It Shall Be the Fuck Ups

Statue of Benkos Bioho, 16th century slave

Ahh, Fridays.  A fellow teacher in the lounge at lunch told me it couldn't have come too soon.  Slightly overweight, she hobbles around on a prosthetic leg.  This is her 26th year of teaching.  Somewhat of  a polymath, she teaches Earth Science, Life Science and Algebra, depending on the year.  These are lower-level, core subject classes that students take who have demonstrated a history of lower grades and lack of study skills, who would likely not be successful in more difficult subjects.

She doesn't have to explain the weariness in her voice; I know it all too well.  It comes from teaching five subjects a day to students a majority of whom are either failing outright or barely passing, struggle to stay focused, have poor organizational skills, frequently miss class, do the minimum amount of work required (even at a substantially lowered bar), frequently disrupt class and get in trouble, and generally find education repellent.  It comes from struggling to find the line between holding to high expectations yet at the same time recognizing practical realities of what the students can actually do (their "zone of proximal development"), and maybe most importantly, empathizing with what can only be described for many of them as tragic home lives and understanding that this socializing force lies at the root of their relentlessly poor performance,

When I entered education, I did so after having spent my undergraduate years trying to understand the roots of social inequality that I saw all around me as I drove back and forth across the class boundaries clearly demarcating the San Francisco and Oakland neighborhoods in which I worked as a delivery driver.  I was convinced that through education, students could be empowered to transcend the shackles of socio-economic disadvantage.  If they came to love learning, they would set themselves on a path to consciousness.  I had experienced enough brain-numbing, authoritarian teaching in my own education to see the glorious value of empathetic, compassionate and inspiring teachers.

Yet after nearly ten years of teaching, first as a substitute in various districts, then as a teacher in various grade levels, I've come to more fully appreciate the ultimate limitations of education as liberation, especially within the context of traditional instruction.  The brutal truth is that the level of developmental disadvantage and relentless life hardship is so great for so many students, that the educational system by itself is woefully inadequate to address their needs.

The classroom is not the proper arena for social change.  It can be a place of rich learning, socialization and self-discovery.  But this can only happen if children's more basic needs are being met.  If a student has not been reared in such a way as to develop age-appropriate cognitive and emotional skills, or is living in an environment at home which causes high levels of stress, the effects of formal schooling are only going to have marginal impact.  Some students, luckily, will possess the right mixture of luck and temperament to overcome such disadvantage, but on whole, most will not - an empirical truth backed up by fact.  Children have basic developmental needs.  In a recent article for the New Republic, Jonathan Cohn lays out just how powerful this developmental disadvantage is.  Research shows that a good portion of a child's developmental trajectory is laid down in its first two years.

a scientific revolution that has taken place in the last decade or so illuminates a different way to address the dysfunctions associated with childhood hardship. This science suggests that many of these problems have roots earlier than is commonly understood—especially during the first two years of life. Researchers, including those of the Bucharest project, have shown how adversity during this period affects the brain, down to the level of DNA—establishing for the first time a causal connection between trouble in very early childhood and later in life. And they have also shown a way to prevent some of these problems—if action is taken during those crucial first two years.

Unfortunately, these are years that are, among disadvantaged populations, going to be spent - by definition - in a context of developmental disadvantage.  And these are only the first two years of life.  By age 5, development is already deeply behind advantaged peers.  The gap only grows.  By the time the child reaches high school, all manner of life trauma and developmental drought have conspired to bring the full weight of social inequality pressing down upon his neck until he either drops out, destined if not for jail then a life of minimum wage toil, or barely squeaks by with a diploma, however with a penchant for rebellion and nihilism that so diminish his sense of self-efficacy that hopes and dreams seem impossible, if even extant in the first place.  Yes, there are those who escape, providing fodder for myths of free will and self-empowerment free from social constraint.  But upon closer examination these prove little more than feeble justifications for a bias towards a status quo which denies structural effects of inequality and seeks to confirm its own flawed assumptions.

For us to continue to pretend that minor education reforms - those centered around the classroom experience, teaching and curriculum - are adequate to deliver social equality to millions of disadvantaged children in America is to ignore the desperate reality of their situation.  If we take a sober look at what these children truly need in order for them to be successful, our gaze cannot but survey a landscape of broken homes, neglect, family crises, neighborhood decay, substance abuse, and a generalized, creeping sense of communal despair at a future of low-wage work and frustrated opportunity. 

No one likes to be treated unfairly.  Even if they don't understand why, they intuitively know that the game is stacked against them.  This seems a basic cognitive truth, grasped by no less than primitive apes, as this video clearly demonstrates.
What the scientist in the video is illustrating is just how obvious injustice is, even to a monkey, who understands quite clearly that he is being punished for doing the same work.  Now, apologists for the status quo might object, claiming that the disadvantaged don't do the same work.  The students in my class are not doing nearly the work of their more successful classmates.  But this is a misunderstanding of human psychology, and the nature of motivation and reward.  Yes, they are fuck ups.  They draw pictures on the desk instead of thinking about the lesson.  They throw papers at their friends instead of copying down notes.  They smoke pot instead of do their homework.

But what is work?  And what does it take to complete it?  An advantaged student who has been given adequate development in a safe, emotionally satisfying and cognitively rich environment hardly has to work to be successful.  Her heart and mind are quiet as she sits, pencil in hand, her book open and organized to digest the lesson.  She has had no conflict with a family member or friend, no sleepless night, no hangover from an escapist substance.  The lesson makes sense because it meshes smoothly with neural patterns in her memory that have been laid down neatly for years.  She makes it look easy because it is.  For her.

Compare her to a child of disadvantage, whose heart is beating fast, stress hormones pumping through his veins, who never had a father, whose family is poor and suffers the slings and arrows of any number of social problems that might have landed them in poverty, who's found solace in a stance of rebellion and a respected identity as one who is unbounded by external rules and limitations.  He didn't come prepared, and he has no intention of completing his work.  But he knows how to play the game well enough to stay out of trouble just enough not to get sent to the principle, yet who is damned if he is going to sit there and suffer through 50 minutes of academic labor.  Because it isn't easy for him.  If the girl next to him makes it look easy, he knows how hard it is.  Trying to concentrate on the teacher's voice, reading the assignment on the board, remembering to get out his notebook and pencil (if he even remembered to bring it), is the academic equivalent of mining for granite with your bare hands in the hot sun (and considering how hopeless the entire endeavor seems - today, and every day for years now - there is no paycheck to look forward to. 

Work, for him, is just showing up and not punching anyone in the face.  Work is maintaining sanity one day at a time.  Work is struggling to finding a way to squeeze something meaningful and fulfilling out of this relentlessly antagonistic world.  Assuming in him that the task is simple: just do your work and behave, is a vicious insult to everything he has ever learned about the world.

Cohn outlines some good directions for policy in his article.  But we have a deeper problem, one that we have yet to come up with a solution for, and can only fumble to put band-aids on.  We live in a system in which societal capital is leveraged for individual advantage.  In a non-linear trajectory, advantage secures more advantage, while disadvantage secures ever more disadvantage.  A war on poverty, a war on inequality must grapple with this fundamental aspect of our system at large, in which both are built in to and perpetuated by the nature of the system itself.  A system of enormous productive power, it also breeds exploitation of the disadvantaged by ensuring their continued existence.  If there can be distilled a singular dilemma that propels this blog, it is this: Some one must clean the floors.  It shall be the fuck ups.  And we shall fuck them up.

Broken Windows and Diamond Rings

An uncomfortable reality of political ideology is the degree to which any given stance is predicated at least in part on economic assumptions.  Try as we might to corral a sense of objectivity and rationality into our views, at some point we must admit that there is just so much we do not know about the ways in which economies work.  This, even as stark and fundamental disagreement can be found among leading economists.

So take, for instance, the controversial concept of government stimulus, which in our recent case represented close to a trillion dollars of federal spending.  Projections have varied widely as to how stimulative it truly was, or could have been.  As soon as you begin to look closely at the underlying arguments, it becomes clear that any lay understanding is woefully inaccurate in forming anything but a shallow and fragile understanding.

And so, it is with this admittedly devastating caveat, that I, intrepid blogger, attempt to carve into the following subject.

I've long wondered about the relative merit of various forms of economic activity, in terms of their effect on overall productivity.  For instance, is a dollar spent on busfare to one's employer of more value than a dollar spent on a chocolate candy?  My question follows largely from the fact that as wealth has become increasingly concentrated into the hands of the rich, there has no doubt been a subsequent shift in the types of economic activity, from utilitarian spending to luxury spending.  Is the former type of spending better for overall growth?  It would seem that to the degree that spending is non-utilitarian, it is wasteful, and thus not only distasteful in terms of a moral reckoning in what ought to be a more fair and equitable society - as a sort of ill-gotten decadence, but distasteful in purely economic terms, as a net drag on the economy.

On first glance, one might say that there should be no real difference.  In each case, the dollar spent moves into the hands of another worker, who then uses it to purchase more goods and labor, and the production continues to be spread throughout the economy.  Monies spent on chocolate will fill the pockets of the chocolatier, who in turn pays his workers, buys his cocoa, etc.

Yet what about this feeling that paying for chocolate is somehow decadent?  It is certainly a luxury expense.  But what does that really mean?  No one will live or die because of it, unlike say basic food stuffs.  But no will will live or die, either, because of money spent on busfare.  Yet without it, considerable hardship might befall the rider; he may lose his job; he may have to purchase a car, leading to desperate sacrifices in other areas of his life.  Maybe the best way to think about the issue is in terms of the productive possibilities of each form of spending.  What are all the ways in which a bite of chocolate, by itself, contributes to productivity.  It surely has some merit, in that it represents a reward, something to strive for that encourages hard work elsewhere.  However this is a limited effect, and in many cases, certainly to the degree that its purchase has indeed been out of decadence, having long ago lost any meaningful pull on behavior, it could have as easily been done without.  Again, this is luxury spending, by definition.  Busfare cannot be done with in the same way.  When we look at long-term drivers of productivity, we see things like the invention of the steam engine,the automobile, the internet.  Chocolate, not so much.  While there have no doubt been great innovations in luxury, their utility in encouraging productivity is conspicuously unaccounted for.

In 1850, French political economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote the following parable about economic activity and productivity.  To economic theorists, it is known as The Broken Windows Fallacy.

     Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation—"It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?"
     Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.
Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade—that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs—I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.
     But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen."
     It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

Bastiat's Fallacy is popular among Austrian economists, and those who favor small government.  Their attraction is based on the parable's illustration of hidden costs; they believe that government spending is not zero sum and represents money that could not have been spent elsewhere.  While this is true enough, what ultimately matters is the projected utility of the spending.  Of course wasteful government spending is a net loss in productivity.  Yet government spending that directs investment in a worthwhile investment that increases productivity, such as a bridge, or public school, is a net benefit.

My interest in the parable is also its illustration of hidden costs, although I'm more concerned with the effects of concentrated wealth and the hidden costs of luxury spending.  To the extent that luxury spending is by itself almost entirely unproductive, and that concentrated wealth encourages it, one can argue that the concentration of wealth leads to, as Bastiat's parable might frame it, much broken glass.  Better this wealth be put to productive use.  Lord knows there is no lack of need for it in today's society.

Not only are there hidden costs to pointless consumer spending, or that which has little inherent value, but so too are there hidden costs in frivolous investment.  I think it fair to claim that much of what caused the 2008 financial crisis was a direct outgrowth of sloppy investment: concentrated wealth led to overflowing pools of money, the manipulation of which was coordinated by greedy investment bankers who saw an opportunity to make enormous profits from money that was primed for recklessness by its decadent acquisition.

I recognize that I'm now far out of my comfort zone in understanding the Great Recession.  But one can confidently make a couple of claims.  Luxury spending and sloppy banking represent poor investments, and as such are defined by their hidden costs - their monies could have been put to more productive use.  There will be many who point to the many government boondoggles as evidence of waste.  The response to this is that there is plenty of good that government does (and often that which only government can do), and the larger controversy has likely much more to do with ideology and one's political and social preferences.  But the Broken Windows Fallacy simply reminds us that there are always hidden costs to spending.  These costs place spending in moral terms, that spending represents a choice between different net social outcomes.  This is a choice we make both as individuals and as citizens of a democratic government.

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.

Dining with the Rich, p.II - "Opportunity"

I think there are two related issues between the liberal and conservative perspectives on inequality and opportunity in America:

- the degree to which extant inequities in power structures tend to remain, if not solidify without intervention. In the extreme*, this might require revolutionary, literal redistribution of wealth. At the margins, it might simply means provision of quality libraries. The trouble is the massive squishy middle where there are a variety of interventions that can promote self-efficacy. Yet to be comprehensive and not tied to grab-bag charity work, a guarantee of equal access can be practicably made only by the government. The most obvious example of this is public education, which can then extend in terms of real efficacy to any variety of programmatic responses such as early childhood, parenting classes, childcare support, drug treatment, counseling, etc. (all of which of course must prove themselves but there is no reasons why they can't be completely effective in theory and there are indeed many such examples of effective programs).

*I'm thinking of countries where a kleptocracy has virtually impoverished everyone and must be removed by force.

- the degree to which opportunity is actually accessible to all. This is tied directly to the one I mentioned previously. We could tie ourselves in knots trying to determine how much self-efficacy any given adult individual has in America. But I think we can make some pretty assumptions based on a lot of very predictive data. The degree of efficacy results directly from an individual's human and social capital.

This however, would contradict your statement: "a middle class existence is within the grasp of everyone with a reasonable enough intelligence level." Clearly, the poor are not of below-average intelligence, at least to the degree to which their income is reflective of any marginal lower IQ.

The real problem lies not in IQ, but one's ability to realize their potential. To do this requires bringing all of the faculties to bear necessary to make the choices that will lead to success. For example, being in excellent shape is within most people's grasp. Yet why aren't they? It isn't that they are stupid. There are just too many competing factors involved in maintaining an excellent health regiment.

Returning to the larger issue of income, people are similarly confined by their capacity for self-realization. Yet this confinement is far more extensive and multi-faceted than mere habits of diet and exercise. For starters, there is a very close link between high school graduation rates and income. It isn't causal - it is certainly possible to be successful despite dropping out of school. But what the link does is point to the incredible power of other indicators that have already begun to act before citizens reach adulthood, and yet have effects that last their entire lives.

People simply do not magically invent their own capacity for habits of mind, etc. that allow them to succeed. These are skills that they have been able to develop over years, and upon adulthood can begin to leverage into success.

Now, it is all well and good to acknowledge this, and then seek ways of increasing agency in society, whether through cultural change, government intervention - whatever. But there are also systematic barriers - "channels" if you will - that provide sort of invisible scaffolding that allows some to reach higher, and leaves others more greatly marginalized and with fewer options.

So, these would basically fall into the realm of social capital. But, as opposed to structures like family or culture, which can be influenced by society at large, these would rather be more infrastructural, and within the larger designs of what kind of society we want to create.

One of the largest, most problematic of these structures is the unintended result of our system of property, specifically property values. What ends up happening is a clustering effect which ultimately has a profound impact not only on individual communities but society at large. When you have large degrees of inequality between neighborhood property values, you get communities with large disparities in human capital. In the rich neighborhoods you get selection for relatively well-adjusted*, motivated, educated, knowledgeable, intact families, etc. - basically high levels of social capital. Yet each point of social capital is not static. They build exponentially, leveraging one and another to to create a sum vastly more useful than its parts.

You can see where this goes with poor communities, where the same holds true, yet in reverse. There is a relative lack of social capital - education, worldly knowledge, motivation, psychodynamic integrity (mental illness, dysfunction,), etc., and each individual piece leverages against one another, building exponentially until the results become catastrophic. This snowballing of capital disadvantage has an overall effect of placing an active downward pressure on communities. Not only are there practical, day-to-day effects on activities, but stress levels increase, contributing to health and behavioral problems. If you think losing weight is difficult, try doing it with massive increases in stress hormones due to not being able to afford rent, getting laid off, your car breaking down, your kids fighting at school, your boyfriend running out on you, etc., etc. Any single lack in social capital advantage becomes extra burdensome in the presence of an overall lack. Whereas something like drug addiction or abuse in a wealthy community can be lessened in its destructive power by the presence of family cohesion, financial stability, in the absence of social supports, it can have much more dire consequences.

Of course, these are extremes. Most of us fall somewhere in between, possessing some mixture of the above. But this does not make any of the elements of social capital any less crucial to the understanding of how "opportunity" works.