In this piece at Atlantic on income inequality, proving the adage I found an acorn from sociologist Kevin Leicht:
It’s not entirely clear that the labor market is actually producing the quality jobs that college graduates are supposed to take. A lot of college graduates are taking jobs that don’t require a college education. The second problem is that the value of a college diploma is inversely related to the number of people that have it. So if you increase the number of people with a college degree, the college-wage premium will probably disappear. Or it will only grow because the unfortunate few who don’t have a college degree will make practically nothing.
which are the points I’ve been making for some time. Sadly, I found his prescriptions for remediation pretty weak.
Basically, as me auld mither said many times, we need to decide what kind of country we’re going to be. If we’re going to be a country with a lot of people earning minimum wage, a small struggling middle class, and a too-large nearly hereditary upper class, we should have one set of policies (the ones we’ve got—we’re well on our way). If we’re going to be a somewhat smaller country with a much smaller number of people earning minimum wage, a larger, more secure middle class, and a smaller upper class, it will take some pretty drastic policy shifts at this point.
In particular I don’t think you can use the tax code to accomplish it. The tax code is a pretty good way to block access to the middle class or the upper class but it’s not much good at getting reducing the number of working poor.
One more thing. Maybe I misunderstand the point that’s being made by the three scenarios but I think it’s woefully inadequate. Or maybe they just can’t draw good curves. If they think that we conform to Scenario C, explain Oprah. I think that the curves in all three scenarios should have “long tails”.
Interesting to read a sociologist criticizing liberals, or perhaps more accurately skybox liberals that are more interested in social issues and preferential college enrollment of a sampling of Democratic constituent groups. To be fair, Republicans also used social issues to bind constituents to the party, through more effectively ten years or so ago. Also, the economic issues are hard, but they are being completely ignored by the core of the Democratic Party who believe the economy is doing great.
He calls me out:
“There’s also this idea that inequality would shrink if the poor would simply get married. The people who are not married have different social characteristics than the people who are married. Simply marrying them off isn’t going to make them better off because of their potential pool of spouses.”
Unfair. Its hard to miss the fact that marital status and number of incomes per household are the most significant factors in household income when you stop focusing on the top one-tenth of a percent. There is a negative aspect though, since one of the worse things that a person can do is have children and then divorce, in which case, the couple is now supporting two households. The basic formula for determining inequality is highly dependent on number of incomes per number of households.
What I don’t know is a policy to address this in any acceptable way. All I can think to do is point it out. (Also observe that the marriage premium appears to have increased over the last 20 years.)
So basically the author says we should stop looking at differences between groups and look more at differences within groups. And then when it comes to solutions he’s got bupkis.
His core complaint is wrong. We are not talking about gaps between white and black as a way to avoid talking about income inequality, that’s nonsense. We’re talking about Problem A and he wants us to focus on Problem B for which he offers the following pabulum:
Yes, fighting income inequality is about fighting income inequality. And traveling faster than light is about traveling faster than light. Let’s focus on that, because we also don’t know how to solve that problem.
I found this interesting:
That’s exactly what happens. It begins with disinvestment in education. But hold up a moment, that did not start with bad schools, it started with integrated schools. White flight preceded and indeed brought on many of the problems we now have. If two black families buy houses on your block and your response is to run away to the suburbs, you’ll end by lowering real estate values and undercutting the financing of schools, and undercutting the larger society’s interest in those schools.
So let’s outlaw private schools. That leaves white families no choice but to fight to improve schools. Forced re-investment. Right? Any takers? I’m going to guess the answer is no.
Projection, not just a way to show movies, but a way that skybox liberals from Orange County try to score political points.
We are paying three times as much in real terms, i.e. adjusted for inflation, for education now as we did when Bill Clinton first took office. That’s doesn’t fit any definition of “disinvestment” I’ve ever heard of.
“That’s doesn’t fit any definition of “disinvestment†I’ve ever heard of.”
Heh. Exactly. In addition, in Naperville some liberal got the bright idea of setting up section 8 housing in the school district as a way to level the playing field. The brand spanking new high school so many fought so hard to get located in their neighborhood also has most of the section 8 students. The results were predictable and predicted.
So out go the people to other areas. Because they don’t like brown skinned people? No. Because the school now has a host of new problems with disruptive students. Students holding the rest back as teachers do remedial teaching. Students who don’t give a damn. Fights. Grade inflation to cover up the problems etc etc.
It’s not money for schools. (Oh, and the difference in the number of single parent households in section 8 vs other is very high.) It’s values. If we can’t handle the truth we’ll keep proposing ineffective solutions. Like “fighting” for better schools, whatever that means. How about having some parents look in the mirror.
Dave:
Go to a title one high school. Then go to my kid’s high school. Then tell me how we’re doing at investing fairly or equally in education. What we’re spending money on is teacher and administrator salaries and benefits, that says nothing about the schools. And those are averages, which also says nothing about any particular school or school system.
My kid’s school just covered the entire parking lot with solar cells that also provide shade for everyone’s BMWs. At title one schools they’re sharing textbooks. Now, let’s say you’re an experienced teacher, which school are you going to pick to teach at? Let’s say you’re a burn-out. Guess which school you’ll be assigned to.
Or, what if you’re a hair-trigger a-hole who occasionally likes to curse out a kid, or shove him, or send him to detention on any pretext, or flunk him without good grounds. You figure you’ll get away with that at one of my local schools? Hah. We well-off parents wield real power
in the system because we have education, money and spare time. Our teachers take their lives into their hands just handing out a B minus.
I give you the case of a highly intelligent kid who just decided around the middle of junior year to start calling in sick 3 or 4 times every week. And in senior year barely showed up at all. At the end of all that chronic misbehavior and terrible grades the kid is offered a chance to graduate anyway, if he will simply deign to show up for 10 remaining classes. 10 hours. 3 weeks. That was my son. He showed up for 7 of the ten classes, they let him graduate, and he got a full ride to Stony Brook because he was a Redwood H.S. grad.
Is there any chance at all that some inner city kid would have had that kind of way out? He was a smart, rich white kid in a smart, rich white school system – anywhere else he’d have been expelled. That’s part of the gap between “us” and “them.” We get treated like rich people. That’s the psychological disinvestment, because “we” are the people who have the time and energy to bully the administrators and teachers, and when “we” are off in our own little school systems, the working people at poor schools don’t have that kind of muscle. They lose the class of people who have the power to impose upon the system rather than being imposed upon. So “they” get the teacher “we” are too clever to allow at our school. And when it’s time to build a new gym, we get it because we can lobby and we can raise additional funds. And if our library’s hours get cut, we’ve got half a dozen soon-to-be-ex-wives who can volunteer.
Bottom line, you can’t look at aggregate numbers, they’re irrelevant to how people live their lives, or their relationships to institutions. Unless you’ve actually been both poor and rich you don’t really get just how much easier life is for people with money. Or to reverse it, how hard it is for people without. If my kid were poor and black he’d be a high school drop-out. Instead he’s at university. For free!
Michael Reynolds,
Thank you, you do get it. You would find the same is true of the criminal justice system.
Maldistribution and malinvestment cannot be corrected by increasing the amount of what’s being distributed or invested.
As it works out, I have.
Good, redistribute away, the poor are tired,
You know you are tired when prison or death seem like a viable alternative to what you have. I’ve said often, it’s cool, it’s quiet, and their is no alarm clock ringing @ 1:00 AM. Prison? Good for me, the only holdup is my wife, who needs my medical insurance, my daughter and grandson who need a home. $10/per hour will not buy you shelter.
If we could just ditch our loved ones, life would be good.