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Podgajski

And poverty is the biggest root cause of fatherlessness.

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I think you are swapping cause and effect here.

I don't quite follow you.

Is that because mothers wealthy enough not to be on welfare don't need to stay single to stay on welfare?

Probably because well-off people tend to marry other well-off people, and don't tend to marry either single mothers or those in the precariat, let alone those who are both at the same time?

You know, every time I see articles like this from a conservative outlet, I always wonder what they want to do about it. It's not like they believe in government action to solve collective problems. Perhaps they should encourage their wealthy readership (I believe the median income of a WSJ reader is quite high) to marry these women who do not have fathers for their children?

I believe this site is populated my males with reasonable to high incomes (I could probably be said to fit that description somewhat) - maybe we should encourage the single ones among us to find single mothers to marry in order to help solve the problem?

I suppose I'm being absurd, but what is the endgame of these articles? I suspect it's just to shame single mothers (as though the party of Donald Trump has any room to try and shame others). I doubt the vast majority of single mothers explicitly planned to end up that way.

The party of Donald Trump didn't break Texas and Florida schools like California and New York did

It’s pretty hard to break something that was already broken. But I’m guessing you have an ideological point to make?

But of course, the WSJ would never want to admit that massive wealth inequality has negative consequences...

If you believe the reason some children are fatherless is because a hedge fund manager owns a jet, you're reaching.

It’s not that the own a jet, it’s the fact that financial capitalism extracts money from people through rentier economics that enable them to make such exorbitant profits so they can afford to buy a jet.

How about the idea that the people working at the dollar store or walmart are making poverty wages while the leadership team hoovers up all the profits? The UAW went on strike this year because the auto makers returned to huge profitability and wanted to keep the concessions the workers gave to keep the manufacturers afloat during the hard times once the hard times were over.

So, yes, it’s not that big of a reach to say that some children are fatherless because the money that might have gone into their parents’ pockets is going to pay for that hedge fund manager’s jet.

If you take a quarter for each person and give it to an executive as additional compensation, the executive will experience a 250/hr increase in pay given a 1000 employee company, and the individual will experience only a loss of 25 cents. Cut executive compensation by that much and they will leave. Heck, cut it by half as much and they will do so. Aside from that, research shows that executive compensation issues are down to the conflict of interest that boards and CEOs have, since the CEO hires the compensation analysts for the board. Hedge funds doing 'vulture capitalism' or stripping the equity from a company without a bias towards a going concern is not down to Jets. Its down to the regulatory environment incentivizing companies to do so.

You forgot to add any links for this blanket statement.

In the world where everyone’s racing to get more money, it’s amazing that people can still think money doesn’t matter.

“Wealth may increase marital stability through its material value, providing couples with economic resources they can use to improve their marital quality, thereby lowering their divorce risk.”

https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/60/1/147/3428...

Could you give some more insight on this?

If you ever been poor, you don’t understand the stress that money puts on a relationship. And that’s just to start with. Poverty also increases stress which increases a likeliness to use drugs to combat the stress. Also, as other people pointed out, it’s most times more economic feasible for people in poverty not to get married because they would be penalized by getting married.

Poverty causes stress and stress causes aberrant behavior.

I might qualify this to say that poverty without spirituality causes fatherlessness.

if poverty is the cause of divorces/families breaking up then why does the US (a developed country) have one of the highest divorce rates?

Because most people who seem wealthy have a lot of money issues as well. And divorce is not only caused by poverty. For example, Christianity looks down on divorce and there are fewer Christians in the US.

But this proves the lead point that fatherlessness does not cause crime, poverty does.

> I might qualify this to say that poverty without spirituality causes fatherlessness.

That’s a bold statement.

I know, right? It’s bold to say that not focusing on materialism as the route to happiness could mean that people in poverty might not suffer as much.

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