An article in today’s LA Times by Meghan Daum seems apt, following my last post.  She writes about new data from the US Census Bureau that shows that "single, childless households are now the largest segment of the population."   The breakthrough is fairly significant: in 2000, 31.6% of all households and now headed by single individuals, while marrieds with children come in at 31.3%; but the singleton households increased by 21% since 1990.  The 1990s, it turns out, was the decade of singleness.

     Daum, who herself is single and childless, guesses that this change is due not so much to cultural change, which does matter to some degree, as to economic possibility.  She does not have all the money data she needs to clinch the point, but her main argument is:

…I’d bet what little money I have left at the end of the month that the vast majority earn considerably more than the average per capita income, which in 2003 was just over $23,000. And one thing I don’t have to bet money on is the fact that the majority of single dwellers are women. In 2003, women represented 57.5% of single householders.

     If we remember that the other side of this coin is the "feminization of poverty" at the opposite end of the income scale – that is, the relatively high proportion of single-mother-headed households with children in poverty – then some interesting questions are raised.      

          Taken together these two groups – well-off single, childless women and poor single mothers – remind us of just how high the costs of raising children are.  Those single women who opt out of child-rearing clearly are better off than their single mother sisters.  And, if it apparently takes two (and it is not at all clear that the "two" have to be of different genders) to raise kids in good economic conditions, then what are the social policy implications that follow?

     I am not a policy wonk and do not have sufficient background to go too deeply into this question.  Rather, I want to pose a larger philosophical query: does society at large have an obligation to intervene and redistribute economic resources away from prosperous single-headed households to worse-off single mother households (I can imagine there might be a small number of single-father poor households also, but, let’s face it, this is largely a single mother issue)?  Should we take money away from some women and give it to others? (Yes, yes I know, any such redistribution scheme would also involve single males, and that’s fine…).  Should the "Sex in the City" girls support single working moms?

      I am not going to pull an old-fashioned Confucian-esque move here and suggest that women, in particular, bear some unique responsibility for addressing what appears to be a peculiarly modern form of socio-economic inequality.  We can safely stay away from the "all women should just get married and be happy" line of thinking.  Rather, I think we should think about the importance of children in society and the question of how to bear the costs – which seem to be rising – of rearing children.

     A more general Confucian take on this would be that, primarily, raising children should be the responsibility of parents.  All those fathers who have bugged out of single-mother households should be held liable for their parental responsibilities.  But, after that, since raising children is so important to Confucius – it is through careful and loving attention that children are brought to understand how to behave humanely in the world – I think he would countenance some form of social redistribution to support single mothers.  And, since marrieds with children are already doing this work and spending the money, perhaps a tax of some sort on single, childless households, precisely to serve the interests of single mothers, would be appropriate.

    I don’t want to push this too far, not yet at least, but how about that? Tax the singles to support the mothers?