American libertarians have fallen for an idea that is an excuse for cutting government welfare spending
Want to get ahead in life? In the rich world, there are three supposedly foolproof steps: graduate from secondary school, get a full-time job and get married before you have children. The “success sequence”, a term popularised by Clinton-era American official Isabel Sawhill and her co-author Ron Haskins in their book,Their thesis appears to be statistically robust:
But just because a correlation is robust, it doesn’t follow that it is meaningful. One of the most reliable and consistent findings in political science is that university graduates are more liberal than people who have not gone on to higher. But a series of studies, most recently a fascinating study of sibling outcomes from the University of Southampton, has found that it is not that going to university makes you more liberal — it is that being liberal makes you more likely to go to university.
The absence of useful sibling studies about the success sequence makes it hard to say with confidence that completing it is all that important. That said, the finding does feel a lot like basic common sense. As the economist Bryan Caplan puts it, saying “dropping out, idleness, and single parenthood make you poor” is on a par with asserting that “burning money makes you poor”.
While it is trivially true that you are better off financially raising a child in a long-term two-parent household, it is far from clear that you are better off financially or socially raising a child with a partner who doesn’t want to stick around than if you are alone. Not all social outcomes can or should be reduced to the question of whether or not a household is better off, financially speaking.
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