Single Mother Births Dropping

Another measure of the K-shift approaching:

The percentage of babies born to unmarried mothers dipped below 40 percent for the first time in 9 years in 2016, dropping to 39.8 percent, according to the final birth-data report for that year published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

However, there were 1,569,796 babies born to unmarried mothers in the United States during that year, according to the report. That made 2016 the 29th straight year (1988-2016) that more than a million babies were born in the United States to unmarried mothers.

Over the past 30 years on record (1987-2016), according to CDC data, there have been 120,777,366 babies born in the United States and 42,015,749 of those babies—or 34.78 percent—were born to unmarried mothers.

Wow, from 3% (which is more like 0% among the middle class and wealthy) to four out of ten. It is an amazing change in reproductive strategy, which it is impossible to claim happened just by random chance.

Notice it was on its way down in 42 and 43. I would assume that was a nadir due to the Depression and the shock of war. It dropped again in 46 and 47 as all the vets came home, and began families. Why it rose in 44 and 45 I am not sure, perhaps seeing the War in Europe head to an end made the US environment seem better than it was, perhaps the War in Europe stimulated economic activity, or perhaps the male population left in the US was higher in r-strategists, per capita in the two years just before the end of WWII. Probably some combination thereof.

Since Kennedy’s War on Poverty and Johnson’s Great Society increased the flow of welfare in the 60’s, especially into black communities, it has been a pretty shocking and consistent rise however, even in the face of the shock of 9/11, and the gross economic incompetence of Carter. The expansion of Welfare that began in the 60’s was the ultimate flood of free resources, and it eliminated any ability to shift toward real K:

Until the 1960s, government welfare programs were small efforts designed for young widows and seniors without other means of support. Payments were more likely to go to elderly white women than young black mothers. There were blacks on welfare, but relatively few families depended on the government in any open-ended fashion.

Welfare was a mean little business meant to get people by in a pinch. Mothers applying for checks had to let social workers inspect their homes to see if their lifestyles were “suitable,” and to make sure they weren’t living with a man who could work. And if they qualified for support, the stipends were scanty, certainly nothing to found a life upon. As late as the early 1960s, Lee Rainwater’s study of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis makes only passing references to welfare: even in the worst black communities it had not yet become a norm.

During the decade that followed, the number of Americans on welfare increased by 169 percent, and then another 30 percent from 1970 to 1975. In New York City, almost one out of every six residents was on welfare in 1972. And many of the new enrollees were black. Even though blacks were only about a tenth of all Americans, they constituted nearly half of all welfare recipients by the late 1970s. Among long-term welfare recipients, it was as high as 70 percent.

One could interpret these numbers to mean that poverty and joblessness in black America were on the rise. The truth, however, was that the American economy was booming, opening up opportunities that blacks would have previously envied. Between 1960 and 1970—the very years that welfare dependency mushroomed into a norm rather than a stopgap in many black communities—unemployment among black men decreased from 7.8 to 4.2 percent.

Strangely it dropped along side the Conservative takeover in Congress in ’94, and leveled off one year after the economic crisis of 2008, presumably since it measuring conceptions almost a year earlier. I am not sure why it dropped in those cases, however. It is probably worth a closer look.

It is possible that this metric is not so much a measure of political ideological parameters, but rather is a measure of how sinecure a life the poorest in the nation are experiencing. Flood welfare to the poorest, and they will go r and explode in number, and that will eventually bleed off into the greater culture.

Eliminate welfare as in the Depression, (or Venezuela), and those single births will plummet. Or, just let the economic conditions deteriorate enough, and you will see that Misery Index Climb, the Conservative Policy Mood shift toward conservatism, and attitudes toward guns, sex, and nationalism all shift K. That is what we are seeing now, and it all in preparation for the collapse.

Then again, since the Kennedy era, we have seen an unprecedented shift toward r-strategist ideology, and that is represented in this graph. Today’s centrist democrat would have been a hardcore communist that John F Kennedy would have spit upon.

Spread r/K Theory, because just as things change they can change back