't be a role model in the same ways as a man, but I believe this is not necessarily a bad thing.
source: student of Depth Psychology