“Thanks for Nothing: The Economics of Single Motherhood since 1980” with Nicholas Wolfinger and Matthew McKeever

This episode centers on a conversation with sociologists Dr. Nicholas Wolfinger and Dr. Matthew McKeever about their book “Thanks for Nothing: The Economics of Single Motherhood since 1980” and what it reveals about poverty, race, and U.S. policy. The hosts discuss the core puzzle: even after four decades of gains in women’s education and employment, single-mother families are still about five times more likely to be poor than two-parent families, just as they were in 1980.

The guests revisit the 1965 Moynihan Report on the “Negro Family,” how it got tangled up with Oscar Lewis’s “culture of poverty” thesis, and how both were weaponized in the culture wars. Wolfinger and McKeever stress that Moynihan’s actual policy prescriptions were economic—jobs programs and large-scale public investment in Black communities—not moral lectures, but that critics (and later conservatives) recast his work as an attack on Black family culture. They trace a longer state preoccupation with “the family,” from Civil War–era pensions for Union widows and anxieties over divorce in Teddy Roosevelt’s day to the backlash against desegregation and the way Brown v. Board rerouted structural segregation into school fights rather than housing policy.

The conversation then turns to single motherhood as an economic condition rather than a moral category. The guests emphasize a simple but often ignored fact: one-earner families have fewer resources than two-earner families, and the majority of people in single-parent families are children. They dismantle the “deserving vs. undeserving poor” narrative that paints single mothers as irresponsible, sexually reckless, or “choosing” poverty, arguing instead that policy has systematically stripped support from families at the bottom while rewarding a subset of working poor through mechanisms like the Earned Income Tax Credit. Programs such as the EITC, they note, do get cash to low-income workers, but they also deepen inequality within the population of single mothers by boosting those who can maintain steady employment while leaving the least advantaged further behind.

A recurring theme is the “fundamental attribution error:” the human tendency to attribute hardship to bad character instead of bad circumstances. The hosts use this to frame how conservative pundits like Ann Coulter talk about single mothers—blaming “promiscuity” and “choices” rather than the collapse of secure jobs, stagnant wages, and the cost of housing and childcare. Wolfinger and McKeever acknowledge that culture, neighborhood effects, and even heritable personality traits can play some role in intergenerational disadvantages, but they insist that the levers governments can actually pull are economic: wages, unions, transfers, and public goods like childcare and schooling.

Nicholas H. Wolfinger is a professor of sociology at the University of Utah, specializing in family demography, marriage and divorce, and social inequality.

Matthew McKeever is Professor of Sociology and Department Chair at Haverford. Prior to that, he was at Mount Holyoke College, Rice University, University of Houston, University of Kentucky, and Yale University. 

 

Resources:

Order the book: https://www.amazon.com/Thanks-Nothing-Economics-Single-Motherhood/dp/0199324328

Dr. Wolfinger webpage: http://www.nicholaswolfinger.com/

Dr. McKeever’s webpage: https://www.haverford.edu/users/mmckeever

Greg’s Blog: http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

Pat’s Substack: https://patcummings.substack.com/

 

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