Five Decades of Crisis: the Persistent, Alarming Link between Illegitimacy and Poverty.

Creating an Opportunity Society cited in August 2009 National Review article

Excerpts from the article:

“IN contemporary America, nonmarital births are inextricably tied to broader socioeconomic divisions. ‘In 2007,’ write Brookings Institution scholars Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill in their new book, Creating an Opportunity Society, ‘the least educated women were six times as likely as the most educated women to have a baby outside marriage.'”

“More recently, Sawhill and her Brookings colleague Adam Thomas concluded that if marriage patterns had held steady at 1970 levels, the overall child-poverty rate in 1998 would have been 4.4 percentage points lower. Subsequent research by Sawhill and Haskins determined that ‘the poverty rate among families with children could be lowered by 71 percent if the poor completed high school, worked full-time, married, and had no more than two children.'”

“In their new book, Sawhill and Haskins point out that the poverty rate among married-couple families is about five times lower than it is among female-headed families with children. ‘The growth of single-parent families and smaller households along with the increased tendency for high earners to marry each other can explain roughly half of the increase in inequality between 1979 and 2004,’ they write.”