Lunchtime Must-Read: Jordan Weissman: Don’t Let Anyone Blame Single Mothers for Economic Inequality

…skyrocketing CEO pay and Wall Street lucre…. They are, however, extremely at home talking about… single mothers…. In that vein, the American Enterprise Institute has released a new report…. I’m… skeptical… turn[ing] the inequality debate toward single mothers and absent fathers…. As Timothy Noah wrote in Slate years ago, the biggest changes in American family structure took place in the ’70s and ’80s, and they help explain why, for instance, the ratio between the 90th percentile of earners and 10th percentile is higher than it was 30 years ago. But the shift away from two-parent households doesn’t really factor into the concentration of wealth among the 1 percent. And the rise of the 1 percent, and the 0.1 percent for that matter, is the real story when it comes to how income inequality is evolving today…