The Language of Poverty

Coates is again in the news as Cornel West takes him to task for his neoliberalism.  A portion of West's thesis deals with Coates' embrace of Obama, including the imperialism he finds distasteful.  While germane to a definition of neoliberalism, I'm personally more interested in how the two deal with minority poverty.  As a white man, I recognize the privileged view from which I sit.  However, with decades of work among poor and minority communities, and a life-long grappling both (literally and figuratively) with how to help understand and solve the wealth gap, I feel my critical engagement with these issues comes from a place of deep respect.  Further, I continue to feel that true anti-racism requires humanization, not objectification of minority thought.  That said, I welcome critique of my ideas should they veer towards offensive caricature, or any other reflection of my whiteness.  But onwards.

Critiques of West have been that he is too ad hominem - arguing Coates' hasn't "earned" the right to his pessimism.  That can be read as such - shouldn't Coates' arguments be taken on their merit, as opposed to the body that voices them?  But one could read West not as impugning Coates' personally, but rather - again in line with West's thesis - his lack of a developed theory of oppression.  West is a Marxist, and places oppression in the context of an accumulation of wealth and power that is  explicitly capitalist.  Coates spends very little time with this.  Coates' paints vivid and beautiful portraits of what oppression feels like.  And this is to be admired greatly.  And his effect has been great.  But much of this effect, arguably, can be attributable to his resonance with Whites' deep ambivalence between their neoliberal assumptions and their discomfort with their obvious privilege.  Coates paints a vivid portrait for them to hang on their wall, to give passing penance.  But nothing else about the room is required to change.  The walls of the building remain.

My problem with Coates’ neo-liberalism is that it rests snugly in the neo-liberal Whites’ allergy top real economic reform. If it is all about racist white behavior, then you don’t have to deal with the deeper economic assumptions that literally perpetuate minority poverty. Whites are, have been, and likely be racist in all kinds of ways. But imagine if you got them all to stop tomorrow: what would that really change about minority poverty? We have an economic system which requires low-skill labor be paid low wages. This means historically marginalized groups will inevitably be the ones doing that work.

Neo-liberals assume that if you simply make the playing field equal, that society with be equal. But capitalism simply doesn’t work that way: it REQUIRES an underclass. Take Coates’ reparations - I’m all for them, but they don’t demand better pay for low-skill work. In fact, the neo-liberal assumption of a meritocracy in which everyone gets a good education and goes to college, ACTIVELY undervalues and views moral failing in the poor. Yet when the poor make bad choices, don’t raise their kids right, misbehave, etc. - neoliberals have no answer other than to pretend it doesn’t exist and that the problem is not the system but rather white racism. What they cannot or will not grasp is that capitalism depends on a caste system of societal capital, in which financial, emotional, cognitive, neighborhood, property, etc. resources are leveraged by market values. These market values don’t care a whit about the immorality of privilege and historical advantage. It depends upon the individual acting according to self-interest, which will always be stronger than group interest unless larger contingencies are in place. The strongest contingency of all is a system of laws that grant privilege status to property above morality. Thus, high-SES and low-SES is allowed to exist.

Of course race will be a factor in this, but it is only the language that the system uses to describe the violence that the economic system perpetrates. West’s critique of Coates is that he is “all talk” in this sense - that he revels in the language of racism without looking deeper, into its economic  grammar, if you will. 

In my intellectual evolution over the years (documented for better or worse on this blog!), I've come to develop the notion of something I call Societal Capital.  Its an extension of the Marxist notion of the leveraging of capital in a capitalist society, but reaching more broadly to include not only financial but other forms of material wealth that can also be seen as commodities.  Essentially, anything that can be leveraged to help one develop for themselves more freedom is Societal Capital.  Likewise, the lack thereof of this development act to deleverage one's freedom.  For example, when a parent reads to her child and engages her in stimulating conversation, she improves the child's cognitive capacity, which the child will be able to leverage for increased access to freedom in school and peer relationships.  Similarly, the way a parent smiles at her child, hugs her and comforts her builds up a child's emotional strength, which then she will be able to leverage outside the home. 

The notion of Societal Capital is Marxist in that it eschews the static notion of libertarian free will that is presumed by classical liberalism.  Supporters of a "free market" imagine in individuals as free actors; if people are free to make decisions, all things being equal they will thrive according to their merit.  An inherent morality is thus derived in which personal circumstance is largely the product of one's "personal freedoms", without regard to past or future learning histories.  The ultimate product of this view is that people who don't do well in school, seek to better themselves, stay in low-wage jobs, or generally make choices that are less productive, have no one to blame but themselves.  

This presents a problem for neo-liberalism, which fundamentally accepts the notion of merit and personal responsibility.  But hold on a second, you might say - I'm a Democrat and I don't blame the poor!  

Enter Coates and West.  I first began reading Coates many years ago, when he used to blog for the Atlantic.  I was interested in his take on education, especially how it intertwined with race.  But I grew frustrated with his embrace of ed-reform (a movement rooted in neoliberalism's assumptions), and the picture he painted of "poor" schools did not reflect what I knew to be the case - both from research as well as first hand experience in the classroom.  More so, I was annoyed with the what White readers - most of whom likely never spent much time in a ghetto in their lives -  seemed to conveniently elevate him.  Sure, there were racist teachers - I'll never forget one in PA who whispered a complaint to me about the "black ones".  But sadly, the racism in her words was not in the facts of the case, but rather her interpretation of them.  In Reading, PA, schools were filled with poor, misbehaved children.  And there, as is the case everywhere in America, a higher proportion of misbehaved kids were indeed minority, especially black.  But the racism dripping from her white lips was that she put the blame squarely ON THEM.  She did not understand the context of what she was seeing.  She did not see the historical marginalization, the wealth gap, and ultimately that poverty, not race was the determining factor in the behavior that she loathed.  And as a teacher, you can only imagine how infuriating poorly behaved, disrespectful, sassy, unmotivated children can be.  But poor white kids were hardly better (owing to their small privilege of being white and the modicum of Societal Capital that had allowed their family to maintain).  When I finally left the profession, it was because I simply could no longer take the daily confrontation of poor kids with no support in the rest of their lives.  I would end the day with a stack of notes to call home.  When I phoned, their parents had long given up on them, and had no advice for me.  These parents did not have enough support themselves.  And in Yucca Valley, CA, they were primarily white.

For decades now, since explicit racism has been written out of the lawbooks (segregation, miscegenation), and society has generally embraced the notion that all races should be in theory treated fairly, the persistence of the minority poverty gap has presented a problem for mainstream political thought.  The conservative Republican party views the problem as classical liberals might: free will in minority communities necessitates that the problem is individual.  Far right racists say this is biological, less far-right race "realists" say it is cultural.  The problem is not, that is, due to racism or economic structure.

The liberal Democratic party is too politically "liberal" (i.e. moderately progressive), to directly challenge the classical liberal assumptions of capitalism such free markets, property rights and individual freedom of action (free will).  Instead, (especially after the horrific example of communism's form of dismantling these assumptions) it has chosen to delicately tip-toe around these notions, avoiding direct confrontation.  Government is sold as a salve in the rougher edges of capitalism.  Supports such as public education and health care subsidies are promoted as morally necessary when individuals are unable to obtain services such as education and health care on the free market.  But when faced with the persistence of minority poverty, they are ill-equipped to confront the problem directly.  To challenge racism is old-hat.  This requires no actual challenge to any real norms.  Be nice to everyone and treat them with respect.  OK, fine.  We've all agreed that this is what you are supposed to do.  Of course, people are going to be racist in all manner of micro-aggressive, ignorant and mildly ugly ways.  But undoing any of this, no matter how hard we try, is... well, lip-service.  

Generational poverty is a product of capitalism.  If we take race out of the equation altogether, you still get economic segregation and broken communities, for the simple fact that low-wages inflict a violence upon families that is beyond compare.  It creates stresses, hardships, and instabilities that devastate Societal Capital.  It creates ghettos bereft of public capital such as parks, clean streets, role-models, nice stores, good transportation and basic safety.  It saps family capital as marriages are strained and children grow up unsupported.  Emotional and cognitive capital is deserted in early childhood, leading to schools filled with children far behind their higher-wage family peers.  Educational capital is thus hamstrung as the school-to-poverty pipe-line is reinforced.  Hope is depleted, short-term is prioritized, which reinforces behaviors that don't build long-term capital.

But all of this is to become skeptical of capitalism, of merit itself.  It is to become skeptical of  economic and social structures that are foundational to our country.  The moral portrait it begins to paint is one of inequity, specifically that the privileged no more earn their place than do those without privilege.  Inequity is not something you can simply "educate away".  All the schools in the world and lack of racism is not going to fill the vacancies of landscapers, dishwashers, maids, cashiers, line-cooks, waiters and the rest.  

This is what I took West to be saying.  Coates was his target not because he was black, but because he wasn't white.  In the neo-liberal mainstream media world, critiques of capitalism are verboten, but lip service to racism is always fair game.  And better yet, when a black writer like Coates, who so eloquently, poetically describes in rich detail the indignity of White Supremacy - yet without the deeper, revolutionary critique of capitalism, he is lauded.  Much like the erasing of Dr. Martin Luther King's pivot to poverty allows modern Whites a sort of moral cleansing, Coates' wallowing in the pessimism of a neo-liberal framework unsatisfied with its own inability to come to terms with its perpetuating forces too abets a process of toothless political meandering.

And while "woke" twitter throws shade over lattes and worn copies of bell hooks, people are still waking up at the crack of dawn to do dirty work for little pay.

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.

The American Hallucination

The American Dream, New Jersey 1991, Marcel Dekker

There may be no more defining characteristic of the American identity than the so-called "American Dream", the idea of America as the land of opportunity where everyone can succeed.  This mythology, by now hundreds of years old, is as persistent as ever.  In many ways, it is an empirical question, and it is true that, as a relatively free, first-world liberal democracy, opportunity is immense.

However, there are two features required of the term opportunity.  First, it must exist as a possible avenue of action.  The opportunity to sit on the grass in a park requires there to be a park in the first place.  But second, and this is just as important, there requires the capacity in one both to desire to, as well as know how to, find the park and sit in it.  For opportunity to exist, it must be realizable objectively, as an external option, as well as subjectively, as a personal option.

In the real world, take the example of the opportunity to start a small business, the hallmark of the American Dream mythology.  Loans might be available.  Markets might be available.  But in order for the opportunity to be real, one must both have the desire and the know-how, as well as the time and energy to start it.  For many Americans, this is has been a very real, attainable opportunity.  But for many more, it has been impossible.  It isn't hard to imagine situations in which personal circumstance might prevent one, through very real obstacles, from following this path.  A single mother with childcare expenses.  Someone with a pre-existing condition for whom self-employment means losing health care coverage.

There are many for whom these kind of practical realities make the American Dream impossible.  But there is another kind of practical reality that arises from something much more complex and less talked about: personal agency.  To those without sufficient personal agency, opportunity is just as unattainable.  As an objective reality, it may exist.  But as a subjective reality, no less important, it does not.

When talking about the American Dream, and the question of opportunity, personal agency is rarely talked about explicitly.  For many, it is something that is assumed to exist in relatively equal measure among all adults.  Objective opportunity is pointed to, and its existence is assumed to be evidence that it is within the grasp of all.  The expectation is that everyone should be able to take advantage of it, and and failure to do so is simply a matter of lack of freely chosen will.

Yet there is no evidence that any such thing exists.  Wherever one looks, human behavior is driven not by free agency, but rather by complex forces of genes and environment.  Depending upon these variables, one either will or will not have the subjective capacity to take advantage of any objective opportunity that exists.

This should be obvious to every parent.  We strive to create the best possible environment within which our children might grow and develop the very best of their potential.  We know that positive environments are almost entirely determinative of future behavioral outcomes.  "Bad parenting" is defined in obvious relation to what is either "good" or "bad" for the child, profoundly effecting development - specifically their capacity for agency.

Somewhat ironically, this can be taken a step beyond.  A cascading effect occurs: "bad" parenting increases the likelihood that the child will reach maturation with a poorly developed skill-set, thus increasing the likelihood that he or she will in turn practice "bad" parenting, in turn increasingly the likelihood that their child will mature poorly, etc.  This process of cyclical, generational dysfunction is well-documented.

In Hart and Risley's classic study, Meaningful Differences, profound differences in language and cognitive development are tracked in granular detail through analyzing interaction in families of varying levels of socio-economic background.  Parent education levels correlated strongly with development of language and cognitive skills in children, which in turn varied greatly across, yet not within, socio-economic background.

In a fascinating follow-up study to Walter Mischel's study in the 1960's on child impulse control, in which children's ability to abstain from eating marshmallows found great variance in self-control as a seemingly tempermental skill, researchers recently found evidence that this skill was not nearly as innate as was once thought.  Environment was actually found to be a strong variable in a child's capacity for self-control.

This comes as no surprise given what we know about child development, and goes a long way to explaining differences in child development across socio-economic backgrounds, specifically with regard to patterns of school success across the nation.  A story emerges in which, from birth to maturation, people are heavily influenced by the environments in which they are raised.  In fact, there is little evidence that one has any capacity to transcend one's environmental or innate abilities.  The outlying cases, upon further scrutiny, always seem to turn up strong evidence of environmental factors.

And yet we seem to cling to the notion that humans can transcend the shackles of genes and environment.  The American Dream is alive and well, despite no evidence that it exists, and a great deal of evidence that it can't possibly.  All around us, we see the link between socio-economics and agency.  But, much like the faith in a God that makes no rational sense, we can't seem to let it go, even when surrounded by evidence to the contrary.

A recent episode of the news program 60 Minutes illustrated the American captivation to this mythology.  A Pakistani immigrant to America was profiled who, seemingly against the odds, through seemingly nothing but pluck and determination, built himself a hugely successful business and is now a multi-billionaire.  The schizophrenia of the American Dream mythology, clinging to its seductive charm, was on high display.  Shahid Khan was at first introduced as coming to America as a teenager from "the dusty streets of Lahore", with nothing but $500 to his name.  From this, he grew a small auto parts company into a profoundly successful enterprise.  A charismatic, jovial man, his optimistic attitude allowed him to become wealthy, proof positive of the American Dream, described as much by a Forbes cover story.

However, as the story quietly mentions, Khan wasn't quite the rags-to-riches story he is made out to be.  The son of a mathematics professor and businessman, he came to America after being accepted as an engineering major at the University of Illinoise.  As a college student in the US, he was clearly of higher socioeconomic status, despite his plaintive descriptions of washing dishes for minimum wage.  In Pakistan, far from the dusty streets, as we are shown, he rather grew up in a walled, two-story compound.  In a 3rd world country like Pakistan with nothing like a middle class, we're hardly taking about a poor kid.  Middle class - if such a thing can really be considered in Pakistan - is unlikely.  My guess is closer to the 1%.

Opportunity in America surely exists.  But in order to take advantage of it, one must first develop the requisite skill sets.  This doesn't happen on its own.  It takes a concerted effort of numerous environmental factors.  Social inequality translates into developmental inequality, and inequality of opportunity.  An American Dream that does not account for this is nothing but a fantasy.  Instead, maybe the American Dream ought to be a vision for all of us to do better, to reduce inequality not just of opportunity but of development of capacity to take advantage of opportunity.

Review of the Film "Home", A Documenting of Societal Failure and Unaccountability

"I can't save them from everything, but I try to do what I can."

SPOILER ALERT: This entry is about the film Home and contains many spoilers.

Yesterday I watched the documentary, Home, about the struggles a single mother faces in buying a new home and leaving the projects.  From IMDb:

'Home' follows Sheree Farmer, a single mother of six, as she tries to buy her first home, and get her kids out of the drug-infested, crime-ridden, and gang-controlled neighborhood in which they live. 

What is most fascinating about the story is how vividly it illustrates the depth of tragedy faced by so many living at the margins of our society.  Sheree Farmer is handed what appears to be a too-good-to-be-true gift from a community non-profit: the promise to subsidize a brand new house valued at $225k, offering a mortgage to her for only $125k - essentially a gift of $100k.  All she has to do is get her credit in order in a few weeks time.  Unfortunately, this proves too much for Sheree to manage.  Stressed beyond measure, she eventually gives up and stops returning the community non-profit liason's phone calls.

Sheree works for the VA, shuttling seniors to and from medical appointments, while taking care of six children at their home in the projects of Newark New Jersey.  Her first two credit issues are easily resolved.  She can afford payment on an outstanding medical bill.  A $1500 cell phone bill is forgiven, after she claims it had been stolen.  (Had it really?  We can only hope, for the sake of Sheree's moral integrity.  At another point in the film, her ex-husband denies her accusations that he physically abused her.  She also claims he became addicted to crack, and took to selling family groceries, including frozen steaks out of the ice box.  Was he such a monster, and she so blameless?  Under great psychological stress, could she sometimes "embroider" the truth a touch?)

But two other issues are more troubling.  Sheree recounts that, after her eldest daughter refuses to perform her chores, Sheree gets her belt and attempts to beat her with it.  The daughter grabs a mop to defend herself.  In the ensuing scuffle, Sheree begins to beat her daughter with her fists, and then calls the police, telling them her daughter is "out of control".  But they take Sheree to jail, charging her with assault.  After two days in jail, the court sends her daughter to live with her father, and forbids Sheree contact.

The final credit problem regards an old issue with her ex-husband, who, after Sheree bailed him out of jail, never turned up at court.  Sheree apparently didn't get notices from the bail bondsman (again, did she really?), who then incurred legal expenses as well as a fee for tracking down her husband, adding further charges to her bill.  This infuriates Sheree, who feels she is being punished for the bad deeds of her lousy ex-husband.  One can see the defiance seething beneath her skin, even after the bondsman offers to reduce her bill.  The community liason, just wanting to see Sheree to move on with her life and into a wonderful new home, pleads with her to simply pay the bail bondsman, even offering to loan her the money interest free.

In the meantime, Sheree is overwhelmed by family life.  A younger daughter has been fighting with a boy down the street.  She wants to go and talk with the boy's parents but her daughter claims not to know his address.  While driving the van at work (being filmed nonetheless), she tries to manage the care of her children over the phone.  One has taken sick and must be taken to the doctor.  Meanwhile, her ex-husband has suddenly decided to claim two of their children as dependents on his tax returns - obviously costing her thousands in tax credits.  Although he pays a couple hundred a month in child support, Sheree points out that her children are all truly dependent on her on a daily basis.

We don't know a whole lot about Sheree's life history.  She hasn't had much more than a high school education.  She's African-American and lives in Newark, NJ, a depressed city with high unemployment, crime, poverty, and low education.  She repeatedly expresses a sense of hopelessness, frustration, anger and defeat.  At one point she tells the camera "I just can't do it anymore, I just can't."   One thing you don't see is Sheree breaking down in tears.  One might imagine this is a luxury she simply can't allow herself. 

In the end, it is indeed too much.  She worries about the prospect of moving from what she knows.  Hanging on by a thread, how can one blame her?  An imagine comes to mind of a cat in a tree, cowering from the hand stretched out to rescue her.  Taking everything she has just to keep from falling, the idea of taking a leap into the unknown requires an extra level of strength.

The major fault lines in American politics are divided along the notion of opportunity.  One side sees it as something that might well exist, but that innumerable obstacles stand in the way of people realizing it.  These may be physical limitations - things like money for car insurance.  Or they might be knowledge-based - like not knowing the right forms to fill out or the availability of neighborhood resources (if they even exist).  But they are just as often psychological - things like trust, confidence, or self-control.  These psychological limitations do not appear out of nowhere.  They might arise from real skills never learned (the love of a family, a behavioral mentor), or simply continued, day-to-day knife-like pressures that fray at one's integrity and emotional health.

The other side of the political divide diminishes these limitations as mere inconveniences - at best tests which one must overcome.  They emphasize the abstract existence of opportunity, and assume that if it is not being realized, then it is the fault of the individual for not trying hard enough.  Attempts to offer help individuals who've been dealt a difficult hand are trivialized as "handouts", insults to the ability of an individual to take credit for his own accomplishments.

The two largest problems with this view is that it is, at its core, immaterial and without grounding in the natural universe, and that it is incoherent.  First, by assuming that every individual is free to realize available opportunity, it denies that an individual's agency is something that must be developed from a functioning social system.  But then, it claims that any effort to help an individual who has not had access to functioning social structures is itself a negative social structure, in that it ultimately limits individual agency by creating in them a sense of "entitlement" that fosters reliance on charity, as opposed to personal responsibility.

These two stances are incongruent.  Individual agency is either free from the causality of social structures or it is not.  If it is free from them, then charity could not limit agency.  If charity has an effect on human agency, as a negative social structure, agency is therefore dependent upon social structures.

My suspicion is that those who would stand by this incongruent politics would want to have it both ways, arguing that agency is only partly affected by social structures.  Yet this then begs the question of where a line is to be drawn between the determining effects on agency and that which emerges free from constraint.  Unfortunately when you look at the data on the development of human agency, it is consistently dependent on prior causes, namely social structures that facilitate its construction (the only way to truly take social structures out of the equation, thus isolating what might be left, is to observe a child raised without social interaction, an obviously terrible idea.)

One might say then, that a basic minimum of social structures are required for the emergence of this "free" agency.  Again, how might one untangle what is free from what has been learned?  And when we look at the data, every variable points to a cause.  I call these factors societal capital, in order to give this process of human development a theoretical framework.  Evidence supporting it is profound, while refuting it would be rather simple.  Just as the theory of evolution could easily be refuted by the discovery of relatively new fossils embedded deeply within a much older strata of rock (for instance, a cat skull found in 1 billion year old layer of sediment), my theory of societal capital could easily be refuted by a pattern of human behavior that does not conform to any known cause, seemingly existing outside the reaches of social structure causality.  Outliers are indeed sometimes found, but aside from themselves not being representative of anything like a pattern, there are indeed after further examination usually specific causal factors at work.

Sheree farmer is not anything like an outlier.  Her lot in life could have been easily predicted by social research.  This is not to say that nothing could have been different for her.  Rather, it is to say that things could have been different had social structures been in place for her.  The tragedy is that, despite the enormous hard work, compassion and dedication of the community non-profit, it was still not enough to overcome the extent to which the Newark community has been ravaged by societal capital depletion.  The larger tragedy is that in the upcoming presidential election, we have such a close race race between the conservative position, which would either deny much of what ails Newark and citizens like Sheree, as well as assume that the solution requires reducing even further our attempts to give them a helping hand, and the progressive position, which holds that the problem is access to societal capital, and seeks to hold larger society accountable for this terrible tragedy.

Poverty of Culture

It is controversial today to speak of a "culture of poverty".  This stems out of a polarization around two notions, that the poor are victims of society and that the poor are victims of themselves.  But these two framings are incomplete.  I would argue that the poor are both victims of society and victims of themselves.

According to Wikipedia, the idea of a culture of poverty came out of the work of anthropologist Oscar Lewis in his 1959 ethnographic study Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty.

The people in the culture of poverty have a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependency, of not belonging. They are like aliens in their own country, convinced that the existing institutions do not serve their interests and needs. Along with this feeling of powerlessness is a widespread feeling of inferiority, of personal unworthiness. This is true of the slum dwellers of Mexico City, who do not constitute a distinct ethnic or racial group and do not suffer from racial discrimination. In the United States the culture of poverty that exists in the Negroes has the additional disadvantage of racial discrimination. People with a culture of poverty have very little sense of history. They are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life. Usually, they have neither the knowledge, the vision nor the ideology to see the similarities between their problems and those of others like themselves elsewhere in the world. In other words, they are not class conscious, although they are very sensitive indeed to status distinctions. When the poor become class conscious or members of trade union organizations, or when they adopt an internationalist outlook on the world they are, in my view, no longer part of the culture of poverty although they may still be desperately poor. 

In decades since, this view has been criticized mainly for relying on the simplistic notion of the poor as a monolithic cultural group, and seemingly perpetuating the notion that the poor are to blame for their own lack of success.  Much of Lewis' thesis seems to argue that it is the attitudes of the poor that keep them from finding success.  This sort of dispositional narrative leaves out other causal factors, letting larger social forces off the hook.

However, it appears to me that Lewis actually got it half right, and that he didn't go far enough.  One of my main complaints on this blog is that in discussing poverty and disadvantage, we too often leave out the fundamental components of human development, and that these arise not organically, freely from human agency, but rather from social forces outside one's control.  There are dispositional, attitudinal problems among many of the poor.  But these are the result of other causal factors which work dynamically to create a system of oppression.  For instance, take the example of Rent-a-Center, the predatory lender of home furnishings.  There is no reason anyone ought to ever engage their services.  There is nothing that they have that is necessary enough to warrant such outrageous and usury prices.  Yet they predominate in low-income communities.  The poor thus are more dispositionally inclined to engage in dysfunctional behavior, to the extent that going to Rent-A-Center is dysfunctional.  Any number of other indicators of dysfunctional behavior can be found in much higher rate sin poor communities, which ultimately stem not from lack of resources but from an unhealthy disposition.

Yet this is not the end of our inquiry.  Many on the left bristle at even engaging in this sort of dispositional critique, specifically because the inquiry has historically ended here.  Right-wing notions of ethnic superiority, social Darwinism, class hegemony, and white supremacist apologetics have historically ended here.  The claim is that because it is well within the power of one to change one's attitude and disposition, the poor's failure to do so makes them morally responsible for their own lack of success.  The corollary to this claim is that the affluent have chosen their attitude and disposition, thus are morally responsible for their own success, and thus have every right to be rewarded for it.

Current right wing economic and social policy claims are rooted in this narrative.  Talk of affluent "job creators" and claims that low tax rates create growth by promoting the attainment of success through the reward of low tax rates assumes that disposition is the main driver of prosperity; if one has the right attitude, one will be successful.  Likewise, "rewarding" the poor with safety net programs is thought to create in them a dispositional aversion to hard work and positive thinking.

While disposition is important, it is only one factor of success.  But more importantly, it is not a first cause.  Human development is vastly more complex.  Human beings are unique in the animal world in how long we take to reach maturity.  Our societies have spent millennium evolving extensive social and institutional frameworks designed implicitly to develop in humans advanced productive capacities.  Modern humans are educated, moral, enlightened, critical thinkers capable of amazing contributions to our fellow man.  We are dynamic, ever-learning and evolving culturally and raising our children to do the same.

When we speak of "disposition" or "attitude", we are reducing vast quantities of human development into an absurdly simplistic shorthand for human agency.  The 22 year old human adult will have lived for 192,720 hours, 128,480 of them awake - a staggering 7,708,800 minutes of conscious thought.  That is the sum total of his interaction with the world - his conversations with parents and peers, his observations of the world around him, his cognitive calculations, his emotional internalizations, his lessons learned, his daydreams, his creative endeavors, his fears, his loves, his dreams.

All of this we call human capital.  He has built this human capital out of what I call societal capital - all that has existed in his world during those nearly eight millions of conscious life that has made him who he is, and has made him who he perceives to make of himself.  The concept of a self-made man relies on a notion of human agency that denies the very truth that permeates everything we know about the physical universe, that everything is preceded by something else, that is caused by prior events.  The notion of time itself is predicated upon this fact.  And yet we need not refer to physics for what ought to be common sense to anyone who has ever learned something knew, or learned how to think about something in a new way.  Every parents understands this basic reality, as we have watched out children growing and transforming before our eyes into complex individuals capable of - hopefully - behaving, thinking and feeling in appropriately advanced ways.  Our children are anything but self-made!  And when they reach adulthood, capable of making sufficiently decisions in a sufficiently independent manner, we are known to have raised them well.

Yet have we done this ourselves?  Are we self-made parents?  Of course not.  We were made - by our parents first, and then in concert with life experience and larger society.  We have internalized the culture that we ourselves have been raised in, and then transmitted it to our children.  The cycle thus repeats.

So when we see poor communities displaying what can be called dysfunctional or sub-optimal dispositions, who is to blame?  We all are.  There is no separation between them and us.  We, all of us, are inextricably caught up in one long chain of causality extant since the beginning of time itself.  Individuals can no more be held responsible for poor dispositions than for successful ones.  All that matters is the way we structure society so that to limit as much as we can sub-standard dispositions and elevate positive dispositions.

The question thus becomes how best to do this.  It surely isn't an easy question.  But it begins with the acknowledgement that we are all doing the best we know how to do, and that the issue is one of development, not simple choice.  The poor are not more likely to frequent Rent-A-Center because they choose to when they could have just as easily, like us, chosen not to.  Their choice was determined, as was ours.  The problem is not that their culture must be changed, but that they have not been fortunate in having received sufficient societal capital to build in themselves to develop adequate human capital, or what we might generally refer to as "culture".  They have not had the education, the access to family resources, the access to more affluent peer groups, etc. to develop what ultimately appears on the surface as "disposition".  Through larger structural forces such as economic and social segregation, they have been disadvantaged.  By finding ways to intervene and remedy these things, we will finally begin to tackle the problem in a real way, without having to either "blame" any one or pretend that poor behaviors don't exist.

Danger, Super Vidoqo, Danger!

So, apparently Vidoqo is not so Super after all.  Well, that was kind of the point of the title*, right?  Who am I, lowly teacher with an undergraduate degree in Social Sciences and a Master's degree in Elementary Education from a state university, to think I could play with the big boys on issues as complex as race, class, philosophy and human development?  Well, in many ways I am not.  Yet in many ways I am.  I have a good deal of first hand experience with these issues, spending nearly two decades of my adult life among the disadvantaged, disabled, disenfranchised and generally dissed.  In many ways, my experience has given me insights that plenty of people with more prestigious academic credentials couldn't possibly obtain without direct experience of their own with the subjects on which they write, from behind the walls of an institution.

(*It occurs to me that I have never officially explained where the name Vidoqo comes from.  It's a pretty silly inside joke.  But it comes originally from a mispronunciation of the title (itself a mispronunciation) of a avante garde children's book I once created, titled "I am not Vidoco".  You can find the book, available for purchase here.)

And isn't this the beauty of blogging - that by simply having access to the internet and a linkable address, I can put my ideas out there for the world to see?  And I try to give you guys the good stuff.  I think a lot about these issues and when I write I do my best to bring thoughtfulness and clarity to my subjects.  But sometimes even the most thoughtful blogger makes mistakes.  Or, more generously, makes new discoveries about prior misunderstandings.  

So, why the long wind-up?  Well, one of the key areas of exploration and articulation on this blog is the concept of human and social capital.  That is why it has been somewhat unnerving for me to discover that my usage of the term social capital has been largely misapplied.  Apparently, the general consensus among sociologists and people who have spent years researching and writing papers on the subject, is that the term refers to the value of social relations.  I had been using the term, rather, to describe the value of one's external relations with society in general - a far larger and more generalized definition.

I think my original problem might have lain in trying to stretch the term out to transcend what I felt were its limitations, and thus provide a much more coherent and descriptive conceptualization, one powerful enough to functionally explain, alongside human capital, the total of human development and subsequent endeavor.  My interest was in developing a frame work for human agency, in terms of the process of input and output.  The social sciences have long found profound evidence that human agency is determined by genetic and societal forces.  Humans exist not in isolation, but rather as intimately wound players in the larger human drama.  Within this framework, there seems to be little room for determination that is neither rooted in genetics nor environment, certainly not in terms of explanatory power.

If one fears this framework to be overly reductionistic, I would caution that the explanatory claim is, like many powerful theories, not attempting to provide evidence for every human action, but merely laying the groundwork upon which any further causal mechanism might work.  For instance, we cannot possibly know with much resolution the precise causal mechanism for a vast range of human behaviors.  But we can, however, stipulate that any such behavior will have been rooted in genetic or environmental conditions.  It is then up to us to gather further evidence to increase the resolution of the causality.  An example of a similarly fundamental theory, would be evolution by natural selection.  While there are an almost infinite number of causal factors involved in the process - from the interaction of individual DNA base pair mutations up to the forces of nature such as weather patterns, and tectonic plate movements.  At the individual level, the process of evolution is quite low-resolution, yet in terms of broadly explanatory and predictive power, the theory is unmatched.

My interest in such a comprehensive narrative is largely a product not only of my readings in social science, but also in what I have witnessed in my life and career.  I suppose it should also be said that one of the imperatives of both adult civic, as well as interpersonal and self-reflective engagement, is to understand not merely what one believes but why one believes it.  At a most fundamental level, conscious life can be boiled down no further than the most basic and primary act of thought itself.  As Descrates famously wrote I think therefore I am, so too any claim we have as intelligent human actors must be derived from this basic premise: if I am what I think, then why do I think what I think?  In attempting this question, social science has been indispensable in providing evidence-based answers.

From this basic existential inquiry, arises all subsequent political, economic and cultural analysis.  No better example of this is in the frustratingly polarized political climate of our current era.  Almost every issue at which our countrymen find themselves at odds can be reduced down to fundamental questions of human development and human action.  Whether how to fairly tax the public, how to school our children, how to determine the morality of our laws, how to attack inequality and promote economic and social justice... all of these questions hinge upon the deeper question: why do men do what they do?

And here, I propose, social science has answers.  In terms of specifics, much less large-scale policy prescriptions, there is a vast amount we do not understand.  But all the evidence so far points to this very clear narrative: that human agency is a sum of Human Capital and capital that is derived from one's external resources, everything from a healthy uterus, the language spoken in a child's home, the condition of the neighborhood, the availability of health services or civic institutions, the adequacy education and social relationships that encourage emotional and cognitive development, the availability of employment opportunities, the quality of police and emergency services, and the quality and availability of government representation and journalistic inquiry. 

All of this, which I had wrongly been calling social capital previously, I will now refer to as Societal Capital. This term is, in my opinion, a much needed counterpart to the established term Human Capital.  Where the latter represents one's internal capacities, and therefore leverage and self-efficacy in society, the former represents the societal conditions which serve to either promote or inhibit those internal capacities. 

One of the main reasons the term Societal Capital is needed, is that neither term is static; neither is solely functional on its own.  One's Human Capital must often be understood in relation to one's corresponding Societal Capital, dependent as it often is both in its prior and future development.  Societal capital, likewise must often be understood in relation to corresponding Human Capital.  Without Human Capital, Societal Capital is often unclaimed, and thus unleveraged.  For instance, the ability to read is meaningless if there are no books available to read.  Likewise, the availability of books is meaningless if one is unable to read.

One of the powerful features of this framework is in its insight into the dynamic effects we see between Human and Societal Capital.  A lack in both will often produce a compounded effect that minimizes future capital acquisition, while an abundance of both will also compound, producing an increased future capital acquisition.  To return to the example of literacy, an absence of books and the capacity to read them will lead an individual to attend to other matters, and both forms of capital will likely remain dormant; no capacity to read stimulates no acquisition of books, no acquisition of books stimulates no capacity to read.  Yet capacity to read stimulates the acquisition of books, and visa-versa.

One can easily see how this dynamic, compounding effect has innumerable ripple effects throughout individual and community life.  This basic premise is a core feature of human culture and civilization, embedded in our societal relations at every level.  A defining feature of families, peer groups, communities, cities, states and countries is their implicit organization around the interaction between Human and Societal Capital.  We are a learning species.  We seek out friends and communities because of their utility in maximizing total Human and Societal Capital.  A friend calls on another friend for support in hard times, and both become stronger for it, their individual Human Capital is strengthened and Societal Capital is formed.  A government builds a system of mass transit that increases the individual Human Capital of nearby citizens, who then in turn vote to make the system better, increasing their Societal Capital.

There is of course the possibility of negative effects embedded in all of these interactions.  But the theory of Human and Societal Capital is only a general measurement designed to guide our analysis.  Some human interactions will have unintended negative consequences, and they will have to be accounted for in the design of our models.  Negative cognitive patterns of mind, for instance, are built that could be thought of as actively negative, in the sense that they actively contribute to a lowering of total individual or societal agency.  But I think it will be more practical, from a theoretical design perspective, to see these patterns in terms of being the result of a reduction in positive Human and Societal Capital.

In future posts, I look forward to continuing to hone this framework.  The term Social Capital, while certainly useful in a more narrow sense, I think fails to deal with what seems a glaring deficit of conceptualization in not taking on a role as an external counterpart to Human Capital's description of the internal mechanism of human agency.