7. On The New Looks Of Inequality
4 April 2011
Frank Rich, a leading NYT op-ed columnist, observed recently: ‘economic equality seemed within reach in 1956, at least for the vast middle class. The sense that the American promise of social and economic mobility was attainable to anyone who sought it…’ That was, he reminds his readers not counting on their memories, the nation’s mood 55 years ago.
As to the American middle class of today, Rich needs only ask a purely rhetorical question: ‘How many middle-class Americans now believe that the sky is the limit if they work hard enough? How many trust capitalism to give them a fair shake?’ meaning how many Americans managed to preserve and retain the old trust, so much alive still a mere half-century ago: the trust in ‘social equality of mobility’, or ‘equality on the move’, ‘equality coming nearer and nearer’, ‘equality within reach’… A rhetorical question it is indeed, since in this case Rich can rely on his readers to answer, unhesitatingly: not many. This is, roughly, what has happened to the middle-class dream ‘that everyone can enter Frontierland if they try hard enough, and that no one will be denied a dream because a private party has rented out Tomorrowland’.
One day earlier another NYT op-ed columnist, Charles M. Blow, noted the latest statistical evidence: ‘According to the National Centre for Children in Poverty, 42 percent of American children live in low-income homes and about a fifth live in poverty. It gets worse. The number of children living in poverty has risen 33 percent since 2000. For perspective, the child population of the country overall increased by only about 3 percent over that time. And, according to a 2007 UNICEF report on child poverty, the U.S. ranked last among 24 wealthy countries. The reaction to this issue in some quarters is still tangled in class and race: ‘no more welfare to black and brown people who’ve made poor choices and haven’t got the gumption to work their way out of them’.
There is no need to tell the parents of 42 percent of American children, struggling as they are day in, day out, trying to make ends meet, that the prospects of equality are nowhere nearer their children, while parents of the 20 percent of children living in poverty would hardly understand what the ‘chances’, of the vanishing of which the latest figures inform, were supposed to mean. Both categories of parents, however, would have little if any difficulty in decoding the message flowing loud and clear from the lips of those who set the laws of the land and translate them into the language of rights and duties of that land’s citizens. The message is simplicity itself: this is no longer a land of opportunity; this is a land for people with gumption.
Renting out Tomorrowland
The socially manageable ‘equality of mobility’ foundered having hit the hard rock of inequality of individual gumption. Their, the parents’, ‘gumption’ is the only life-boat on offer to those who wish to navigate their children out of poverty. A small boat this is; you’ll be lucky to procure a boat capacious enough to accommodate the whole family. More likely, only a few of the family members, the most daring and tight-fisted among them and so with the largest supply of gumption, will manage to squeeze into the dinghy and keep their place for as long as it takes to reach the coast. And the journey is no longer (if it ever was) a voyage to equality. It is a chase to leave others behind. The room at the top is pre-booked and only the chosen are admitted. As Frank Rich aptly puts it, ‘a private party has rented out Tomorrowland’. Land of opportunity promised more equality. Land of people with gumption has only more inequality to offer.
The Spirit Level, the eye-opening Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett’s study that demonstrated and explained why ‘greater equality makes societies stronger’, is at long last beginning to worm its way into American public opinion (thanks to Nicholas D. Kristoff’s comment in the New Year issue of the NYT). The delay all the more thought-provoking as, for the US, the country firmly perched at the very top of the global premier league of inequality (according to the latest statistics, the wealthiest one per cent of Americans masters more wealth than the bottom ninety per cent), and one that supplied the researchers with the most extreme instances of inequality’s collateral damages, Wilkinson-Pickett’s message should have sounded most urgent and closest to the red-alarm level.
Even at this late stage Kristoff prefers to introduce the authors of the study to the American readers as ‘distinguished British epidemiologists’ (rather than connecting them to social studies, redolent as they are in the opinion of American opinion leaders of the condemnable and contemptible leftist-liberal bias and for that reason dismissed before being heard, let alone listened to). Guided probably by the same prudent caution, Kristoff quotes from the reviewed study mostly the data concerning macaques and the relations between low- and high-status macaques and other, unnamed ‘monkeys’. And having quoted for support John Steinbeck’s sentence on the ‘sad soul’ that is able to ‘kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ’, he placates the possible alarm of readers spying out a tax-hike menace, and preempts their violent protests, by setting the bad news in the less wallet-threatening order: the toll of inequality, he points out, is ‘not just economic but also a melancholy of the soul’. He admits though, even if in a somewhat round-about and innocuous way, that ‘economic’ it is as well, when pointing out that the choice is between less inequality and more prisons and police – both alternatives known all too well to be costly in rates-of-tax terms.
Biology, stupid!
Inequality is bad not as such, not because of its own injustice, inhumanity, immorality and life-destroying potential, but for making souls bad and melancholic. And for its morbid connection with biology, now finally scientifically confirmed: ‘humans become stressed when they find themselves at the bottom of a hierarchy. That stress leads to biological changes’ like the accumulation of abdominal fat, heart disease, self-destructive behaviour and (sic!) persistent poverty. Now, finally, we know, as endorsed and certified by distinguished scientists unsuspected of wicked sympathies and illicit connections, why some people are sunk in misery and why, unlike us, they can neither avoid sinking in it nor climb out of it once sunk. This scientific finding comes, at long last, as the much needed sweetener in the bitter reminder of our world-record inequality: the silver lining under that particularly nasty and threateningly murky cloud. It’s all biology, stupid!
All the same, one would say that speaking up is admittedly better than keeping silent, and speaking up late is admittedly better than never… And a truncated, sanitised and blunted message is better than none – so one would be tempted to add. But is it indeed? Shouldn’t we rather, for the sake of the message we carry and the good it was meant to accomplish, beware surrendering to that temptation?
The vision of the toxins of inequality neutralised, made liveablewith and rendered harmless by the education-driven upward mobility, and yet more disastrously, the vision of education able to keep upward social mobility in operation, begin to simultaneously evaporate. Their dissipation spells trouble to education as we know it. But it also spells trouble to the excuse favoured and commonly used is our society in the efforts to justify its injustices.