Wednesday, March 21, 2012 8:06:07 AM
Reforms for the New Upper Class
[tab headline]
Jon Han
Narrowing the New Class Divide
By CHARLES MURRAY
Published: March 7, 2012
Washington
THERE’S been a lot of commentary from all sides about my recently published book, “Coming Apart,” which deals with the divergence between the professional and working classes in white America over the last half century.
Some of the critiques are fair, some are frivolous. But there’s one — “He doesn’t offer any solutions!” — that I can’t refute. The reason is simple: Solutions that are remotely practicable right now would not do much good.
The solution I hear proposed most often, a national service program that would bring young people of all classes together, is a case in point. The precedent, I am told, is the military draft, which ended in the early 1970s. But the draft was able to shape unwilling draftees into competent soldiers because Army officers had the Uniform Code of Military Justice to make their orders stick.
Administrators of a compulsory civilian national service program would likewise face young people who mostly didn’t want to be there, without being able to enforce military-style discipline. Such a program would replicate the unintended effect of jobs programs for disadvantaged youth in the 1970s: training young people how to go through the motions and beat the system. National service would probably create more resentment than camaraderie.
That said, I can see four steps that might weaken the isolation of at least the children of the new upper class.
For one thing, we should get rid of unpaid internships. The children of the new upper class hardly ever get real jobs during summer vacation. Instead, they get internships at places like the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute (where I work) or a senator’s office.
It amounts to career assistance for rich, smart children. Those from the middle and working class, struggling to pay for college, can’t afford to work for free. Internships pave the way for children to move seamlessly from their privileged upbringings to privileged careers without ever holding a job that is boring or physically demanding.
So let the labor unions win this one: If you are not a religious organization and have more than 10 employees, the minimum wage law should apply to anyone who shows up for work every day.
We can also drop the SAT in college admissions decisions. The test has become a symbol of new-upper-class privilege, as people assume (albeit wrongly) that high scores are purchased through the resources of private schools and expensive test preparation programs.
Instead, elite colleges should require achievement tests in specific subjects for which students can prepare the old-fashioned way, by hitting the books.
Another step would replace ethnic affirmative action with socioeconomic affirmative action. This is a no-brainer. It is absurd, in 2012, to give the son of a black lawyer an advantage in college admissions but not do the same for the son of a white plumber.
Finally, we should prick the B.A. bubble. The bachelor’s degree has become a driver of class divisions at the same moment in history when it has become educationally meaningless. We don’t need legislation to fix this problem, just an energetic public interest law firm that challenges the constitutionality of the degree as a job requirement.
After all, the Supreme Court long ago ruled that employers could not use scores on standardized tests to choose among job applicants without demonstrating a tight link between the test and actual job requirements. It can be no more constitutional for an employer to require a piece of paper called a bachelor’s degree, which doesn’t even guarantee that its possessor can write a coherent paragraph.
If I’m advocating these ideas now, why didn’t I propose them in “Coming Apart”? Because, sadly, they won’t really make a lot of substantive, immediate difference. Internships that pay the minimum wage are still much more feasible for affluent students than for students paying their own way through college. The same students who score high on the SAT score high on achievement tests, and for the same reason (they’re smart and well prepared).
Even without socioeconomic affirmative action, a high proportion of academically gifted children from the working class already get scholarships to good schools. And even if job interviews are opened up to people without a bachelor’s degree, those with the best real credentials will still get the job, and they will be drawn overwhelmingly from the same people who get the jobs now.
There may, however, be a symbolic value in these reforms. The changes that matter have to happen in the hearts of Americans. The haves in our society are increasingly cocooned in a system that makes it easy for their children to continue to be haves. Recognizing that, and acting to diminish the artificial advantages of the new upper class — especially if that class takes the lead in advocating these reforms — could be an important affirmation of American ideals.
Charles Murray [ http://www.aei.org/scholar/charles-murray/ ] is a scholar [sic - an idiot] at the American Enterprise Institute and the author, most recently, of “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 [ http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/0307453421 ].”
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Related
Sunday Book Review: ‘Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010’ by Charles Murray (February 12, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/charles-murray-examines-the-white-working-class-in-coming-apart.html
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© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/opinion/reforms-for-the-new-upper-class.html
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Government, Responsibility and Happiness
By GARY GUTTING
March 7, 2012, 3:23 pm
Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/books/charles-murrays-coming-apart-the-state-of-white-america.html?pagewanted=all ]” has attracted attention mainly for its rethinking of the nature of American inequality. Conservatives [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/opinion/brooks-the-great-divorce.html ] tend to be elated by Murray’s cultural rather than economic understanding of inequality; liberals [ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/30/charles_murray_does_it_again/singleton/ ] tend to be outraged at the suggestion that inequality is due to the moral faults of the working class. But Murray’s sociology of inequality is only a preliminary to the real point of his book, which is an impassioned defense of a libertarianism that he sees at the root of the “American project” as envisaged by the founders of our republic. I propose to look at the argument — far more philosophical than sociological — that Murray advances for his libertarianism.
Despite all his graphs and data-analysis, Murray is explicit about the limits of his empirical, sociological evidence: “Many of our opinions about policy are grounded in premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data . . . . So it has been with the evidence I have presented.”
The evidence Murray presents concerns what he sees as a large and disturbing socioeconomic gap between Americans in the top 20 percent and the bottom 30 percent. The two groups can be specified by differences in income, education and power, but Murray’s concern is differences in values. His central — and most striking — finding is that the top 20 percent strongly uphold “distinctively American” values of hard work, honesty, support for marriage and religious faith, whereas the lower 30 percent do not.
He goes on to assert that the decrease in industry, honesty, religion and marriage among the lower 30 percent has resulted in a serious loss of “social capital,” defined as “neighborliness and civic engagement.” Citing further data, Murray then claims that “people living in places with weak social capital generally lead less satisfying lives than people who live in places with high social capital — they are less happy.” Therefore, people in the lower 30 percent are significantly less happy than people in the higher 20 percent.
I leave it to social scientists to scrutinize Murray’s data. As a philosopher my interest is in the argument he goes on to develop for a libertarian approach to making the lower 30 percent happier. Here he goes beyond sociological data and argues from something much closer to a philosophical thesis about human nature and happiness. The thesis is that happiness requires responsibility: “All of these good things [elements of happiness like self-respect, intimacy and self-actualization] require freedom to act in all areas of life with responsibility for the consequences of actions . . . . Knowing that we have responsibility for the consequences of our actions is a major part of what makes life worth living.” Call this the responsibility principle.
Murray invokes this principle to support his own version of libertarianism: that, except to prevent “starvation or death by exposure,” a government should not interfere at all in the lives of any citizens, including the lower 30 percent. His argument is that any government intervention to improve the lot of the lower 30 percent decreases the responsibility of the people helped and thereby decreases their happiness. Childcare is a paradigm example: “If you’re a low-income parent who finds it easier to let the apparatus of an advanced welfare state take over” the care of your children, then “the deep satisfactions that go with raising children” are “diminished accordingly.”
Murray further argues that government intervention also “enfeebles the institutions [families and larger communities] through which people live satisfying lives.” Such institutions “are strong and vital” because they have “the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless [they] do them.” Once government withdraws and leaves the responsibility to families and communities, “an elaborate web of expectations, rewards and punishments evolves over time” and leads to norms of good behavior. Correspondingly, when government takes on the responsibility, “the web frays and eventually disintegrates.”
But Murray’s argument trades on a fallacy. His responsibility principle says, very plausibly, that responsibility for the goods we possess is an essential element in our happiness. No responsibility, no happiness. But his following argument assumes that any decrease in responsibility implies a decrease in happiness. That would be true if responsibility were the only factor contributing to our happiness. There are, however, many things that make us happy for which we are not responsible: a parent’s love, good weather, a stranger’s smile, a beautiful song, among many others.
Even a good for which we might have been responsible but weren’t — say, a fortune inherited rather than earned — may bring us great happiness. An earned fortune might have provided even more happiness, but there’s no reason to think that a much smaller earned income would make us happier than a large inheritance would. Murray’s principle says only that some amount of responsibility is needed for happiness, not, as his argument requires, that every decrease in responsibility means a net decrease in happiness.
Murray’s assumption is also undermined by the large amount of assistance the top 20 percent receive from the government. He claims that they are far happier than the lower 30 percent because government seldom intervenes to improve their lives: “the things the government does to take the trouble out of things seldom intersect with the life of a successful attorney or executive.” This ignores, however, the many tax exemptions and government-financed projects like urban development, scientific research, museums and parks that make life much more pleasant for the upper 20 percent. This, of course, is in addition, to the enormous educational and financial benefits they receive from simply being children of their parents. Their situation makes it entirely clear that a very high level of happiness is consistent with receiving considerable benefits for which the individual is not responsible.
Murray presents what he sees as a noble picture of “a man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children” and so “doing something authentically important with his life,” in which “he should take great satisfaction.” No doubt he is. But why, in a society as wealthy as ours, couldn’t he be freed—as most of the top 20 percent are — from serious threat of economic disaster and allowed to take responsibility for seeking higher levels of happiness for himself and his family? Murray’s case for libertarianism is based on a misunderstanding of his own responsibility principle.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/government-responsibility-and-happiness/ [with comments]
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The Reproduction of Privilege
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
March 12, 2012, 12:31 am
Instead of serving as a springboard to social mobility as it did for the first decades after World War II, college education today is reinforcing class stratification, with a huge majority of the 24 percent of Americans aged 25 to 29 currently holding a bachelor’s degree coming from families with earnings above the median income.
Seventy-four percent of those now attending colleges that are classified as “most competitive [ http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Staffingstudents/Chasing-the-college-acceptance-letter-Is-it-harder-to-get-into-college-At-a-glance/What-do-you-mean-by-a-competitive-college.html ],” a group that includes schools like Harvard, Emory, Stanford and Notre Dame, come from families with earnings in the top income quartile, while only three percent come [ http://tcf.org/media-center/pdfs/pr19/leftbehindrc.pdf ] from families in the bottom quartile.
Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and co-author of “How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do about It [ http://tcf.org/publications/2010/9/how-increasing-college-access-is-increasing-inequality-and-what-to-do-about-it/ ],” puts it succinctly: “The education system is an increasingly powerful mechanism for the intergenerational reproduction of privilege.”
These anti-democratic trends are driven in part by a supposedly meritocratic selection process with high school students from the upper strata of the middle class performing better on SAT and ACT tests [ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-income/ ] than those from poor and working class families.
Contrary to those who say that this is the meritocracy at work, differences in scores on standardized tests do not fully explain class disparity in educational outcomes. When high-scoring students from low-income families are compared to similarly high-scoring students from upper-income families, 80 percent of the those in the top quarter of the income distribution go on to get college degrees, compared to just 44 percent of those in the bottom quarter.
Post-secondary education is not, in fact, functioning to dissolve long-standing class hierarchies. There are various ways of examining these trends, which I’ve outlined below. However you look at it, the cultural and political implications of the deepening of the income achievement gap are profound.
Beginning in the early 1980s, according to the Census, the college “premium” – the difference in annual earnings [ http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/education/cb09-66.html ] of a high school graduate and a college graduate – rose from 50 percent to approximately 80 percent. In 2007, workers with a high school degree made an average of $31,286 compared to $57,181, 82.8 percent more, for those with a bachelor’s degree. A college degree does not guarantee affluence, but it puts the recipient in a far better position to achieve or maintain upper-middle-class status than those without degrees.
Higher education itself has polarized: Competitive four-year colleges, as defined by Barron’s [ http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Staffingstudents/Chasing-the-college-acceptance-letter-Is-it-harder-to-get-into-college-At-a-glance/What-do-you-mean-by-a-competitive-college.html ], have seen enrollments rise from 41 percent of all post-secondary students to 46 percent from 1994 to 2006; 2-year community colleges at the bottom have seen their share of enrollment grow from 46 to 49 percent. In the middle ground, the percent enrolled at the less competitive four-year colleges has been cut in half, from 13 to 6 percent, according to the Carnevale study mentioned above.
Postsecondary Enrollments, by Type, 1994 and 2006
Source: National Education Longitudinal Study: Base Year through Fourth Follow-Up, 1988–2000 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2000); The Education Longitudinal Study of 2002: Base Year through Second Follow-Up, 2002–2006 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2006).
Student bodies in competitive colleges and in community colleges reflect two very different economic worlds [ http://chronicle.com/article/Our-Economically-Polarized/129094/ ]. At the 1,044 competitive colleges, 76 percent of the freshman came from families in the upper half of the income distribution. In the nation’s 1,000-plus community colleges, almost 80 percent of the students came from low-income families.
Low income students are heavily dependent on scholarship aid to go to college, and especially dependent on grants as opposed to loans. Need-based scholarships are one way to increase low-income enrollment, but over the past three decades, the value of Pell Grants – the basic form of federal scholarship aid to poor students – has steadily declined as tuition costs have grown at a much faster rate than inflation. In 1979-80, the maximum Pell Grant covered 99 percent of the cost of a community college, 77 percent at a public four-year college and 36 percent at a private four-year college. By 2010-11, these percentages had dropped to 62, 36 and 15 percent respectively, according to Education Week [ http://www.edweek.org/media/lowincomestudents.pptx ].
At the same time, colleges, both public and private, have shifted their own spending priorities, modestly increasing the investment in students from families in the lowest income quintile, while sharply boosting their investment in education of students from the top income quintile. The Education Trust has produced the charts showing the shift [ http://www.edtrust.org/sites/edtrust.org/files/publications/files/Lifting%20the%20Fog%20FINAL.pdf ] over a 12-year period, from 1995 to 2007.
SAT scores, in turn, correlate directly to students’ family income. The following charts show this linkage [ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-income/ ]:
Source: College Board
There is a substantial body of evidence that the system is failing to reward students with high test scores who come from low-income families. In a 2005 report, the College Board found [ http://trends.collegeboard.org/downloads/archives/EP_2005_Update.pdf ] that among those scoring highest in math tests in 1992, just under three-quarters of students from families in the highest quartile went on to get bachelor’s degrees by the year 2000. Among those from families in the bottom quartile, less than half that number, 29 percent, went on to get degrees.
As the value of a college degree has nearly doubled, in terms of future earnings, the percentage of low income college students actually graduating by age 24 has grown by only 2.1 points, from 6.2 percent in 1970 to 8.3 percent in 2009. Among students from families in the highest income quartile, the graduation rate by age 24 has surged by 42.2 percentage points, doubling from 40.2 percent to 82.4 percent over the last four decades [ http://www.postsecondary.org/last12/221_1110pg1_16.pdf ].
Source: Postsecondary Education Opportunity
“The income-achievement gap is now more than twice as large as the black-white achievement gap. Fifty years ago, in contrast, the black-white gap was twice as large as the income gap,” according to Sean Reardon, a professor of education and sociology at Stanford, writing in “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations [ http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/widening-academic-achievement-gap-between-rich-and-poor-new-evidence-and-possible-explanations ]:”
At the same time that family income has become more predictive of children’s academic achievement, so have educational attainment and cognitive skills become more predictive of adults’ earnings. The combination of these trends creates a feedback mechanism that may decrease intergenerational mobility. As the children of the rich do better in school, and those who do better in school are more likely to become rich, we risk producing an even more unequal and economically polarized society.
The “income achievement gap” – differences in standard test scores and grade point averages – between children from families in the top 10 percent of the income distribution and those from families in the bottom ten percent has been growing. Reardon has found that the income achievement gap [ https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/reardon%20whither%20opportunity%20-%20chapter%205.pdf ] between children from the highest and lowest income deciles is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born in 1976.
“The children of the rich increasingly do better in school, relative to the children of the poor — that is, they score higher on standardized tests and they graduate from college at much higher rates. This has always been true, but is much more true now than 40 years ago,” Reardon told The Times in an email. “This means that social mobility has gotten rarer – the ‘American Dream’ is increasingly difficult to attain.”
Not only does a college degree significantly boost income, it also helps protect against downward mobility. The Pew Charitable Trusts found in a 2011 study [ http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Economic_Mobility/Pew_PollProject_Final_SP.pdf ] that those with just a high school degree or less are 13 percent more likely to experience significant downward mobility – seeing their income fall substantially below what their parents made – than those with college degrees.
The class-reinforcing trends of higher education pose an acute dilemma for the American political system. “The built-in tension between postsecondary selectivity and upward mobility is particularly acute in the United States. Americans rely on education as an economic arbiter more than do other modern nations,” Carnevale wrote in “How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do About It.” “Americans always have preferred education over the welfare state as a means for balancing the equality implicit in citizenship and the inequality implicit in markets.”
Politically, the lack of access to a four-year college education is a crucial problem for one of the key battleground constituencies of 2012: whites without college degrees. Several issues that can be mined by enterprising politicians cluster around this debilitating lack of access — in fact they help cause it — including the enormous debt loads carried by students [ http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.26.1.165 ] and recent graduates, as well as the emergence of for-profit colleges saddling low-income students with loans for programs they cannot complete. The data show that a disproportionately large percentage of young adults from working-class families who, according to their test scores and grade point averages, are equipped to earn a B.A., are either not going to college, or failing to finish — relegating them to a life of stagnant or declining wages. There is a reservoir of resentment over this fate waiting to be tapped by either party.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/the-reproduction-of-privilege/ [with comments]
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The Not-Much-Opportunity Society
By NANCY FOLBRE
March 19, 2012, 6:00 am
Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential contender, likes to contrast [ http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2011-12-19/romney-us-economy-entitlements/52076252/1 ] his vision of an Opportunity Society in which people choose whether to pursue an education or hard work with an Entitlement Society, offered by President Obama, in which government provides every citizen the same or similar rewards.
I’m not sure what Entitlement Society he’s talking about, since after-tax income has grown far more rapidly [ http://cbo.gov/publication/42729 ] at the top than elsewhere, and federal taxes and transfers became less redistributive between 1979 and 2007. As far as I can tell, President Obama hasn’t done much to reverse this trend.
But what is even more misleading about Mr. Romney’s vision is its emphasis on grown-ups. Children, after all, can’t simply choose to pursue an education. They are dependent on their parents, their communities and their fellow citizens for the opportunities to do so.
As the University of Chicago economist Gary Becker [ http://home.uchicago.edu/gbecker/ ] noted in his classic “Treatise on the Family [ http://books.google.com/books/about/A_treatise_on_the_family.html?id=NLB1Ty75DOIC ]” and his colleague James Heckman [ http://heckman.uchicago.edu/ ] reiterated in a paper written with Flavio Cunha [ http://economics.sas.upenn.edu/faculty/flavio-cunha ], children don’t choose their own parents. They don’t choose which country or state they are going to be born in, either, though geography [ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/the-best-states-to-grow-up-in/ ] has a huge impact on their life chances.
Public spending aimed at children in low-income families, including programs like Head Start [ http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ohs/ ], has garnered substantial political support precisely because it promises to enhance opportunities. Yet the Head Start program has never served [ http://books.google.com/books?id=2L6d9bijdDoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Hidden+History++of+Head+Start&hl=en&sa=X&ei=apBiT6q8L-S-0QGWwMySCA&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA ] more than 60 percent of eligible children in extreme poverty.
Since 2000, state support for early childhood education programs has almost doubled the enrollment of 4-year-olds in prekindergarten programs, to 27 percent from 14 percent. Increases in access, quality and coordination [ http://fcd-us.org/our-work/prek-3rd-education ] with early years of elementary school would improve both opportunity and outcomes for children.
Yet per-child spending on early childhood education has declined [ http://nieer.org/yearbook/pdf/yearbook_executive_summary.pdf ] in the last two years, and the phase-out of the American Recovery and Investment Act will almost certainly lead to further cuts [ http://www.clasp.org/issues/pages?type=child_care_and_early_education&id=0043 ].
A recent Urban Institute report [ http://www.urban.org/publications/412367.html ] projects significant declines in federal spending on education and certain discretionary programs for children. Another shows that federal spending is more directly focused [ http://www.urban.org/publications/412522.html ] than state and local spending on children in families with incomes less than twice the poverty level. In 2010, about 44 percent of all children were living in such families.
Most of the federal benefits such children received took the form of direct assistance with basic health, nutrition, housing or education. Children in families with higher income received 82 percent of their benefits [ http://www.urban.org/publications/412522.html ] in the form of tax breaks.
Urban Institute researchers focus on a simple comparison between low-income families and others, because the data available doesn’t make it possible to break out differences among those above 200 percent of the poverty line.
But a new book edited by the economists Greg J. Duncan [ http://www.gse.uci.edu/faculty/profilebridge.php?faculty_id=5614 ] and Richard Murnane [ http://www.nber.org/people/richard_murnane ], “Whither Opportunity [ https://www.russellsage.org/publications/whither-opportunity ],” documents widening disparities in educational outcomes between children in poor and rich families, finding that educational mobility has declined over time.
Alan B. Krueger [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cea/about/members ], chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, recently summarized [ http://www.americanprogress.org/events/2012/01/krueger.html ] international evidence that inequality among adults reduces economic mobility among children. As he puts it, “The fortunes of one’s parents seem to matter increasingly in American society.”
Mr. Romney didn’t inherit [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/20/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-he-didnt-inherit-money-his-parent/ ] his financial wealth. But he enjoyed an affluent upbringing that included the advantage of an excellent education.
He should acknowledge that entitlement isn’t the opposite of opportunity but a necessary — even if not sufficient — condition for it.
Nancy Folbre [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/business/economy/Folbre.ready.html ] is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_massachusetts/index.html ], Amherst.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/the-not-much-opportunity-society/ [with comments]
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Why Economics Can't Explain Our Cultural Divide
Even during upturns, blue-collar Americans are marrying and working less, writes Charles Murray
By CHARLES MURRAY
March 16, 2012, 6:25 p.m. ET
Some reviewers of "Coming Apart," my new book about the growing cultural divide between America's upper and lower classes, have faulted me for ignoring the role of the labor market in undermining once widely shared values involving marriage and hard work.
As these critics see it, the loss of our common culture is a result not of cultural changes but of shifts in policy and the economy. Over the past four decades, they argue, the U.S. has shipped high-paying manufacturing jobs overseas and undermined the labor unions that could protect workers' pay and benefits. Working-class earnings fell more than 20% from their high point in 1973, men were no longer able to support families, and marriage eroded accordingly. Demoralized workers fell out of the labor force. The problems of the new lower class would fade away, they suggest, if only we would use public policy to generate working-class jobs at good wages.
There are two problems with this line of argument: The purported causes don't explain the effects, and whether they really were the causes doesn't make much difference anyway.
Start with the prevalent belief that the labor market affected marriage because of the disappearance of the "family wage" that enabled a working-class man to support a family in my base line year of 1960.
It is true that unionized jobs at the major manufacturers provided generous wages in 1960. But they didn't drive the overall wage level in the working class. In the 1960 census, the mean annual earnings of white males ages 30 to 49 who were in working-class occupations (expressed in 2010 dollars) was $33,302. In 2010, the parallel figure from the Current Population Survey was $36,966—more than $3,000 higher than the 1960 mean, using the identical definition of working-class occupations.
This occurred despite the decline of private-sector unions, globalization, and all the other changes in the labor market. What's more, this figure doesn't include additional income from the Earned Income Tax Credit, a benefit now enjoyed by those making the low end of working-class wages.
If the pay level in 1960 represented a family wage, there was still a family wage in 2010. And yet, just 48% of working-class whites ages 30 to 49 were married in 2010, down from 84% in 1960.
What about the rising number of dropouts from the labor force? For seven of the 13 years from 1995 through 2007, the national unemployment rate was under 5% and went as high as 6% only once, in 2003. Working-class jobs were plentiful, and not at the minimum wage. During those years, the mean wage of white males ages 30 to 49 in working-class occupations was more than $18 an hour. Only 10% earned less than $10 an hour.
If changes in the availability of well-paying jobs determined dropout rates over the entire half-century from 1960 to 2010, we should have seen a reduction in dropouts during that long stretch of good years. But instead we saw an increase, from 8.9% of white males ages 30 to 49 in 1994 to 11.9% as of March 2008, before the financial meltdown.
If changes in the labor market don't explain the development of the new lower class, what does? My own explanation is no secret. In my 1984 book "Losing Ground," I put the blame on our growing welfare state and the perverse incentives that it created. I also have argued that the increasing economic independence of women, who flooded into the labor market in the 1970s and 1980s, played an important role.
Simplifying somewhat, here's my reading of the relevant causes: Whether because of support from the state or earned income, women became much better able to support a child without a husband over the period of 1960 to 2010. As women needed men less, the social status that working-class men enjoyed if they supported families began to disappear. The sexual revolution exacerbated the situation, making it easy for men to get sex without bothering to get married. In such circumstances, it is not surprising that male fecklessness bloomed, especially in the working class.
I barely mentioned these causes in describing our new class divide because they don't make much of a difference any more. They have long since been overtaken by transformations in cultural norms. That is why the prolonged tight job market from 1995 to 2007 didn't stop working-class males from dropping out of the labor force, and it is why welfare reform in 1996 has failed to increase marriage rates among working-class females. No reform from the left or right that could be passed by today's Congress would turn these problems around.
The prerequisite for any eventual policy solution consists of a simple cultural change: It must once again be taken for granted that a male in the prime of life who isn't even looking for work is behaving badly. There can be exceptions for those who are genuinely unable to work or are house husbands. But reasonably healthy working-age males who aren't working or even looking for work, who live off their girlfriends, families or the state, must once again be openly regarded by their fellow citizens as lazy, irresponsible and unmanly. Whatever their social class, they are, for want of a better word, bums.
To bring about this cultural change, we must change the language that we use whenever the topic of feckless men comes up. Don't call them "demoralized." Call them whatever derogatory word you prefer. Equally important: Start treating the men who aren't feckless with respect. Recognize that the guy who works on your lawn every week is morally superior in this regard to your neighbor's college-educated son who won't take a "demeaning" job. Be willing to say so.
This shouldn't be such a hard thing to do. Most of us already believe that one of life's central moral obligations is to be a productive adult. The cultural shift that I advocate doesn't demand that we change our minds about anything; we just need to drop our nonjudgmentalism.
It is condescending to treat people who have less education or money as less morally accountable than we are. We should stop making excuses for them that we wouldn't make for ourselves. Respect those who deserve respect, and look down on those who deserve looking down on.
Mr. Murray is the author of "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010" and the W.H. Brady Scholar [sic - Idiot] at the American Enterprise Institute.
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304692804577281582403394206.html [with comments]
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Doors Opening
“I didn’t want to miss out”: Kimberly Reading with her two sons, Jake (left) and Braden.
Brian Carlson
By Ronald Brownstein
March 15, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.
Updated: March 16, 2012 | 6:16 a.m.
Construction isn’t an industry usually considered hospitable to women, but Kimberly Reading of Deltona, Fla., found it a firm foundation for opportunity.
Working at a family-owned home-building firm, she started off “in the front office … answering telephones and purchasing pencils,” she recalls. But the father and sons who ran the company gave her an opportunity to prove she could handle more responsibility. “Once they could see I could do it, they embraced it,” Reading says. Eventually she became a project manager, directing multimillion-dollar housing subdivisions and training other project managers. At the industry’s peak, she collected a six-figure salary. And apart from a few flirtatious comments from male coworkers early in her career, she says she never felt held back because she was a woman. “It’s the new culture we’re in,” she says. “If you want it, you can go for it. You can’t get held back by your gender.”
Comparing her own experience with her mother’s, Reading, 34, believes she enjoys vastly greater opportunity and choice. In that belief she’s among a commanding majority of women. In the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll, two-thirds of women said they have greater opportunities to get ahead in society than their mothers did; only one in 14 said they have fewer. “My opportunities were a lot more,” Reading says. “My mother was a home-wife her whole life. She was very young when she had children.” Like Reading, a striking three-fourths of women say they believe they can now advance as far as their talents will take them, regardless of their gender, and nearly as many say they have not personally experienced discrimination in the workplace.
Still, despite the widespread sense that more workplace doors are opening for women, the survey found that half of women still believed that more opportunities were available for men and that most women expected the lingering pay gap between the sexes to endure. It also found that men and especially women were struggling to balance their responsibilities at work and home in an economy when many families need the income from two earners to stay afloat. Perhaps most strikingly, women felt the rules and expectations were often changing more rapidly around the conference table than the kitchen table, according to the survey: The vast majority of women with children continue to report that they spend more time than their spouses raising the children.
And yet, for many mothers, the survey makes clear that this decision is at least as much a choice as a necessity. Indeed, the poll suggested that many women now look at time in the workplace and time with children not so much as irrevocable decisions than as fluid options that they will dial up or down at different points in their lives. After an era in which sociologists talked about the “mommy wars” between women who worked outside the home and those who remained there to rear children, this new survey found that many women today are comfortable shifting between the two roles, at a pace and proportion that they control.
Reading exemplifies that dynamic. Notwithstanding her rapid ascent at the home-building company, she left in 2009 around the time she gave birth to her second son. “With my first son, we paid for child care…. It went well; he was taken care of, and he learned a lot,” she says. “But when I had my second son, I wanted to do the nurturing myself. I didn’t want to miss out on all the things I missed with my first son.” Even that’s not the end of the story, though. Now Reading is working toward a history degree that she hopes will allow her to transition into a career in historic preservation when her children are older. Looking at her friends, she knows that integrating career and home life can be “very stressful.” But she’s confident that it will be her choices, rather than any limits imposed by others, that will determine how she strikes that balance.
ECONOMIC EXPERIENCES
The latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll is the 12th in a series exploring the ways that Americans are navigating the changing economy. The poll, conducted by Ed Reilly, Brent McGoldrick, and Jeremy Ruch of FTI Strategic Communications, a communications-strategy consulting firm, surveyed 1,000 adults by landline telephone and cell phone from March 3 to 6. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
This survey focused on the economic experiences of women and the ways that men and women balance the demands of home and work. Since the most recent Heartland Monitor was taken in December, the poll finds a noticeable uptick in optimism about the country’s direction and the economy’s trajectory; that breeze has lifted President Obama’s approval rating above 50 percent for only the second time in the survey since September 2009. The other occasion came immediately after the killing of Osama bin Laden. (See “Stronger, but Not Secure.")
The poll comes at a complex moment of opportunity and continuing challenge for women in the workforce. Women now receive roughly three-fifths of both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from American colleges and universities. And for 47 of the past 50 months, the unemployment rate has been lower for women than for men, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (In the Heartland Monitor survey, men were more likely than women to say they had lost a job or had seen their hours and pay cut in the past five years.)
But women, at every step up the credential ladder, still earn less than men with the same level of education. (Indeed, in the survey, a majority of working women said they earned less than their spouse, and only one-fifth said they had more opportunity to advance in their job than their spouse did.) And while the Labor Department mostly forecasts the greatest job growth in fields dominated by women, many of those jobs, including health care and education, don’t pay very well. This reality means that the pay gap between men and women probably won’t disappear any time soon.
In fact, the survey found that 65 percent of women, and a narrower 52 percent of men, expect the wage gap between the sexes to persist. Yet only about one-fourth of each gender attributed the pay gap primarily to discrimination or unfair treatment in the workplace. The largest group in each gender—almost half of women and about two-fifths of men—said that the pay gap existed because “women have different family and home life priorities and responsibilities than men.” The remaining one-fourth of men and approximately one-sixth of women attributed the difference to women making “different choices than men in the workplace,” such as not pursuing promotions as aggressively.
Mothers who work were slightly more likely than woman overall to attribute the pay gap primarily to the family and home life priorities of women themselves. Sherryl Kuhnen of Beaver Creek, Fla., works full time as a resident nurse, but she left the workforce to care for her children when they were young. “We sacrificed financially so I could take care of my children,” she says. “I don’t regret that decision—I really don’t. I believe that a lot of problems in our society stem from the fact that we devalue the role of motherhood.”
Despite the persistence of the wage gap, the most powerful sentiment among women in the poll is a sense of doors opening, especially when compared with previous generations. That’s not to say that women believe the playing field is completely level today. Forty percent of women said that men and women have equal opportunities today, while 5 percent said that women have more opportunities than men. But 51 percent of women said that “men have more opportunities than women.” (Only 32 percent of men agreed; most men say that opportunity is now equal for both genders.)
Yet the survey captured a strong sense that trends for women are moving in the right direction. Fifty-four percent of both men and women said they believed that opportunities to get ahead were more equal now for women and men than they had been for their parents’ generation. About half of both women and men said that any opportunity gap for women will continue to shrink over the next generation. “Historically, men have been in charge of things,” says Brent Bevers, a student and a part-time bartender in Port Angeles, Wash., who responded to the poll. “If you look back to the first half of the [20th] century, women were the caretakers at home, and men were in charge of running businesses and being the breadwinners. And if you take that generation, and ask them whether women are just as capable of men, they’re going to have a different idea of what that means than people of this generation.”
When asked to compare themselves to their mothers, 68 percent of women said they enjoyed more opportunity to get ahead in society. Far fewer men, only 45 percent, said they considered their opportunities greater than those available to their fathers. A mere 7 percent of women said they had fewer opportunities than their mothers; the remaining one-fourth saw no change.
Just under one-third of women attributed these increasing opportunities to the growing number of women with college degrees; a roughly equal share attributed them to changing social attitudes about the role of women. About one in six gave credit to laws requiring equal treatment for men and women; an approximately equal number said that opportunity was expanding primarily because so many women were entering the workforce.
OPPORTUNITIES, DISCRIMINATION
The sense of expanding opportunity was widely shared among women. Nearly three-fourths of working women with children under 18 said they enjoyed greater opportunities than their mothers. Not only did 77 percent of college-educated working women agree, so did 69 percent of working women without college degrees. (Again, by comparison, only 40 percent of working men without college degrees believed that their opportunities exceeded those of their fathers.) Just over two-thirds of both white and nonwhite women saw their opportunities expanding compared with their mothers.
One reason for that broadly shared sense of expanding vistas: Two-thirds of women said they have obtained more education than their mother did. “I’ve definitely had more opportunity than my mother did,” Kuhnen says. “My mother got married when she was 19 years old, and she had five children. It was a different day and age. She didn’t get the opportunity to go to college. I think she would have liked that. I don’t think she necessarily wanted to have five children, but that’s just how things were.”
Most women in the workforce, the poll found, don’t see gender as a barrier to their advancement. Three-fourths of women who are either working outside the home now, or have done so in the past, said that in their own workplace they can “advance as far as their talents would take [them]” regardless of their sex. Once again, that sentiment is virtually as strong among noncollege as college-educated women, and among nonwhite as white women. Similarly, 71 percent of women who are working or have worked said they have not been personally discriminated against, including being denied promotions or raises. “At this time, women really have as much opportunity [as men],” says Reading, the former construction-company executive. “I could see other women in my field, who took the chance in a field that was dominated by men, and I could see them succeed. If they could show and shine where I worked, they definitely had an opportunity.” Amy McElroy, a Coast Guard officer from Springfield, Va., agrees. “I haven’t experienced any discrimination,” she says. “I haven’t experienced a situation where my gender has played a role in preventing me from meeting my goals.”
Even so, a substantial 27 percent of women said they have faced discrimination in the workplace. Sharon Bridges, a retired telecommunications worker in Gahanna, Ohio, is one who believes that women still are often treated unfairly. “For 35 years I worked in a large corporation,” she says. “From the day I started there until I retired, it was very clear to me that men were making more. Some of us were working side by side with them. And I always thought that was very unfair.”
College-educated working women were considerably more likely than those without degrees to say they had been discriminated against at work. That finding may help explain why the poll found only modest optimism about women’s ability to crack the glass ceiling—the tendency for women’s careers to stall out before they can reach the pinnacle of public and private office. Told that women account for less than 3 percent of the chief executives at Fortune 500 companies, just 41 percent of women said they considered that very likely to change. A slightly larger, but still restrained, 49 percent of women said they considered it very likely that women will hold more public offices in the future. Only 39 percent of women said it’s very likely that the nation will have a female president. For many women, it seems, the sense of expanding opportunity expires above a certain level of influence. “It’s a well-known fact that for women in corporate management, the numbers are slim and not really growing,” says Mary Beth Morabito, a homemaker in Novi, Mich. “The glass ceiling still exists in 2012.”
JUGGLING WORK AND FAMILY
Two large clouds loom over this generally positive landscape of widening options for women. One is the financial strain facing many Americans, particularly in the aftermath of the Great Recession that began in December 2007. The other is the intertwined challenge of juggling work and family at a time when many families need two incomes to pay their bills. Tellingly, when asked whether they found themselves worrying more about “financial issues like earning enough money … and keeping up with bills and expenses” or “personal issues like being able to spend time with family, taking care of children … and having time for yourself,” both men and women divided nearly in half between the two choices.
Each of these challenges affects men and women. But for families with children, the strain of balancing the demands of home and work still falls most heavily on women. On a variety of fronts, the poll found women in such families making greater accommodations to meet such demands.
For instance, 44 percent of women who have ever worked outside the home said that at some point in their career they had left the workforce for a period longer than a maternity leave to care for young children. Only 6 percent of men concurred. Even more strikingly, 63 percent of women with children said they were more active than their spouse in the care of their children; just 1 percent said their spouse took a greater role, while 33 percent said they shared the responsibilities equally. Men, not surprisingly, demur: Just 35 percent of men agreed that their spouse shouldered more responsibility; a 52 percent majority insisted they accepted equal responsibility.
But in interviews, several women said that the choice to suspend their careers to focus on young children was not forced on them but something they had welcomed. Many of these comments suggested some 21st-century amalgam between old gender stereotypes and a new sense of empowerment among women who feel free to navigate between the workplace and motherhood by their own compass. “Women are more nurturing,” says Charlotte Brummel, a human-services officer for a nonprofit in West Seneca Falls, N.Y. “Some women are just built to nurture, or we’re raised thinking that we’re supposed to be that way. There’s a learning curve involved with taking care of children, and guys are afraid to screw up. With my son, his first day in the hospital [after being born], when he spit up, I didn’t ask what to do. Dr. Spock didn’t tell me what to do about this. And not even a few days later, one of the nurses asked me if he was my first, and when I said, ‘Yes’, they were like, ‘Well, you seem so calm!’ I figured he was a newborn baby, and there was only so much you could do. I just kind of fell into the role.”
And the poll presents striking evidence that in the families with working women, couples are renegotiating responsibilities at home. About half of working women with children under 18 said they shared child care about equally with their spouse (compared, recall, with just 33 percent of all women with children). So did about half of men and women in two-earner households. In that vein, a striking 47 percent of men, as well as 33 percent of women, in two-income households said they staggered their work schedules to ensure that one spouse is available to watch the children. Working men without a college degree were the most likely to report such shift-juggling. Women were also more likely than men to report that they manage the finances in their household—and working mothers were slightly more likely than women overall to say they control the checkbook. Nearly two-thirds of men and women in the workforce also gave their employers good marks for helping them balance their responsibilities at home.
Those polled don’t report a big increase in the use of organized child care compared with their own childhood. Both men and women in the survey split about evenly among those who said their own children spent more, less, and about the same time in organized child care as they did when they were young.
Still, there’s no question that child care outside of the home remains a source of ambivalence for many Americans. Those polled divided nearly in half when asked if child care was “mainly a positive experience” for children and their parents or “mostly a negative experience.” Women and men divided almost evenly on the question. Working women with young children were predominantly positive: 54 percent of them said they considered child care a positive experience, compared with just 35 percent who did not. Stay-at-home mothers with children younger than 18 gave child care more negative reviews, but not vastly so. Even a plurality of women older than 50 viewed child care as a net positive.
FEELING SQUEEZED
The precarious balance of opinion on organized child care was one of several ways in which the poll recorded anxiety about parents’ ability to meet the demands of work and family. Asked which occurs more often, about three-fifths of men and women said that work obligations interfered with family life, while only about one-fifth said that family needs more frequently interfered with work. The sense that work took away from family life was even higher for the most affluent families than for those of more modest means.
The response to a related question, especially among women, underscored the feeling of squeeze. The survey asked those who are in the workforce, or whose spouses work, whether they would choose to work more hours to generate more income, or fewer hours to spend more time with their families, even if that meant less income. Women, by almost 2-to-1, said they would prefer to work less; a slimmer 52 percent of men also picked that option. A resounding 63 percent of working men and women with children under 18 said they would prefer more time rather than more money.
Yet for all of the strains, tensions, and ambivalence surrounding this new world of women in the workplace, the poll captures a strong conviction that it represented an irreversible tide—and one that has mostly improved American life.
One question noted that women now comprise more than half of the nation’s workforce, up from around 40 percent in the 1960s. Reminded of that change, 56 percent of those surveyed—including 58 percent of men and 54 percent of women—said that “this change is encouraging and … will have a positive effect on the country because the economy will benefit” from a workforce with more women. Just 34 percent of women and 31 percent of men said that this change “is troubling … because it reflects a shift away from the traditional family structure.” That’s a much more lopsidedly favorable verdict, for instance, than Americans rendered in an earlier Heartland Monitor poll on the demographic changes rapidly diversifying the nation. (See “Race to the Top,” NJ, 6/4/11, p. 24.) The results also point toward a truce in the fabled “mommy wars”: Women who stay at home with young children were slightly more likely than working mothers to describe women’s growing prominence in the workforce as a good thing. Younger women were the most enthusiastic; but, again, even a plurality of older women viewed the change positively.
Like many women who responded to the survey, Brummel, the human-services worker, has little doubt that she might have obtained more education and advanced further in her career if she had not devoted as much energy to her family, particularly caring for an autistic son. But like many of the women interviewed, she seems very much at peace with the decisions she has made and the balance she has struck. Above all, she sees the state of her career as a reflection not of choices imposed on her but of the choices she has made herself. “I don’t think gender has played into it,” she says firmly. “I know this because I’ve got several friends who’ve gotten married and chosen not to have kids, and are doing higher level work and making higher salaries. [But] this is what my priority is in my life. Instead of going to the gym every day, I come home and I bake cookies with my son. It’s no longer about me anymore. Instead of doing for me, I choose to do for us.”
Amrita Khalid contributed
This article appeared in the Saturday, March 17, 2012 edition of National Journal.
Copyright © 2012 by National Journal Group Inc.
http://nationaljournal.com/magazine/say-good-bye-to-the-mommy-wars--20120315 [no comments yet] [also at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/a-working-womans-world-out-learning-and-under-earning-men/254625/?single_page=true (with comments)]
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Why Conservatives Are Afraid of Cities
James Poulos
Mar 20, 2012
Rick Santorum has a problem with cities.
“If you look at where my Republican opponent has won, it’s always in and around the cities,” he told [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/us/politics/santorum-sees-divide-between-rural-and-urban-america.html ] a campaign-trail crowd over the weekend in vacation hotspot Osage Beach, Missouri, pop. 4,351. For many conservatives, that’s a cultural trouble sign—despite the fact that when Santorum says Mitt Romney wins “the areas the Democrats win, and I win the areas the Republicans win,” he’s unintentionally warning Republicans that he himself may not be so competitive in a general election.
So why is Santorum throwing cities under the bus? It’s not just to pander to rural primary voters. No matter how enthusiastic, they can’t deliver must-win states like Illinois, where two thirds of the population resides in the Chicago metropolitan area. Nor is Santorum simply speaking in code calibrated to appeal to Republicans who don’t like the kind of diversity that typifies America’s big (and heavily Democratic) cities.
The truth is subtler than that. Actually, it’s staring us in the face. But because of effective messaging by Democrats, it’s mostly just a conservative instinct instead of a fully formed campaign issue. At the level of principle, what actually bothers Republicans most about America’s big cities is the stark division between rich and poor.
Surprised? To be sure, Republicans are often less troubled than Democrats by a wide national spectrum of income and wealth. Free-market thinkers assume, on the basis of good evidence, that a society where people occupy all rungs of the economic ladder is probably a relatively freer society. Cultural conservatives tend to agree—not because they’re die-hard capitalists (though frequently they are), but because they recognize the essential role that a middle class plays in moderating and ameliorating the political consequences of substantial class disparities.
What’s politically scary about cities from a culturally conservative perspective is that Democrats have built such huge bases there by building powerful coalitions among America’s richest and poorest voters. Nowadays, the wealthy and the impoverished aren’t the most conservative of constituents when it comes to culture (even if marriage, increasingly, is a luxury good [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most-births-occur-outside-marriage.html (at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=72310641 )]). And not just religious Republicans are concerned that the middle class is uniquely dependent on social traditionalism. This is the thesis of Coming Apart, Charles Murray’s much-discussed book on the roots of downward mobility among middle-class whites.
Even though neoconservatism made its biggest impact on the Republican party as an urban-renewal movement, Rick Santorum—like too many Republicans—is missing the most important point about the deepest implications of changing city cultures. Put bluntly, what the right fears about cities is happening everywhere, not just in states that tip Democratic because of their big cities. It’s taking root in the heartland’s metropolitan areas, too—including suburbs. A study last year authored by Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon showed [ (second item at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69266428 )] that middle classes are shrinking and upper classes are self-segregating in some 90 percent of large and mid-sized metro areas, measured from 2000 to 2007. That includes red states, though you wouldn’t know it from the Republican rhetoric that makes headlines.
Dig deeper, and you will find conservatives who grasp the extent of the problem. The news media does have an interest in caricaturing Republicans’ view of the urban/rural divide, but Santorum’s use of the problem as a knock on Romney demonstrates how easy it is for Republicans to play to type.
Several thousand years ago, Socrates and Plato warned that citizens who loved money above all would divide into rich and poor, with class war and mob rule the unhappy result. That’s a message Republicans still have a chance to deliver this election cycle. But it’ll take a change in the way they think about cultural politics to do it.
James Poulos [ http://www.theatlanticcities.com/authors/james-poulos/ ] is a Forbes [ http://blogs.forbes.com/jamespoulos/ ] contributor and a columnist at The Daily Caller [ http://dailycaller.com/author/jpoulos/ ].
Copyright 2012 The Atlantic Media Company (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/03/why-conservatives-are-really-afraid-cities/1536/ [with comments]
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[tab headline]
Jon Han
Narrowing the New Class Divide
By CHARLES MURRAY
Published: March 7, 2012
Washington
THERE’S been a lot of commentary from all sides about my recently published book, “Coming Apart,” which deals with the divergence between the professional and working classes in white America over the last half century.
Some of the critiques are fair, some are frivolous. But there’s one — “He doesn’t offer any solutions!” — that I can’t refute. The reason is simple: Solutions that are remotely practicable right now would not do much good.
The solution I hear proposed most often, a national service program that would bring young people of all classes together, is a case in point. The precedent, I am told, is the military draft, which ended in the early 1970s. But the draft was able to shape unwilling draftees into competent soldiers because Army officers had the Uniform Code of Military Justice to make their orders stick.
Administrators of a compulsory civilian national service program would likewise face young people who mostly didn’t want to be there, without being able to enforce military-style discipline. Such a program would replicate the unintended effect of jobs programs for disadvantaged youth in the 1970s: training young people how to go through the motions and beat the system. National service would probably create more resentment than camaraderie.
That said, I can see four steps that might weaken the isolation of at least the children of the new upper class.
For one thing, we should get rid of unpaid internships. The children of the new upper class hardly ever get real jobs during summer vacation. Instead, they get internships at places like the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute (where I work) or a senator’s office.
It amounts to career assistance for rich, smart children. Those from the middle and working class, struggling to pay for college, can’t afford to work for free. Internships pave the way for children to move seamlessly from their privileged upbringings to privileged careers without ever holding a job that is boring or physically demanding.
So let the labor unions win this one: If you are not a religious organization and have more than 10 employees, the minimum wage law should apply to anyone who shows up for work every day.
We can also drop the SAT in college admissions decisions. The test has become a symbol of new-upper-class privilege, as people assume (albeit wrongly) that high scores are purchased through the resources of private schools and expensive test preparation programs.
Instead, elite colleges should require achievement tests in specific subjects for which students can prepare the old-fashioned way, by hitting the books.
Another step would replace ethnic affirmative action with socioeconomic affirmative action. This is a no-brainer. It is absurd, in 2012, to give the son of a black lawyer an advantage in college admissions but not do the same for the son of a white plumber.
Finally, we should prick the B.A. bubble. The bachelor’s degree has become a driver of class divisions at the same moment in history when it has become educationally meaningless. We don’t need legislation to fix this problem, just an energetic public interest law firm that challenges the constitutionality of the degree as a job requirement.
After all, the Supreme Court long ago ruled that employers could not use scores on standardized tests to choose among job applicants without demonstrating a tight link between the test and actual job requirements. It can be no more constitutional for an employer to require a piece of paper called a bachelor’s degree, which doesn’t even guarantee that its possessor can write a coherent paragraph.
If I’m advocating these ideas now, why didn’t I propose them in “Coming Apart”? Because, sadly, they won’t really make a lot of substantive, immediate difference. Internships that pay the minimum wage are still much more feasible for affluent students than for students paying their own way through college. The same students who score high on the SAT score high on achievement tests, and for the same reason (they’re smart and well prepared).
Even without socioeconomic affirmative action, a high proportion of academically gifted children from the working class already get scholarships to good schools. And even if job interviews are opened up to people without a bachelor’s degree, those with the best real credentials will still get the job, and they will be drawn overwhelmingly from the same people who get the jobs now.
There may, however, be a symbolic value in these reforms. The changes that matter have to happen in the hearts of Americans. The haves in our society are increasingly cocooned in a system that makes it easy for their children to continue to be haves. Recognizing that, and acting to diminish the artificial advantages of the new upper class — especially if that class takes the lead in advocating these reforms — could be an important affirmation of American ideals.
Charles Murray [ http://www.aei.org/scholar/charles-murray/ ] is a scholar [sic - an idiot] at the American Enterprise Institute and the author, most recently, of “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 [ http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/0307453421 ].”
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Related
Sunday Book Review: ‘Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010’ by Charles Murray (February 12, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/charles-murray-examines-the-white-working-class-in-coming-apart.html
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© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/opinion/reforms-for-the-new-upper-class.html
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Government, Responsibility and Happiness
By GARY GUTTING
March 7, 2012, 3:23 pm
Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/books/charles-murrays-coming-apart-the-state-of-white-america.html?pagewanted=all ]” has attracted attention mainly for its rethinking of the nature of American inequality. Conservatives [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/opinion/brooks-the-great-divorce.html ] tend to be elated by Murray’s cultural rather than economic understanding of inequality; liberals [ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/30/charles_murray_does_it_again/singleton/ ] tend to be outraged at the suggestion that inequality is due to the moral faults of the working class. But Murray’s sociology of inequality is only a preliminary to the real point of his book, which is an impassioned defense of a libertarianism that he sees at the root of the “American project” as envisaged by the founders of our republic. I propose to look at the argument — far more philosophical than sociological — that Murray advances for his libertarianism.
Despite all his graphs and data-analysis, Murray is explicit about the limits of his empirical, sociological evidence: “Many of our opinions about policy are grounded in premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data . . . . So it has been with the evidence I have presented.”
The evidence Murray presents concerns what he sees as a large and disturbing socioeconomic gap between Americans in the top 20 percent and the bottom 30 percent. The two groups can be specified by differences in income, education and power, but Murray’s concern is differences in values. His central — and most striking — finding is that the top 20 percent strongly uphold “distinctively American” values of hard work, honesty, support for marriage and religious faith, whereas the lower 30 percent do not.
He goes on to assert that the decrease in industry, honesty, religion and marriage among the lower 30 percent has resulted in a serious loss of “social capital,” defined as “neighborliness and civic engagement.” Citing further data, Murray then claims that “people living in places with weak social capital generally lead less satisfying lives than people who live in places with high social capital — they are less happy.” Therefore, people in the lower 30 percent are significantly less happy than people in the higher 20 percent.
I leave it to social scientists to scrutinize Murray’s data. As a philosopher my interest is in the argument he goes on to develop for a libertarian approach to making the lower 30 percent happier. Here he goes beyond sociological data and argues from something much closer to a philosophical thesis about human nature and happiness. The thesis is that happiness requires responsibility: “All of these good things [elements of happiness like self-respect, intimacy and self-actualization] require freedom to act in all areas of life with responsibility for the consequences of actions . . . . Knowing that we have responsibility for the consequences of our actions is a major part of what makes life worth living.” Call this the responsibility principle.
Murray invokes this principle to support his own version of libertarianism: that, except to prevent “starvation or death by exposure,” a government should not interfere at all in the lives of any citizens, including the lower 30 percent. His argument is that any government intervention to improve the lot of the lower 30 percent decreases the responsibility of the people helped and thereby decreases their happiness. Childcare is a paradigm example: “If you’re a low-income parent who finds it easier to let the apparatus of an advanced welfare state take over” the care of your children, then “the deep satisfactions that go with raising children” are “diminished accordingly.”
Murray further argues that government intervention also “enfeebles the institutions [families and larger communities] through which people live satisfying lives.” Such institutions “are strong and vital” because they have “the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless [they] do them.” Once government withdraws and leaves the responsibility to families and communities, “an elaborate web of expectations, rewards and punishments evolves over time” and leads to norms of good behavior. Correspondingly, when government takes on the responsibility, “the web frays and eventually disintegrates.”
But Murray’s argument trades on a fallacy. His responsibility principle says, very plausibly, that responsibility for the goods we possess is an essential element in our happiness. No responsibility, no happiness. But his following argument assumes that any decrease in responsibility implies a decrease in happiness. That would be true if responsibility were the only factor contributing to our happiness. There are, however, many things that make us happy for which we are not responsible: a parent’s love, good weather, a stranger’s smile, a beautiful song, among many others.
Even a good for which we might have been responsible but weren’t — say, a fortune inherited rather than earned — may bring us great happiness. An earned fortune might have provided even more happiness, but there’s no reason to think that a much smaller earned income would make us happier than a large inheritance would. Murray’s principle says only that some amount of responsibility is needed for happiness, not, as his argument requires, that every decrease in responsibility means a net decrease in happiness.
Murray’s assumption is also undermined by the large amount of assistance the top 20 percent receive from the government. He claims that they are far happier than the lower 30 percent because government seldom intervenes to improve their lives: “the things the government does to take the trouble out of things seldom intersect with the life of a successful attorney or executive.” This ignores, however, the many tax exemptions and government-financed projects like urban development, scientific research, museums and parks that make life much more pleasant for the upper 20 percent. This, of course, is in addition, to the enormous educational and financial benefits they receive from simply being children of their parents. Their situation makes it entirely clear that a very high level of happiness is consistent with receiving considerable benefits for which the individual is not responsible.
Murray presents what he sees as a noble picture of “a man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children” and so “doing something authentically important with his life,” in which “he should take great satisfaction.” No doubt he is. But why, in a society as wealthy as ours, couldn’t he be freed—as most of the top 20 percent are — from serious threat of economic disaster and allowed to take responsibility for seeking higher levels of happiness for himself and his family? Murray’s case for libertarianism is based on a misunderstanding of his own responsibility principle.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/government-responsibility-and-happiness/ [with comments]
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The Reproduction of Privilege
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
March 12, 2012, 12:31 am
Instead of serving as a springboard to social mobility as it did for the first decades after World War II, college education today is reinforcing class stratification, with a huge majority of the 24 percent of Americans aged 25 to 29 currently holding a bachelor’s degree coming from families with earnings above the median income.
Seventy-four percent of those now attending colleges that are classified as “most competitive [ http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Staffingstudents/Chasing-the-college-acceptance-letter-Is-it-harder-to-get-into-college-At-a-glance/What-do-you-mean-by-a-competitive-college.html ],” a group that includes schools like Harvard, Emory, Stanford and Notre Dame, come from families with earnings in the top income quartile, while only three percent come [ http://tcf.org/media-center/pdfs/pr19/leftbehindrc.pdf ] from families in the bottom quartile.
Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and co-author of “How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do about It [ http://tcf.org/publications/2010/9/how-increasing-college-access-is-increasing-inequality-and-what-to-do-about-it/ ],” puts it succinctly: “The education system is an increasingly powerful mechanism for the intergenerational reproduction of privilege.”
These anti-democratic trends are driven in part by a supposedly meritocratic selection process with high school students from the upper strata of the middle class performing better on SAT and ACT tests [ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-income/ ] than those from poor and working class families.
Contrary to those who say that this is the meritocracy at work, differences in scores on standardized tests do not fully explain class disparity in educational outcomes. When high-scoring students from low-income families are compared to similarly high-scoring students from upper-income families, 80 percent of the those in the top quarter of the income distribution go on to get college degrees, compared to just 44 percent of those in the bottom quarter.
Post-secondary education is not, in fact, functioning to dissolve long-standing class hierarchies. There are various ways of examining these trends, which I’ve outlined below. However you look at it, the cultural and political implications of the deepening of the income achievement gap are profound.
Beginning in the early 1980s, according to the Census, the college “premium” – the difference in annual earnings [ http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/education/cb09-66.html ] of a high school graduate and a college graduate – rose from 50 percent to approximately 80 percent. In 2007, workers with a high school degree made an average of $31,286 compared to $57,181, 82.8 percent more, for those with a bachelor’s degree. A college degree does not guarantee affluence, but it puts the recipient in a far better position to achieve or maintain upper-middle-class status than those without degrees.
Higher education itself has polarized: Competitive four-year colleges, as defined by Barron’s [ http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Staffingstudents/Chasing-the-college-acceptance-letter-Is-it-harder-to-get-into-college-At-a-glance/What-do-you-mean-by-a-competitive-college.html ], have seen enrollments rise from 41 percent of all post-secondary students to 46 percent from 1994 to 2006; 2-year community colleges at the bottom have seen their share of enrollment grow from 46 to 49 percent. In the middle ground, the percent enrolled at the less competitive four-year colleges has been cut in half, from 13 to 6 percent, according to the Carnevale study mentioned above.
Postsecondary Enrollments, by Type, 1994 and 2006
Source: National Education Longitudinal Study: Base Year through Fourth Follow-Up, 1988–2000 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2000); The Education Longitudinal Study of 2002: Base Year through Second Follow-Up, 2002–2006 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2006).
Student bodies in competitive colleges and in community colleges reflect two very different economic worlds [ http://chronicle.com/article/Our-Economically-Polarized/129094/ ]. At the 1,044 competitive colleges, 76 percent of the freshman came from families in the upper half of the income distribution. In the nation’s 1,000-plus community colleges, almost 80 percent of the students came from low-income families.
Low income students are heavily dependent on scholarship aid to go to college, and especially dependent on grants as opposed to loans. Need-based scholarships are one way to increase low-income enrollment, but over the past three decades, the value of Pell Grants – the basic form of federal scholarship aid to poor students – has steadily declined as tuition costs have grown at a much faster rate than inflation. In 1979-80, the maximum Pell Grant covered 99 percent of the cost of a community college, 77 percent at a public four-year college and 36 percent at a private four-year college. By 2010-11, these percentages had dropped to 62, 36 and 15 percent respectively, according to Education Week [ http://www.edweek.org/media/lowincomestudents.pptx ].
At the same time, colleges, both public and private, have shifted their own spending priorities, modestly increasing the investment in students from families in the lowest income quintile, while sharply boosting their investment in education of students from the top income quintile. The Education Trust has produced the charts showing the shift [ http://www.edtrust.org/sites/edtrust.org/files/publications/files/Lifting%20the%20Fog%20FINAL.pdf ] over a 12-year period, from 1995 to 2007.
SAT scores, in turn, correlate directly to students’ family income. The following charts show this linkage [ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-income/ ]:
Source: College Board
There is a substantial body of evidence that the system is failing to reward students with high test scores who come from low-income families. In a 2005 report, the College Board found [ http://trends.collegeboard.org/downloads/archives/EP_2005_Update.pdf ] that among those scoring highest in math tests in 1992, just under three-quarters of students from families in the highest quartile went on to get bachelor’s degrees by the year 2000. Among those from families in the bottom quartile, less than half that number, 29 percent, went on to get degrees.
As the value of a college degree has nearly doubled, in terms of future earnings, the percentage of low income college students actually graduating by age 24 has grown by only 2.1 points, from 6.2 percent in 1970 to 8.3 percent in 2009. Among students from families in the highest income quartile, the graduation rate by age 24 has surged by 42.2 percentage points, doubling from 40.2 percent to 82.4 percent over the last four decades [ http://www.postsecondary.org/last12/221_1110pg1_16.pdf ].
Source: Postsecondary Education Opportunity
“The income-achievement gap is now more than twice as large as the black-white achievement gap. Fifty years ago, in contrast, the black-white gap was twice as large as the income gap,” according to Sean Reardon, a professor of education and sociology at Stanford, writing in “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations [ http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/widening-academic-achievement-gap-between-rich-and-poor-new-evidence-and-possible-explanations ]:”
At the same time that family income has become more predictive of children’s academic achievement, so have educational attainment and cognitive skills become more predictive of adults’ earnings. The combination of these trends creates a feedback mechanism that may decrease intergenerational mobility. As the children of the rich do better in school, and those who do better in school are more likely to become rich, we risk producing an even more unequal and economically polarized society.
The “income achievement gap” – differences in standard test scores and grade point averages – between children from families in the top 10 percent of the income distribution and those from families in the bottom ten percent has been growing. Reardon has found that the income achievement gap [ https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/reardon%20whither%20opportunity%20-%20chapter%205.pdf ] between children from the highest and lowest income deciles is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born in 1976.
“The children of the rich increasingly do better in school, relative to the children of the poor — that is, they score higher on standardized tests and they graduate from college at much higher rates. This has always been true, but is much more true now than 40 years ago,” Reardon told The Times in an email. “This means that social mobility has gotten rarer – the ‘American Dream’ is increasingly difficult to attain.”
Not only does a college degree significantly boost income, it also helps protect against downward mobility. The Pew Charitable Trusts found in a 2011 study [ http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Economic_Mobility/Pew_PollProject_Final_SP.pdf ] that those with just a high school degree or less are 13 percent more likely to experience significant downward mobility – seeing their income fall substantially below what their parents made – than those with college degrees.
The class-reinforcing trends of higher education pose an acute dilemma for the American political system. “The built-in tension between postsecondary selectivity and upward mobility is particularly acute in the United States. Americans rely on education as an economic arbiter more than do other modern nations,” Carnevale wrote in “How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do About It.” “Americans always have preferred education over the welfare state as a means for balancing the equality implicit in citizenship and the inequality implicit in markets.”
Politically, the lack of access to a four-year college education is a crucial problem for one of the key battleground constituencies of 2012: whites without college degrees. Several issues that can be mined by enterprising politicians cluster around this debilitating lack of access — in fact they help cause it — including the enormous debt loads carried by students [ http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.26.1.165 ] and recent graduates, as well as the emergence of for-profit colleges saddling low-income students with loans for programs they cannot complete. The data show that a disproportionately large percentage of young adults from working-class families who, according to their test scores and grade point averages, are equipped to earn a B.A., are either not going to college, or failing to finish — relegating them to a life of stagnant or declining wages. There is a reservoir of resentment over this fate waiting to be tapped by either party.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/the-reproduction-of-privilege/ [with comments]
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The Not-Much-Opportunity Society
By NANCY FOLBRE
March 19, 2012, 6:00 am
Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential contender, likes to contrast [ http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2011-12-19/romney-us-economy-entitlements/52076252/1 ] his vision of an Opportunity Society in which people choose whether to pursue an education or hard work with an Entitlement Society, offered by President Obama, in which government provides every citizen the same or similar rewards.
I’m not sure what Entitlement Society he’s talking about, since after-tax income has grown far more rapidly [ http://cbo.gov/publication/42729 ] at the top than elsewhere, and federal taxes and transfers became less redistributive between 1979 and 2007. As far as I can tell, President Obama hasn’t done much to reverse this trend.
But what is even more misleading about Mr. Romney’s vision is its emphasis on grown-ups. Children, after all, can’t simply choose to pursue an education. They are dependent on their parents, their communities and their fellow citizens for the opportunities to do so.
As the University of Chicago economist Gary Becker [ http://home.uchicago.edu/gbecker/ ] noted in his classic “Treatise on the Family [ http://books.google.com/books/about/A_treatise_on_the_family.html?id=NLB1Ty75DOIC ]” and his colleague James Heckman [ http://heckman.uchicago.edu/ ] reiterated in a paper written with Flavio Cunha [ http://economics.sas.upenn.edu/faculty/flavio-cunha ], children don’t choose their own parents. They don’t choose which country or state they are going to be born in, either, though geography [ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/the-best-states-to-grow-up-in/ ] has a huge impact on their life chances.
Public spending aimed at children in low-income families, including programs like Head Start [ http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ohs/ ], has garnered substantial political support precisely because it promises to enhance opportunities. Yet the Head Start program has never served [ http://books.google.com/books?id=2L6d9bijdDoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Hidden+History++of+Head+Start&hl=en&sa=X&ei=apBiT6q8L-S-0QGWwMySCA&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA ] more than 60 percent of eligible children in extreme poverty.
Since 2000, state support for early childhood education programs has almost doubled the enrollment of 4-year-olds in prekindergarten programs, to 27 percent from 14 percent. Increases in access, quality and coordination [ http://fcd-us.org/our-work/prek-3rd-education ] with early years of elementary school would improve both opportunity and outcomes for children.
Yet per-child spending on early childhood education has declined [ http://nieer.org/yearbook/pdf/yearbook_executive_summary.pdf ] in the last two years, and the phase-out of the American Recovery and Investment Act will almost certainly lead to further cuts [ http://www.clasp.org/issues/pages?type=child_care_and_early_education&id=0043 ].
A recent Urban Institute report [ http://www.urban.org/publications/412367.html ] projects significant declines in federal spending on education and certain discretionary programs for children. Another shows that federal spending is more directly focused [ http://www.urban.org/publications/412522.html ] than state and local spending on children in families with incomes less than twice the poverty level. In 2010, about 44 percent of all children were living in such families.
Most of the federal benefits such children received took the form of direct assistance with basic health, nutrition, housing or education. Children in families with higher income received 82 percent of their benefits [ http://www.urban.org/publications/412522.html ] in the form of tax breaks.
Urban Institute researchers focus on a simple comparison between low-income families and others, because the data available doesn’t make it possible to break out differences among those above 200 percent of the poverty line.
But a new book edited by the economists Greg J. Duncan [ http://www.gse.uci.edu/faculty/profilebridge.php?faculty_id=5614 ] and Richard Murnane [ http://www.nber.org/people/richard_murnane ], “Whither Opportunity [ https://www.russellsage.org/publications/whither-opportunity ],” documents widening disparities in educational outcomes between children in poor and rich families, finding that educational mobility has declined over time.
Alan B. Krueger [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cea/about/members ], chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, recently summarized [ http://www.americanprogress.org/events/2012/01/krueger.html ] international evidence that inequality among adults reduces economic mobility among children. As he puts it, “The fortunes of one’s parents seem to matter increasingly in American society.”
Mr. Romney didn’t inherit [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/20/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-he-didnt-inherit-money-his-parent/ ] his financial wealth. But he enjoyed an affluent upbringing that included the advantage of an excellent education.
He should acknowledge that entitlement isn’t the opposite of opportunity but a necessary — even if not sufficient — condition for it.
Nancy Folbre [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/business/economy/Folbre.ready.html ] is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_massachusetts/index.html ], Amherst.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/the-not-much-opportunity-society/ [with comments]
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Why Economics Can't Explain Our Cultural Divide
Even during upturns, blue-collar Americans are marrying and working less, writes Charles Murray
By CHARLES MURRAY
March 16, 2012, 6:25 p.m. ET
Some reviewers of "Coming Apart," my new book about the growing cultural divide between America's upper and lower classes, have faulted me for ignoring the role of the labor market in undermining once widely shared values involving marriage and hard work.
As these critics see it, the loss of our common culture is a result not of cultural changes but of shifts in policy and the economy. Over the past four decades, they argue, the U.S. has shipped high-paying manufacturing jobs overseas and undermined the labor unions that could protect workers' pay and benefits. Working-class earnings fell more than 20% from their high point in 1973, men were no longer able to support families, and marriage eroded accordingly. Demoralized workers fell out of the labor force. The problems of the new lower class would fade away, they suggest, if only we would use public policy to generate working-class jobs at good wages.
There are two problems with this line of argument: The purported causes don't explain the effects, and whether they really were the causes doesn't make much difference anyway.
Start with the prevalent belief that the labor market affected marriage because of the disappearance of the "family wage" that enabled a working-class man to support a family in my base line year of 1960.
It is true that unionized jobs at the major manufacturers provided generous wages in 1960. But they didn't drive the overall wage level in the working class. In the 1960 census, the mean annual earnings of white males ages 30 to 49 who were in working-class occupations (expressed in 2010 dollars) was $33,302. In 2010, the parallel figure from the Current Population Survey was $36,966—more than $3,000 higher than the 1960 mean, using the identical definition of working-class occupations.
This occurred despite the decline of private-sector unions, globalization, and all the other changes in the labor market. What's more, this figure doesn't include additional income from the Earned Income Tax Credit, a benefit now enjoyed by those making the low end of working-class wages.
If the pay level in 1960 represented a family wage, there was still a family wage in 2010. And yet, just 48% of working-class whites ages 30 to 49 were married in 2010, down from 84% in 1960.
What about the rising number of dropouts from the labor force? For seven of the 13 years from 1995 through 2007, the national unemployment rate was under 5% and went as high as 6% only once, in 2003. Working-class jobs were plentiful, and not at the minimum wage. During those years, the mean wage of white males ages 30 to 49 in working-class occupations was more than $18 an hour. Only 10% earned less than $10 an hour.
If changes in the availability of well-paying jobs determined dropout rates over the entire half-century from 1960 to 2010, we should have seen a reduction in dropouts during that long stretch of good years. But instead we saw an increase, from 8.9% of white males ages 30 to 49 in 1994 to 11.9% as of March 2008, before the financial meltdown.
If changes in the labor market don't explain the development of the new lower class, what does? My own explanation is no secret. In my 1984 book "Losing Ground," I put the blame on our growing welfare state and the perverse incentives that it created. I also have argued that the increasing economic independence of women, who flooded into the labor market in the 1970s and 1980s, played an important role.
Simplifying somewhat, here's my reading of the relevant causes: Whether because of support from the state or earned income, women became much better able to support a child without a husband over the period of 1960 to 2010. As women needed men less, the social status that working-class men enjoyed if they supported families began to disappear. The sexual revolution exacerbated the situation, making it easy for men to get sex without bothering to get married. In such circumstances, it is not surprising that male fecklessness bloomed, especially in the working class.
I barely mentioned these causes in describing our new class divide because they don't make much of a difference any more. They have long since been overtaken by transformations in cultural norms. That is why the prolonged tight job market from 1995 to 2007 didn't stop working-class males from dropping out of the labor force, and it is why welfare reform in 1996 has failed to increase marriage rates among working-class females. No reform from the left or right that could be passed by today's Congress would turn these problems around.
The prerequisite for any eventual policy solution consists of a simple cultural change: It must once again be taken for granted that a male in the prime of life who isn't even looking for work is behaving badly. There can be exceptions for those who are genuinely unable to work or are house husbands. But reasonably healthy working-age males who aren't working or even looking for work, who live off their girlfriends, families or the state, must once again be openly regarded by their fellow citizens as lazy, irresponsible and unmanly. Whatever their social class, they are, for want of a better word, bums.
To bring about this cultural change, we must change the language that we use whenever the topic of feckless men comes up. Don't call them "demoralized." Call them whatever derogatory word you prefer. Equally important: Start treating the men who aren't feckless with respect. Recognize that the guy who works on your lawn every week is morally superior in this regard to your neighbor's college-educated son who won't take a "demeaning" job. Be willing to say so.
This shouldn't be such a hard thing to do. Most of us already believe that one of life's central moral obligations is to be a productive adult. The cultural shift that I advocate doesn't demand that we change our minds about anything; we just need to drop our nonjudgmentalism.
It is condescending to treat people who have less education or money as less morally accountable than we are. We should stop making excuses for them that we wouldn't make for ourselves. Respect those who deserve respect, and look down on those who deserve looking down on.
Mr. Murray is the author of "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010" and the W.H. Brady Scholar [sic - Idiot] at the American Enterprise Institute.
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304692804577281582403394206.html [with comments]
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Doors Opening
“I didn’t want to miss out”: Kimberly Reading with her two sons, Jake (left) and Braden.
Brian Carlson
By Ronald Brownstein
March 15, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.
Updated: March 16, 2012 | 6:16 a.m.
Construction isn’t an industry usually considered hospitable to women, but Kimberly Reading of Deltona, Fla., found it a firm foundation for opportunity.
Working at a family-owned home-building firm, she started off “in the front office … answering telephones and purchasing pencils,” she recalls. But the father and sons who ran the company gave her an opportunity to prove she could handle more responsibility. “Once they could see I could do it, they embraced it,” Reading says. Eventually she became a project manager, directing multimillion-dollar housing subdivisions and training other project managers. At the industry’s peak, she collected a six-figure salary. And apart from a few flirtatious comments from male coworkers early in her career, she says she never felt held back because she was a woman. “It’s the new culture we’re in,” she says. “If you want it, you can go for it. You can’t get held back by your gender.”
Comparing her own experience with her mother’s, Reading, 34, believes she enjoys vastly greater opportunity and choice. In that belief she’s among a commanding majority of women. In the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll, two-thirds of women said they have greater opportunities to get ahead in society than their mothers did; only one in 14 said they have fewer. “My opportunities were a lot more,” Reading says. “My mother was a home-wife her whole life. She was very young when she had children.” Like Reading, a striking three-fourths of women say they believe they can now advance as far as their talents will take them, regardless of their gender, and nearly as many say they have not personally experienced discrimination in the workplace.
Still, despite the widespread sense that more workplace doors are opening for women, the survey found that half of women still believed that more opportunities were available for men and that most women expected the lingering pay gap between the sexes to endure. It also found that men and especially women were struggling to balance their responsibilities at work and home in an economy when many families need the income from two earners to stay afloat. Perhaps most strikingly, women felt the rules and expectations were often changing more rapidly around the conference table than the kitchen table, according to the survey: The vast majority of women with children continue to report that they spend more time than their spouses raising the children.
And yet, for many mothers, the survey makes clear that this decision is at least as much a choice as a necessity. Indeed, the poll suggested that many women now look at time in the workplace and time with children not so much as irrevocable decisions than as fluid options that they will dial up or down at different points in their lives. After an era in which sociologists talked about the “mommy wars” between women who worked outside the home and those who remained there to rear children, this new survey found that many women today are comfortable shifting between the two roles, at a pace and proportion that they control.
Reading exemplifies that dynamic. Notwithstanding her rapid ascent at the home-building company, she left in 2009 around the time she gave birth to her second son. “With my first son, we paid for child care…. It went well; he was taken care of, and he learned a lot,” she says. “But when I had my second son, I wanted to do the nurturing myself. I didn’t want to miss out on all the things I missed with my first son.” Even that’s not the end of the story, though. Now Reading is working toward a history degree that she hopes will allow her to transition into a career in historic preservation when her children are older. Looking at her friends, she knows that integrating career and home life can be “very stressful.” But she’s confident that it will be her choices, rather than any limits imposed by others, that will determine how she strikes that balance.
ECONOMIC EXPERIENCES
The latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll is the 12th in a series exploring the ways that Americans are navigating the changing economy. The poll, conducted by Ed Reilly, Brent McGoldrick, and Jeremy Ruch of FTI Strategic Communications, a communications-strategy consulting firm, surveyed 1,000 adults by landline telephone and cell phone from March 3 to 6. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
This survey focused on the economic experiences of women and the ways that men and women balance the demands of home and work. Since the most recent Heartland Monitor was taken in December, the poll finds a noticeable uptick in optimism about the country’s direction and the economy’s trajectory; that breeze has lifted President Obama’s approval rating above 50 percent for only the second time in the survey since September 2009. The other occasion came immediately after the killing of Osama bin Laden. (See “Stronger, but Not Secure.")
The poll comes at a complex moment of opportunity and continuing challenge for women in the workforce. Women now receive roughly three-fifths of both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from American colleges and universities. And for 47 of the past 50 months, the unemployment rate has been lower for women than for men, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (In the Heartland Monitor survey, men were more likely than women to say they had lost a job or had seen their hours and pay cut in the past five years.)
But women, at every step up the credential ladder, still earn less than men with the same level of education. (Indeed, in the survey, a majority of working women said they earned less than their spouse, and only one-fifth said they had more opportunity to advance in their job than their spouse did.) And while the Labor Department mostly forecasts the greatest job growth in fields dominated by women, many of those jobs, including health care and education, don’t pay very well. This reality means that the pay gap between men and women probably won’t disappear any time soon.
In fact, the survey found that 65 percent of women, and a narrower 52 percent of men, expect the wage gap between the sexes to persist. Yet only about one-fourth of each gender attributed the pay gap primarily to discrimination or unfair treatment in the workplace. The largest group in each gender—almost half of women and about two-fifths of men—said that the pay gap existed because “women have different family and home life priorities and responsibilities than men.” The remaining one-fourth of men and approximately one-sixth of women attributed the difference to women making “different choices than men in the workplace,” such as not pursuing promotions as aggressively.
Mothers who work were slightly more likely than woman overall to attribute the pay gap primarily to the family and home life priorities of women themselves. Sherryl Kuhnen of Beaver Creek, Fla., works full time as a resident nurse, but she left the workforce to care for her children when they were young. “We sacrificed financially so I could take care of my children,” she says. “I don’t regret that decision—I really don’t. I believe that a lot of problems in our society stem from the fact that we devalue the role of motherhood.”
Despite the persistence of the wage gap, the most powerful sentiment among women in the poll is a sense of doors opening, especially when compared with previous generations. That’s not to say that women believe the playing field is completely level today. Forty percent of women said that men and women have equal opportunities today, while 5 percent said that women have more opportunities than men. But 51 percent of women said that “men have more opportunities than women.” (Only 32 percent of men agreed; most men say that opportunity is now equal for both genders.)
Yet the survey captured a strong sense that trends for women are moving in the right direction. Fifty-four percent of both men and women said they believed that opportunities to get ahead were more equal now for women and men than they had been for their parents’ generation. About half of both women and men said that any opportunity gap for women will continue to shrink over the next generation. “Historically, men have been in charge of things,” says Brent Bevers, a student and a part-time bartender in Port Angeles, Wash., who responded to the poll. “If you look back to the first half of the [20th] century, women were the caretakers at home, and men were in charge of running businesses and being the breadwinners. And if you take that generation, and ask them whether women are just as capable of men, they’re going to have a different idea of what that means than people of this generation.”
When asked to compare themselves to their mothers, 68 percent of women said they enjoyed more opportunity to get ahead in society. Far fewer men, only 45 percent, said they considered their opportunities greater than those available to their fathers. A mere 7 percent of women said they had fewer opportunities than their mothers; the remaining one-fourth saw no change.
Just under one-third of women attributed these increasing opportunities to the growing number of women with college degrees; a roughly equal share attributed them to changing social attitudes about the role of women. About one in six gave credit to laws requiring equal treatment for men and women; an approximately equal number said that opportunity was expanding primarily because so many women were entering the workforce.
OPPORTUNITIES, DISCRIMINATION
The sense of expanding opportunity was widely shared among women. Nearly three-fourths of working women with children under 18 said they enjoyed greater opportunities than their mothers. Not only did 77 percent of college-educated working women agree, so did 69 percent of working women without college degrees. (Again, by comparison, only 40 percent of working men without college degrees believed that their opportunities exceeded those of their fathers.) Just over two-thirds of both white and nonwhite women saw their opportunities expanding compared with their mothers.
One reason for that broadly shared sense of expanding vistas: Two-thirds of women said they have obtained more education than their mother did. “I’ve definitely had more opportunity than my mother did,” Kuhnen says. “My mother got married when she was 19 years old, and she had five children. It was a different day and age. She didn’t get the opportunity to go to college. I think she would have liked that. I don’t think she necessarily wanted to have five children, but that’s just how things were.”
Most women in the workforce, the poll found, don’t see gender as a barrier to their advancement. Three-fourths of women who are either working outside the home now, or have done so in the past, said that in their own workplace they can “advance as far as their talents would take [them]” regardless of their sex. Once again, that sentiment is virtually as strong among noncollege as college-educated women, and among nonwhite as white women. Similarly, 71 percent of women who are working or have worked said they have not been personally discriminated against, including being denied promotions or raises. “At this time, women really have as much opportunity [as men],” says Reading, the former construction-company executive. “I could see other women in my field, who took the chance in a field that was dominated by men, and I could see them succeed. If they could show and shine where I worked, they definitely had an opportunity.” Amy McElroy, a Coast Guard officer from Springfield, Va., agrees. “I haven’t experienced any discrimination,” she says. “I haven’t experienced a situation where my gender has played a role in preventing me from meeting my goals.”
Even so, a substantial 27 percent of women said they have faced discrimination in the workplace. Sharon Bridges, a retired telecommunications worker in Gahanna, Ohio, is one who believes that women still are often treated unfairly. “For 35 years I worked in a large corporation,” she says. “From the day I started there until I retired, it was very clear to me that men were making more. Some of us were working side by side with them. And I always thought that was very unfair.”
College-educated working women were considerably more likely than those without degrees to say they had been discriminated against at work. That finding may help explain why the poll found only modest optimism about women’s ability to crack the glass ceiling—the tendency for women’s careers to stall out before they can reach the pinnacle of public and private office. Told that women account for less than 3 percent of the chief executives at Fortune 500 companies, just 41 percent of women said they considered that very likely to change. A slightly larger, but still restrained, 49 percent of women said they considered it very likely that women will hold more public offices in the future. Only 39 percent of women said it’s very likely that the nation will have a female president. For many women, it seems, the sense of expanding opportunity expires above a certain level of influence. “It’s a well-known fact that for women in corporate management, the numbers are slim and not really growing,” says Mary Beth Morabito, a homemaker in Novi, Mich. “The glass ceiling still exists in 2012.”
JUGGLING WORK AND FAMILY
Two large clouds loom over this generally positive landscape of widening options for women. One is the financial strain facing many Americans, particularly in the aftermath of the Great Recession that began in December 2007. The other is the intertwined challenge of juggling work and family at a time when many families need two incomes to pay their bills. Tellingly, when asked whether they found themselves worrying more about “financial issues like earning enough money … and keeping up with bills and expenses” or “personal issues like being able to spend time with family, taking care of children … and having time for yourself,” both men and women divided nearly in half between the two choices.
Each of these challenges affects men and women. But for families with children, the strain of balancing the demands of home and work still falls most heavily on women. On a variety of fronts, the poll found women in such families making greater accommodations to meet such demands.
For instance, 44 percent of women who have ever worked outside the home said that at some point in their career they had left the workforce for a period longer than a maternity leave to care for young children. Only 6 percent of men concurred. Even more strikingly, 63 percent of women with children said they were more active than their spouse in the care of their children; just 1 percent said their spouse took a greater role, while 33 percent said they shared the responsibilities equally. Men, not surprisingly, demur: Just 35 percent of men agreed that their spouse shouldered more responsibility; a 52 percent majority insisted they accepted equal responsibility.
But in interviews, several women said that the choice to suspend their careers to focus on young children was not forced on them but something they had welcomed. Many of these comments suggested some 21st-century amalgam between old gender stereotypes and a new sense of empowerment among women who feel free to navigate between the workplace and motherhood by their own compass. “Women are more nurturing,” says Charlotte Brummel, a human-services officer for a nonprofit in West Seneca Falls, N.Y. “Some women are just built to nurture, or we’re raised thinking that we’re supposed to be that way. There’s a learning curve involved with taking care of children, and guys are afraid to screw up. With my son, his first day in the hospital [after being born], when he spit up, I didn’t ask what to do. Dr. Spock didn’t tell me what to do about this. And not even a few days later, one of the nurses asked me if he was my first, and when I said, ‘Yes’, they were like, ‘Well, you seem so calm!’ I figured he was a newborn baby, and there was only so much you could do. I just kind of fell into the role.”
And the poll presents striking evidence that in the families with working women, couples are renegotiating responsibilities at home. About half of working women with children under 18 said they shared child care about equally with their spouse (compared, recall, with just 33 percent of all women with children). So did about half of men and women in two-earner households. In that vein, a striking 47 percent of men, as well as 33 percent of women, in two-income households said they staggered their work schedules to ensure that one spouse is available to watch the children. Working men without a college degree were the most likely to report such shift-juggling. Women were also more likely than men to report that they manage the finances in their household—and working mothers were slightly more likely than women overall to say they control the checkbook. Nearly two-thirds of men and women in the workforce also gave their employers good marks for helping them balance their responsibilities at home.
Those polled don’t report a big increase in the use of organized child care compared with their own childhood. Both men and women in the survey split about evenly among those who said their own children spent more, less, and about the same time in organized child care as they did when they were young.
Still, there’s no question that child care outside of the home remains a source of ambivalence for many Americans. Those polled divided nearly in half when asked if child care was “mainly a positive experience” for children and their parents or “mostly a negative experience.” Women and men divided almost evenly on the question. Working women with young children were predominantly positive: 54 percent of them said they considered child care a positive experience, compared with just 35 percent who did not. Stay-at-home mothers with children younger than 18 gave child care more negative reviews, but not vastly so. Even a plurality of women older than 50 viewed child care as a net positive.
FEELING SQUEEZED
The precarious balance of opinion on organized child care was one of several ways in which the poll recorded anxiety about parents’ ability to meet the demands of work and family. Asked which occurs more often, about three-fifths of men and women said that work obligations interfered with family life, while only about one-fifth said that family needs more frequently interfered with work. The sense that work took away from family life was even higher for the most affluent families than for those of more modest means.
The response to a related question, especially among women, underscored the feeling of squeeze. The survey asked those who are in the workforce, or whose spouses work, whether they would choose to work more hours to generate more income, or fewer hours to spend more time with their families, even if that meant less income. Women, by almost 2-to-1, said they would prefer to work less; a slimmer 52 percent of men also picked that option. A resounding 63 percent of working men and women with children under 18 said they would prefer more time rather than more money.
Yet for all of the strains, tensions, and ambivalence surrounding this new world of women in the workplace, the poll captures a strong conviction that it represented an irreversible tide—and one that has mostly improved American life.
One question noted that women now comprise more than half of the nation’s workforce, up from around 40 percent in the 1960s. Reminded of that change, 56 percent of those surveyed—including 58 percent of men and 54 percent of women—said that “this change is encouraging and … will have a positive effect on the country because the economy will benefit” from a workforce with more women. Just 34 percent of women and 31 percent of men said that this change “is troubling … because it reflects a shift away from the traditional family structure.” That’s a much more lopsidedly favorable verdict, for instance, than Americans rendered in an earlier Heartland Monitor poll on the demographic changes rapidly diversifying the nation. (See “Race to the Top,” NJ, 6/4/11, p. 24.) The results also point toward a truce in the fabled “mommy wars”: Women who stay at home with young children were slightly more likely than working mothers to describe women’s growing prominence in the workforce as a good thing. Younger women were the most enthusiastic; but, again, even a plurality of older women viewed the change positively.
Like many women who responded to the survey, Brummel, the human-services worker, has little doubt that she might have obtained more education and advanced further in her career if she had not devoted as much energy to her family, particularly caring for an autistic son. But like many of the women interviewed, she seems very much at peace with the decisions she has made and the balance she has struck. Above all, she sees the state of her career as a reflection not of choices imposed on her but of the choices she has made herself. “I don’t think gender has played into it,” she says firmly. “I know this because I’ve got several friends who’ve gotten married and chosen not to have kids, and are doing higher level work and making higher salaries. [But] this is what my priority is in my life. Instead of going to the gym every day, I come home and I bake cookies with my son. It’s no longer about me anymore. Instead of doing for me, I choose to do for us.”
Amrita Khalid contributed
This article appeared in the Saturday, March 17, 2012 edition of National Journal.
Copyright © 2012 by National Journal Group Inc.
http://nationaljournal.com/magazine/say-good-bye-to-the-mommy-wars--20120315 [no comments yet] [also at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/a-working-womans-world-out-learning-and-under-earning-men/254625/?single_page=true (with comments)]
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Why Conservatives Are Afraid of Cities
James Poulos
Mar 20, 2012
Rick Santorum has a problem with cities.
“If you look at where my Republican opponent has won, it’s always in and around the cities,” he told [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/us/politics/santorum-sees-divide-between-rural-and-urban-america.html ] a campaign-trail crowd over the weekend in vacation hotspot Osage Beach, Missouri, pop. 4,351. For many conservatives, that’s a cultural trouble sign—despite the fact that when Santorum says Mitt Romney wins “the areas the Democrats win, and I win the areas the Republicans win,” he’s unintentionally warning Republicans that he himself may not be so competitive in a general election.
So why is Santorum throwing cities under the bus? It’s not just to pander to rural primary voters. No matter how enthusiastic, they can’t deliver must-win states like Illinois, where two thirds of the population resides in the Chicago metropolitan area. Nor is Santorum simply speaking in code calibrated to appeal to Republicans who don’t like the kind of diversity that typifies America’s big (and heavily Democratic) cities.
The truth is subtler than that. Actually, it’s staring us in the face. But because of effective messaging by Democrats, it’s mostly just a conservative instinct instead of a fully formed campaign issue. At the level of principle, what actually bothers Republicans most about America’s big cities is the stark division between rich and poor.
Surprised? To be sure, Republicans are often less troubled than Democrats by a wide national spectrum of income and wealth. Free-market thinkers assume, on the basis of good evidence, that a society where people occupy all rungs of the economic ladder is probably a relatively freer society. Cultural conservatives tend to agree—not because they’re die-hard capitalists (though frequently they are), but because they recognize the essential role that a middle class plays in moderating and ameliorating the political consequences of substantial class disparities.
What’s politically scary about cities from a culturally conservative perspective is that Democrats have built such huge bases there by building powerful coalitions among America’s richest and poorest voters. Nowadays, the wealthy and the impoverished aren’t the most conservative of constituents when it comes to culture (even if marriage, increasingly, is a luxury good [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most-births-occur-outside-marriage.html (at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=72310641 )]). And not just religious Republicans are concerned that the middle class is uniquely dependent on social traditionalism. This is the thesis of Coming Apart, Charles Murray’s much-discussed book on the roots of downward mobility among middle-class whites.
Even though neoconservatism made its biggest impact on the Republican party as an urban-renewal movement, Rick Santorum—like too many Republicans—is missing the most important point about the deepest implications of changing city cultures. Put bluntly, what the right fears about cities is happening everywhere, not just in states that tip Democratic because of their big cities. It’s taking root in the heartland’s metropolitan areas, too—including suburbs. A study last year authored by Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon showed [ (second item at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69266428 )] that middle classes are shrinking and upper classes are self-segregating in some 90 percent of large and mid-sized metro areas, measured from 2000 to 2007. That includes red states, though you wouldn’t know it from the Republican rhetoric that makes headlines.
Dig deeper, and you will find conservatives who grasp the extent of the problem. The news media does have an interest in caricaturing Republicans’ view of the urban/rural divide, but Santorum’s use of the problem as a knock on Romney demonstrates how easy it is for Republicans to play to type.
Several thousand years ago, Socrates and Plato warned that citizens who loved money above all would divide into rich and poor, with class war and mob rule the unhappy result. That’s a message Republicans still have a chance to deliver this election cycle. But it’ll take a change in the way they think about cultural politics to do it.
James Poulos [ http://www.theatlanticcities.com/authors/james-poulos/ ] is a Forbes [ http://blogs.forbes.com/jamespoulos/ ] contributor and a columnist at The Daily Caller [ http://dailycaller.com/author/jpoulos/ ].
Copyright 2012 The Atlantic Media Company (emphasis in original)
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2012/03/why-conservatives-are-really-afraid-cities/1536/ [with comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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