Mobility
Vs. Nobility
By
Michael Kinsley, in the LA
Times and Washington
Post, Sunday, June 5, 2005
According
to our founding document and our national myth, we are all created equal, and
then it's up to us. Inequality in material things is mitigated in two ways:
first, by equal opportunity at the start and, second, by full civil equality
despite material differences. We don't claim to have achieved all this, but
these are our national goals and we are always moving toward
them.
The
20th century added two, somewhat vaguer, elements to the myth. One is that
even material inequality will be limited, at the bottom end, by social
guarantees against absolute deprivation or vertiginous plunges. Another is
that prosperity will gradually make us all more equal even in the material
sense.
Three
of the nation's top newspapers have been examining the national myth recently.
The Wall Street Journal has looked at social mobility. In recent decades,
financial inequality has been increasing, not shrinking. That didn't matter,
many said, because studies show a constant shuffling of the
deck.
Where
you are today says little about where you might be tomorrow and even less
about where your offspring will be in 25 years.
But
it turns out these studies were flawed. Where you are is the best predictor of
where your children will be. And immobility over generations is what congeals
financial differences into old-fashioned, European-style social
class.
This
is where the New York Times takes up the story.
The
Journal series included a wonderful story, straight out of Trollope, about a
vulgar arriviste trying to crash the absurd charity-ball society of Palm
Springs. Less fun, but more telling, was a Times piece comparing three victims
of heart attacks. The Times series has been especially good at capturing the
subtle ways that privilege manifests itself and gets transmitted over
generations. It's not just money. It's not just IQ or education or blue blood
or even good values. It's how all these combine into knowing which hospital to
ask for when the ambulance arrives.
The
Los Angeles Times takes over with a scary look at downward mobility. The
national myth imagines the ascent from poverty to the middle class as a
ratchet. But sliding out of middle-class prosperity is getting easier every
day.
You
can do it by losing your job, by having an accident or other health emergency,
by squandering your savings. Globalization and technology may make everyone
better off on average (I believe they do), but they land like a boulder on
individuals who lose their jobs to foreigners and
machines.
Health
care becomes more costly, and employers get stingier about paying for it. And
President Bush wants to make Social Security more of an opportunity to do well
and less of a guarantee against doing disastrously. In short, if insurance is
shifting risks from individuals to society, what has been going on lately is
the opposite: shifting risks from society back onto the
individual.
Of
the many questions raised by all this, the most pressing is: What happened to
The Post? If The Post wants in, there are still rich veins to mine. For
example, The Post might reexamine the role of civil equality as a consolation
prize for economic inequality. This conceit seems to be eroding in two
ways. First, money is playing an ever-larger role in the
mechanics of democracy. Second, whole areas of life that were part of everyday
democracy have fallen to the empire of money. People increasingly go to
schools with people of their own class, live in class-sifted neighborhoods,
hold their Fourth of July picnics in their own back yards rather than the
public park.
Meanwhile,
despite months of superb reporting by three great newspapers, the question of
how closely our national reality resembles our national myth remains open.
Does
it matter whether your place in life is determined by your IQ or your
schooling or your parents' wallets?
All of these are beyond your control.
As
we learn more about the human mind, even qualities such as self-discipline
seem to be a matter of luck, not grit. The
problem, in short, may not be that reality is receding from the national myth.
The problem may be the myth.
The
writer is editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles
Times.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/03/AR2005060301464.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kinsley5jun05,1,443987.column?coll=la-util-op-ed
