{"id":71269,"date":"2018-05-18T09:00:43","date_gmt":"2018-05-18T13:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=71269"},"modified":"2018-05-18T07:20:42","modified_gmt":"2018-05-18T11:20:42","slug":"ifs-straight-talk-about-the-success-sequence-marriage-and-poverty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=71269","title":{"rendered":"(IFS) Straight Talk About the Success Sequence, Marriage, and Poverty"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some communities in America convey the success sequence\u2019s three rules to their young adults very emphatically. The importance of these norms gets through loud and clear in much of Mormon Utah, many\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ifstudies.org\/blog\/if-you-stumble-in-the-success-sequence-a-strong-family-can-lift-you-up\">immigrant<\/a>\u00a0communities, and in countless\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/stateofourunions.org\/2010\/when-marriage-disappears.php\">upper-middle class<\/a>\u00a0homes, neighborhoods, and schools across the nation. A whole host of stories, ideals, expectations, and norms in these communities foster adherence to the success sequence. This adherence, in turn, reduces the odds that their young adults end up poor,\u00a0<em>even<\/em>\u00a0when those young adults hail from poor and working-class families. It\u2019s no accident, for instance, that children raised in lower-income families from Utah have markedly\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.aei.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/IFS-HomeEconReport-2015-FinalWeb.pdf\">higher rates of economic mobility<\/a>\u00a0than children raised in lower-income families in most other states, or that\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/html\/brooklyn%E2%80%99s-chinese-pioneers-13640.html\">children<\/a>\u00a0raised by poor Chinese immigrants from Brooklyn are much more likely than other poor children in New York City to\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wnyc.org\/story\/301916-around-sunset-park-tutoring-is-key-to-top-high-schools\/\">get into<\/a>\u00a0the city\u2019s elite public high schools, positioning them to move into the middle class or higher as adults. These young adults have been formed by communities that reinforce their own versions of the sequence\u2014<em>even<\/em>\u00a0in the face of social structural obstacles that make following the sequence more difficult.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s no reason, however, to limit the success sequence\u2019s message to the offspring of the privileged, particular immigrant groups, or the religious. All young Americans\u2014regardless of their parents\u2019 education, ethnicity, or religious commitments (or lack thereof)\u2014deserve to hear straight talk about the importance of education, work, and marriage. Although this message is not a panacea, and it is not a substitute for taking policy actions to address structural disadvantages \u2014like reforming education, expanding the child tax credit, and increasing wage subsidies\u2014we owe it to our young people to tell them the truth about how the exercise of their own agency in the direction of particular choices rather than others is likely to affect their own financial future. Doing anything less is just one more way in which our country locks in durable inequality for poor, Black, and Hispanic young men and women, and increases the odds that they forge a path into adulthood not towards the American dream, but towards poverty.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/ifstudies.org\/blog\/straight-talk-about-the-success-sequence-marriage-and-poverty\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some communities in America convey the success sequence\u2019s three rules to their young adults very emphatically. The importance of these norms gets through loud and clear in much of Mormon Utah, many\u00a0immigrant\u00a0communities, and in countless\u00a0upper-middle class\u00a0homes, neighborhoods, and schools across<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=71269\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,149,168,597,98,593,88,109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-economy","category-ethics-moral-theology","category-laborlabor-unionslabor-market","category-marriage-family","category-personal-finance","category-poverty","category-sociology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71269"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71271,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71269\/revisions\/71271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}