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The Common Good: Social Welfare and the American Future
that time. Eighty-six percent of the black babies will live with
a single mother by age eight, and most will be poor during most of
that time. Many will grow up in an urban environment devoid of
opportunity and full of danger. If current trends continue, more
than of 40 percent of the Hispanic children will experience poverty
before age eighteen. Although many will also live in households
headed by women, a growing proportion of poor Hispanic children
will live in two-parent families.
To summarize,
we could look through the nation's nursery windows and separate the
fortunate babies born to hope and safety from the unlucky
babies—perhaps one in four—born threatened and
suffering. The fortunate majority of infants can look forward to a
long life span and a good standard of living. They will be well fed
and decently housed, see a pediatrician regularly and receive all
of the appropriate immunizations, attend good schools, never suffer
child abuse or neglect, and be raised in relatively safe
neighborhoods. The large number of unlucky babies will experience a
childhood lacking in the essential requirements for good health,
physical safety, and proper mental and social development. By the
time they reach kindergarten, they will already be falling behind
through no fault of their own. Anyone looking at the rows of
infants in a hospital nursery and consciously advocating policies
that deliberately produce such outcomes would rightly be branded a
monster. Yet such is the effect of our current policies.
Investing
in Infants
It is easy to
generate sympathy, if not tax dollars, for infants born burdened
and suffering through no fault of their own. A more hard-nosed case
for increasing our investments in young children can be made by
calculating the long-range benefits from the point of view of pure
self-interest. We can pay a little now to try to prevent blighted
childhoods or we can pay a lot later for the consequences. In other
words, money for decent prenatal care, or more than three times as
much to deal with lowbirthweight infants; several thousand dollars
for a good preschool program to open the mind of a ghetto
three-year-old, or tens of thousands of dollars to cope with a
hardened teenage criminal. At the same time, we in today's work
force will eventually depend on the abilities and economic
productivity of the infants being born today. In 1950 there were
seventeen workers to support each older retired person; today there
are 3.5 workers, and by the next century there will be only about
two workers for each retiree. Finally, wasted childhoods will
produce inadequate workers at a time when we can ill afford it,
when growing competition in the world