re: families and economies, which do you consider truer...

[Omega 3 snake oil]

Broken families cause povertyorPoverty causes families to become broken.... I've worded these statements in an overly-simplistic manner to emphasize the bare-bones of what I'm getting at... I know you could rip apart either one as not being necessarily, 100% true, but I think it goes without saying both are true enough to hold significance.I've thought about this but want to hear what everyone else thinks.

[cab21]

how are we measuring poverty?

 

broken families cause poverty could be truer

 

a family in poverty does not need to be broken at all.

[Alan C.]

Broken families cause povertyorPoverty causes families to become broken

 

Poverty didn't cause families to become broken in the past. People lived in poverty for most of human history. The proliferation of broken families is a recent phenomenon.

[Daniel Unplugged]

I think the statement "poverty causes broken families" is barely true. I'm not even sure what the rationale for such a statement would be. A family is in poverty, so it breaks apart? Why? To bring them out of poverty? At most that would apply to the breadwinner (Usually the father), since I doubt it could be argued that a mother and children would be financially better off without the father, and, it would only make sense if the cost of living alone, and (maybe) paying child support/alimony is less than the cost of living together, which would be unlikely. If a man did ditch his wife and children for such a reason, I thing a lack of income would be among the least important problems facing the family, since he would obviously be a total douche. Another rationale could be: Families in poverty tend to fight a lot about money, due to a lack of it, and that that friction caused the family to break up. But, fighting about money is by no means limited to families in poverty, so there must be some other, underlying cause to the friction (not a lack of money), even if the friction seems to be related to poverty. In any case, a poor choice of provider (by the mother), and the decision by the father to have children that he can not afford to support, are significant factors to be considered. In this case, poor planning, and poor choices are the underlying causes of the breakup. Blaming the poverty is a cop out.Please state any other lines of reasoning if you think them relevant.

Poverty didn't cause families to become broken in the past. People lived in poverty for most of human history. The proliferation of broken families is a recent phenomenon.

...and all this is occuring during the period of the greatest level of income of the poorest families in society in human history, families that are also far richer than the billion or so families in developing countries, which are not breaking up at anything like the rate that first world families are.

[Think Free]

Broken families cause povertyorPoverty causes families to become broken

 

"Broken families cause poverty" is definitely truer.

 

The U.S. is richest nation in history (even our poor are rich by international or historical standards), and we have world-topping rates of divorce, abortion, out-of-wedlock births, imprisonment. But the sections of our society in which the family broke down first are the poorest. On the other hand, people who get and stay married in the U.S., on average, die twice as rich as those who don't.

 

Another true statement that you don't mention is this: "Many of the systems that reinforce poverty in the West also break up families." This fact is often confused with your second statement.