American Poverty and Household Structure

Why aren’t we making more progress in fighting poverty in America? The rate of poverty in America was 20% in the early 1960s. After the Great Society programs of the 1960s, that rate dropped to an all-time low of 11.1% in 1973. It climbed to 15.2% in 1983 and again to 15.1% in 1993. As of 2005, the rate was 12.6%. After countless hundreds of billions of dollars and more than thirty years later, the poverty rate is 13% greater.

What accounts for this? Tax cuts for the wealthy? Insufficient minimum wage laws? Inadequate welfare programs? Outsourcing of jobs to developing nations? These are the frequently offered explanations in the popular press. Any or all of these may have some impact, but if we want to find the driving force, we must look elsewhere.

Based on some recent reading, I decided to look at the poverty rate relative to people’s household living arrangements. I used four household types: Male headed households, female-headed households, independent males, and independent females. (1) Independent households are adults living alone or with others to whom they are not related. I compared 1974 data to 2005 data. (2) Here is what I found. (3)

Looking at the poverty rate by household arrangement, we see that some significant headway has been made against poverty, particularly in the traditional husband-and-wife household arrangement. But how could the poverty rate decline for each type of household, and yet the overall rate went up? The answer is quite simple. The percentage of people living in the various household arrangements has changed.

If the same percentage of people lived in each household arrangement as in 1974, the present poverty rate would be 8.9%! People have shifted into household arrangements with higher levels of poverty. This shift also explains why poverty among seniors is very low, but poverty among children has slowly increased in recent years. An increasing number of children are being reared in single-parent homes, and these homes are more susceptible to poverty.

Explaining why this shift in household arrangements has occurred is a complex discussion, but it underscores what social scientists have been telling us many years now: The two most important things you can do to avoid poverty are to live in a household with a husband and wife have at least a high school education.

The Left in the US loves to hammer the Right about their “family values” rhetoric and characterize it as little more than code language for homophobia. There is no doubt some truth in the critique. But let us also acknowledge that what frequently exists behind this lambasting is a commitment to a licentious individualism that causes the Left to bristle at being held accountable for the harm personal choices bring to society when exercised on a wide scale. 

During my first decade out of college, I was sympathetic to the Left’s rhetoric about concern about justice for the poor. I worked for a time analyzing neighborhood-serving organizations in urban core Kansas City, MO, and I went on to graduate school to study micro-economic development. What became clear to me through my experiences was that underneath the rhetoric of caring for the poor was a stronger commitment toward an underlying ideological agenda. Professed concern for the poor was much more of a tactic to demonize opponents than a true concern for the poor. Of course, the political Right, with its “family values” rhetoric, is deeply enmeshed in a whole other set of agendas. But pointing to the “family values” speck in the Right’s eyes does not justify the “licentious individualism” log in the Left’s eye.

Any given single-parent home can be a quality home, but when we look at the issue in the aggregate, the two-parent home is the family structure that is least vulnerable to poverty and a host of other social maladies. I do not intend to suggest that this is the only issue that needs to be addressed. However, a social policy that promotes two-parent homes is valid and important. The religious Left talks a fine talk about caring for the poor. I’ll believe it when I see the promotion of two-parent homes at the center of their agenda. Personally, I’m not holding my breath.

(1) Male-headed households would include families without a mother. I could not devise a way to disaggregate this information from the data I used, but they are a relatively small percentage of the total.

(2) I used 1974 data when the rate was 11.2% because the 1973 Statistical Abstracts were unavailable online.

(3) Data is from The Statistical Abstracts for the United States, page 415, “Table 673: Persons Below Poverty Level, by Family Status, Race, and Sex of Head, 1959-1974”; and The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2007, page 66, “Family Status, Sex, and Race, 1986-2005.”