NY Times says one answer to black-boys homicide rates, ten times whites’, is “getting them jobs.”  Fine, says Heather Mac Donald.  Jobs for all is an excellent goal.

But the biggest barrier to the employment of crime-prone inner-city youth isn’t lack of real or even make-work jobs; rather, it’s their own willingness to show up every day on time and accept authority.

Not that “many inner-city teens aren’t courteous and enthusiastic workers.”  But:

Few teenagers from any background possess the self-discipline and reliability that employers seek; teens growing up in chaotic home environments are even less likely to have developed a work ethic.

Hard times add to crime rates, as NYT editorializes?  Hardly, says Mac D:

The claim that crime results from a bad economy has limited empirical backing in general, but it is particularly ludicrous applied to juvenile violence. It is not the collapse of consumer lending that induces a 16-year-old to shoot a rival who “disses” his girlfriend; it is a failure of self-control and a distorted understanding of self-worth.

Missing from the NYT editorial is the M-word:

The marriage imperative civilizes boys. By contrast, in a world where it is unusual for a man to marry the mother of his children, boys fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility: you are responsible for your children. Freed of the social expectation that they will have to provide a stable home for their offspring, boys have little incentive to restrain their impulses and develop bourgeois habits.

Not that anyone knows how to change the culture that has little room for marriage, but wouldn’t big ideas about how to solve the black youth murder rate have something to say about the problem, even in the NY Times?