To momentarily take a breath from the election's aftermath and zoom back to the long view, there's some interesting research out of the Brookings-Princeton project "The Future of Children" on the impact of culture on poverty transmission.
In short, conservatives have two ideas on poverty. The first is that people should work. That was achieved in the 1996 welfare reform. The second is that they should get married. Post-welfare reform, that's been their focus. Nothing, they claim, is nearly so critical as marriage. So Charles Murray now preaches the gospel of Leave It To Beaver. The approach is a particularly elegant form of pandering: It denies the need for government action, reifies the Christian obsession with marriage, and insinuates that the poverty of poor blacks can be blamed on their insufficiently virtuous family structures. In other words, it's their fault.
Problem is, the evidence doesn't support the claims. There's plenty of data proving a correlation between marriage rates and better situations for children, but precious little proving it an effective bulwark against intergenerational poverty. Poverty isn't primarily intergenerational. Poor kids don't generally grow up into poor adults. And poor adults don't generally start as poor kids. It's a problem epidemiologists often face: When evaluating a condition's spread, a small group at high-risk may not be nearly so important as a large group at small risk. And that's the case here.
