Teen pregnancy:
A new study by economists Phillip Levine and Melissa Kearney suggests that income inequality is a major cause of teenage pregnancy. Yglesias summarizes:
Where poor people can see that hard work and “playing by the rules” will reward them, they’re pretty likely to do just that. Where the system looks stacked against them, they’re more likely to abandon mainstream norms. Those who do so by becoming single teen moms end up fairing poorly in life, but those bad outcomes seem to be a result of bleak underlying circumstances rather than poor choices.
Anna North calls for a real solution:
Really, they say, teen pregnancy is more of a social problem than a sexual one. And the best way to solve it isn't to target pregnancy directly, as sex education programs try to do, but rather to improve girls' lives as a whole. … This might seem like a bipartisan solution, since it requires neither preaching abstinence nor handing out condoms. But, says Levine, there's a problem: "Buying condoms is a cheap solution. Abstinence-only is really cheap. Improving life chances is not."
Millman wants more research on how we can reduce poverty:
I’m already sold on the idea that economic aspiration is the key to keeping poor girls from getting pregnant. But how the government can successfully promote that kind of aspiration is not something we agree on the answer to. We need more data – from more experiments.
Will Wilkinson draws a different lesson:
Perhaps we'll be less eager to combat teen motherhood now that we understand that it doesn't much harm the economic prospects of the young women most likely to go in for it. My own reaction to this news is to wonder whether it isn't cruel to try to discourage relatively poor teen girls from seeking the comforts of motherhood, if motherhood won't hurt their prospects. If we set aside as ill-founded our paternalistic economic motivations to reduce rates of teen motherhood, only the impulse to discourage the proliferation of those people and/or that culture seems to remain. I'm not comfortable with that.
The Dish 