The Growing Gap in the White Out-of-Wedlock Birthrate

Charles Murray reports on the Enterprise Blog about the large gap in the illegitimate birth rates between the top and bottom classes.

[Mrs. G. doesn't like the term "illegitimate birth" on the grounds that no child is illegitimate. This is true. So I will use the cumbersome "out-of-wedlock" - though it seems like a euphemism piled on a euphemism for bastardy. But that perfectly useful term has been co-opted for other uses. Continue.]

Murray compares the top tenth and bottom tenth (overclass and underclass, in his terms) of white women born at the end of the Baby Boom and the beginning of Gen-X. The top fraction, college graduates with family incomes over $100,000, had an out-of-wedlock birthrate barely over 1%. The bottom fraction, with less than high school education making under $20,000 per year, had nearly half of their kids (44.5%) unmarried. Murray sees this gap as confirmation of the point he and Richard Herrnstein made in The Bell Curve that there is a growing gap in all aspects of life between the top and bottom classes.

And, Murray says, that was then, when the white out-of-wedlock birthrate was only 11%. Murray estimates that the current white underclass has an out-of-wedlock birthrate of perhaps 70%, while the comparable figure for the overclass can't be higher than 5%.