> I can't think of any country in the western world who has a social welfare system on the same low level as the US - and yet we don't have such a 'decline in social indicators'. Quite the opposite.
But I thought the paper said "That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents."
The US has a welfare state if the banks need a TARP bailout, or if Cheney needs more contracts for Halliburton etc. Not so much for the rest of us. Actually, the inflation-adjusted hourly wage is lower in the US now than it was in the early 1970s.
One difference you have to remember about the US is the history of Africans in the US. There was slavery until 1865, then Jim Crow, then in the 1960s there was segregation, lack of voting rights, restriction on those of African background drinking from certain water fountains, sitting in certain bus seats, using certain bathrooms etc. Peaceful demonstrations against this were greeted by police dogs, fire hoses, batons, as well as extra-judicial Ku Klux Klan murders, bombings etc. Any how, some attempt to remedy this started in 1964 but by the 1978 Bakke ruling there was already enormous pushback. In fact Reagan announced his presidential candidacy in an obscure rural town unknown for anything aside from three people registering black people to vote being killed their by the Klan. As has been in the news, a white supremacist killed someone this year because they wanted a Civil War statue in their town taken down. In short, the US from its beginning to now has expended an enormous amount of energy
in subjugating people of African background. Google has very few engineers of African background, but fellow engineers like James Damore are incensed even about that due to what he perceives as his biological superiority. Now he's a hero on HN and much of the US. Polls show the majority of Americans are against towns taking down their civil war statues, and state legislatures are forbidding towns from tearing down statues celebrating a slaveholder uprising against the US government.
The writer mentioned talks about the "the anti-'acting white' rap culture of inner-city blacks". Even putting aside what I mentioned before, the "rap culture" is marketed by and controlled by the big media corporations. The real indigeneous inner-city black culture can more be seen by books written by and for blacks, which you can see in small stores and sidewalk tables, which the white, bourgeois companies don't sell for some reason. Perhaps it's not lucrative enough. In fact blacks have been saying for years that rap culture is bourgie junk corporations try to foist on black youth.