ABSTRACT
Historically, poor economic circumstances often led people to forgo marriage and even desert families. Unwed women usually remained childless, whether they lived as servants or in cloisters. The Poor Law once made welfare lower than the lowest wage to encourage work and not dependence. The perceived cruelty of such a system may be one reason why the role of incentives in driving welfare dependency and family fragmentation is denied with such vigour and venom. A standard response to the question of incentives is that the restructuring and growth of welfare must be seen as a consequence, not a cause, where the increased instability of relationships and upward trend in lone parenthood somehow changed the nature of social security. The evidence is clear from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies that economic incentives do matter when people take family decisions, which is not to say that other factors are not sometimes important.
