City Journal's Kay Hymowitz weighed in over the holidays with a response to our Dec. 16 column, in which we faulted the premise of her earlier article titled "Boy Trouble." She maintains that the main body of the article (which we described as "informative and important") is responsive to our criticism:

"Men traditionally sought to 'better themselves' not because working in an office or on an assembly line was itself a source of delight, but because being a workingman enabled them to earn respect and made possible the joys of domestic life," Taranto writes. I've made a similar point repeatedly (though perhaps in less enthusiastic terms about domestic life.) Feminism, particularly as it has led to widespread acceptance of single motherhood, poses a profound existential problem for men, who feel consigned to the status of "optional" in family life.

Yet tragic as the implicit displacement may be, nothing in the data suggests that it can explain the large numbers of low-income men who are failing in school and either remaining low-threshold earners or leaving the workforce entirely. For that, we need to think about their early development--the subject of "Boy Trouble."

Hymowitz's original article described a series of studies finding that boys growing up in households without fathers are likelier to have discipline problems in school and to end up in prison, and less likely to go to college, than boys growing up in intact families. For girls, those correlations were much smaller or absent altogether. Hymowitz also invokes family structure to explain the finding that American boys born into the lowest income quintile are less likely than girls to "climb the income ladder"--a gap that is wider than in other countries with lower illegitimacy rates.

When interpreting social-science data, one can never be too vigilant against the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Hymowitz sums up the findings by observing that children "have a better chance at thriving when their own father lives with them and their mother throughout their childhood--and for boys, this is especially the case." But she implicitly acknowledges it's unclear to what extent individual fathers, as distinct from the values of the wider community, make a difference:

A highly publicized recent study by the Equality of Opportunity Project comparing social mobility by region found that areas with high proportions of single-parent families have less mobility--including for kids whose parents are married. The reverse also held, the study discovered: areas with a high proportion of married-couple families improve the lot of all children, including those from single-parent homes. In fact, a community's dominant family structure was the strongest predictor of mobility--bigger than race or education levels. This research suggests that having plenty of married fathers around creates cultural capital that helps not just, say, the coach's son, but every member of the Little League team.

It could also be that the causation runs in the other direction--that economic mobility makes it easier or more advantageous to form families. Or some other factor may account for both mobility and the propensity to marry.

That said, Hymowitz's hypothesis that family breakdown causes "boy troubles" is an entirely plausible one. But there's still a problem with it: That framing makes the argument circular. Recall that she posed the question as (among other things) why "poor and working-class boys" fail to become "reliable husbands and fathers." She ends up concluding that the cause of fatherlessness is . . . fatherlessness.