POLITICS FEBRUARY 13, 2012
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As stirring as Occupy Wall Street's exhortations about the 99 percent were, it's important to realize that they were the symptom, not the cause, of a wider trend. Inequality, of course, has recently become a much more integral part of the American conversation. But it's more than that: There is now an unprecedentedly widespread understanding of economic class as the primary dividing factor in the nation. Indeed, this year seems to mark a historic tipping point for the United States: the year that our primary concerns about inequality went from being about race to being about class.
Take Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, for example. Something insufficiently noted in the plentiful coverage of it last week is that the underclass emergency that he has identified is white. Those who haven’t read the book may not know that Murray barely discusses black inner cities at all. Nor, however, is his purpose to call special attention to the fact that white people can be very poor as well, a la Nicholas Kristof’s take on the book. Murray treats this white version of the underclass as ordinary and old news, almost as if the term “underclass” had never essentially been shorthand for black ghetto.
One might suppose that Murray chose this in part to avoid reanimating the contempt he elicited in his conclusions about black America in his prior work, including Losing Ground and The Bell Curve. However, it’s notable that no one of consequence has derided Murray for not putting a black face on poverty. Rather, the book is being received in all quarters as a notable, if flawed, statement about inequality.
Other recent news, as unconnected to Murray’s book as Murray’s book is to OWS, tell the same story. We have learned in a report by the Manhattan Institute’s Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor that black people are living under less segregation today than since 1920, and that the drop since just 2000 has been quite extraordinary, even in big cities classically supposed to be hotbeds of racial tension. Glaeser and Vigdor, well aware that plenty of black people are still much too poor in America, conclude that desegregation can no longer be seen as a key item on American’s agenda, compared to—again—inequality in general.
Then last week came news about the achievement gap. The use of that term always used to signal a conversation about race, but the news this time was about class. The achievement gap between the poor and the wealthy has become much greater than that between blacks and whites over the past several decades. Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon has shown that from 1960 to 2007, the gap between rich and poor in standardized test scores grew by 40 percent, while the one between black and white narrowed. A study by University of Michigan researchers has shown that the rich-poor gap in college completion has grown by 50 percent just since the 1980s.
Meanwhile, our discussions about racist rhetoric increasingly turn on the theme of accusing people of exaggerating racial discrepancies, rather than not paying them enough attention. Newt Gingrich has been reminded that more white people are on food stamps than black, and that housing project adults work at robust rates. We deride Ron Paul’s newsletters for warning of a race war, with the implication that black America, unlike in 1965, is not in such a bad way as to be on the verge of an uprising.
The easy take on these episodes is “racism as usual.” But actually, what’s going on is that speaking up for black people is no longer mired in defensiveness; we are increasingly comfortable with admitting that black people aren't the country's perpetual poster children. It’s a sign of the times that Tavis Smiley and Cornel West are barnstorming the country deriding poverty rather than racism. It’s highly unlikely that what animates either of these men when they wake up in the morning is the coal miner’s daughter’s problems. However, both sense that calling on the President to “save Black America” would fall on deaf ears in 2012.
If we are, indeed, moving past a focus on racial inequality and toward a fight against class inequality, we should at least be informed by the failures of that previous struggle. Indeed, if there is anything we learned after the Great Society era, it is that simply giving people more money rarely turns lives around. Occupy Wall Street, unfortunately, exemplifies that potential pitfall, in implying that the main issue is income. Surely the fact that wealth is so imbalanced in the country is a problem to be addressed. But the nasty truth is that generations of poverty can leave people unprepared to take advantage of opportunity.
Back in the day, if one termed this a “culture of poverty,” as did writers deeply sympathetic to the plight of the poor like Oscar Lewis, one was accused of all manner of grisly insensitivity. In the same fashion, the typical response to Murray’s book is to deride him for inattention to economic reasons for underclass America’s low level of participation in the workforce. However, this perspective, too, neglects the poor. Columnists accusing Murray of a small and polemical moralism are misportraying a careful argument, including rather detailed ethnographic research. Coming Apart is a flawed book, as I have argued in The Daily. However, it is also required reading as we move into an honest discussion of class over race.
Murray, as he always has, argues that welfare policies of the 1960s through the 1990s destroyed the incentive to work. Perhaps the wording is unfortunate, as it implies that people consciously decided to go on the dole instead of working. The wording also has a way of implying, for many, that welfare was somehow plush. A better way of putting it is that when welfare was made easier to get and easier to stay on in the 1960s, with no concern for recipients’ job training, it was now possible to not work indefinitely. This “possible” was all it took to create a new kind of underclass; few understand, because it was so long ago now, how much less possible it was to live on welfare indefinitely before the mid-1960s.
Murray is also being criticized for focusing on culture over the disappearance of low-skill manufacturing jobs. “Working class whites are different from the cognitive elite in at least one way: They have less money,” as Nicholas Confessore has it in his review. However, the equation between cultural breakdown and deindustrialization is notoriously oversimplified. For one, it is rarely noted that the same inner city cultural breakdown happened in cities where factory jobs did not leave in significant numbers after the sixties: in my own work, I have shown this to be the case in Indianapolis. Second, we rarely consider that men who have a hard time finding jobs as solid as their fathers' could nevertheless work lower-paying jobs as a best resort. No one would consider this societal state anywhere near ideal, but the question must be asked—especially as immigrants to inner-city communities so clearly do exactly this so often.
As such, Murray is not unfeeling or ignorant to see that cultural shifts played as large a role in these changes as factories moving away—and that the former was not a mere result of the latter. Coming Apart highlights a sensitive ethnography of a representative white “ghetto,” Philadelphia’s Fishtown. “The people of Fishtown lamented the loss of high-paying factory jobs, but they did not say there were no jobs to be had anymore. They talked about men who just couldn’t seem to cope with the process of getting and holding a job,” the ethnography by Patricia Smallacombe notes. Fishtown men of 30 to 49 claimed physical disability in 2010 at five times the rate they had in 1968. Murray notes that these changes have occurred independently of the state of the economy; NYU political scientist Lawrence Mead has highlighted more specifically that these changes occur regardless of the availability of jobs.
These men are not monsters. They have simply grown up in a culture where, from about 1966 to 1996, beneficently intended post-Great Society welfare policies made it possible for people to not work, ever. Generations have gone by; too many innocent people never knew anything different. You speak the language you grow up around.
The question, then, is how to address not just economics but culture—even if the culture is due to discrimination, racism, or other mistakes in the past. David Brooks got this right in a recent column, stressing how difficult it is to pin down how we would, for example, discourage alienated 14-year-old girls from allowing themselves to get pregnant in a quest for attachment. Adjusting income inequality would have a decidedly marginal impact on that girl’s decision in the here and now.
In the same way, the college graduation gap between rich and poor will have to be addressed, in part, by changing specifically cultural aspects of poverty, such as exposure to reading. Economist James Heckman at the University of Chicago notes this, warning that “the danger is we will revert back to the mindset of the war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that, it’s a mistake.”
A prediction: About six months from now, an articulate and concerned black writer will complain in a prominent venue that the focus on class since OWS is a conspiracy to distract America from its moral duty to think about racism. Ironically, this will be a sign of progress. It will mean that to be black is no longer to likely be one of America’s most utterly disadvantaged people, and that a conversation about class addresses a greater volume and variety of human miseries than an outdated one focusing on skin color.
John McWhorter is a contributing editor for The New Republic.
19 comments
Well-stated and solidly argued premise. But not only income inequality is a matter of culture, as opposed to race--so is crime. Children of any race learn how to avoid working from their families, and they also learn how to be criminals from them. This brings me to something that Mr. McWhorter left out: unreported income. People who are on welfare or SSI can and do make extra money, sometimes a lot, that is not reported as income. This holds true even for those who have regular, well-paying jobs. There's a whole underground network of cash recipients out there who don't report their extra income. This directly impacts the amount of income inequality that actually exists. Sometimes someone with no reported income at all is livin' large.
- magboy47.
February 13, 2012 at 1:01am
magboy47, with respect, I suspect that doesn't apply to a whole lot of people. Most poor people are just poor. Any extra cash goes to basics. Do the math. Rent, food, electricity, heat, clothing, transportation, medical and dental care - you think SSI covers that stuff adequately? A trip to the dentist, a simple filling, runs $150 in this city. Think about it.
- Sophia
February 13, 2012 at 1:58am
magboy47, I would have to agree with sophia about your politically reactionary comments and observations.
- rewiredhogdog
February 13, 2012 at 5:25am
It is popular now to speak of the one percent but in the America I see the true dividing line is probably at twenty percent. The top fifth of the population contains the college professors, the engineers, the managers, the local politicians, the doctors, the lawyers, the architects, the businessmen, etc., etc. These are the people who can indulge their leisure hours with study and travel, romance and sport. These are the people who are rich enough to marry and rich enough to divorce. These are the folks who can afford good schools and occasional stops at the spas. These are the folks who can plan in years and even decades. And then there is everyone else.
- paskunac
February 13, 2012 at 7:51am
McWhorter is a real clown. Does he really think that no one accepts lower paying jobs? All poor people are on welfare? That the very "possibility" of welfare was - itself! - "all it took to create a new kind of underclass"??? Talk about a slippery slope!
- NR851651
February 13, 2012 at 8:05am
paskunac nailed it. Pretty much the entire American heartland is a white ghetto outside of cities where there are colleges, and even college towns have terrible drug problems that wear down local police forces. Some exceptions stick out, like Indianapolis and Chicago, but the vast majority of towns and smaller cities have just been raked over the coals by the economic restructuring of the past few decades. There has been a proliferation of low wages, and those opportunities are plentiful, even. But low wages simply do not pay for the items that Sophia mentioned, especially if it is a female-headed household with kids or dependents, where fathers are not around. Paul Krugman suggested a book that can describe our current situation as it affects white ghettos in William Julius Wilson's "The Disappearance of Work." I have not read this book but have to get it in light of the wave of book reviews around Charles Murray. I have driven through inner cities and the types of work available is simply mediocre, and the drug "cash" economy is simply a magnet too big to ignore for a lot of disaffected youths. Add to that the failing schools that don't galvanize kids to want to learn, which thankfully is changing in a lot of cities due to education reformers (and good teachers, be they union or not). In small towns across America, so too is the drug "cash" economy better than working at, say, a meatpacking plant for 10 hours a day making $6/hour with no benefits. Why would you do that? Just because it is there? In this light, selling your soul to making or dealing a destructive drug like meth seems like a much better alternative, indeed perhaps a rational one. Meaningful work is available for the top 20%, but for the rest it is simply survival wages that create more problems than they solve. Our low-wage economy is going to destroy us in the long wrong if we don't develop policies that enhance that labor pool. Republicans think it a gift that McDonalds wages are available to mid-fifties unemployed workers and disaffected youths, and that is their prescription for the economic woes of this country. Surely, there has to be a better policy somewhere
- RedState
February 13, 2012 at 8:13am
There is an interesting and far reaching article about income disparity and its effects on society here: http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1187 While the speakers are conservative their views touches on issues that transcend their own biases. Moreover the information they offer isn't conservative: "Peter Thiel: Yes. There’s an overall sense that in many different domains the government is working incredibly inefficiently and poorly. On the foreign policy side you can flag the wars in the Middle East, which have cost a lot more than we thought they should have. You can point to quasi-governmental things like spending on health care and education, where costs are spinning out of control. There’s some degree to which government is doing the same for more, or doing less for the same. There’s a very big blind spot on the Left about government waste and inefficiency. In some ways these two debates, though they seem very different, ought to be seen as two sides of the same coin. The question is, should rich people keep their money or should the government take it? The anti-rich argument is, “Yes, because they already have too much.” The anti-government argument is, “No, because the government would just waste it.” I think if you widen the aperture a bit on the economic level, though I identify with the libertarian Right, I do think it is incumbent on us to rethink the history of the past forty years. In particular, the Reagan history of the 1980s needs to be rethought thoroughly. One perspective is that the libertarian, small-government view is not a timeless truth but was a contingent response to the increasing failure of government, which was manifesting itself in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The response was that resources should be kept in the private sector. Then economic theories, like Laffer’s supply-side economics, provided political support for that response, even if they weren’t entirely accurate. We can say that the economic theories didn’t work as advertised, but for Obama to try to undo Reagan-era policies, he would have to deal with the political realities those theories were confronting. We cannot simply say things went wrong with credit creation in the 1980s; we also have to deal with government malfunction in the 1970s. So you have these two different blind spots on the Left and Right, but I’ve been more interested in their common blind spot, which we’re less likely to discuss as a society: technological deceleration and the question of whether we’re still living in a technologically advancing society at all. I believe that the late 1960s was not only a time when government stopped working well and various aspects of our social contract began to fray, but also when scientific and technological progress began to advance much more slowly. Of course, the computer age, with the internet and web 2.0 developments of the past 15 years, is an exception. Perhaps so is finance, which has seen a lot of innovation over the same period (too much innovation, some would argue). There has been a tremendous slowdown everywhere else, however. Look at transportation, for example: Literally, we haven’t been moving any faster. The energy shock has broadened to a commodity crisis. In many other areas the present has not lived up to the lofty expectations we had. I think the advanced economies of the world fundamentally grow through technological progress, and as their rate of progress slows, they will have less growth. This creates incredible pressures on our political systems. I think the political system at its core works when it crafts compromises in which most people benefit most of the time. When there’s no growth, politics becomes a zero-sum game in which there’s a loser for every winner. Most of the losers will come to suspect that the winners are involved in some kind of racket. So I think there’s a close link between technological deceleration and increasing cynicism and pessimism about politics and economics. I think, therefore, that our problems are completely misdiagnosed. The debates are all about macroeconomics, about how much money we should print. I think you can print more money and have inflation, or stop printing money and have deflation. Bad inflation involves commodity prices and inputs, and bad deflation involves people’s wages, salaries and house prices. But the middle-way Goldilocks version, where commodity prices and consumer goods go down and wages go up, seems very farfetched. I don’t see how that sort of outcome can be crafted in a world with no growth."
- arnon
February 13, 2012 at 9:16am
Murray's latest opus is, as his work always has been in the past, an accurate reflection of how political conservatives choose to see and respond to economic and cultural change rather than honest and perceptive reporting on such change. If you are an honest observer my age, born into the white working class, you recognized years ago (as black leaders warned) that the economic changes affecting African Americans in the 60s and 70s would inevitably affect white Americans too -- and you have been living through and coping with those changes for close to half a century. As those changes have robbed much of the white working class of opportunity, security, political agency and more, the conservative view of the white working class has become indistinguisable from their view of racial minorities -- transformed from an army of virtuous "real" Americans to a threatening wave of feckless, shiftless, envious freeloaders who reject "real" American values. As the Republican party becomes more Southernized, it is interesting to note that this is the same view of the white working class that Confederate leaders (such as Jefferson Davis) held, and that that view gave rise to their approval of, and arguments for instituting in their new Confederate nation, slavery for the white working class and preference for aristocracy over democracy.
- esmense
February 13, 2012 at 10:07am
"Murray's latest opus is, as his work always has been in the past, an accurate reflection of how political conservatives choose to see and respond to economic and cultural change rather than honest and perceptive reporting on such change." Murray doesn't speak for all conservatives. In his book he favors giving poor people a guaranteed income. Most conservatives would deride this as "socialism."
- arnon
February 13, 2012 at 11:02am
In his book he doesn't offer much in the way of prescriptions. His guaranteed income idea is one unlikely to meet approval from conservatives or liberals (who recognize the need to, and have consistently advocated for, a focus on job creation). What he does offer in abundance is political framing -- a conservative argument for seeing and presenting the problems of the working class and a disappearing middle class as based in changing cultural values and a lack of personal virtue, rather than in real and significant global economic change.
- esmense
February 13, 2012 at 11:42am
"magboy47, I would have to agree with sophia about your politically reactionary comments and observations." rewiredhog, Your comment cements my decision to remain a Near Leftist, as opposed to a Far Leftist (which I used to be). I reported what I directly experienced from living in the inner city of Detroit for ten years. When I was there, there were a lot of whites, also, who were making unreported income. That's just what people do--rich and poor alike enjoy making money without paying taxes on it or reporting it to their case workers. There's even a white guy in my senior-housing building who makes several hundred dollars a month of unreported income. He brags about it. Nobody's turned him in, because we know that that's just what people do. When I was a house painter, I met many rich white people in the suburbs, and they were doing the same thing--not reporting income and sometimes bragging about it. They learned this from their families, while they were growing up. Let me quote myself: "Children of ANY (emphasis mine) race learn how to avoid working from their families, and they also learn how to be criminals from them." And, oh, when I was young and scrapping for a living, I wasn't reporting all my income either. You need to get out of your ideology and into the real world, rewiredhog. Your street cred is not very high. Sophia, I know four people, all white, on SSI, and they're all living lower (very lower) middle class lives (and they admit it). They get Section 8, which pays almost two-thirds of their rent, and they're on Medicare, with their premiums and co-pays taken care of by Medicaid. They also get discounts on utilities and even free cell phone service (250 minutes a month). They have to budget carefully, but they are not suffering. And they deserve to be on SSI. They are truly disabled. By the way, Sophia, dentists must be cheaper in Chicago than they are in Seattle. My dentist gets $300 for a filling. And I paid $830 to have my cat's two front teeth removed by my vet!
- magboy47.
February 13, 2012 at 12:16pm
One should also note as a very general point that even low-paying jobs these days are surrounded by barbed-wire fences of long application forms, credit reports, urine testing, and suchlike carried out by parasite companies to which actual employers contract out the job of screening potential new hires. Another piece of evidence imo that the Republicans and even some Democrats are indulging in a retro fantasy of the 1950s is the implication that people can just "walk into" even a low-paying service job, like in some old movie where the boss says "you can start in the morning" to the fresh-faced enthusiastic kid.
- ironyroad
February 13, 2012 at 12:29pm
"Another piece of evidence imo that the Republicans and even some Democrats are indulging in a retro fantasy of the 1950s is the implication that people can just "walk into" even a low-paying service job, like in some old movie where the boss says "you can start in the morning" to the fresh-faced enthusiastic kid." Not only in the fifties, Irony. In the 70's too I applied for work one day and was told to start in the morning. Even today it happens. How do you think people without working papers get hired off the books?
- arnon
February 13, 2012 at 1:17pm
I'm too busy at work today to comment more fully on this interestting piece and thread and perhaps will later but I note this: http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.1/ryan_d_enos_manhattan_institute_segregation.php In respect to this: ...Other recent news, as unconnected to Murray’s book as Murray’s book is to OWS, tell the same story. We have learned in a report by the Manhattan Institute’s Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor that black people are living under less segregation today than since 1920, and that the drop since just 2000 has been quite extraordinary, even in big cities classically supposed to be hotbeds of racial tension. Glaeser and Vigdor, well aware that plenty of black people are still much too poor in America, conclude that desegregation can no longer be seen as a key item on American’s agenda, compared to—again—inequality in general...
- basman
February 13, 2012 at 1:52pm
It's interesting thinking about this from an Australian perspective. Here in Victoria race is mostly a non-issue. (Too few aboriginals to factor in.) And while class barriers may in fact be as impermiable as in the States--the divide between public high schools and private in terms of family income and postgraduate advancement is stark--and yet despite significant amounts of meth and heroin and high rates of teen pregnancy, life on the bottom end somehow doesn't appear as bleak in Oz as it does in the US. For one thing, the minimum wage is $15/hour. Couple that with free, universal health care and you can actually make a living working at McDonalds ("Maccas" here). Also, the social lines are blurrier too. I have friends here with no education beyond high school. It isn't such a big deal, the whole where-did-you-go-to-college? thing. Granted, these no-uni friends are fairly successful small business people, but maybe that says something too.
- AaronW
February 13, 2012 at 5:20pm
I didn't know you were an Australian, Aaron.
- arnon
February 13, 2012 at 5:57pm
Hey Aaaronw interesting and effectively synoptic comment. Not unlike in general outline like Canada th
- basman
February 13, 2012 at 6:16pm
(that got away on me, IPAD has a life of its own) so continuing: ...though the minimum wage is more like around $9.00 per hour varying from province to province.
- basman
February 13, 2012 at 6:20pm
"The question, then, is how to address not just economics but culture—even if the culture is due to discrimination, racism, or other mistakes in the past. David Brooks got this right in a recent column, stressing how difficult it is to pin down how we would, for example, discourage alienated 14-year-old girls from allowing themselves to get pregnant in a quest for attachment. Adjusting income inequality would have a decidedly marginal impact on that girl’s decision in the here and now." Since OWS is a lot better at posing questions than providing any sort of coherent answer, perhaps this is a good time to respond to those conservatives like Brooks and Murray (and those pseudo-liberals like McWhorter) who revel in pessimism about what, if anything, to do about the poor and how reducing income inequality won't really change anything. Their arguments may be an effective answer to those liberals (like OWS) who argue that large income inequality is immoral per se, without drawing any further conclusions about how society generally and the poor in particular may actually benefit from a reduction in income inequality. For those liberals who are of a more Pragmatist bent, there is a better answer -- reducing income inequality (first and foremost, by restructuring a tax code to make it more progressive and more rewarding of work than of passive income) would help the government get its fiscal house in order and allow it to implement programs to encourage the poor to work, finish school and quality for employment in value-added industries, stay drug-free and crime-free, save and invest and reduce teenage pregnancy. Many such programs, at state and Federal levels, are starved for funds and consequently make little impact on anybody's lives. Even a marginal level of improvement in the lives of the poor and working-class as a result of those programs would have a measurable impact upon both income inequality (as they help thin the ranks of the perpetually unemployed and unemployable) and the lives of the poor. The current system, on the other hand, merely results in a barely-effective safety net without the funds to innovate new programs and a burden of indebtedness to cover inadequately funded social insurance programs for the general population. An America where the poor can work more, earn more and rise from poverty into the middle class -- even at the margins -- because the government finally has enough money to fund programs to help them is infinitely better than the kind of neo-Victorian hand-wringing over the hopelessness of the poor indulged in by the likes of Brooks and Murray.
- wildboy
February 14, 2012 at 1:48pm