The Single Father Deficit Crisis

I hadn't been up more than 40 minutes before I was already pelted with another piece of leftist-religious propaganda telling me I should man up and start dating single mothers.

After the initial rage and anger subdued, however, I had a clear and intriguing thought:

"Why am I, a childless bachelor who didn't torpedo his life with an unwanted child, constantly asked, nearly commanded, to date and court single moms?  Why are bachelors in general even a part of this?  Shouldn't there be just as many single dads to go and date these single moms???  Why don't they go date themselves and leave us childless people alone?"

So my brain did some thinking in the shower.

What if there was a shortage of single dads?  What if there were more single mothers than there were single fathers, thereby necessitating us childless bachelors who didn't screw up our lives go in and sop up the surplus supply of single moms.

It's certainly possible because a man can impregnate multiple women.  Say a real Casanova, who's a little lax on the use of birth control knocks up three women.  In this case you have ONE father, but THREE mothers, two of which at minimum have to be single mothers.  However, it is also possible for there to be more fathers than there are mothers.  A woman can have multiple children with multiple men resulting in a shortage of single moms.  The question then becomes which scenario is more likely.

Based on the OK Cupid study (where women rated 80% of men unattractive) it suggests a classical 80/20 scenario where 20% of the men are making off with 80% of the women.  You also throw in the natural tendency for women to trade up, it becomes more likely a scenario where you have fewer men knocking up more women, than more women getting impregnated by fewer men.

Then I realized something as stoking the morning fire.

"Hey!  I'm an economist!  And there's the Census Bureau!  Why don't I just look up how many fathers there are in the country and how many mothers there are in the country and that will prove whether or not there is a surplus or deficit of fathers."

And shucks howdy, what do you know.

There are only 70.1 million fathers in the US

While there are 85.4 million mothers.

This means (optimistically assuming all fathers are married, which they're not) there's at least a surplus of 15 million single mothers.

Now, in all intellectual honesty, some of this can be chalked up to men dying before women.  In other words grandpa kicks off and grandma is still alive, but grandma is not looking for a new man to save her.  I tried to find data at the Census Bureau that would address age, but their data tables do not delve into that level of detail.  Regardless, I think it is such a deficit that it can be safely assumed (until somebody wishes to do the research to prove otherwise) there are millions more single mothers looking to date than there are single fathers available because of the "Casanova Effect" (or whatever you want to call it). 

In truth, this should be insulting to most bachelors who kept their nose clean.  It means you have some of these women doing the 80/20 thing, thinking only 20% of men are good looking enough to sleep with, while the remaining 80% of you schmoes are not worth it.... 

That is until they get pregnant and then need you single, childless, non-screwed up "schmoes" to bail them out.

The truth is you already are financially bailing them out.  In collecting things like WIC, EBT, and scores of other forms of government aid, not to mention the entire public school system, these women disproportionately force you to pay higher taxes for children that aren't even yours.  You needn't pay double by giving them your company, affection and attention.