Responding to earlier criticism
When I concluded my first book club post with, “let the clubbing begin,” I was wondering if the clubs wielded would be made of wood—or Nerf. So I guess the answer is both. So let me respond to the questions raised by Dana (Nerf) and Scott (wood).
Part of writing a book that’s intended as a wake-up call is that it has to be pointed, even angry. But to pull back and go into disinterested social scientist mode, my goal is to argue that trends are in the wrong direction. As I wrote in the introduction to the book, “Conservative economic policies have not merely stopped the social progress that was making American freedom real for those further down the socioeconomic ladder. They have begun rolling back freedom for everyone.” So if I’m showing that even relatively privileged people are now facing lives dominated by economic compulsion, it’s even more the case for those further down. We’re truly becoming a society in which only the independently wealthy control their own lives. And this is odd, considering the country has only gotten more prosperous in recent decades. So somehow we’ve flipped the natural relationship between freedom and development (to borrow Amartya Sen concept) and we need to flip it back. But ironically, it’s harder to flip it back when our most eloquent agents of change are pushed to sell out—like when the universal healthcare advocates go to work for Big Pharma.
I’m glad Dana’s willing to make lots of sacrifices for her service-oriented career. She’s willing to have only one child; and she’s even willing to enroll that child in what is widely regarded to be the worst urban public school district in the nation. Some will sacrifice even more. A freelance writer I know who went from the richest university in America (Harvard) to the poorest congressional district (the South Bronx) to pursue his craft. And there’s an activist in the book who lives in a boarding house and has sworn off family entirely. Yes, there are plenty of saints out there, but, as I write in the book, “An America of entrenched wealth and widespread poverty cannot rely on saints to address its social ills. This has been tried before. It was called the Dark Ages and, despite the inspiring works of Saint Francis, it did not pan out so well.”What I’m trying to describe is a ticking time bomb. Maybe Dana will decide to save money by sending her kid to a public college. Well, a baby born today can expect to pay $150,000 to go to a public college. Yeah, it’s less than the $300,000 estimated for a private college. But the point is we’ll have to fix things sooner or later so let’s do it now. And I also want to ask how we got here: the country got richer and public college tuition went up?!?!?! It’s supposed to be just the opposite. In Ireland, when the economy boomed in the 1990s, they passed a law to make college free.
As for Scott’s criticisms: Part of writing a trade book rather than a Ph.D. thesis is making it accessible. There are lots of citations for people who want to do further reading but I try not to bore the reader with econ-speak. That being said, Scott did his homework, read the citations, and still has questions. He raises important objections that demand a serious response. So here goes:
1) The book does not argue that there are no poor neighborhoods (I even wrote that “the ghetto has become a seemingly intractable fixture of urban America’s landscape”). Indeed, the Brookings Institution report I cite shows that the number of poor neighborhoods has grown. That study, however, does not suggest they have become more affordable—in major cities, the opposite is true. But here I come back to my point above—there are few college-educated people who will move into the worst neighborhoods in our cities to live a life of service. The book doesn’t argue it’s impossible, only that it’s getting harder—that even dedicated people often hit the wall when they have children—and all the trends are in the wrong direction.
2) My argument is not that the supply of service jobs has declined, but that they have become less desirable. That’s shown in statistics for turnover: most Teach for America volunteers leave the field of education altogether. And it’s shown in statistics for job placement: in 1968, 41% of Harvard Law graduates went into private practice. Today, two-thirds do immediately, with many more following after clerkships. The usual counter-argument is that these kids today aren’t politically progressive. Butthe Pew survey shows today’s twenty-somethings are the most left-leaning public-service-oriented generation in decades.
3) Do tax rates affect salaries or just after-tax incomes? There’s really good research on how cutting top tax rates pushed up salaries by MIT business school professor Carola Frydman. It makes a lot of sense intuitively. As economists say, “when we tax something, we get less of it.” And this is exactly what Frydman found when she looked at corporate statements to shareholders from the era when top tax rates were in the 70-91% range. Time and time again, companies told their shareholders that their executives were doing a great job and they thought about paying them more but with tax rates so high, it just made more sense to reinvest the money in the company or give it to the shareholders as dividends. And then there’s the compounding effect of the rich keeping more of their income from lower income taxes and then investing it and keeping more of the profits from lower capital gains taxes.
4) As for the minimum wage. In the book, I call for a minimum wage in line with other developed countries. That would mean at least doubling it. The UK’s minimum wage is twice ours. Ireland, a country with our per capita GDP, is even higher. So by these standards tons of people are affected: anyone making up to $20,000 directly and those considerably further up the income distribution indirectly.
5) The international comparison: Thatcher, Reagan’s ally across the pond, had a lot to do with rising inequality in the UK. As for Canada and other developed societies, our hard to turn to the right really pushed them right too. We’re the elephant in the global economy. When we were leading a race to the top others followed. When we started leading a race to the bottom, others had to as well. When we have massive tax cuts on capital, other societies have to follow suit simply to stay competitive.
More importantly, though, rising inequality is not as important for Canadians and Brits as it is for Americans. No matter how rich the rich get in Britain or Canada, everyone has health insurance. Any bright kid can go to Oxford or McGill practically for free. So the penalty for not being rich isn’t nearly as stark there as it is here.
6) Do I have a problem with American culture? Yes and no. The aspect of American culture most social scientists cite as the reason we tolerate high degrees of economic inequality and an inadequate social safety net is the legacy of racism. It’s no coincidence they say that the only two developed countries without a national healthcare system are the US and South Africa. So if that’s what you mean by American culture, then I’m proud to say I have a problem with it.
But what the book tries to do is look more deeply at what America is all about. Conservatives have sold us a bill of goods about our country. They say free higher education is a European welfare frill. But that’s simply not true. Free public higher education—like free public education in general—is an indigenous American creation. It was the brainchild of Thomas Jefferson who founded the University of Virginia as a free public institution explicitly for the bright rather than the wealthy. And as the book points out, many American institutions of higher learning were free until the right-wing resurgence. The UC system, for example, was free from its founding after the Civil War until Ronald Reagan became governor of California. So we need to read up and re-think what’s “American” and what’s “un-American.”
7) Do the connections between inequality, corporate power, and an inadequate safety net only exist in my head? No. They also exist in the heads of all the great thinkers of the political Right from Hayek to Milton Friedman. And one of the problems on the Left is we think of them as balkanized problems when they’re all connected. That’s what The Trap tries to do.
I think this is the take-away:
"We’re truly becoming a society in which only the independently wealthy control their own lives."
We can quibble over data, causes and the willingness of the American people to just grin and bear it, but that's the crisis. There will be freedom only for those who can afford it.
And who would want to preserve that state of affairs? The wealthy few who need service industry serfs, I guess.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
October 17, 2007 1:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Deleted
October 17, 2007 1:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
"We’re truly becoming a society in which only the independently wealthy control their own lives." Destor's nailed it. After all, activists have long been largely volunteers or poorly paid, not just after Reagan. It's not even easy to get a nonprofit job unless you're a lawyer or otherwise highly skilled and marketable individual, I found in applying myself after having worked in publishing for years and then for five years at a university collaborating with nonprofits on getting environmental science and policy info online. Too few jobs, too many interns and volunteers.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 17, 2007 1:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
If controlling ones life means doing whatever one wants and still be able to live comfortably and make no sacrifices, it is entirely unrealistic.
October 17, 2007 1:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's not quite the expectation.
We can control some of the sacrifices, though. Government sponsored health cre would keep people from having to take a job just for the health benefits. Or a public 401(k) as Hillary has proposed, with a government match, would mean that people won't necessarily have to work a job just for the retirement planning.
People will still have to make choices, but we can make those choices easier.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
October 17, 2007 2:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
The book doesn’t argue it’s impossible, only that it’s getting harder—that even dedicated people often hit the wall when they have children—and all the trends are in the wrong direction.
I think that this is where Brook's point is the strongest (I'm in the middle of the book, by the way). I graduated from the kind of law school where most of the graduates went to work at mega-firms. I went to work for the Legal Aid Society, and lived in a $400-a-month room on the Lower East Side with no radiator and a roommate's cat I was allergic to so I could save the money to pay off the student loans. Because of that, my most unattractive feature is a disdain for similarly-situated people who insisted that they had no choice but to "sell out."
But now I'm thirteen years out of law school, a new father, and a co-op owner in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and feeling the squeeze much worse than I've faced in my life. The biggest problem with parenthood is the choice my household faces of demoting ourselves from a two-income family to a one-income family or a two-income-minus-one-child-care-income family. This at a time when the costs of home ownership (property taxes, home heating) are rising, and the health insurance coverage has gotten much worse. The only way I see out is to finally say, hey, I am a lawyer after all, maybe it's time to actually make some money. Not for luxuries, but just to live in a neighborhood like Flatbush, which is hardly a destination for choosy hipsters.
October 17, 2007 2:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's really cool that the workers would give up their vacation time for a coworker in need. But it's also the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life. That your employer isn't intervening to make sure that the employee has time to safely recover from a life-threatening event is... Well... I think Dickens wrote a story about it... had to do with Christmas and ghosts...
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
October 17, 2007 3:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
Funny (not) I was just reading about the latest superbug - a drug resistant staph that's infected about 90,000 per year. Very dangerous. And last week I read about the brain-eating amoeba - it's last victim not far from my home. This critter likes warm algae-laden water, brought to you in abundance by global warming.
What kind of society is it that we live in that only gives you a pittance in vacation, and then requires you to spend most or all of it when you or your kids get sick?
I realize that your question is rhetorical, but I think it should be repeated, over and over.
But let me offer another anecdote from a contrasting situation: a friend of mine was visiting London, and slipped on a sheet of newspaper on the marble floor of Victoria Station, and shattered his kneecap. The Brits gave him major surgery and he was sent to a country hospital for recupe and therapy. He said it was an old WWII barracks, nothing fancy but it was clean, airy and very pleasant. The staff was great too - very cheery and they looked well-fed. When he was released, a clerk gave him a bill for about $350.00 bucks for the whole thing, including the surgery. But she said "There's really no way we can force you to pay this, but we would really appreciate it if you did." Of course when he got home his healthcare provider jumped at the chance to pay the bill.
So what do the Brits have that we don't? Hmmm, a Labor Party for starters...
Neoboho
October 17, 2007 3:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
Is it not possible to find a middle way, go to work for a for profit law firm that does pro bono work, or donate some of your free time working for those who cannot pay?
October 17, 2007 3:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
A job that represents the best of both worlds? Gee, why didn't I think of that?
October 17, 2007 5:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have a tolerable but mid-level-paying job requiring a high level of credentials and years of experience that still isn't enough to maintain a modest home in a modest neighborhood with one child. If pointing that out constitutes "playing the victim," then I guess that's what I'm doing. It's not at all rewarding, though.
October 17, 2007 6:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's not what you're doing. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
October 17, 2007 7:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Gee, why didn't I think of that?
Because you don't live in Robert's "My Meritocratic Life," where honorable, society-benefiting and yet high-paying jobs, jobs which also, by the way, leave you plenty of time to mow the lawn and take the kids to the park everyday, are abundant. If only you tug on those bootstraps a bit more.
Really, you're probably just not working hard enough, hp.
October 17, 2007 9:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Here's another example for you.
A coworker recently had a minor heart attack. Because this happened in October, she had already used up most of her vacation over the summer, which means she doesn't have enough vacation to cover her period of recovery. Those who have some extra vacation are banding together to donate vacation.
I would donate, but I can't, as I used up the last of my vacation in August and September when I got sick, and then when my kids got sick. I think I have four hours left.
What kind of society is it that we live in that only gives you a pittance in vacation, and then requires you to spend most or all of it when you or your kids get sick? What kind of society is it that shifts the burden of providing for sick or injured employees onto their fellow employees? In 2003, my oldest was sick so much that I ran through all my vacation and had nearly two weeks of LWOP. I consider myself lucky to have a job that allows you to take that much LWOP, as some places would fire you if you missed that much work.
It's not just about pay, it's about quality of life. It's about the most highly compensated people also enjoying the most liberal leave policies, taking off work early or entirely without loosing a dime from their paycheck, while the hourly employee must sacrifice their measly two weeks of vacation per year every time their kid runs a fever.
An immediate and obvious result of this is the level of disease in our preschools. Preschools are known to be a likely incubator for the next big plague, just behind Southeast Asia. One reason is because parents are forced by their job situation to return sick kids to the daycare, rather that keeping them home long enough to get well. Combine this with people not finishing their antibiotics and the rise of resistant strains of disease, and you're looking at a disaster in the making. Last August, my entire family caught a virulent rotovirus that was running through the daycares here. I heard that as much as 50% of the daycare staff and kids were out on any given day. Over the course of 6 hours, my oldest son vomited 15 times. It really was the sickest I or anyone I know has been in a long time, and it was extremely contagious. If this had been something more serious...
We kept our kids home until they were completely well, because we could. We spent our vacation doing it. Other families couldn't, so they sent their sick kids to school and allowed the disease to spread, costing local business and government god knows how many millions in lost labor hours, all because of stingy corporate vacation and sick leave policies that apply for the most part only to those at the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
October 17, 2007 10:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
Personally, I have great respect for lawyers who had opted for social services in lieu big heaps of cash. Kind of rare these days. Something got lost over the years, since, say, the 70s. It seems to me like a huge shift in values - on the grand scale of general culture. You know, the folks who sacrificed lucre for the common good were once honored, and now it seems, dispised. Am I imagining this?
Neoboho
October 17, 2007 10:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Those wealth transfer schemes do not come close to allowing one to control ones life by any stretch of the definition. Most people are going to have to spend a portion of their time producing something that other people want and are willing to pay for regardless of the level of income redistribution. That something may be something that they would rather not do.
October 17, 2007 10:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Not when your law firm requires you to make 2,000-2,200 billable hours per year, which is the industry standard.
October 17, 2007 11:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
As one of those lawyers, I can tell you what got lost since the 1970s -- pay and the public's commitment to higher education.
The baby boomers who started their careers in legal aid in the 1970s were able to raise families on the salaries they were paid. (Yes, they raised families. They didn't have to live like perpetual grad students or saints.) The differential between what legal aid attorneys got paid and what private sector attorneys got paid in the 1970s was small, and higher education was priced accordingly.
Thirty years later, these folks are now in management at these agencies, and the people who work for them turn over at a rapid rate. Hardly anyone lasts more than three years, unless they are independently wealthy or married to someone who makes real money. By the time people are trained enough to be good at their jobs (and it takes a few years to get good at being an attorney), they're gone.
I went to a state school in the Midwest. It was a top-notch law school and also considered to be a great bargain pricewise. When I graduated seven years ago, the state was supplying 40% of the law school's funding. Now it's down to 15% in just seven years, and the law school has set a goal of amassing an endowment large enough to forego state support entirely if necessary. But that doesn't mean they'll start giving out education for free.
I know people don't want to believe this, but you cannot work for long at a legal aid agency making $3,000 per month when your monthly student loan payment alone is $800 per month. Not all the ramen noodles in the world can fix that. I've seen too many people burn out trying.
October 17, 2007 11:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
silly me...it's much more rewarding to play the victim isn't it?
October 17, 2007 12:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
There are many people in the United States and around the planet that have serious problems. I am having difficulty feeling sympathy for you. You certainly are not going to get any of my money, if I can halp it, if that is the goal of your sob story.
October 18, 2007 4:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's what sick leave is for. They can't help it if you or your children get sick more than 4 days a year. If that happens, well, you just have to use your vacation.
But 4 days is better than the 2 days per year we used to get!
October 18, 2007 10:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
Speaking of, my youngest had that very staph infection in September. One reason I was home using up my vacation.
He got it - where else - at daycare.
Word of advice, if you get a boil, see a doctor. Don't wait until that joker pops on its own.
If your baby gets one, see a doctor immediately. The staph can only be treated by two drugs - one is sulfa. My son is allergic to sulfa. The other is perhaps the nastiest tasting substance even created. An adult can't drink the liquid version, much less a three-year-old, and most three-year-olds can't swallow a pill, so he ended up in the ER getting an IV.
October 18, 2007 10:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: We’re truly becoming a society in which only the independently wealthy control their own lives.
Has this ever not been the case? Anyone who has to work for their living is not "free" if the definition of freedom is being to do anything (legal and possible at least) any time they want to. I don't recall my father back in the middle-class Golden Age of the 1970s, or the other breadwinners of our neighborhood, having any more control of their life than I do. Like me, they worked when, where and how their employers told them. The term "wage slavery" was not invented at the turn of the millennium.
October 18, 2007 6:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
If I might, to mix metaphors, pick a bacterial nit, there is significant local variation in the antibiotic susceptibility of organisms such as Staphylococcus aureus. Competent hospitals don't rely only on culture and sensitivity in an infected patient, but collect patterns so that a reasonably appropriate antibiotic can be started when an antibiotic is clearly necessary.
Even when there's a reasonable set of antibiotic choices, it's not a given that a specific patient will recover with one antibiotic, perhaps administered longer than the usual course. With full recognition that anecdote is not the singular of data, I had a staph infection of my lower leg, which a cephalosporin clearly reduced, but didn't clear. In my case, the decision was to switch to an antibiotic of the fluoroquinolone class, but continuing the first for another week would not have been unreasonable.
An infection in one city might respond to one, two, or many of a combination of antibiotics, where the same apparent organism, elsewhere, might need a "cocktail" of concurrent antibiotics.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
October 18, 2007 7:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's relative, not absolute; nobody ever has total control over their lives, so it's silly to pretend you're talking about that; it's *how much* control you have.
If you're typical, your father most likely did have more control over his life than you do in a few critical areas, specifically in regard to *health care*, but also likely with regard to housing; see the horror stories above.
The point made by the book is, of course, that wage slavery has been getting more common and severe, when we would obviously prefer the trend to be in the other direction.
Nobody disputes that it was worse in the late 19th century "Gilded Age". We seem to be heading back to that level of near-complete middle-class elimination, however.
October 19, 2007 2:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
You certainly are not going to get any of my money, if I can halp it, if that is the goal of your sob story.
First off, if that's what you think this is about, then I think you've really missed the point of this whole discussion. This post above boils it down better than I could; it's not about food-stamp-like income transfers from you to me. It's about finding different ways of arranging how we go about things like health insurance, so that we all get a bigger bang for the buck, collectively.
Second, as someone who worked for twelve years at offices providing free legal services for poor people, and as a union member at those offices, at this point I'm used to people (usually the management of the legal services offices) trying to pit the poor against the advocates who are trying to help them out. I don't think you're serving the people that you piously assert have priority claims on your sympathy by so cavalierly dismissing the concerns of their service providers. It's kind of offensive, really, the idea that by virtue of the fact that your job consists of helping other people that your personal concerns are no longer legitimate.
October 19, 2007 7:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's dredful, Jeff - you must have stressed out to the max. I had a staph infection once (to my knowledge) - in the mountains of NE California. Just a small infection on a finger - sore but not debilitating. But when I woke up one morning and saw read streaks running up my arm, it scared me, and I went down to Redding and got a shot, which cleared it up quickly. Certainly not the "superbug".
NeobohoOctober 20, 2007 10:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
You know, there's a seed of a great conspiracy theory in your comment (not your conspiracy theory, but mine). In the 70s I was very involved in Indian uprisings, and there were a lot of lawyers around to come to the rescue. Many who I knew were simply unemployed - there was a lawyer glut - and that of course might be a regional thing...I'm talking about Northern California. Institutions such as New College of California were pumping out lawyers on high production, especially minority lawyers. Not a bogus program at all - most of the graduates were able to pass the state bar with no problem.
But here's my c.t. - Newby lawyers couldn't find jobs, and ended up in civil rights work and other forms of social protest etc. So the government thinks the best way to restore peace and order is to cut scholarship funding to lawschools. No itinerent lawyers around - no civil disobedience.
What do you think? (I'm just having some fun with this - but I've always wondered how and why the 60s and 70s protests came to an end. Was it the demise of Cointelpro?)
Neoboho
October 20, 2007 10:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Brown's comment was nothing more than a gigantic strawman anyway, honestpartisan. Legal Aid by and large was regarded as an advocacy for the poor by the Reagan Administration and thus slashed into the pitiful state it is in today. Personally, I think this is an excellent example of the topic of this blog - how and why economic inequality has grown in the US.
Neoboho
October 20, 2007 11:29 AM | Reply | Permalink