Why Is It Controversial?

In her op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Wendy Wang writes:

Brookings scholars Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill call it the “success sequence”: getting at least a high-school diploma, working, and then marrying before having children—again, in that order. But the message isn’t much discussed on this side of the Pacific—and when it is, it’s controversial. Liberals often dismiss it as a right-wing notion. They shouldn’t. Following the success sequence is associated with a much lower chance of being poor and much better odds of realizing the American Dream.

Tracking a cohort of young adults from their teenage years to early adulthood in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and I recently tested how well the three success sequence “steps” work among the millennial generation. We found that at ages 28 to 34, 53% of millennials who had failed to complete all three steps were poor. The poverty rate dropped to 31% among millennials who completed high school, 16% among those who had a diploma and a full-time job, and 3% for millennials who also put marriage before the baby carriage. Among childless and unmarried millennials 28 to 34 who followed the education and work steps, the poverty rate was 8%.

In regression models that predict the odds of being in poverty after controlling for a range of background factors—including intelligence, childhood family income, race and ethnicity—the probability of ending up poor was reduced by 60% for millennials who married before having children and by about 90% for millennials who followed all steps of the sequence compared with those who missed all three.

Why is the “success sequence” controversial? Because it advises the poor to place limits on their own behavior? Because it means that poor people can make mistakes that blight their entire lives?

Should people be indemnified against the consequences of their own risky behavior? I don’t think we should do that in the case of the rich and I don’t think we can afford to do that in the case of the poor.

We are living in a period, unlike any other in world history, in which a tremendous number of people treat immediate gratification without consequences not merely as expected but as a right. I think that’s the reason that quite a number of people these days characterize themselves as spiritual but not religious. It doesn’t prevent you from acting as you please.