Last Wednesday, Mayor Bloomberg announced a $127 million Young Men’s Initiative — funded half by his philanthropies and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, and half by the city — aimed at connecting “at risk” black and Latino youth to employment and careers.
Though surely well-intended, this latest Bloomberg social-engineering effort is mistaken in several painful ways. The failure to include poor white and Asian men — which perpetuates the racial stereotyping that the mayor and Soros claim to be fighting — is only the most obvious.
Worse, Bloomberg hasn’t learned from the failure of his last anti-poverty initiative, which gave cash rewards to poor families and/or their children for doctors visits, prenatal care, good grades and so on. That program had no impact because it didn’t change the family dynamic.
The new initiative gives young men incentives to “stay involved” with their children — but it does nothing to encourage them to marry the mothers and stay married. That is, it doesn’t target the overwhelming issue in persistent poverty.
Unmarried women with children are at a disadvantage (and not merely financial) compared to two-parent households. “Serial parents” — men with children with different mothers; women with children with different fathers — are as much a menace to family stability as are absent fathers.
The Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz cites studies showing that men living with their children work longer hours and earn more, while those who move out are more likely to become unemployed.
Poverty is highest among children and women. Without income earners (male and female) and a committed “team” heading the family, poverty will persist.
The late Sen. Pat Moynihan saw it coming in 1965, when he criticized federal welfare rules that provided payments only if the “man [was] out of the house.” In the 1990s, he reiterated his concern that the welfare system still encouraged women to raise their children without fathers.
Moynihan wasn’t wrong to blame the social ills of urban communities on the breakup of the family. Yes, policies to provide job-training for steady employment, to build adolescent self-esteem and academic excellence or to identify sexual abuse are useful interventions. But the core of anti-poverty policies must be to promote marriage and family stability.
That is, uniting fractured families and encouraging healthy, intact income-earning families are necessary to improving life outcomes, lessening the significance of race and reducing the incidence of teen births and abortion.
To succeed, Bloomberg’s initiative must also be a pathway to employment — since a real job is the most effective incentive for an impoverished young man. Without jobs, it will be just another “feel-good” liberal program like the countless ultimately ineffective ones that alienated so many in my generation.
For the part of the initiative that focuses on former prisoners, the mayor and his advisers should look at the work by the Manhattan Institute and the Community Service Society. Since 2008, the institute has teamed with Newark Mayor Cory Booker to create a “prison-to-work” initiative that connects ex-offenders to job-training, employment-placement services and family-reunification resources.
The Young Men’s Initiative will be a hollow program unless Bloomberg accepts the necessity of promoting monogamous marriage and reducing sexual promiscuity and connecting people to real jobs. These are the things that Daniel Patrick Moynihan would champion.