City Journal's Kay Hymowitz has an informative and important new essay out surveying the social-science research into the effects of fatherless household on boys and young men. (Spoiler: They're baneful.) But Hymowitz, generally an astute observer, opens by framing her argument in terms of an immense fallacy of presumption, the unraveling of which should be helpful in any consideration of what those empirical findings mean.

Here are Hymowitz's opening 2½ paragraphs:

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