INCREDIBLY FUNNY BUT TERRIBLY BAD ANSWERS : HERE IS THE CORRECT ONE. Here is the correct, and entirely impolitic one. It also accounts for poverty and IQ statistics.

Diversity increases extremes.

—PART 1 – CAUSATION—
ECONOMICS OF RACE AND REPRODUCTION

QUESTION: “Why is single motherhood so common in the south?”

Well, of course I don’t like to say the impolitic truth and then have to fend off the ignorant. Quora is peopled by the demographic that does not rely on data. We know this because almost all questions there can be answered easily with available data. But since all data of meaning requires knowledge of economics and statistics, and ignorance of economics and statistics is pervasive, this prohibits access to comprehension of that data, and prohibits resolution of questions of popular opinion and political doctrine.

As such, it’s tedious to answer impolitic questions here. That is why few people do it.

That said, I will do my best:

FAMILY STRUCTURE

  1. Family structure and family economic structures determine poverty. The nuclear family is highly efficient economic structure. The two income nuclear family is the most efficient economic structure. For a male it is the smallest tribe he can be alpha in, and maintain access to a female as he declines in desirability For a woman she is the alpha female in her tribe of one, and has a monopoly claim on his production for the duration of her childrearing, despite her declining ‘desirability’ during this time. The nuclear family also places asset demands on the male, and therefore delays marriage and mating, both of which increase the skill level, work experience of the members.

  2. Redistribution undermines the family and increases poverty, partly because men in the lower classes are less desirable (and able) than women in the lower classes, because men are more widely distributed in feature and ability than are women, with more men at the very top (nobel prize winners) and more men at the bottom (persistently impulsive criminality). Our Y chromosome is where nature experiements, and our wider male distribution affects mating under monogamy, and less so under polygyny, because under polygyny, a smaller number of more desirable males can be shared amongst a larger number of marginally more desirable females.

  3. Racial groups are more or less ‘desirable’ as mates worldwide, not just in the states. This has largely to do, as best as any of us can tell, with a mating preference for females with thinner skin in contrast to mates with thicker skin as a signal that is different from the thicker skin of males. Since the only uniform scale of beauty across all cultures, other than symmetry, is quality of female skin clarity, this is the only selection preference necessary to explain racial preferences, other than the rate at which we appear to have exited Africa and begun the process of near-speciation (racial diversification), and the problem of access to vitamin D in the northern climes. This research is impolitic and the people who pursue it are ostracized from academia so it has moved to being conducted under a different guise, or now to china where such things are considered only logical. But the research is available. And it shows that fairer, thinner skin on females with finer features, is more desirable regardless of racial group.

  4. People mate almost entirely within race (<15%) and prefer to associate, work, and live within racial groups. With the consumer marketplace for goods the only shared environment. Extremes can run counter to this fact with crossing occurring at the lower and higher ends of desirability where each individual has better options in mates and often better access to social class by crossing racial boundaries.

  5. Even where racial admixture occurs, it places downward pressure on extra-group status and opportunity (desirability). In other words, racially mixed children maintain the lower of their racial preferences. Altough in black and hispanic communities and families children are still ranked in preference by skin color because it grants access to status both mating and social.

ECONOMICS
6) Impulsivity (the ability to resist impulses) varies between the races, with the east asians the least impulsive distribution, and the subsaharan african population the most impulsive. Impulsivity is a positive reproductive strategy unless external (climate) pressures punish survival. Impulsivity places a high penalty on learning ability which favors long periods of ‘frustration’ and concentration.

  1. Impulsivity affects both trustworthiness and creditworthiness. Nuclear families have higher more stable incomes, and are more creditworthy, as well as more economically efficient. As such high densities of nuclear families will produce higher wealth. Higher wealth will generate greater opportunity. Greater opportunity within a geography will increase demand for housing in that geography. Housing in that geography will increase in price. People who live in more impulsive, less efficient groups will of course, be unable to gain access to that geography and its opportunities.

  2. For these reasons (Which I assume I should use graphs to illustrate) the reason that poverty and single motherhood are so prevalent in the south is that 74% of black mothers, and a high percentage of hispanic mothers are unmarried. And they live in close communities reliant on support from extended family members, with populations too high to integrate into more successful communities. White single motherhood is on the increase in the lower classes, and teh USA, Ireland and New Zealand, where the postmodernist and feminist movements have been most successful, have the highest rates of single motherhood among whites, and the countries of southern europe who remain familially integral the lowest: Italy, Greece, Spain and Luxembourg.

TRUST AND OPPORTUNITY
All humans are faced with opportunities for both cooperation and conflict at all times. We must choose how to apply our limited time effort and resources to a limited number of opportunities.

All opportunities other than exchanges of commodities purely on price, consist of a network of cost and benefit tradeoffs. All cost and benefit tradeoff’s are simple.

We trade (cooperate) on all sorts of terms, but economic status, social status, values, language, culture(mythology, habits) are significant terms. Every variation in every property that is not identical in interest is a negative.

Status signals (status and reputation) have higher value in-group than across groups. Therefore status pressure to encourage each of us to adhere to agreements is of higher value in-group.

Therefore we trust and cooperate in-group at lower cost and risk than across group.

This is why people break into racial, cultural, socioeconomic, educational, generational, occupational groups. Because it’s the lowest risk pool of people with the lowest cost of cooperation, even if it’s less productive it may also be the only pool available to you where you can find someone willing to pay the higher cost of cooperating with you across groups.

Political discourse assumes we want to help each other and we do. The problem is the logic of that statement -it’s meaningless when we CAN help everyone, we must still choose the best return on our help. And we do. And that is how it is. Anything else is irrational.

SOUTHERN RELIGIOSITY
Race is the reason for ‘everything’ in the south, including religiosity. Although southern religiosity we must understand is a rebellion against the state, after the north conquered the south. Race is the reason for everything in america. People are born, live, reproduce, associate, work with, and speak to, people within their racial groups except where they participate in the marketplace together.

RATES OF POVERTY BY RACE
Page on Carseyinstitute

RATES OF SINGLE MOTHERHOOD BY RACE
LINK: KIDS COUNT Data Center

There is no end of data on this subject.

—PART II—
CORRELATION NOT CAUSATION

States are, in general, rational economic alliances, usually run by an oligarchy, and usually the oligarchy grants monopolistic privileges to key industries in order to fund them sufficiently that they can compete outside of the local market where returns are highest.  We call this corporatism.  It is a rational system. Unfortunately, the natural incentive of all monopolies, and of course, a political bureaucracy is by definition a monopoly, are self interested and will prey upon their populations to the limits at which they can maintain power.

Religions are ARATIONAL (not irrational) and they are a means of setting the moral limits to the actions of the state. Religions are resistance movements. Mystical religions consist of rational ends, but stated irrationally.  The only religion that is compatible with the state rather than an opposition to it is polytheistic, or what we today would call ‘history worship.”  The state will attempt to control religious doctrine to the best of its ability. In some cases it succeeds – theocracy results.  This is usually bad, because while oligarchic monopolies are self interested and predatory, they are also economically productive.  Theocratic bureaucracies are self interested and predatory but economically unproductive, and they manufacture ignorance in volume.

The south is religious as a means of opposing the state. First, in response to the conquest by the north. Second as a resistance to the north.  Third as a resistance to racial integration.  Fourth as a resistance the feminist and postmodern attack on the family using redistribution and law. 

I will leave it to you whether the use of arational methods to resist the state is effective (it is) or and whether or not it is right (it appears that the feminist, socialist, and postmondern movements have systemically increased poverty by destruction of the nuclear family.)

—PART III – CONCLUSION—

There is a correlation between southern religiosity and single motherhood, but there is no causal relationship.

I hope that this was helpful and informative.

Curt Doolittle

https://www.quora.com/How-do-Christian-conservatives-in-the-USA-explain-the-very-high-teen-birth-rates-in-the-Bible-Belt