What exactly did Moynihan say about the relationship between employment, welfare, and family breakdown?
WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: What Moynihan talked about back then is, I think is true today, and that is joblessness creates problem streams in the family. It leads to family break-ups resulting in an increasing number of families going on welfare. And so if you want to strengthen families, you should provide, the logical conclusion, following his arguments, would be to provide employment opportunities for males, not to mention females. But the lack of jobs increases family tensions, leading to marital break-up, leading the growth of female-headed families, which oftentimes results in greater use of welfare. [In my own research], what we found was a strong relationship between black male joblessness and single-parent families. We found that employed fathers were two-and-a-half times more likely to marry the mother of their first child than jobless fathers. This is especially true of men under the age of thirty-five. So, in the inner city we found a very strong relationship between male joble
