as forty articles and chapters. His work has been published in The Atlantic, National Review, Huffington Post, and other outlets.
Matthew McKeever is Professor of Sociology and Department Chair at Haverford College. His research focuses on the structure of social inequality within a variety of institutional, cultural, and regional contexts. This work examines different theories regarding the distribution of education, occupation, and income, and how processes that determine the distribution of these resources vary regionally.
Wolfinger and McKeever applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Thanks for Nothing: The Economics of Single Motherhood since 1980, and reported the following:
On page 99, readers will find Figure 4.17, which depicts the effect of family size on income. The figure is based on the multivariate analysis of 39 years of data from the Current Population Survey, a Census Bureau product that polls a nationally representative sample of U.S. families on their economic well-being. This particular figure looks at whether the presence of a pre-school-age child affects family income for married mothers (spoiler: it does not). It’s in chapter 4, which is devoted to exploring the predictors of income at different points of the income distribution. In the case of page 99, the question is whether the economic impacts of a young child are the same for more or less privileged mothers.Learn more about Thanks for Nothing at the Oxford University Press website.
Despite the conventional wisdom that young children are a disproportionate drag on a mother’s income, the page 99 results show that having a young child in the house doesn’t affect income for married mothers. This is true for mothers at the top and at the bottom of the income distribution, and hasn’t changed between 1980, the beginning of our study, and 2018, the last year of data we looked at.
The figure on page 99 does convey a more general finding of our study, namely the growth of income inequality over the past 40 years. At the lower income quartile (i.e., the bottom 25 percent of incomes), family income for married mothers was about the same in 2018 as it was in 1980, about $57,000. In contrast, there was a big difference between upper quartile income in 1980 and 2018: upper quartile incomes rose over time from $105,000 (married mothers without young kids in the house) and $107,000 (married mothers with pre-school-age children) to $122,000 and $124,000. In short, only the top of the income distribution has witnessed income growth over the 40 years.
These results are based on multivariate analysis that accounts for major social and demographic differences between respondents: race, education, age, family size, and so on. And the sample size is immense, in the hundreds of thousands after all years of data between 1980 and 2018, inclusive, are pooled. The results depicted on page 99 capture a small slice of the multifaceted data analysis we undertake.
This page demonstrates both the futility of the page 99 test for a book that analyzes quantitative data, and the usefulness of maybe reading more than just one page. It’s nearly impossible to get a sense of the scope of our data analysis from this one graph. We’re quantitative scholars and like graphs and tables just fine, but Figure 4.17 offers nothing but a non-result, albeit one that goes against what some believe to be common sense. What’s more, it’s a non-result for our comparison group, not our population of interest. Thanks for Nothing is a book about the economics of single motherhood. Throughout the book we present data on married mothers as bases of comparison. It’s just dumb luck that page 99 is one of the comparison figures based on married mothers.
Consequently, if we were prospective book purchasers basing our decision on page 99 of Thanks for Nothing, we’d likely do more than simply not buy it: we’d tell others to eschew the book, perhaps likening it to the appendices of a Census report. It is, we’d aver, the academic answer to Atlas Shrugged or War and Peace, little but a somniferous doorstop.
At the same time, page 99 does capture one aspect of what is crucial to building a social scientific argument: namely, it’s important to look for possibilities that your argument is incomplete, even if it does mean demonstrating that certain things don’t matter. If readers just turn the page they’ll see two figures depicting data for single mothers—and these figures show larger effects of having a pre-school age child in the house. This, in the case of our book, a “page 99-101” test might prove more useful.
Figure 4.17, the focus of page 99, is a brick in a wall. Our book is a comprehensive investigation of how the economics of single motherhood have changed over the past 40 years, all in service of solving a mystery: in 1980, single-mother families were five times as likely to be poor as were two-parent families. More than 40 years later, single-mother families are still five times as likely to be poor. How can that be, given the gains in education and employment women have made over the past half century?
We’re not content just to put forth a hypothesis. Instead, we make the case systematically, with over 130 charts. If you have a question about the economics of single motherhood that can be answered with quantitative data, you’ll probably find the answer in our book. It’s just dumb luck that page 99 is one of the least interesting pieces of the puzzle.
This profusion of data—and our interest in the economics of single motherhood more broadly—didn’t emerge in a vacuum. For over 100 years Washington policymakers and public discourse has been concerned with family structure. Much of this discourse—too much in our estimation—has been moral rather than practical. Generations of politicians seem to have been guided by The Scarlet Letter, content to wag their fingers at fallen women. This tradition reached its nadir in Ronald Reagan’s anti-welfare invective and Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform legislation.
We contend that Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a better way. Starting in his famous 1965 report and continuing in his decades in the U.S. Senate, Moynihan identified family structure as an important topic for public concern. The legislation he championed would have bettered the lot of single mothers and, perhaps most notably, the future generations of Americans in their care. Those interested in the welfare of America’s children would do well to relearn these lessons.
--Marshal Zeringue
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