Three facts about poverty and prosperity

These are three tough-to-refute findings from my fifty years in higher education.

1. The family unit is the foundation of the economy and social order. Two parents, with one of them employed outside the home, and with two or more children create the basis for social and economic development. Here is an argument for this case by congressman Burgess Owens. Well beyond examples and anecdotes, economic and census statistics also bear this out. The well established "three things you need" to avoid poverty also support this, basically education, employment and marriage before children. Also, see here, here and here.

2. From the first point, in developed countries, sex outside marriage is the primary driver of poverty. Troubled, drug-abusing and jailed youth are more likely to come from single-parent families, with long-term negative implications for the youth to become a productive person, contributing to society.

3. In developing/poor countries, sex within marriage is the primary driver of poverty. Poor parents produce poor children. The more poor parents producing more poor children increases the number of people in poverty. Family size is less of a factor in developing countries when it comes to causing poverty, primarily because wealthier parents tend to have fewer children, so family size in developed countries has declined considerably over the past fifty years, in some case to the point of creating a demographic decline, i.e., births not able to sustain population growth.

For the skeptics, here is a feeble, ineffective attempt to "disprove" these general guidelines. NOTE: You can't disprove a general rule by exceptions to the rule.

As to the gross misunderstanding of the relationship between prosperity and inequality, while progressives like Alan Blinder carp that inequality curbs prosperity (a/k/a growth, economic development, wealth creation), history provides a very different picture: Prosperity increase inequality. A "rising tide lifts all boats" cliche is more of a canard, as even though all boats "are lifted" in this metaphor, bigger boats rise faster than small boats. That means that while everyone is better off, those already better off are even "more better off." The problem comes when progressives try to curb inequality by destroying wealth. The best and perhaps only significant of how this happens occurred over a hundred years ago, where the combination of Work War I and th global pandemic that followed destroyed so much wealth among the rich (countries), that wealth inequality declined. In this case, everyone was worse off, with the "rich" being even "worser off" than the poor in the sense that the poor had little to lose while the wealthy lost a lot.

For more, look at this earlier post. And here is a good rebuttal of the faux conclusion when progressives find a correlation that shows two dire, related conditions, they tend to assume causality and, worse, the wrong direction of the causality.