If you’d like to dispute my characterization of Sowell, you’re welcome to tell me what you think his actual arguments are and where I got them wrong. Simply saying I did doesn’t do anything to move the ball forward.

As for the “family breakdown,” that falls under the broad category of “behavior,” since he also blames things such as criminality or unwillingness to work. I did more specifically mention family structure in the form of single motherhood, which is the most prominent problem pointed out by Sowell and others who emphasize family breakdown as a cause of poverty. Like I said in the paper, if we brought single motherhood to zero in the US, poverty would only dip 1.3 percentage points. Family structure simply cannot explain systemically high poverty.