In March 1993, the conservative commentator William J Bennett released a report entitled "The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators." Over the course of the preceding three decades, he wrote, the US had experienced "substantial social regression." Since 1960, there had been a more than 500 per cent increase in violent crime; a more than 400 per cent increase in out-of-wedlock births; almost a tripling in the percentage of children on welfare; a tripling of the teenage suicide rate; a doubling of the divorce rate; and a decline of more than 70 points in SAT scores. Bennett concluded: "the forces of social decomposition in America are challenging—and in some instances overtaking—the forces of social composition." Could anything be done to halt the slide?
But a strange thing has happened. Just when it seemed as if the storm clouds were about to burst, they began to part. And now, a decade and a half after these dire warnings, improvements are visible in the vast majority of social indicators; in some areas, like crime and welfare, the progress has the dimensions of a sea change.
According to the National Crime Victimisation Survey (NCVS), the rates of both violent and property crime fell sharply between 1993 and 2005, reaching their lowest levels since 1973 (the first year for which data is available). Teenage drug use, which moved relentlessly upward throughout the 1990s, declined thereafter by an impressive 23 per cent. In welfare, since the high-water mark of 1994, the national caseload has declined by over 60 per cent. Abortion, too, is down. After reaching a high of over 1.6m in 1990, the number of abortions each year in the US has dropped to fewer than 1.3m, a level not seen since the supreme court's 1973 decision to legalise the practice. The divorce rate, meanwhile, is at its lowest level since 1970. The high school dropout rate, under 10 per cent, is at a 30-year low, and the mean SAT score was 8 points higher in 2005 than in 1993.
Yet it should not be forgotten that these improvements occurred after more than three decades of almost uninterrupted free fall. American popular culture remains, in many respects, a cesspool of violence and vulgarity. And, perhaps most importantly, some of the most vital social indicators of all—regarding the condition of the American family—have so far refused to turn upward. Even as the teenage birth rate has fallen, out-of-wedlock births in general have reached an all-time high: 37 per cent of all births in 2005. Over half of all marriages are now preceded by a period of cohabitation, and marriage rates themselves have declined by almost one half since 1970.
Obviously, no single explanation for the improvement will suffice. Instead, long overdue changes in government policy appear to have combined with a more or less simultaneous shift in public attitudes, with each sustaining and feeding the other. The 1996 welfare reform bill was the most dramatic and successful social innovation in decades, reversing 60 years of federal policy. In effect, the new law ended the legal entitlement to federally funded welfare benefits, imposing a five-year time limit on the receipt of such benefits and requiring many recipients to find work. When the bill was passed, there were dire predictions of an explosion of poverty and hunger. They were quickly refuted. State welfare rolls plummeted—and poverty, instead of rising, decreased.
Crime rates, too, benefited from something of a policy revolution over the course of the 1990s. Incarceration rates rose, policing improved, crime data was processed faster, criminal patterns were identified more effectively—all of which furthered the twin goals of intervention and prevention. The progress made against drug use also appears in large part to be another product of a reformed government policy—an integrated approach, applying pressure on all fronts: law enforcement, prevention, treatment, interdiction and education. During the Clinton presidency, the drug issue was allowed to fade from attention, but since then national policy has returned to its former levels of efficacy, and the statistics reflect the encouraging results. And in education, the emphasis placed by government on testing, accountability and transparency has unquestionably made a difference.
But how to account for the anomalous absence of improvement or, more precisely, the acceleration of decline in the overall marriage rate, in rates of cohabitation without marriage and in illegitimacy? Suppose that, in 1992, you had known that the picture in these crucial areas of family life would continue to be at least as dark in 2007, if not darker. Would you not have predicted a similarly dismal profile in the related areas of crime, drug use, welfare, education, teenage sex, abortion and poverty?
In fact, just that kind of linkage was behind many of the most dire forecasts of the 1990s. In 1993, reviewing national figures on illegitimacy, then at just under 30 per cent of all births, the social scientist Charles Murray wrote that "every once in a while the sky really is falling." Murray believed that rising illegitimacy would lift with it a whole fleet of social pathologies.
Murray may well have been correct about the importance of illegitimacy. But he—and not he alone—seems to have been incorrect that it would drive everything else. Over the past 15 years, on balance, the American family has indeed grown weaker—but almost every other social indicator has improved. Murray's dictum could still be borne out; in time, the explosion of illegitimacy might undo the signs of healthy cultural revival we have charted. Or it may be that the broad improvement in cultural attitudes will in time cast its benefits upon the family as well, helping to curb the seemingly inexorable growth of illegitimacy.
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