The War Between the State and the Family

How Government Divides and Impoverishes

Patricia Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351301664
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Patricia Morgan's core assumption is that the family is an extremely effective vehicle for raising the welfare of its members. If this is correct it is quite possible that the state can best support the family by doing very little--by not taxing the family heavily and by minimizing the subsidization of those who choose alternatives to financially self-sustaining family life.

At one level, Morgan argues, the family can be seen as a unit within which there occurs enormous transfer of economic resources between husband and wife, parents and children, and, on a wider scale, within extended families. The family is the most important vehicle of welfare and the welfare vehicle of first resort. Within the family many services are provided by family members to each other, rarely for direct personal benefit. Basic economic analysis, Morgan asserts, suggests that the family could be seriously undermined if the state provided significant support for dependents who are not brought up within self-sustaining family units, and if it also provided services, such as childcare, that are generally provided within families. This work shows that this is precisely what has happened in the last twenty-five years.

The driving force of significantly reduced family formation is not economic but social. Perhaps social changes have led to a desire by individuals to bring up children in family circumstances different from those of a generation or two ago, but evidence does not support this hypothesis. Rather, tax and benefit systems seem to be important determinants of family structure worldwide. Patricia Morgan does not simply analyze the problem, she also suggests policy solutions. The author argues that divorce laws should be reformed to ensure that those who make commitments are held financially responsible. The author's argument is compelling because it is backed up with strong evidence and is argued from an unemotional economic perspective--individuals within families are rational agents who respond to incentives.

1  HOUSEHOLD FRAGMENTATION AND THE DECLINE OF MARRIAGE

It does not pay to have no ties.

TACITUS, GERMANIA

Lonely planet: getting away from them all

Human beings may well be a social species, but household trends suggest increasing fragmentation or atomisation. Such trends impose pressures upon living standards and the environment, and are closely bound up with problems of poor child development, personal disadvantage, endemic welfare dependency and the increasing inequalities that have exercised researchers, policy-makers and politicians over the last decade or so. As individuals are disconnected from family, friends, neighbours, churches, clubs, associations and community networks, social capital is destroyed, trust evaporates, despoliation and predation spread.¹ These developments are not simply fortuitous or accidental, but are being created by government policies that are altering our demographics: policies that have progressively eradicated the links that bound families and communities together. Out of indifference or even hostility to human collaboration, by ignorance or design, these are subverting the formation of enduring bonds and furthering social dislocation.

If the media are to be believed, living alone is quite a swanky lifestyle for a man who ‘has a three bedroom house that he rarely visits and a cleaner to do the washing and ironing. He has all the trappings of a comfortable middle class lifestyle except one: a wife and family’. Instead, ‘most nights he dines out and spends weekends visiting friends, relatives or playing golf.² Another perspective is provided by an account of a woman lying dead for more than two years, with her faithful television keeping the corpse company. The following day brings a further report of someone who was left dead, unmissed and unlamented, for three years.³ The proportion of one-person households had increased from 14 per cent in 1961 to 30 per cent by 2004. It is projected to increase to 40 per cent by 2021. More than half of those living alone are below pension age whereas, in 1961, the number of those living alone over pension age was double that of younger people living alone. In 2004 the proportion of one-person households with men under 65 was more than three times the proportion in 1961.⁴ The increase among men in their thirties has been particularly pronounced; once the smallest group of men living alone, they are now the largest, with a majority predicted to be living alone in ten years’ time.⁵

A more familiar aspect of fragmentation is the growth of lone parenthood. While men move from their childhood home, or from being one of a couple, to live alone, women often move from their childhood home, from a couple or from living alone to become lone parents. With marriages falling steeply, the marriage age rising and the proportion of births out of wedlock rising from 8 per cent in 1970 to 42 per cent in 2004, the number of lone parents has tripled. While one in four women with a child born out of wedlock goes on to marry in the subsequent eight years, a half of all lone mothers (the fastest-growing subgroup) have never married. A quarter or more of children now have lone parents, who often produce their child(ren) in one or a series of cohabitations, accounting for 60 per cent of unwed childbearing. At the same time, the percentage of first births outside any ‘partnership’ has more than doubled in a very short space of time (from 6 per cent in the 1980s to 15 per cent in the 1990s).

One-person and one-parent households have made a significant contribution to the 32 per cent increase in the total number of households in the last 30 years. This increase in the number of households should be seen against a backdrop of total population growth of 6 per cent. In 1971, in England, there were 46 million people and 16 million households with an average size of 2.86 people. In 2003 the population was nearly 50 million, with 21 million households and an average size of 2.36.

When it comes to living arrangements, it is now usual for a trend or an increase along any dimension to be taken for a norm or an ideal. An underlying logic seems to dictate that the way things are going must be right simply because that is how they are going, and so, therefore, it must be embraced and furthered. Often incorporated into this response is the assumption that a trend not only signifies an overwhelming preference, but is already a majority or even a universal behaviour. Therefore, it needs to be pointed out how over two-thirds of people still live in couple households, as do about three-quarters of children (two-thirds of whom are with married couples). Moreover, if something is moving in a certain direction, this does not necessarily make it either right or beneficial. Indeed, as we shall see later, the trend in living alone is something strongly encouraged by government subsidy and taxation policy – it does not result from the spontaneous action and free choice of people who are facing the full economic costs and consequences of their actions.

The retreat from marriage

The retreat from marriage is clearly a major factor behind the increase in living alone. Younger age groups are remaining single more than previous cohorts, and once in a union they are more likely to dissolve it. The divorce rate increased sharply in the early 1970s and stayed high. More years are spent unmarried and there is more childbearing among the increasing numbers of unmarried people. Cohabitation is twice as likely to produce children now as it was only ten years ago. At the same time, cohabitations in which children are born are much less likely to be converted into marriage, and more likely to dissolve than either marriages or childless cohabitations. Eight per cent of married couples break up before their child is five, compared with 62 per cent of cohabiting parents,⁶ with the result that three-quarters of family breakdowns affecting young children involve unmarried parents. This was recently confirmed by the Millennium Cohort study (of babies born between September 2000 and January 2002), where the extent of family breakdown in children’s first three years was 6 per cent where there were married parents, 32 per cent where there were cohabitants and 76 per cent for ‘closely involved’ couples. Even high-income cohabiting parents are twice as likely to split as married ones.⁷ There is a generally upward trend in the proportion of cohabiting relationships that dissolve rather than turn into marriage: the proportion dissolving increased from 30 per cent to 37 per cent to 50 per cent for women born in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s respectively. After break-up, it takes about two years to form another relationship, which, again, is likely to be cohabitation and which, again, is subject to the high risk of dissolution. The strongest predictor of a father’s absence is the parental relationship at the time of the child’s birth,⁸ with little difference for a child born into cohabitation or outside any live-in relationship. Even teenage mothers who have their first child within marriage are more likely to be with the same man in their mid-thirties than those who had their first child while cohabiting: 1 in 2 compared with 1 in 3.⁹

The biggest decline in babies born to married families has been in homes with around average income. In the 1970s, most children were found in the third and fourth deciles of the income distribution, with declining numbers in successively richer deciles. Lately, most children are found in the bottom two deciles. A report on the ‘drivers’ of ‘social exclusion’ for the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office identified one such driver as the rapid decline in fertility for middle and upper socio-economic groups, with a growing proportion of children born to lower-class and single women.¹⁰ Moreover, the size of lone-parent families is increasing while that of couple families continues to decline. Four or more children are now as likely to be found in lone-parent as in couple households.¹¹ As the age of all mothers has risen, the average age of lone mothers has fallen, with a third of the increasing number of single lone mothers aged less than 25. Unwed childbearing was once a temporary status, typically and often fairly quickly followed by marriage and marital childbearing. Now, a new boyfriend, live-in or not, often means a new child, and a larger lone-parent family when the ‘partnership’ breaks up, as it is very likely to do.¹²

The big surge in men living alone is in tune with this escalation in lone parenthood, the continuing high divorce rate and even higher level of cohabitation breakdown. Between 25 and 44 years old more men live alone than women, although this reverses between 55 and 64, as women are more likely to be widowed than men and children leave their lone mother’s home. By 2031, the proportion of men aged 45–54 years old who have never married is expected to rise to 40 per cent.

Analysing the evidence

In the next chapter, we look at the economic and social consequences of what might be termed the atomisation of households. We find that income transfers and the division of labour in households provide important economic and social functions. We then examine how policy has systematically favoured the breaking up of households and militates against their formation. The state is now willing to step in both as ‘bread provider’ and child carer if one parent of a child is absent. We then look in greater detail at the economic evidence regarding the relationship between family status and poverty and try to separate cause and effect. Finally we examine potential approaches to policy and conclude that the state cannot continue to subsidise those who do not meet their family responsibilities because the consequences of doing this are the undermining of the family as an important vehicle for welfare provision and personal progress.

Notes

1  R. D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2000.

2  P. Johnson, ‘Rise of the home alone generation’, Daily Telegraph, 9 May 1997.

3  L. Deeley, ‘Dead for two years, missed by no one’, The Times, 14 April 2006; ‘Corpse lay in house for years’, The Times, 15 April 2006.

4  ‘Households and families’, Social Trends, 34, 35 and 36, ONS, London, 2004, 2005, 2006; Focus on Families, ONS, London, 2005.

5  Projections of Households in England to 2016, HMSO, London, 1995.

6  J. Ermisch, Trying Again: Repartnering after Dissolution of a Union, ISER working paper no. 2002-19.

7  H. Benson, The Conflation of Marriage and Cohabitation in Government Statistics, Bristol Community Family Trust, 2006.

8  L. Clarke et al., ‘Fathers and absent fathers: sociodemographic similarities in Britain and the United States’, Demography, 35(2), 1998, pp. 217–28. In the USA, births to unmarried couples account for almost all of the increase in unmarried childbearing since the 1980s – at the same time as a rapid decline in the likelihood that the parents would marry each other. L. Bumpass and H. Lu, ‘Trends in cohabitation and implications for children’s family contexts in the US’, Population Studies, 54, 2000, pp. 29–41.

9  K. E. Kiernan, Transition to Parenthood: Young Mothers, Young Fathers – Associated Factors and Later Life Experiences, Suntory-Toyota International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines, London School of Economics, 1995.

10  J. Bradshaw et al., The Drivers of Social Exclusion, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, London, 2004.

11  J. Haskey, ‘One parent families – and the dependent children living in them – in Great Britain’, Population Trends, ONS, 2002; and see S. D. Hoffman and E. M. Forster, ‘Nonmarital births and single mothers: cohort trends in the dynamics of non marital childbearing’, History of the Family, 2–3, 1997, pp. 255–75.

12  A. Marsh and S. Vegeris, The British Lone Parent Cohort and their Children 1991 to 2001, DWP Research report 209, 2004, and Hoffman and Forster, ‘Nonmarital births and single mothers’.

2 THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF ATOMISATION

In this chapter we simply examine the effects of household fragmentation in terms of poverty, inequality and welfare. Here we simply look at the evidence. We do not make judgements about policy implications until we have examined whether policy intervention is one of the causes of household fragmentation.

Atomisation in the big picture

In the twenty years between 1995 and 2016, the number of English households will grow by almost a quarter.¹ About a third or more of the increase in households will be required as a direct result of inward migration and the rest arises from the increase in ‘stand alone’ singles households (4.4 million extra homes between 1996 and 2016).² There is virtually no increase projected in the domestic indigenous population. Here, of course, our focus is on the growth in the number of households as a result of fragmentation.

Not so long ago, social or council housing was seen as something for young couples with children unable to afford to buy their own ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• The author
• Foreword
• Summary
• 1 Household fragmentation and the decline of marriage
• 2 The economic and social consequences of atomisation
• 3 The enemies of collaboration
• 4 Cause and effect
• 5 Rhetoric and reality
• 6 More of the same or a new policy approach?