Single parenting and the bottom line

It seems that recently I've begun to come across a lot more article looking at the financial implications of divorce. One such article was Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’ from this past weekend's New York Times. What do you find there? An excerpt:

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

... About 41 percent of births in the United States occur outside marriage, up sharply from 17 percent three decades ago. But equally sharp are the educational divides, according to an analysis by Child Trends, a Washington research group. Less than 10 percent of the births to college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school degrees or less the figure is nearly 60 percent.

Long concentrated among minorities, motherhood outside marriage now varies by class about as much as it does by race.

The article talks about child being born to unwed mothers previously being concentrated primarily among minorities. What they don't tell you is what can be found in Figure 5 in this paper. What you see there is that up until the welfare system and the sexual revolution kicked in around the 1960s African Americans were not less but slightly MORE likely to be married.

The New York times piece notes that now those most likely to financially benefit from marriage are now least likely to be married, whereas it seems as though the reverse was the case back then. In the 50 years or so since a broader welfare system was introduced in the USA, the probability that African Americans were married dropped from similar but slightly higher than that of their white fellow citizens, to about half its former levels.