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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Black people have a much higher propensity to crime at every income level, but single motherhood alone makes up almost all that difference. The problem is much clearer than people often let on.

The father is usually alive. Parents don't live together probably because one, or maybe both parents are assholes. These traits are passed to children. Doesn't neccessarily mean that forcing parents to live together will eliminate the gap. Remember, pre Civil-rights era such horrible share of single parent household didn't exist and the crime gap was about the same.

Obviously the parent is still alive, the question is if they are contributing to child care in any meaningful way. Just splitting the time between households is probably not meaningfully different than having 1 parent. The benefit of nuclear family is probably mostly in having more child rearing labor at any time. You actually see the same effect in Japan, except with traditional multi generational families having better outcomes vs nuclear families.

Parents don't live together probably because one, or maybe both parents are assholes. These traits are passed to children.

This may have some effect, but given that even significantly heritable factors like height and intelligence aren't that inheritable (I think IQ is roughly 30%?), it really doesn't fit.

Remember, pre Civil-rights era such horrible share of single parent household didn't exist and the crime gap was about the same.

Pre ~1950 data isn't that good in the first place, (EDIT: actually even now I don't think the data is excellent) but there is a pretty huge uptick in crime that fits very well with the adolescence of the first generation of single parent children.