Revisiting Societal Capital

An article in the Root today on White Privilege put me in mind to revisit my thoughts on what in the past I have termed "societal capital".

I like to think of privilege as a form of capital, and capital as: that which can be leveraged to gain advantage in society. There are many forms of capital - financial (cash), emotional (regulation), cognitive (learning, vocabulary), neighborhood (safety, networking), educational (classmates, teachers), community (stores, libraries, services, parks), parental (this one is huge, maybe most important as it affects all others: family dynamics, stress, relational development, cognitive enrichment, vocabulary spoken), racial/ethnic (treatment and assumptions in society).

These are all interwoven and dynamically linked, interacting in non-linear ways. In combination they open up new avenues of privilege. However, when subtracted and de-linked, they do the opposite. They cut off avenues of opportunity and actively place in the individual at risk for further devaluation of capital. For instance, having a car opens up new job opportunities. But living in a poor neighborhood and having a car stolen can make traveling to work more difficult, which increases stress, increases costs if car payments are still due, limits family engagement, lowers status, etc.

Poverties

Is this lede tactic getting tired:

"I really like X, but......."

Hey - It's the way my brain operates.  OK.  I'll try something different....

Talking about socio-economics is tricky.  Because the subject usually comes up as a result of some other context, we tend to use off-hand catch-alls like "disadvantaged", or "poor".  But these are incredibly blunt tools, and can easily be misinterpreted.

Take for example, "he grew up poor, but found a way to reach his goals."  The word "poor" is doing a ton of work here.  Depending on the case, it could mean a lot of things apart from mere financial poverty.  It could also mean an unsafe neighborhood, a single-parent home, a low-scoring school, a polluted neighborhood, parents who didn't read to him, parents who were abusive, family members on drugs, negative peer influences, etc.  All of these are environmental risk-factors that are associated with poverty.  When we say "grew up poor", any or none of them could be included.  Maybe his parents were loving, nurturing, well-educated, and lived in a relatively safe neighborhood, and sent him to a school with other high-achieving children.  Or maybe not.

Yet how often do we hear poverty spoken of in purely financial terms?  The difference between someone in the former situation and someone in the latter is vastly different.  You put a hundred kids in the first, and a hundred kids in the second, and guess how they'll turn out on average.

The reality of socio-economics is that there are a whole bunch of factors involved, some more harmful or beneficial than others, and depending on how they interact.  Often times, a child will grow up with a host of serious socio-economic risk-factors, yet will turn out quite well due to some key privileges he enjoyed: having a grandmother who was able to support him, having a teacher he connected to, living on a certain street instead of the one a block over.

The contingencies are myriad.

And so I saw this on facebook today.  It was a post by Lin Manuel-Miranda:

Apparently one of his first jobs was McDonalds.  Now, to be charitable, he did work there, and it's a completely low-rung job, and now he has an award-winning musical.  But lest anyone forget for a damned second, there is working at McDonalds, and there is working at McDonalds.  Most McDonalds employees have little education, and grew up poor.  Most will stay uneducated, and stay in poverty.

This verb finds itself at the intersection between the two types of poverty mentioned early.  One type of poverty is like lying at the bottom of a cold dark ocean.  The other is sitting in a dingy just off shore, ones tiny hands on the oars.

From Wikipedia:

His father is a former political advisor who advised New York City mayor Ed Koch, and his mother is a clinical psychologist.  His father is a former political advisor who advised New York City mayor Ed Koch, and his mother is a clinical psychologist….After graduating from Hunter College Elementary School,  and Hunter College High School, Miranda went on to attend Wesleyan University.

Exchanging Boughs

Anyone familiar with casino advertising knows the general theme: exuberant "regular" person jumping for joy, often waving handfuls of cash, along with an exclamation in bold print, "I won $50,000!!!"  Of course we realize this is false advertising, in the sense that odds are you will not be winning anything at all, but rather losing most of what you spend.  Yet nonetheless, it is an attractive concept.  Witness the $10 billion + market in the US alone. 

Yet would we go as far as devoting entire sections of our newspapers to covering the rare gamblers that find themselves beating the odds, and getting lucky enough to win big?  Or further still, would we publish stories about their lives that never mention the fact that their success was entirely due to luck, and celebrate instead their current status and accomplishments, with a brief mention of which casino they frequented.

This thought occurred to me as I turned to the Weddings/Celebrations section of the Sunday New York Times.  Wedged in-between coverage of some or another bourgeois cocktail party and a spread of the latest upscale fashions, there lie the dozens of marriage announcements.  Upon further inspection, these announcements (pronouncements?) nearly all detail what could easily be described as the lineage of wealth and privilege.  A modern day family tree of minor royalty. 

The wedded couples, almost always successful and well-bred, generally combine into astonishingly powerful arrangements:

 - A "management consultant in the Washington office of the Boston Consulting Group", marries an "adjunct law professor at the Georgetown Law Center and next month will begin working in the Washington office of the Council on Foreign Relations as the senior fellow for global health, economics and development".  He " graduated from Columbia and received a law degree from Stanford", she "received an M.B.A. from Georgetown University".

- A "a fourth-grade teacher" at a school in the 99th percentile, marries "the founder and chairman of Libertad Bank".  He "graduated from Princeton and received an M.B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin", she "graduated cum laude from Colgate and received a master’s in childhood education from Fordham."

And those were simply the first two couples. So, you might say, these are incredibly bright and high-achieving individuals.  Good for them.  We should all be so ambitious.

Well, we should all be winners at casinos as well.  Because the thing about wedding announcements, is that they always mention the parents.  And almost without fail, the parents too were incredibly bright, high achieving individuals.

- Of the first couple, her mother was an ER nurse and ethics consultant, her father a judge on the Vermont Superior Court.  His mother the "executive director of the North and South American chapter of the International Ozone Association, an educational and scientific organization,", his father "a chemical engineer, is an environmental engineering consultant in Stamford."

- Of the second couple, her mother taught English as a second language at a poor middle school, her father was "the executive editor of USA Today".  His father " the senior partner of J. C. Bradford & Company, a stock brokerage in Nashville" (founded by his grandfather in 1927).

The obvious take-away here is that, just like money doesn't grow on trees, neither does success.  Unless of course, you're talking about family trees, in which case it most certainly does.

So what are we celebrating in these young, successful and promising couples?  Surely we can be happy for them.  We can gaze upon them from afar, pondering what it must be like to live upon such gilded limbs.  Of course, all of our limbs are gilded to various degrees - some of ours more than others.  Yet let us not forget, as their magnificence, their "royalty" is offered to us from the pages of newspapers of record, that these vignettes are as rarefied and fortune-borne as anything glimmering down upon us from roadside billboards pointing the way to the nearest casino. 

Yet, instead of cash, the capital being teased is privilege, in many ways a jackpot more precious than gold.