Entitled to Our Dependency

A longstanding conservative critique of what it calls "big government" is that by providing services to the public, you increase a sense of dependency and entitlement, as people make a rational choice to do less for themselves and come to expect "handouts" instead. This appeals to a sense that personal responsibility is being destroyed, and frustration by those who neither receive nor want to receive these services, that their tax dollars are being spent on others for things that they should be doing themselves.

Conservatism differs, however, on where to draw the line at government services.  Traditional conservatives have been OK with things like reasonable regulation of food and safety standards, infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges, public education, parks, libraries, etc.  They have also been amenable to spending on the so-called "safety net" - services targeting the poor and needy, designed to roughen the edges of capitalism, granted they are of a temporary nature, needs-based, and unlikely to contribute to a "culture of dependency".

More recently, modern conservatism has experienced a shift, as reflected in the platform of the Republican party and mainstream conservative rhetoric, towards much greater hostility towards government services in general, and a demonization of government itself as well as those who might be receiving so-called "handouts" (the implication being a handout is undeserved, as opposed to deserved benefit).  This type of thinking is much more in line with traditional libertarianism, which at the extremes views all government save military and security concerns as not merely economically ineffective, producing weak growth and stagnation, but ultimately immoral and unjust taxation and regulation of private property.  To this line of thought, a man's money or business is his own, and he should not be responsible for paying taxes to a government that redistributes resources to the undeserving.

Interestingly, the political philosophy of libertarianism shares its name with the philosophical position on human agency known as libertarian free will.  Libertarian free will, an increasingly minority view in the philosophical and scientific community, assumes that the human mind, owing to the fantastic complexity of consciousness, has a special property that exists no where else in nature, namely that humans are able to make choices entirely free from prior causes or impulses, or at least free enough that something like free will can be said to exist. 

This is in direct opposition to the views called determinism or compatibilism, both of which acknowledge that human do indeed make choices, but that those choices originate in prior causes.  Ultimately no different than computers or anything else in nature (as uncomfortable the prospect may be to some), these prior causes extend back in time in what is referred to as a "causal chain", and which human conscious can ever only be only partially aware.  Thus, when we make choices, we understand some of what impulses have given rise to our final decisions, but because we are only ever aware of these impulses after the fact, and furthermore only ever partially aware of them, we simply can't claim any ultimate responsibility for them.  This implication for the destruction of personal responsibility and intention is usually the greatest problem most people have with the view that no one is his own agent.  The determinist response is actually quite simple, but instead of laying it out here, I'll link to Tom Clarke's excellent essay on it.

Given conservatism's emphasis on personal responsibility, it would make sense that conservatives would embrace libertarian free will.  I know of no direct polling on the question (a difficult proposition, given that the term "free will" is fraught with philosophical complications that need to be teased apart), but I would guess that most would be quite uncomfortable with a determinist account of human agency. 

And this shows up frequently in conservative rhetoric.  "Liberals" are routinely characterized as assuming that people have less agency than they really do.  Calls for being tough on crime, increased personal responsibility, accountability, and moral clarity are rooted in the notion that "excuses" are being made for people.  The "nanny state" is metaphor that describes government provision of services to an infantilized public, unable to think for itself, without the free will and agency of mature adults.  "Helping" people fosters dependency in the same way that a nanny taking care of a child hinders his ability to become self-reliant. 

Yet here we come to a strange tension in the conservative worldview.  At once people are assumed to have greater free will and agency, but at the same time these same people are supposedly in danger of, in the form of provided government services, a weakening of  self-agency.  One might easily imagine that if people already had greater levels of agency, they would be likewise less prone to having their agency sucked out of them by a reliance on the state for some service or another.

I don't mean to completely dismiss the prospect of people's agency being weakened by government services.  Indeed, there are points at which government services crowd out social, cultural or economic structures what would otherwise operate at the behest of motivated citizens.  We do, after all, live in a generally capitalist, not communist, society.  The state certainly does not provide for our every need.  The vast majority of Americans have jobs and earn money with which we buy food, housing, utilities and consumer goods.  If any of these were given to us for free, many of us would likely not  - simply out of rational self-interest - opt to purchase out own. 

So, what exactly is this "culture of dependency" that conservatism seems increasingly interested in?  While there is still diversity of opinion among conservatives on this issue, it is quite telling that their leading candidate in the '12 election, Mitt Romney, was recently recorded engaging an audience of wealthy donors with an extended monologue in which he invoked audacious claims of a 47% of the population essentially mooching, suckling at the government teat,

"who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them."

The 47% he so infamously referred to are those who do not pay income tax.  However, most indeed pay payroll taxes or are retirees on social security who had ostensibly paid into it all their lives, and all pay sales tax.  Romney seems to be wildly conflating two very different categories of people: those who receive government services yet are otherwise hard-working and self-reliant, and those who simply want to take and never contribute.  This second category is the group that conservatives have historically demogogued, expending the majority of their ire on them and the liberals who "enable" them.

Yet is it unclear who these people are or ever were.  "Welfare queen" was once a popular image, a thinly racialized shibboleth, evocative of a inner-city black woman sitting around in her government-provided housing, sleeping with multiple partners and having babies "just to receive their welfare".  Now, I've actually spent a good deal of time among the inner city poor, both in my work in their neighborhoods, as well as educating their children, enough to examine this portrait with my own eyes.  These individuals do indeed exist, however they are exceedingly rare.  And the story is far more complicated. 

Most families in these communities are working, however only at low-wage jobs (a student in my class yesterday just mentioned that her mother has been working at Del Taco for 9 years).  Government provision of food stamps, day care or health services merely supplement fragile economic circumstances, and in no way are an incentive to remain poor.  The reality of our economy is that a large segment of it runs on low-wage, low-skill labor.  This creates a market in which opportunities for higher pay will always be limited only to those with the human capital (developing out of societal capital) to acquire the necessary skills.  It must be remembered that no one wants to be poor. 

Here might be a good place to dig deeper into the psychology of agency.  Why is it that one person stays working at Del Taco for nine years, while another quits after one day?

True story: At the tender age of 17, Super Vidoqo was once hired to work at Taco Bell.  After a brief training session, I was set to work scrubbing hardened bean crust off dirty pans.  The second time the manager took a rude tone of voice with me, ordering me to "scrub harder", I walked right out the back door, never to return.  I would rather apply for $150 in monthly food stamps and sleep on couches - which I then did -  than subject myself to such indignities.  Aha, you say, the government supported your idolatry - err, ...idlety!  Well, in the short term, it did.  But no longer wasting time scrubbing beans for a grease-angered manager, I was free to apply my capital elsewhere, namely by networking myself into a romance with a college-track lass who's wealthy father paid her rent (and by proxy, mine), while she and I entered college.  10 years later, after a number of decidedly low-wage, low-skill jobs, and countless hours of night school, I left university with a Master's degree.

But as I stood there in my black shoes and Taco Bell baseball cap, deciding whether to stay or go, what motivated my reasoning?  If you asked me then, it was clearly the supervisor's humiliating management style.  But despite the humble aura of the tale, I should admit that I was a rather bright young man.  Naturally so?  Maybe.  But mind this: both of my parents graduated college and had professional careers.  My childhood was richly endowed with quality literature, enrichment activities and cognitively advanced conversations with adults.  My school was largely filled with other middle-class children of educated and professional parents, and my neighborhood was largely safe and promoted a sense of community peace and harmony.  There were successful neighborhood businesses and the parks, roads and libraries were clean and well-funded.

All wasn't perfect.  There were psycho-dynamic family issues involving depression, anger, hostility and rebellion.  But within the larger structure of societal and human capital, my siblings and I have all turned out quite well, educated and professionally-tracked.  No one works at a fast-food franchise.

But what of my student's mother?  Nine years ago her daughter would have been around 5 years old, just entering kindergarten.  She's mentioned her father.  She told a story last week of his altercation with a repo-man in which he punched the man in the face.  My student proudly recounted her defense of her "dad's [expletive] truck", by jamming a screwdriver in the ignition.  That's about all I know of her story, other than her being in a low-level science class, struggling to maintain focused on her studies.

Sadly, family income and education is highly correlated with generational poverty.  Poor students are at much higher risk for a host of social problems - delinquency, drug abuse, teen pregnancy.  They tend to have lower levels of cognitive development, emotional regulation, vocabulary and general world and academic knowledge.  Their development is not only hindered by a lack of stimulating input, but a range of life struggles that actively hinder development, not the least of which is increased levels of stress brought about by the effects of poverty on the family unit.

These things are all directly determinative, and in aggregate are highly predictive of life outcomes among different sectors of society.  It is simply factually incorrect to assume that everyone have similar levels of agency.  They may have opportunities, hypothetically, but in reality their ability to take advantage of those opportunities is dependent on their agency, which in turn is dependent on the kinds of societal and human capital I have discussed. The social science literature is replete with evidence for this. 

Which returns us to the question of government's effects on human agency.  Given the large amount of data on social structures that, through human development, determine agency, to what extent do government services affect it?  The conservative argument is that it creates a shift in human behavior away from self-determination and towards dependency.  But what evidence is there of this?  And how does it stack up against an individual's lifetime experience, the amount of human capital he has developed, and which affects his entire conscious perspective every waking moment of his life?

A simple thought experiment would be to simply imagine that no government services are on offer, and ask whether he would make any different decisions.  Given the fact that most of the working poor receive very little in the way of government help, it's hard to imagine any real difference at all.  The elderly might indeed have to work longer before retiring.  But are these the moochers conservatives have in mind?  I don't really think so.  Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan has been accusing Obama of wanting to cut medicare and social security spending (a rather ironic charge, considering the self-professed Ayn Rand devotee and opponent of moochers everywhere had previously pushed those very cuts himself).  In line with Romney's 47% comments, Obama is currently being referred to as the food stamps president, many prominent conservatives arguing his giving states more leniency over federal welfare subsidies being a back-door attempt to "encourage dependency".

Who is the average food stamp recipient?  Is the paltry welfare they get from the government encouraging their sense of dependency and entitlement?  What if we refused them food stamps?  What effect would this have on the poor?  My guess would be that the poor would still be just as poor, only a few hundred dollars a month poorer.  There might be some tiny portion of individuals for whom that small amount of cash was in some subliminal way contributing to a subtle lack of extra effort to maybe fill out a community college application, or save a little bit harder, or maybe scan the job listings for work that was a tad more challenging.  Maybe.  But one could as easily make the opposite case: that in a real way the extra cash allowed them to get out of debt, buy some better food, take their kid to the movies or a museum, or some nicer clothes, thereby increasing the societal capital that in aggregate promotes within the family a sense of upward mobility.    Subliminally, it could likewise be argued that, some portion of stress being relieved, new possibilities and horizons might open up that were heretofore nonexistent.

"Dependency" is an interesting word.  It is generally used to characterize a sort of psychological, behavioral disposition in which personal agency is sacrificed for a "free ride".  But are we not all dependent?  As I have detailed, I can personally attest to the privileges I have enjoyed in my life - entirely predicted in the social sciences literature - that I have in a very real sense been "dependent" on for my relative life success.  I was dependent on my educated, professional parents.  I was dependent on the love I received from my father who played catch with me even though he was tired after a long day at work.  I was dependent on my mother's interest in facilitating my sense of agency as she allowed my help her in the kitchen, all the while developing my cognitive capacities by engaging in complicated dialogue and inquitive conversation.

It seems dependency can be thought of in two ways.  One, as a crutch in which agency is not developed but rather allowed to stagnate without stimulation, and another in which the act of development itself is dependent on stimulation.  When conservatives speak of dependency, they refer to a lack of stimulation that one's agency might have received were it required to progress unaided.  But is the development not then dependent on something else?  Those of us who have been fortunate to have had our agency developed by stimulation from high levels of societal capital - friends, a family, community - can get by pretty easily without dependency on government welfare.  (However, it must be said, we are still hugely dependent on the many varieties of modern state infrastructure, things like roads, schools, police, fire, libraries, parks, safety inspections, etc.)  And we are still enormously dependent on the social and human capital we continue to enjoy.  I am dependent on my work ethic.  I am dependent on my emotional regulation and self-control.  I am dependent on the subtle sense of confidence that comes from being a relatively handsome white male with a professional occupation, a wonderful wife and charming, intelligent daughters.  These are things of anti-despair.  On them I depend.

Liberals often describe all of this as "privilege".  Privilege is leveraged, and it is a form of dependency.  Just as a businessman is dependent on his stock of product to sell, man is dependent on his human and societal capital to leverage, to "sell" himself in the world.  Inherent in the concept of privilege is dependency.  In the children's game "king of the hill", one's titular position affords considerable advantage.  Advantage is dependent on a privileged position. 

Another word conservatives decry is "entitlement", as in the entitlement programs and the sense of entitlement that is said to be engendered among recipients.  Yet what of the sense of entitlement felt by the privileged who refuse to acknowledge their entitlement, and pretend to have somehow "earned" it or "deserve" it.  Witness Republican candidate Romney, heir to a vast fortune, who after leveraging his own privilege, expresses explicit disdain for those with a sense of "entitlement".  Witness his remarks to a reporter when asked how he feels about his income being taxed at a lower rate than others.  His lower rate was the

"right way to encourage economic growth -- to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work."

Talk about a "culture of entitlement".

The fact that today I make a middle class income and am not still working at Taco Bell is dependent on my privilege, it is my dependency.  I do not know whether my student's mother has ever received food stamps.  But the fact that she has been wrapping burritos for nine years is dependent on her lack of privilege.  So when conservatives speak of "a culture of dependency" - if such a thing as they envision it even really exists, much less has anything but those most marginal import in society, given the numbers of actual citizens one could even describe as such - they might expand their understanding of the term's insight into human behavior and the ways in which society works, as evidenced by what decades of social science data tells us.  They might expand their conceptualization of who is a "maker", and who is a "taker".  Might they also see the complexity of human nature and the development of agency as something far larger and more subtle than that which a paltry bit of government aid could ever have much of an effect upon. 

A Buddhist exhortation asks that we, in the end, point our "rivers of compassion" inward, not merely projecting kindness outward, but into ourselves as well.  So too might conservatives turn their "rivers of ire" inwards, recognizing the role of privilege in their own lives, and hopefully find in those waters some humility and compassion still afloat. 

A Definition of Societal Capital

As I originally discussed here, when I discovered my usage of the term social capital was incorrect, I decided to try an coin a new term to better describe my intended meaning.

Societal Capital (n): the stock of resources a society provides a developing human so as to further their development of human capital, either through physical, cognitive or emotional nourishment, as well as bodily safety.  

Beginning in utero, and continuing through adolescence and adulthood, negative as well as positive factors can serve to promote or inhibit human capital growth, and societal capital represents the net of this developmental leverage.  Societal capital can be highly direct, such as specific vitamins and minerals that stimulate tissue development, or the presence of cognitively stimulating language and activities in the home.  It can also be more indirect and abstract, such as social services, access to libraries, neighborhood safety, or employment opportunities.

The 'Values" Excuse

Mohammed visits unfaithful women in Hell, 15th c.

America has become increasingly divided by family.  That is, the more affluent middle class tends to have more stable, two-parent homes, while the lower middle-class and working poor have much higher rates of single-parenthood.  This only compounds the struggles they face.  A story in the NY Times this morning states,

 Less than 10 percent of the births to college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school degrees or less the figure is nearly 60 percent.

It illustrates this divide by contrasting the lives of two families - one working class mother struggling to pay the bills for herself and three kids after the no-good father left, and two middle-class parents able to afford yearly cruises, good schools for the kids and extra-curricular activities.  The stories are meant to paint a picture of what usually happens, not what is possible.  Many single mothers are able to find jobs that support their families comfortably, and send their children to college.  But this is not the norm.  Statistically, they tend to be less educated, and their children ending up so.

What is so often missing from these stories is a sense of causality.  We see a correlation between education and stable families.  But what does that mean?  Is it a simple matter of income?  Surely, better pay means a mother is better able to afford a nicer neighborhood, with nicer schools and a safer environment.  But this doesn't explain how it is that undereducated families are less stable, births are often out of wedlock, and from multiple partners.

It seems easy to make hand-waving claims about declining morality and values.  If these people would just have safe sex, or wait until they find a good partner - demonstrating proper values, their children would have stable homes, and an opportunity for more success.  Indeed, decades ago, this was clearly happening.

Yet, even in the "good old days", we still had poverty and economic segregation.  It wasn't as if all that family stability was enforcing economic mobility.  The lower classes were still staying poor.  Poverty still meant poor neighborhoods, more crime, worse schools, etc.  It's easy to look at staggering numbers about family breakdown and assume it is responsible for poverty today, considering that family instability is suboptimal.

But let us return to the question of why exactly it is that the poor seem to have more trouble forming lasting family bonds.  Why are so many children being born out of wedlock, to parents unable to stay together, with fathers out of the picture.

In the story, details are not given but the father of the poor mother's children is implied to have been somewhat of a menace, finally requiring police to remove him from the house in the end.  One can imagine that, decades ago, the scene might have played out differently, with the mother quietly suffering her partner's behavior.  Indeed, they would no doubt have been married - the young woman resigned to her primary role in life as obedient wife.  Would it be so terrible a thing if social norms evolved to allow for a woman to dream of more, even if it meant lower on average rates of family stability?

And yet, the poor will still be poor.  This economic reality of capitalism cannot be denied.

A question I have is why affluent couples have higher rates of family stability.  The gap is clearly enormous.  And any social norms that evolved over the decades are lining up along class lines, not being distributed evenly.  Is Charles Murray correct in assuming that the affluent have better values?  What does that even mean?  The affluent tend to do a lot of things that give their children advantages.  They performed better in school, the went to college, they read more to their children.  They also grew up in nicer neighborhoods, went to nicer schools - with "nicer" children, and generally inherited opportunities for social advancement that the poor did not.

All of this is the stuff of human and societal capital.  It is not simply a "value".  The term value implies a clear choice.  But the choice is not clear, it arrives from the vast accumulation of life experiences one has.  It isn't as easy as simply possessing the "value" of choosing to have protected sex, choosing a partner you know will be a good father, or choosing to work hard in school and finish college. 

And yet it is enormously difficult to tease out what any individual's accumulation of experience ultimately has been, such that causality can be traced to the final problematic decision or outcome.  Articles like these, can only ever - in the course of a few pages - not only set the table for sociological discussion, but dig very deeply into an individual's lifelong developmental trajectory.  The forces at work are myriad and complex, interacting dynamically to push and pull an individual through time and space, society and consciousness.

In order to truly understand how class works, we must broaden our scope to include not merely one individual's conscious decision-making process, but the larger social structure in which they have developed, with a careful accounting of the advantages and disadvantages they have been afforded.  Things like attitudes, values and behaviors are merely the products - the symptoms - of social privilege, and ultimately the product of capitalism's economic requirement for a permanent underclass.  To see them as primary causes is not only lazy, but philosophically incoherent.

The Wealth Producers

H. J. Heinz factory workers, 1909

In a recent post I described how many American workers have enormously strenuous jobs, and yet are compensated poorly because of the low skill level and low status of their labor.

According to Wikipedia,

Productivity is a measure of the efficiency of production. Productivity is a ratio of production output to what is required to produce it (inputs). The measure of productivity is defined as a total output per one unit of a total input.

An assumption commonly made by those not progressively inclined is that labor compensation ought to follow productivity.  In other words, pay ought to reflect one's productive contribution.  This is a reasonable enough proposition.  But what is often overlooked are the unseen factors involved in production.  There is a tendency to view those who's productivity is associated with larger quantities of production as being more productive than they actually are.  Thus, a manager of 100 employees is seen to be much more productive than a single employee, as he is responsible for the net production of one hundred people, rather than one person.  His contribution is less the creation of goods, but rather the management of structures involved.  To the extent that he creates efficiency, he is adding value.  But it is a mistake to measure his value by the end product, as his role is much more limited.

Because productivity is a combination of what the worker brings to the table, as well as the structures at their disposal, man digging a ditch with a shovel is less productive than a man using a backhoe, even though his work is much harder.  The man with the backhoe has the advantage of the structure which designed, developed, purchased, etc. the backhoe.  What he brings to the table might be his skill with operating it, yet that depends on the structures that trained him.  His increased productivity is thus a result of larger social systems.

This is the thinking underlying progressivism, that there are systems in place that facilitate and allocate different levels of production and capital (human/societal/financial).  These systems tend to solidify inequality in very real ways, ways that create an unfair distribution of capital, which results in rewards not being just.  All manner of factors conspire to limit freedom of individuals to access agency-increasing capital.

There is a moral case here for progressive redistribution.  But there is also an economic argument, in that a degree of redistribution of capital lubricates individual agency and promotes innovation.  For instance, libraries, public schools, health care, minimum wages, etc. all redistribute capital in ways which promote human agency by more evenly spreading it around society and allowing more creative enterprise to develop. 

The last thing you want is capital stuck in the hands of the few, with fewer opportunities for it to be leveraged into growth.  The meritocratic argument assumes that the high levels of inequality and wealth concentration we currently see are a function of those best able to allocate, manage and create growth.  Yet this is a post-hoc justification of power structures that are often not a function of merit at all, but rather systemic privilege.

SES and Parent Involvement

A post at NYC Educator points to the serious, often unmentioned problem of truancy and parent involvement.

"My school's intrepid guidance counselor and I spent yesterday making phone calls to parents--about attendance, Regents tutoring, and classes that students are still failing.  As you can imagine, there's a pretty strong link between that first item and the last one.  And while I'm sorry to keep harping on this subject, I can't deny that trying to cajole parents into doing their legal duty to educate their children is starting to wear on me and my guidance counselor partner in all this.

One young lady whose guardian was just here last week has already missed two more days of school.  Two other sets of parents have respectively broken nearly half a dozen appointments to come to the school.  And I teach high school, and it's May...and if not now, when?"

This is a huge problem.  Truancy is obviously the most blatant example, but it speaks to a larger problem of academic inclination in families..  There are a few things going on.  Some parents just don't care much for education.  Some parents don't know how to prioritize it.  Some parents are so busy with work that they must leave much of the parenting up to relatives, siblings, student peers or neighbors.  Some parents have developed relationships with their children such that they have authority in their lives.  For some parents it is a mix of all of these factors.

And this is all highly correlated with family capital.  In a 1987 paper , Lareau describes parent night at two schools of different SES make-ups, fictionally named Colton (low -SES) and Prescott (high-SES).(1)

Ironically, teachers at Prescott actually complained of too much parent involvement, and at Colton, too little.  Prescott parents were felt to sometimes get in the way, while Colton parents were not present enough.  At back to school night, Lareau describes the differences between teacher-parent interactions at the two schools.

At Colton, the interactions between parents and teachers were stiff and awkward. The parents often showed signs of discomfort: nervous shifting, blushing, stuttering, sweating, and generally looking ill at ease. During the Open House, parents wandered around the room looking at the children's pictures. Many of the parents did not speak with the teacher during their visit. When they did, the interaction tended to be short, rather formal, and serious.....

At Prescott, the interactions between parents and teachers were more frequent, more centered around academic matters, and much less formal. Parents often wrote notes to the teacher, telephoned the teacher at school, or dropped by during the day to discuss a problem. These interactions often centered around the child's academic progress; many Prescott parents monitored their children's education and requested additional resources for them if there were problems. Parents, for example, asked that children be signed up to see the reading resource teacher, be tested by the school psychologist, or be enrolled in the gifted program. Parents also asked for homework for their children or for materials that they could complete at home with their children.

Lareau's research mirrors my own experiences and those of colleagues in poor schools.  This issue speaks both to issues of the practical nature of poverty, in which it is often impossible for a parent to be as involved as they might want to be because of life circumstances.  However, parents who not only truly want to, but know how to be involved, will find a way.  More often than not, low-SES populations simply don't possess the human capital sufficient to provide the sort of involvement a child's education demands.


These are all situations in which there is little a teacher can do but work with the student when he or she shows up in class.  But that is obviously not enough.  How is it then, that we a society, might intervene in a way that secures for the child a proper education?

1 - Social Class Differences in Family-School Relationships: The Importance of Cultural Capital, Author(s): Annette LareauSource: Sociology of Education, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Apr., 1987), pp. 73-85

Victimhood

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, was on the Colbert Report last week.  In the interview, she claimed that people of color don't use drugs at higher rates than whites.  Colbert then asked her, "why didn't David Simon set The Wire in Greenwich, Connecticut?"  I'm skeptical of her claim.  What kind of drugs are being compared?  Surely more crack is smoked in the ghetto than in Greenwich.  But regardless, an obvious answer to this question is that the Wire is about the drug trade, and whites must get their drugs from somewhere.  I'm also wary of the notion seemingly argued in the book that much of the problems facing the black community have to do with drug laws and biased enforcement.  But having not read the book, I'll refrain from comment.

However, a common response to the notion of dysfunction in the black community, mainly coming from the the right, is the idea that  "they need to fix their own problems".  This rests on the assumption that larger society bears no responsibility - whether structurally or because of explicit bias.  Further, many on the right claim that indeed, it is the claim that minorities are in any way victims that actively perpetuates a sense of victim hood, thus driving behavioral dysfunction.  If one thinks of oneself as a victim, then a nihilism sets in and hopelessness leads to low self-expectations and lowered standards of behavior.  This is quite a theory!  But is it true?

 In my work with at-risk, minority teenagers, there is some degree of resentment and distrust of white people, and it is sometimes vocalized as an "excuse" of sorts to explain their poor behavior. But the larger dynamic of dysfunctional community breakdown and lack of societal capital is far more salient. It isn't as if these kids are sitting around resenting white people and thinking up a narrative of how their problems are all white people's fault.

Actually, in my many conversations with them regarding their poor behavior, they cite the existence of cultural norms in which they feel they must participate in order to survive. They fight because they have to prove they are tough. They misbehave because they don't have a strong family structure at home supporting them. Their role-models are not academically inclined, but toughs who have lots of girls and smoke or sell lots of pot.

Now, they do see themselves as victims. But they are! They are profoundly unlucky, born into such a world. They don't understand who is to blame. They don't understand how the system works, much less how white racism might even be an issue. The most cohesive narrative I've heard has revolved around illuminati conspiracies - their music idols are frequently thought of as having literally made deals with the devil to achieve fame and fortune.

No, their sense of victimization is based on looking around them, at their friends and families. They began down a negative path when they were in elementary school, struggling with schoolwork and dealing with chaos at home. Before they knew it they had developed behaviors and habits that made them rebels. Success meant failing well.

They say that black America must take a hard look at itself. Doesn't it already, on a daily basis? People are doing the best they know how. My students' parents are trying to parent the best they know how. Yet teen parents and dropouts are going to be at a severe disadvantage when raising children, not only because of their lower levels of human capital, but because of social and economic segregation that places them in neighborhoods, peer groups and apartment complexes with low levels of societal capital.

My main issue with what seems to be the thesis of Alexander's book is that it equates the conscious, explicit racism of Jim Crow with a modern system in which racial bias might exist, but is marginal to the larger structural problems afflicting poor and minority communities. I think it is a disservice to individuals to limit the scope of the inequities they face to racial bias, when they are caught up in a far larger and more damaging social and economic system that limits their opportunities from birth.

Social Aristocracy

David Bornstein has a nice piece in the NYTimes on poverty and human development.  Poverty is more than simply a lack of income, or access to opportunity, but a complicated blend of social disadvantages.

Thinking about poverty in terms of human development is an essential shift.  Ghettoization happens not only by income, but by social and human capital.  This human tendency - our natural association with like-minded peers - reinforces a de facto class hierarchy, in which human development is imposed on individuals from socio-economic circumstance.  Social immobility is thus limited not by opportunity so much as by consciousness and familiarity.

At my daughter's public school, in a relatively posh neighborhood, It isn't uncommon to find at a gathering of parents multiple doctors, lawyers, business owners, and other professionals.  In a poor neighborhood, you would likely find multiple service industry workers, such as janitors, house cleaners, cashiers, etc.  Within this dynamic you find a disparity in human development and skill.  Compounded by the practical effects of income on the facilitation of daily life, there is the effect that forms of human capital such as vocabulary, cognition and social knowledge have had on an individual's ability to build self-efficacy and leverage ambition.  In aggregate, as groups of individuals with similar levels of capital come together, the network effect is powerfully determinative of a family's ability to achieve and maintain higher levels of social status.  Children of these families develop skill-sets largely in accordance with their parents' levels of capital.

Looking back over generations, what you see is a sort of social aristocracy, in which not only income, but human and cultural capital, as well as social capital, is the determinative dynamic in social mobility, or the lack thereof.  Society is coming to terms with this, and naturally looking at schools as the most obvious solution.  But the problem is much deeper and more complex, and real solutions will require much more than finding so-called "superteachers", able to leap tall fences of human and social capital development in a single bound.  What we need are programs like those mentioned in this article, as well as a relentless effort to find innovative ways of building human capital for all.  Relying on social aristocracy for human development is the antithesis of freedom.

The Elephant In the Room

To be sure, there is no substitute for a good teacher. There is nothing more valuable than great classroom instruction. But let’s stop putting the whole burden on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make every teacher more effective.

I was astonished when I read this quote in today's NY Times.  It's from Thomas Friedman, someone you might have little reason to believe would make a claim so far outside the current neo-liberal/conservative alliance on education reform.  The full column, titled How About Better Parents?, points out that the real culprit in student achievement is not poor teaching, but poor parenting.  This is not a call for breaking the teachers unions, nor a call for higher standards, nor a more market-based emphasis on charter schools and teacher accountability.  It is a head-on call for a change in the national debate about what really drives the achievement gap.

Looking through the comments to his piece, one gets the impression that his claim is obvious.  Of course it is the parents - we all know this!  Yet why does the education reform debate ignore this issue.  One the one hand, it assumes that all poor parents need is more choice in where to send their children, as if a better school is all that is needed.  On the other hand, it sees schools as the primary factor in student achievement, and thus the solution to closing the achievement gap, and inevitably solving poverty in America.

I think there are two historical reasons for this schizoid thinking, one each from the left and  right, and they account for why parenting has been so long ignored.  The right has never had a problem with blaming parents.  It is the first to blame all social ills on culture and ethnicity (even, at times, genes).  Its primary interest, the security of the white middle class against the barbaric poor, not to mention its fear of the secularism of the state, drove it to embrace vouchers as a way to allow middle class families to remove their children from public schools (and the children in them).  Yet it found that dropping the issue of vouchers for a much less controversial, yet in many ways similar, call for charters was good politics. 

Charters could be promoted without ever having to engage in the sort of victim-blame that was such red meat for the base, yet turned off the majority of American voters.  In fact, charters were a sort of win-win: not only were they a way of breaking unions (and big-government democratic ambitions), but they could be held out as quasi free-market solutions to poverty and the achievement gap.

The left, for its part, has never been comfortable with blaming the poor.  It's been too busy trying to argue the structural issues with a capitalist economy, as well as fighting for multiculturalism and the right wing notion that other cultures and ethnicities - even immigrants, brown people! - are as important and have as valuable a place at the American table as any.  So the idea that the low success rates for poor students can be traced to their poor home environment and lack of quality parenting, and not racism, discrimination, or exploitation, the idea that the poor are to blame for their own lack of academic success, would seem to undermine everything they've always fought for.

Yet this doesn't have to be the case.  What both sides are missing is the scope of the problem.  While the left wants to ignore the contemporary, active dysfunction among the poor, the right wants to ignore the historical social and economic structures that have conspired to create, and actively perpetuates a population which has been leeched of its human and social capital, and thus its ability to leverage in the world.  The children, the students of this population are simply the current inheritors of what is essentially our collective failure to establish an equitable distribution of human and social capital. 

My desire is that Friedman's words will not fall on entirely deaf ears.  He surely isn't alone.  The words he speaks will make intuitive sense to any who reads them.  Yet what must be transcended is our fear of embracing a difficult and messy truth about America, both past and present.  The problem - nothing less than poverty and social disadvantage itself - has always been humanity's greatest challenge.  Solving it will require a serious reckoning not only with what kind of institutions and governmental structures we seek, but, and more fundamentally, with how we perceive human agency itself.  This is the elephant in the room.

The Whole Story

Matt Yglesias points out something interesting that is often overlooked when we discuss important people: place.  He refers to a concept in the economics of cities known as "agglomeration externalities", "basically the idea that individuals and firms obtain productivity boosts by clustering together."  He sees the ways in which a Steve Jobs could not have existed outside of his particular place and time.

"As a sophomore in high school, for example, Jobs worked at an electronics store called Haltek that Isaacson describes as “a scavenger’s paradise sprawling over an entire city block with new, used, salvaged, and surplus components crammed onto warrens of shelves, dumped unsorted into bins, and piled in an outdoor yard.” The presence of an excellent electronics stores is helpful to the young Jobs as he builds his skills. But there would be no gigantic electronics specialty store except in a place with an unusually high concentration of people interested in electrical engineering. The presence of the engineers creates the market for the store, which drives the interest of the younger generation of engineers."

These patterns exist throughout history.   Often emerging organically, serendipitously, they tend to gain their own momentum, as others are attracted to what has become something important.  Aside from no small element of happenstance, this process can be best explained by the interaction of human and social capital.  In Silicon Valley, individuals with the human capital - the educated, success-minded parents, combined with the concentration of technological resources, created a tinderbox of creativity and enthusiasm for building new technologies.

In America there seems a curious resistance to this notion of social collectivity.  There seems a preference for the vision of solitary genius and individualism.  One wonders how much this has to do with the immigrant experience, and the forced severance of connections to our past.  Of course, despite the attractive notion of the immigrant going it alone, succeeding on his own merits, this is rather the exception to the rule.  The history of immigrant communities is one of networking, cooperation and group goal orientation.  Where individuals have succeeded without family help, they have done so despite the odds.


And yet, the fact remains that America is incredibly heterogeneous, with great generational mobility, and a national character defined in no small part by communal isolation.  A number of known cognitive biases could contribute to this tendency to see American success in isolation, removed from communal context.  A basic impulse of the sentiment could be a desire to deflect the painful experience - the anxiety, the stress - of "going it alone", by remembering events as not just better than they were, but as positively productive.  In this sense, one's trials and tribulations are not seen merely as unfortunate handicaps, but actual necessities for personal success.

This is certainly not a valid model of social activity.  Success is almost always built from human and social capital resources.  To the degree that it is not, more often has to do with good fortune.  Now, there certainly is an element of success-inducing tribulation.  Being forced to make do with little can be profoundly inspiring of creativity and tenacity.  But tribulation alone does not equate with success - that is surely absurd.  A crucial component in leveraging tribulation is sufficient human and social capital to allow for both its weathering and subsequent creative transcendence.  To a large degree, this capital is formed by an individual's family - how he is raised, but also by community resources and availability of alternative options.  Where there is success, no matter how devoid of opportunity an environment may appear at first glance, there will always exist an underlying story of human and social capital.

A Greater Inequality

The Occupy Wall Street movement is no doubt about many things, but I think it could be said to be at its core about income inequality.   My greatest problem with income inequality may have less to do with actual equality of income, but rather the inequality of opportunity it represents.   

The ownership of capital gives one an advantage in a capitalist economy.  We can accept that a certain amount of private capital is necessary to a healthy, competitive, robust marketplace, as its incentive structure tends to foster innovation and efficiency, often towards the common good.  But this is not necessarily the case, as it can also hamper innovation and efficiency, generally as accumulated wealth tends to accrete into entrenched interests.

But something I think is often missing from this part of the discussion is the degree to which human capital also accretes and gives structural advantage to the few.  I recently wrote about this in response to Eric Cantor's evocation of his poor Jewish immigrant grandmother's overcoming poverty to live out the American Dream through her grandchildren.  He speaks - as so many often do - of poverty in purely financial terms, as if financial capital is the only leverage point in capitalist society, and it is possible for anyone without it to begin to accumulate his or her own leverage.

Yet there is another, more powerful form of capital that needs to be leveraged in order to even begin to compete in a capitalist economy.  This is human capital.  What Cantor didn't mention (although was implicit in his narrative), was the amount of human capital his immigrant grandmother possessed.  Malcolm Gladwell raises the point in his book, Outliers, that Jewish immigrants in early 20th century New York tended to have access to human capital that other immigrants, such as Italian and Irish, did not.  Ironically, because of their oppression and marginalization in European society, they did not have the "luxury" of relying upon low-skill labor in the countryside, and instead were forced to develop skill-intensive occupations such as tailoring, jewelry, etc.  This provided an enormously useful form of capital they could then leverage in America, as such corollary skills, such as accounting and business-management, enabled them to make a profitable new life.

The problem the notion of human capital poses to the traditional economic debate is one of human behavior.  It makes a case that even in a relatively competitive and "free" market, even when you overcome the problem of access to capital, you're still faced with the dilemma of human means, where it simply isn't the case that "everyone" can succeed, because everyone does not have access to the same levels of human capital - that which allows them to leverage themselves in the economy, their ability to work hard, play by the rules, learn new skills, apply their knowledge, have productive social interactions, plan for the future, delay gratification, etc.  These are all skills that have little to do with inherited traits, but rather what they have learned from family, friends, neighbors and cultural interactions.

Most damning of all, just like financial capital human capital has a tendency to accrete.  Not only is the capital self-leveraging (healthy self-esteem = determination = study skills = more knowledge = more self esteem), but it brings up those around it, whether children or friends and neighbors, or schoolmates.  And because property values tends to create communities of homogeneous financial capital, so too do they create communities of homogeneous human capital.  So you end up with communities either both low in financial and human capital, or high in financial and human capital.  The clearest evidence of this can be see in public schools, where academic progress, the product primarily of human capital, aligns almost perfectly with financial capital.

It is a fact that opportunity is a product of human capital.  Without these core skills, one has no real self-efficacy.  Thus, to the extent that American citizens are growing up in families and communities which are failing to provide them with human capital, all the objective opportunity in the world will be essentially inaccessible.  It is rather like dangling fruit just out of reach of one whose legs are simply not long enough to reach.

The situation is clearly unfair.  People are growing up without opportunity.  For them, there is no real American dream.  Likewise, there are those who have been privileged with an abundance of human capital, and have been able to leverage it into great wealth. The million dollar question is not whether this is fair (it obviously is not), but whether there is anything we as a society can do to help them.  Public education is a great first start.  Other social programs that aim to guarantee access to the means to build human capital are equally important.  But it remains to be seen how effective any of these programs can really be.

So the next question that must be asked is whether a sort of "palliative care" might be owed to those lacking both human capital itself, and for whatever reason the means to develop it.  First on this list might be access to health care.  Millions of Americans will be stuck in poverty wage jobs with no access to it.  They will not have the means to develop sufficient human capital in the foreseeable future.  This will lead directly to great hardship as they inevitably become sick and injured.  Other quality of life issues can be remedied through such things as parks, libraries, public museums.  As this population will continue to be at risk of financial catastrophe, a basic social safety net will be required.

A case can be made that provision of these services runs the risk of disincentivizing the development of human capital.  However, I find claims that the strongest factor in the development of human capital is the desire to avoid the punitive effects of life without healthcare, food stamps or temporary welfare to be quite weak.  Millions already live in dire poverty, without these supposed barriers to human capital development, due to their acquisition of menial, poverty-wage labor, and obviously are not climbing out of poverty in large numbers.  American generation poverty is vast, and multi-causal.  Structural concerns are much more deterministic than the paltry government assistance offer. 

For instance, take the example of a common problem in poor neighborhoods.  A single parent household, in which children return home from school and are essentially left unattended, to roam the streets with neighborhood peers.  This will more often than not contribute to a net weakening of human capital.  Some strengths will be gained, but many more will likely be lost, or rather, weaknesses gained.  Many forms of human capital will be gained that provide some real benefit in the context of the norms of that marginalized neighborhood - such as fighting, acting tough, becoming fluent in cultural norms - but these will more than often represent patterns of thinking and behaving that are obstacles in wider society.  Even to a family with the best intentions, a child may not be able to avoid developing these negative behaviors and attitudes, sometimes referred to having been "lost to the streets".  This is a problem of structural failure, when even high degrees of human capital in a parent are overwhelmed by its opposing forces in other areas of a child's development.

Not only is capitalism, or free marketism, not competent to address this age-old dilemma, but it often actively contributes to it, through the accretion of unequal distributions in human capital and structural impediments to its formation and leveraging.

Invoking the Myth of Means

In a speech to a student newspaper, Eric Cantor uses his poor grandmother to remind us that, as he sees it, the American dream is still alive and well in America.

"Widowed by age 30, she raised my father and uncle in a tight apartment above a tiny grocery store that she and my grandfather had opened. She worked day and night and sacrificed tremendously to secure a better future for her sons. And sure enough, this young woman – who had the courage to journey to a distant land with hope as her only possession – lifted herself into the ranks of the middle class. Through hard work, her faith and thrift, she was even able to send her two sons to college."

I assume that by referring to his poor grandmother, Cantor was attempting to overturn what he likely considers the myth of means. That is, that one does not need means to become successful - that poverty is no excuse.  Yet this is a misunderstanding of socio-economics. It isn't necessarily the fact that someone is poor that makes success difficult. It is what is so highly correlated with poverty - things like single-parenthood, lack of education, lack of parenting skills, lack of cultural knowledge, etc. Cantor's grandmother no doubt possessed many forms of social capital that she was able to leverage into social capital for her family.

In this sense, she would have been financially, but not socially impoverished.  The former is a hardship, but no where near as devastating as the latter.  Without knowledge, one is indeed powerless.  What Cantor assumes in his grandmother, he assumes away in what he would no doubt consider the "undeserving" poor: he assumes she made her own social knowledge, as he assumes others can make their own.  Yet this type of knowledge is not self-made.  It comes from generations before you, and generations before them.  In America we have poverty - social poverty - that goes back generations.  Despite whatever convenient faith Cantor and other conservatives claim to have in the individual, their faith cannot overcome the reality of finding oneself without the knowledge and power to be successful.

Bleak Post

By now it's an old story to talk about the death of American manufacturing and our losing economic war with a third world more than happy to slave away for an existence we couldn't even dream of.  Automaticity and new technologies have allowed us much greater efficiency and productivity.  But it doesn't seem to be trickling down much, aside from fancier consumer electronics and discounts off bulk purchases.  We've seen the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class lose whatever sense of job security it once thought it had.  As New Jersey Governor Chris Christie famously asked, "Who gets pensions any more?"

The whole field has indeed changed, and I'm not sure we can cope as a culture/society. In the past a blue-collar family could count on a simple high school education providing entrance and exit into a stable income. This essentially took care of a pretty vast swath of American humanity.

But the kind of economy we're seeing pan out is pretty brutal to these kind of family traditions. Essentially, the bar for human and social capital has been raised significantly higher than it ever was. It's all too common for commenters to make vague proclamations about needing to "fix" education, as if the problem was output. But the truth is that it is input. We simply don't have the capacity of quality families that can produce children that can excel in academics.

Now, as a teacher, don't believe for a second I'm not trying. And I honestly don't think I'm saying today's generation is any worse than it was in the past. We've always had these families, and their kids didn't need degrees to find quality careers. But it is as if we are trying to cram a square peg into a round hole. Sure, you can always tweak the education model. But the margin of improvement has far less to do with what you can do in the classroom compared with the reality of where society simply is at. 

The term "class warfare", as a rhetorical device, has been in the news lately.  But a real class war has been raging for decades.  Having lost the battle long ago to smart machines and overseas labor, blue collar American families found themselves forced to compete with the well-read and groomed upper socio-economic classes, despite a severe disadvantage in human and social capital.  Without an academic culture and strong support at home, preparing for college isn't something most can do completely on their own.  Those eventually managing to find "the world of the mind", and then going on to graduate, have found an over-saturated job market without enough supply to meet demand.

Despite the many shiny new trinkets that globalization has placed upon our shelves and inside our screens, we seem to be taking two steps back for every one forward.  Add to this our ideological spectrum bending relentlessly rightward, and our government expenditures on things that used to take the rough edges off an unforgiving economic platform - like roads, schools, police and health care, and the future looks bleak indeed.

Hidden Privilege

The Trusty Servant

 From Wikipedia:

“The hircocervus (Latin: hircus, "billy goat" + cervus, "stag") or tragelaph (Greek: τράγος, tragos, "billy goat" + έλαφος, elaphos, "stag"), also known as a goat-stag or horse-stag, was a legendary creature imagined to be half-goat, half-stag. Plato utilized the idea of a fabulous goat-stag to express the philosophical concept of something that is knowable even though it does not really exist.”

This article in the NY Times points out a tragic flaw in our economy.   Farmers trying to find labor can't find Americans to do the work.  Picking crops is exhausting, back-breaking work, and people won't even do it at $11 an hour.  At what price would they do it?  How much would we pay for food?  On a recent Daily Show skit, Jason Jones couldn't even find Mexicans to do it.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mexed Out
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

The excellent, heart-wrenching documentary Last Train Home recently aired on PBS followed the story of a Chinese couple's tribulations as they sacrificed everything to move from their rural village to a big city in order to work 7 days a week in a sweatshop.  They had moved fifteen years earlier, when their daughter was barely one year old.  They come home for one week, once a year, along with the rest of the migrant city workers wishing to celebrate Chinese New Year with loved ones.  The stations are packed by the tens of thousands, all scrambling madly, dangerously to escape the thriving smog for the impoverished, bucolic countryside.

They live in bunk beds at what appears to be the factory, or some nearby squalor, and wash from a bucket.  They send everything home, so that their daughter might have a chance to go to college and have a better life.  Yet now a teenager, their daughter barely knows them, and resent their visits.  To rebel, she flees school and finds her own job at a factory in the city.



The product of their labor appears to be designer jeans.  But it could be any product really, that we in America consume so readily and purchase so cheaply from Chinese and other foreign labor markets.

A case might be made that this is improvement for China.  It certainly is for American migrant farm workers, in the sense that they are making ten times what they might have made in Latin America. 

Yet what a convenient scheme for us.  Their servitude is our gain.  Unless of course we see a lack of jobs to replace those we have lost through efficiency.  In theory, the cheaper prices and increased productivity of business investment is channeled back into the economy where it can hire new employees for new types of production.  In theory.  I can't claim to understand economics well enough to make a claim either way.

The American job market doesn't seem to be what it once was.  Today a high school diploma, hands and a strong back won't get you as far as it once did.  You can still do pretty well for yourself by going to college and taking a degree in math or science, to do the labor that American businesses will still pay top dollar for.  But that's a selective portion of American society.  It requires a level of human and social capital that many American families don't possess - that for many was never possessed.  The difference is that in the past, you could stumble out of high school and find a cozy middle class life for yourself.  No longer. 

This seems a question for American civilization: can we as a people raise the bar enough for the average American family that even the lowest rungs - those for whom - for whatever reason - the rigor of high school and college or technical school wasn't enough?  Is this economic and social requirement too much to ask?  We've still certainly the need for low-skill, tedious labor.  Who will perform these jobs? 

You can't outsource crops.  Not at least to the extent that the land itself is a natural resource.  We've done a pretty swell job sneaking in illegal labor for now.  Our obedience to the siren song of low prices and hidden externalities has enabled a robust market for low-wage earners.  People are being taken advantage of, as they must be.  They are working in shitty conditions for compensation we would not stoop to accept.

And yet anti-illegal sentiment seems to be reaching historic proportions.  We have the gall to pretend that these people are somehow leeching off us - expecting health care and public education.  Not In My Backyard (well, unless you're here for the lawn trimmings).

Everyone wants the brainwork.  No one wants to swab the decks.  Unless the price is right.  Which it isn't.  How much would they have to pay before your daughter or son making a career out of picking lettuce, washing dishes or sewing garments seems admirable?

Someone has to do it. 

"A trusty servant's picture would you see,
This figure well survey, who'ever you be.
The porker's snout not nice in diet shows;
The padlock shut, no secret he'll disclose;
Patient, to angry lords the ass gives ear;
Swiftness on errand, the stag's feet declare;
Laden his left hand, apt to labour saith;
The coat his neatness; the open hand his faith;
Girt with his sword, his shield upon his arm,
Himself and master he'll protect from harm."
- Arthur Cleveland Coxe