Glenn Reynolds picks up this quote from the Washington Post …

As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent. The working class and the poor, meanwhile, increasingly steer away from marriage, while living together and bearing children out of wedlock. . . . Marriage has declined across all income groups, but it has declined far less among couples who make the most money and have the best education. These couples are also less likely to divorce.

… and cites back to his own citation in January to the work of Kay Hymowitz. I discussed this the month before, actually, writing this at Dean’s World:

I’ve fought an uphill battle in these pages for the proposition that we have lost something in our abandonment of traditional morality, especially as regards family life. There are so many unclear empirical questions, though, and so much cultural and religious baggage this conversation has to carry, that I never felt I was making any headway, or could, without recourse to explicitly religious arguments.

That’s why I’m grateful for a link provided in the Kaus article to an article by Kay Hymowitz in City Journal. Hymowitz takes apart the truisms, generalizations, assumptions and illogic that dance around the just plain truth that the socioeconomic, and social, reality for mothers and children — and dads — in households without a husband are worse off, remain worse off, and bestow a future of worse off to their own offspring.

I was, however, quite unable to get any traction in the comments. People ended up defending what great parents certain single parents were, while, in my view, missing the real issue — that traditional morality, as rapidly dwindling as it is in popularity in this country — even among “conservatives” — has something to say about healthy relationships, healthy child-rearing, and healthy adulthoods.

Now even the Post agrees that, empirically speaking, those with the most choice and given the most options more or less choose the most traditional arrangements. Why is that? I can’t say it’s because of a rebirth of religious or “traditional” morality — that’s not happening among elites in the West. But here’s one hint: People who accomplish the most — “couples who make the most money and have the best education” — are the most likely to have gotten to that point by virtue of being accustomed to discipline, i.e., self-denial and delayed gratification. Hence: “These couples are also less likely to divorce.”

Investment pays off. Successful people not only know this, but apply to all aspects of their lives — not only careers and finances. It is true that success in those areas can make you think there’s a shortcut to happiness in the other, arguably more challenging ones — family, love, and making some stab at finding meaning in life. But the only shortcut achieved, usually, is distraction from the truth.

As the research shows, the poor and working class don’t even have that. Nor the leadership — political or spiritual — to suggest where they can find it.

UPDATE: Villanously more.