Should the government push poor people to marry?

The urge to do so has a long pedigree, dating perhaps as far back as 1965. When serving as a Labor Department official in the Johnson administration, Daniel Patrick Moynihan — who was later a top adviser to President Richard M. Nixon and ultimately one of the most influential Democrats in Congress as a senator from New York — argued that the surge in African-American families headed by single mothers was condemning many black children to fail in school and in life.

Promoting marriage and two-parent families was part of President Bill Clinton’s welfare overhaul of 1996. His successor, George W. Bush, offered up a Healthy Marriage Initiative. The Obama administration policy quiver included marriage promotion, too.....

.....And yet, after all those efforts to strengthen the bonds between mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, it is hard to resist the conclusion that much of this is misdirected, a waste of resources and time.

Births out of wedlock can be sharply reduced by providing young women with access to sex education and long-term contraception, so they might delay having children until they feel ready. And instead of trying hopelessly to reconstitute the conventional family of yore, why not devote resources to improving the welfare of the families as they are?.....

.....Remember the Healthy Marriage Initiative? When MDRC, the policy evaluation organization, performed a careful evaluation of its program of marriage education for low-income married couples who had or were expecting children, it had to conclude that it “did not lead more couples to stay together....."

.....Marriage is increasingly unpopular around the industrialized world. Births out of wedlock have surged across the board. Yet somehow families in other rich countries have avoided the depth of dysfunction of their American peers. This is not a result of policies encouraging marriage. Rather, it is a result of policies aimed at increasing families’ and children’s well-being.....

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