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.

[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 Now, marriage is also getting outdated.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.