"You're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts." This nugget of common sense is credited to former US Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey.  Nonetheless, if people can’t have their own facts, they can decide which facts to consider, and folks turn out to have a strong preference for data that confirms their beliefs combined with an unerring ability to ignore conflicting data.  It could be that this selective data processing is sometimes an oversight.  Not everyone is a social scientist.

I would like to believe that Pete Wehner and Yuval Levin, posting on the state of American society at commentarymagazine.com fall into the oversight category.  Be that as it may, their failing grade in elementary statistics fuels the wrong conclusions from people with an axe to grind.

 Andrew Sullivan responds hopefully to their optimistic post with conclusions that are no more than wishful thinking on his part.  As inconvenient as the raw data may be to our modern lifestyles, it will not be bent to suggest that what Sullivan calls the 1950s family model does not remain the standard to beat.  He headlines his remarks “Slouching Away from Gomorrah.”  He might better have titled them “Slouching Away from the Relevant Data.”

Sullivan raises a question that seems to be suggested by the data Wehner and Levin present:  If rates of measurable social/cultural ills (drug use, crime, abortion) are falling while traditional family structure continues to unravel, mightn’t previous arguments blaming social problems on de-structured families be flawed?  Worse than simply mixing apples and oranges, the possibilities he posits (perhaps childbirth outside marriage is not necessarily a bad thing, etc) make a veritable fruit salad.

These individual groups of data (overall crime rate and drug use down, raw numbers down on abortion, generally improved school performance, divorce rates down among the college-educated but increasing in other groups, increasing out-of-wedlock births, co-habitation on the rise) can easily be simultaneously true without having any relation whatsoever to one another. Co-relation is not implication.  If YouTube visits increase over a period in which crime rates fall, should we conclude that potential criminals are online rather than on the street?

Of course, it would be equally unfair for social conservatives to take unrelated data on increasing crime and increasing illegitimacy and blame the former on the latter.  Though this may sometimes be done, it is not necessary to make fruit salad to relate de-structured families to social ills.  Any number of social science studies that do control for the separate issues directly relate them.  Wehner and Levin ignore the data most relevant to their article, and Sullivan’s commentary suggests that he doesn’t find it lacking.

That crime rates are down while illegitimacy is up is irrelevant to the question of whether illegitimacy breeds crime.  The only crime data with any bearing on that question concerns how the particular children in question – those born out of wedlock - compare to children raised by both of their own, married parents.  And in fact, the first group is twice as likely to fall into delinquency than the second, after controlling for factors such as income and education.  

Similarly, the two authors cite data that drug use is down lately, but ignore the fact that whatever the generalized level of drug use-abuse in the culture at large, the numbers are much lower still within married families (both married parents and their teens are more abstemious).

Statistics do not address each individual case on its own merits, and there certainly are examples of newfangled families that turn out fabulously. But the relevant data clearly shows that on average, children raised by both of their married parents will be more physically and emotionally healthy, will do better and go further in school and later earn more money in better jobs, will be less likely to be incarcerated, less likely to be victims of abuse in the home or of crime outside of it, less likely to have children out of wedlock, less likely to live in poverty, less likely to use or abuse alcohol or drugs of any kind, and less likely to wind up divorced themselves than children raised in single parent or step-family situations.

Regardless of what modern adults might want for ourselves, that 50s family is the one that works best for children.  In matters of social policy and individual family dynamics, children cannot speak for themselves.  The data speaks for them, if we will only consider it dispassionately.

Data sources from the book Why Marriage Matters: 26 Conclusions from the Social Sciences