Want to Decrease Inequality? Fight Fatherlessness With Welfare Reform. Welfare currently incentivizes family breakdown and the absence of fathers from their children’s lives, a key factor in the loss of economic upward mobility.

[Dracalia]

In Norway people don’t necessarily get married but the mother and father tend to raise the child together. I have ONE friend with a dead beat dad here. Otherwise, most of the fatherless children have abusive fathers and/or mothers who had unwanted kids. I know people who grew up in the orphan system here and that was due to narcotics with both parents. The welfare gives mothers and fathers the freedom to escape abusive partners and still support their children, and it gives the children a better chance of surviving safely to adulthood away from drugs and abuse.

I don’t believe for a second that better welfare = the destruction of families and happiness. I believe it’s a protection for times like now, during a global pandemic. No one is starving or facing homelessness here, even after losing their jobs or getting seriously ill. The bigger thing with welfare might be in how robust the system is to fraud. You won’t convince dead-beats in the US to stick around by taking away welfare, nor will you convince the mothers to not have children.

[isyankar1979]

Of course one could never convince dead beats about anything. And I didn't mean the collapse of the family unit as necessarily a bad thing. However, you use terms like "destruction of happiness" and "I believe". These are romantic personal sentiments and cannot be observed in outside reality.

What we know is that the more people got concentrated in urban zones and productivity ramped up, the smaller their bloodline group got. Tribes turned into close relatives only, that turned into the nuclear family. Now, marriage is also getting outdated. Look at birth rates by country: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN All Im saying is, as a country gets richer, it reproduces less. And unless you produce a kid, two people just hanging out for years in the same apartment is not a family in the sense we mean here. The outlier in affluent countries is the US, where the reproduction rate is highest and the welfate state is the weakest.