Finally, the strongest predictors of upward mobility are measures of family structure such as the fraction of single parents in the area. As with race, parents' marital status does not matter purely through its e ects at the individual level. Children of married parents also have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents.
Here's the map of incidence of single parents by region of the country:
One of the reasons for the very high amount of single parents in the South is the VERY harsh sentences for non-violent drug crime, especially among African Americans. Sometimes 10 years for first offenses [1]. Yikes.
Even worse, many in the past ten years are being denied parole [2].
Why the high recidivism? I'm glad you asked. The culprit is For-Profit Prisons [3]. They come in to an area, pay off local judges and congresspeople, and watch the money roll in. Absolutely despicable, and something I am working to end. If you only read one link, read number 3.
[1] http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1891&dat=20050404&id=_...
[2] http://www.eji.org/prisons/parolereform
[3] http://www.birminghamcriminaldefenseblog.com/2013/09/article...
Outkast (from GA) mentions this in their song Gasoline Dreams (from 2000)
http://rapgenius.com/Outkast-gasoline-dreams-lyrics#note-788...
65% (59,253) of children whose parents do not have a high school degree live in poor families.
42% (72,939) of children whose parents have a high school degree, but no college education live in poor families. [1]
There are a number of factors that contribute to child poverty and upward mobility, but it may be a bit hasty to suggest that the primary hindrance to upward mobility is single parenting per se. The study states that they are strong predictors, but that does not preclude other factors that may be correlated with single parenting.
This is hinted in the final sentence of your quote. If children of married parents have lower rates of mobility in communities with more single parents, this would suggest that the effect may be not the sole result of the parental structure, and instead associated factors such as socioeconomic status, social norms, education, etc.
Generally speaking wealthier people have fewer financial problems.
This an interesting link, but it is a garbage argument. Marriage as a time series is just as plausibly (if not more-soe) inversely related to wealth. People were more poor and more likely to be married in the pre-war years (one example). Furthermore the rate of dissolution in marriages is also (in recent times) correlated with increases in wealth (postwar prosperity). Its far more likely that social causes (both technological and cultural) drive family structures. Wealth is perhaps a boundary constraint in some contexts. This latter would best explain recent trends that show a bifurcation (but this is more ~last decade or two).
The Hamilton Project has found marriage rates are decreasing across the board, but far faster in lower-income groups [1]. The marriage rate of those in the lowest income percentile have dropped almost 30%, while the highest income percentile has dropped less than 10%.
Of course, these are not absolute values, but I think it's hardly a "garbage argument" that poverty results in fewer marriages. There a number of other sources that have similar conclusions.
[1]http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/jobs/posts/2012/02/03-jobs-gr...
But more importantly, the broad counterfactual that before WWII, broadly speaking, people were more married and less wealthy.
Furthermore its highly plausible that (so-called) breakdown of marriage (in the post-war) is correlated with non-wealth effects, such as the sexual revolution fostered by hormonal birth control and the spread/use of class A drugs (ie: culture, technology). So, in addition to wealth not explaining marriage rates (broadly) at the scale of long- time, in the short term it has competition as an explanatory variable in the micro-analytic sense. Thirdly, and importantly, the relationship of marriage as a utilitarian tool for <gaining> wealth is an altogether diferent layer of abstraction. It may be, for example, that people (in the jane austen era) married into wealth as a tactic of wealth-creation. Or, alternatively, people are for-going marriage (as in the "cant have it all generatinon") as a means to facilitate of wealth creation (or, even: protection). But these are wholly different effects/causes than the broad relatinships of wealth to marital status. They involve the precise staus of marriage itself. Furthermore, they may or may not have any bearing on the develepment of Children...so far, children haven't even been a consideration in the determinants of marriage (ei, access to sex, wealth acquisition, weath protection). The status of children may wholly be an emergent phenomenon (of marriage) or it may actually be linked to the quality of the principals (absent special instituyional support).
So, in the big scheme of things, waving around macro stuff is a bit hand-wavey. It's quite a bit more important to look at the micro-analytics and actually (a) assess them; and (b) apply them to the context at hand.
On that, I think I agree with the author of the linked essay.
Even accepting their statistical significance qualification, you could have a .1% difference in the percentage of single-parent families between two states, and as long as you have enough samples, your result could be statistically significant and so bucketed with different colors, implying a much greater disparity since you would also bucket two states with a 20% difference in the same way.
Here's a different map:
http://www.thenationalcampaign.org/state-data/state-comparis...
And you can see similar issues with their bucketing (why cut off at those particular numbers?), but far more importantly they provide the actual percentage per state. And here we can see (to take the submission's comparison) that what makes California and North Carolina different when it comes to single-parent households is only 4% (33% vs 37%).
Now there may be more to this when we look at the numbers for smaller regions, but at least at the state level that your map showed, there are significant confounding factors that single-parent status would not explain.