Op-ed: Political Opportunity (Not)
op-ed by Beverly Mann
Political Opportunity (Not)
The link at the end of Steve Roth’s post yesterday, “American Exceptionalism #238: Opportunity (Not),” is to a post on Sunday by Paul Krugman on his NYT blog, in which he discusses Alan Krueger’s speech last week. Krugman’s blog entry says:
“Alan Krueger, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers … gave a very informative speech on inequality last week that should have received more press than it did. Much of it was stuff that inequality mavens already know, but he had one striking result that was what I suspected but hadn’t seen demonstrated: a clear negative relationship between inequality at a point in time and intergenerational social mobility.
“Below is what he dubs the Great Gatsby Curve…. As he shows [using graphs], America is both especially unequal and has especially low mobility. But he also argues that because we are even more unequal now than we were a generation ago, we should expect even less social mobility going forward.”
As everyone who discusses politics with me knows, huge pet peeves of mine are Obama’s refusal to discuss specific facts, including statistics, in speeches to the public—and his failure even to speak to the public at all on substantive issues. Exceptions are ridiculously rare. But the campaign is about to start, and—who knows?—he might actually deign to occasionally speak in specifics and cite facts (including statistics) in order to refute the Republican mantras of anti-Keynesianism and anti-progressive tax codes. Assuming, of course, that he agrees with his own Council of Economic Advisers chairman about the importance of the statistics, and recognizes the salience of those statistics with the public.
Another pet peeve of mine is the silly meme of political pundits, such as Maureen Dowd, in which they repeatedly describe Obama as professorial—as if professors teach their classes by speaking in clichés and generics.
But even if Obama continues his personal policy of refusing to argue Democratic economics and tax policy and to use statistics to support the arguments, Democratic congressional candidates hopefully will be smart enough to mention the important statistics and discuss them. I expect that Elizabeth Warren will be a model for them in this. Hopefully they’ll take note and follow her lead.
Well
we no longer have Gatsby’s opportunities. and I hope you remember how Gatsby made it big. But if you are one of those who think Daisy was a heroine (good guy) you won’t understand the point.
you have two points, that i noticed, in your essay. One about oh Bama, and one about in equality, or mobility… which may not be the same.
as for Obama, he was quoted (sorry about the link) as saying to his staff, “tell me what’s right and I can sell it.” this was repeated as if it was a good thing. but it says to me that Obama doesn’t know what is right and doesn’t know or care how to find out. He is just a salesman.
As for inequality, that’s obvious. Whether it is bad or not is less obvious,but i would say that in its current form it is bad. The rich are too rich for either their own good or the country’s good, and the poor are poor in a hopeless dismal way that is bad for them and bad for us. That doesn’t mean you couldn’t have good deal of inequality which allowed for a meaningful (happy) life for the poor, and a life for the rich that was not degenerate and dangerous to democracy. But the emphasis needs to be on quality of life, not equality of iife.
As for whether intergenerational mobility is a good measure of quality, or equality of opportunity, i’d suspect it may not be. I have no desire to be richer than my parents, and as long as I don’t compare myself to “peers” who “have more” and therefore despise me in ways that hurt, I can’t see any reason to worry that the very rich, for example, are richer than I am. certainly we can’t all be “very rich,” and we might do ourselves a lot of harm in trying to be. and everyone trying to be even middle class rich by today’s standards is going to destroy the possibility of the next generation having even enough for comfort. it is a lot like all the people in a crowded theater trying to get out the exit at the same time.
well, this has been long enough. allow me to urge you try to focus on the real problem and not confuse yourself with statistics, or make a fetish of them.
oh, i did leave out the “obvious” reason for intergenerational lack of mobility, but let me suggest there may always be people who are not going to get rich. we need to find ways to provide them a reasonable life, not teach them to hate themselves, or us, because they are not.
it is perfectly possible (though probably not currently true) that we have already done all the “leveling” that can be done, in the way you are thinking of, and that the lack of intergenerational mobility is more evidence of our success than our failure.
not claiming this is true (now), but essays on “equality” would profit from having thought seriously about it.
Coberly, I think the distress about the lack of intergenerational mobility is that we have less mobility than the British, which this country and immigrants to this country like my now deceased father-in-law, have always criticised for its rigid class society. The fact is that the one per cent have worked the system not only to stay in the one per cent, but to keep their kids and grand kids in the one per cent and by definition that means keeping others out. This is accomplished not only through the accumulation of great wealth which is defended against taxes of all kind, but through the concentration of capital, including human capital. For every person who gets into an Ivy League School on merit, there are “legacy” entrants–our immediate past president is a great example–and these folks all look out for each other. A Bill Gates or Warren Buffet can crash the party, but it is a pretty insular group.
Coberly:
You never heard of the precipt of “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” or “The American Dream” or the Horatio Alger stories??? That has been sold in America since its beginning and has been pretty much a myth or as Hunter Thompson concluded in the final sentence of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” :
“monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger. A Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident” as he examines his beliefs and himself.
The Country was founded on these beliefs.
It is not so much rising to the level of “high in income” as much as staying the same in income and perhaps rising one level in income. There is a much higher likelihood a person born into the middle income may indeed slip downwards rather than go up one level today. The likelihood of slipping backward increases if you are a minority.
Inequality in life negates the quality of life. It used to be the way to keep low income black Americans in place was to give low income white Americans a higher level of citizenship such as the vote. The “Colfax Massacre” during Reconstruction certainly is a good example of what happens when there is equality and the ability to make your own way in the world without being inhibited.
With half of Congress being from that 1% of the highest income households and 1 of 4 of the same household income bracket being from the financial industry, there does not appear to be much interest in creating equality by creating an economy based upon job creation. We are being played one against the other as set in motion by the politics of a few.
Coberly:
You never heard of the precipt of “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” or “The American Dream” or the Horatio Alger stories??? That has been sold in America since its beginning and has been pretty much a myth or as Hunter Thompson concluded in the final sentence of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” :
“monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger. A Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident” as he examines his beliefs and himself.
Many in this country have come to have these beliefs.
It is not so much rising to the level of “high in income” as much as staying the same in income and perhaps rising one level in income. There is a much higher likelihood a person born into the middle income may indeed slip downwards rather than go up one level today. The likelihood of slipping backward increases if you are a minority.
Inequality in life negates the quality of life. It used to be the way to keep low income black Americans in place was to give low income white Americans a higher level of citizenship such as the vote. The “Colfax Massacre” during Reconstruction certainly is a good example of what happens when there is equality and the ability to make your own way in the world without being inhibited.
With half of Congress being from that 1% of the highest income households and 1 of 4 of the same household income bracket being from the financial industry, there does not appear to be much interest in creating equality by having an economy based upon job creation. We are being played one against the other as set in motion by the politics of a few.
Your suspicions have no basis when compared to the attached study and I will point out another which I have cited on several occassions: “Understanding Mobility in America” Tom Hertz. No one is calling for everyone to be the “very rich.” what they are calling for are jobs and a nation which is encouraging job growth over gambling on Wall Street.
terry
i think bill gates went to harvard.
otherwise i agree with what you said pretty much. that is the “cause and effect” basis of concern about inequality and its evil consequences. what i was arguing about in my comment is the rather mindless jump from statistics about social mobiity and inequality to the idea that we need to give all god’s chillun scholarships to harvard.
oh, and of course aspire to be in the top one percent… or would everyone be far above average?
I think the problem is this. When I hear speeches on inequality it sounds like this:
“If we make the rich poorer, our society will have less inequality”.
This might sound great when you are preaching to the choir. It might work statistical, but will it truly lift the poor and lower middle class economically? This is the problem with the discussion, it completely lacks proper framing by the people who want to address it.
What things could help the people at the lower end of the economic scale might be:
1) Better public schools (especially inner city schools)
2) More job growth
3) Better drug policy (affects the poor greatly)
4) Better mental health system (effects homeless and poor greatly)
5) National health plan
The problem is people like Obama are not crafting sellable plans to address these things. Instead of proposing higher tax rates, create a tax REFORM plan that maybe lowers exemptions for rich and makes taxes simpler for everyone. That could be far more sellable and raise revenue. Politicians need to learn how to put lipstick on the pig and actually make it pretty.
run
i have the silly idea that my “suspicions” do have some basis. on the other hand, i’ll be damned if i can follow the “logic” of your reply.
i might agree with half or more of your individual statements, but what they add up to completely escapes me.
if you mean we need better jobs for everyone and less gambling on wall street, i’d agree with that enthusiastically. don’t see what that has to do with the “basis” of my “suspicions.”
I’m at a loss, coberly, to understand how the hugely increased chasm between the very wealthy and the middle class would be a sign of success, or how a strong reduction in generationsl upward mobility would be, either. Why would this be true now, when, clearly, it would not have been true in, say, the ’50s and ’60s?
Beverly
you are at a loss. whatever gave you the idea i was saying any such thing?
but since you are here, i wonder if you are agreeing with run that if everyone moved up a quintile things would be better. or, since more people are moving down than up, there are now more people in the bottom quintile than the top?
or maybe you could read what i actually said?
but in case you meant this:
suppose you had a container with two kinds of molecules… very fast, and very slow. you keep taking measurements, and at first you have “high social mobility” some very slow molecules start moving faster. of course since this is by definition (the one you are using) zero sum, we must expect to see some very fast moving molecules start moving slower. good, serves em right, they stole their money in the first place.
now, after awhile we notice that all the molecules are moving at pretty much the same speed and we don’t see slow molecules moving up the ladder any more.
this could either be “perfect communism… everybody is already equal” or it could be perfect aristocracy, no one is allowed to go up or down. or it could be perfect evolution: everyone has found their niche.
i am not arguing that any of those is true, or should be. i am suggesting that you need to consider carefully what you are talking about if you are not just talking talking points.
oh, hell, i forgot i was talking to a lawyer who may not recognize thermal equilibrium as a concept.
mcwop
much as i hate to say it, you are making more sense here than my natural allies.
i didn’t used to believe that there were people whose basic motivation was to “make the rich poorer.”
i am learning to recognize them. thing is, plenty of “the rich” got that way by harmful or at least useless behavior and i would not cry real tears if they had to earn an honest living… if they could, nor do i have much sympathy with the “don’t tax the job creators…” But I am beginning to feel we are never going to get anywhere until we can get the “revenge” motive out of both parties.
(well, that’s a strange thing to say. why would the rich need revenge against the poor? dunno, but it might have something to do with projection. but listen to alan simpson and peter peterson and you can feel the hate waves directed at the poor. or the contempt of an Ayn Rand or her followers toward second raters. Or the hate the nazi’s felt for the jews: we hate them because we treat them so bad.)
oh, and just to try to say it again:
i am not against programs to make the poorer better off. nor am i against taxing the rich to pay for such programs.
i am against incoherent slogans, misuse of statistics, and just sloppy thinking.
Actually, mcwop, during the period of a significantly lower gap between the rich and the middle class—the late 1940s to about 1982, I believe—the middle class was doing much better than it is today. And in most of the industrialized countries, like Germany , Sweden, Norway and Canada, where the gap between the rich and the middle class is far smaller than it is here, the middle class is doing much better than our middle class is, generally.
Some part of the reason is that the elimination of important financial regulations contributed to the excessive accumulation of wealth at the top and the financial hardship that some many others are having. And the tax policies that in the last decade have so exacerbated the gap in this country and that have contributed so much to the federal deficit have removed the availability of federal funds for infrastructure revitalization, funds to local schools, college scholarships, and such.
Beverly
Fine. discuss that. But you have got the cart before the horse. You are against “inequalty” or for “mobiiity.” Better to be against the elimination of important financial regulations, and the tax policies that have contributed so much to the debt…. and to the ability to financeinfrastructure, schools, scholarships and such.
but i can’t help adding… look hard at those scholarships and see if they are doing what we all hoped.
Agree.
Back in the day
we thought being able to go to a Junior College was a huge step upward.
as it happens i got a scholarship to a “good” school. damn near ruined my life. i couldn’t stand hob nobbing with my betters and they couldn’t stand me.
and when i look at the Harvard Graduates ruin… er running the country, I know why.
I think the generalized characterization of rich in this country are wrong. Plenty of them are for higher taxes, and other things. There are billionaires for both parties. They do not sit around all day figuring out how to squish the little guy.
I also think the current crop of rich, who are richer than those from different eras, got that way because the world is very different. Public companies get higher multiples these days, stock option plans, bigger world economy, fewer economic borders.
Yes some wealth is ill begotten. But I think that is the exception.
I bet if one puts forward sensible solutions, even ones that require higher taxes, you might find surprising support from many rich.
I also disagree that the middle class in every European country is doing better than ours. Some are and some are not.
it’s like this, see, when you are a poor person you got to deal with reality. you got to make sense. you got to do things that work.
when you go to harvard you get to talk about ideas. and if you are brilliant at putting words together that rhyme with what the professor said, why you get jobs where you never have to know what you are talking about.
this doesn’t mean that all poor folks is smart. a lot of them are like my old friend formerly anonymous’s relatives. but that’s what makes it so tricky.
Quintile? Sheeesh. How’d a statistics ignoramus like me end up writing for a blog where everyone else uses words like “quintile”? I assume y’all have no trouble figuring out your checkbook balance, too … without checking online.
Anyway … I just reread your post and, yup, I misread it. Whew.
I’m not a socialist, coberly. I’m not for artificial complete equality. But I’m against the policies that have encouraged and exacerbated the trend toward hugely-widening income inequality.
Absolutely, there are plenty of rich people who are political progressives, mcwop. I don’t think anyone disputes that.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say that public companies get higher multiples. (When the company is sold?) But, yes, there are factors unrelated to U.S. public policy that play roles in the increased income gap and in the lack of generational mobility (the near-demise of U.S. manufacturing, for example). But U.S. public policy should be attempting to counteract, not enhance, the effect of those external forces. Most of the international factors that affect income gap and generational mobility also affect the economies of other countries, which have nothing like the huge and ever-increasing income gap and which have better generational upward mobility than we do.
Beverly
I agree with you. Just think your approach to it is political suicide. I just talked to an upper middle class friend of mine. well, more upper than me. she… her family… works hard to stay at that level. far harder than i would work…. or knew how to work. not sure of the difference. it seemed to me that the “challenges” put before me in school and at work were of the kind “if you will do this stupid or unethical thing without complaining, we may have a job for you.”
of course that might just be the way a low-class person like me would rationalize things, or it might be some kind of karma thing. but it seems to me that there is a real difference between those who “succeed” and those who don’t. i am not sure that either virtue or “intelligence” has much to do with it. but i don’t see any actual institutional barriers… other than general human stupidity and how hard it is to rise above your surroundings.
i think that societies tend to gravitate toward a ‘ruling’ class and the enablers and the serfs. there have been times in america, and mabe the present time in europe, when things got shook up a bit, but real hard to maintain that “shaking up” (social mobility).
you might be able to get us back to that with careful policies, but i don’t see it happening.. you can’t get there from here. and i don’t think simple calls for “equality” will do anything except add to the general political noise.
Beverly
McWop
I agree with both of you (I knew you’d care), but Bev still leads with “generational mobility” and i think that is a loser as a guiding principle. Better to work on those policies that positively feedback wealth and poverty (the rich get richer, the poor get television). And, I think, McWop resists those policies because he sees them as indiscriminate “punishing the rich.”
Note though what he said about “sensible solutions.” There is the challenge.
“Absolutely, there are plenty of rich people who are political progressives,”
I’ll believe this when they start spending their money in the same manor as the Koch brothers and their like. And I’m not talking campaign contributions.
As to upward mobility; it has never been about moving everyone to the top. It is, or was about moving as many as possible into a life that is as free from the risks of living as possible. That is what we had when we refer to the “great middle class”.
Unfortuneately, I believe that people interpret the experience of being free of risk as being rich. As such, the neoconservative (or neolib in the rest of the world) were able to talk to the middle class as citizens in kind. So, the middle fell for all the arguments regarding how to become richer that only work for those who earn their money from money. The middle feeling rich, did not recognize the difference regarding how they earned thier money.
The middle class knows the difference now.
I don’t resist the policy goals, but almost always despise the design. We seem to keep on making AMC Pacers instead of Mercedes Benz’s.
Becker
i think there was a time, and may still be, rich folk who spend their money trying to make the poor better off. that’s one reason why i think we still need “the rich.” they can do things government can’t do. and while i am unable or unwilling to get rich myself, i don’t begrudge it to them.
but i am talking about the decent rich. koch and peterson and alan simpson and most of the republicans who talk in public are not decent people.
“a life as free from the risks of living as possible.” yes, exactly. add a little room for cultivation of a human soul (can’t think of a better word for it just now) and i think you are on the right track. a writer named Sigrid Undset had one of her characters describe the twentieth century as bringing “everyone into situations subject to short notice.”
of course i have fantasies about everyone living in very small towns and every man having a trade or craft. failing that i think we could manage to provide everyone with a decent job and a reasonable wage. but we don’t. we go crazy worrying about “socialism” or “the rich” as if they were all members of the same evil class. we could perfect social insurance on the model of social security, but instead we insist upon “welfare”… that is taxing the rich to maintain the poor in a condition of dependency… sorry, that sounds too close to a Republican talking point… but it would be interesting to take them up on that and offer the working people something better and see if “the rich” would pay for what it takes to get there…. on accounta they are the ones with the money.
i don’t know that the middle ever “felt rich.” they felt “out of poverty” and desperately afraid of being dragged back down by their ne’er do well relatives. so became suckers for the R rhetoric which seems designed to lead us all back to a condition of permanent poverty and slavery while chanting slogans about pfreedom and self ssufficiency.
Higher multiples means Facebook will go public at 50-70x earnings, making a lot of their employees richer than railroad Barrons in an instant. I don’t believe that sort of thing happened back in the 50’s, but I could be very wrong. Will try to see what I can find on the latter.
One link:
http://www.visualizing.org/visualizations/biggest-ipos-history
Facebook, 1300 employees and an estimated market cap of $100 billion. Crazy numbers never seen in the history of modern economics.
My Dream: Obama pulling a Ross Perot, with flip charts. Charts provided by Angry Bear.
@ coberly
I don’t know what you are saying. Maybe I should try to figure it out. 🙂
But one thing that follows from equality of opportunity is that people on average move towards the middle in relation to the status of their parents. It is not about rags to riches, although that happens, too. That makes intergenerational movement towards the middle an indicator of equality of opportunity. Talk is cheap. People can claim that America is the Land of Opportunity, and that was very likely the case in the 18th century. But it is not so now, or people would be moving out of relative poverty at a much higher rate.
Mine too, Steve! Really! It’s sorta like dreaming of winning the lottery, though.
Min
that’s okay. most folks don’t know what i’m saying. in fact i read somewhere that we understand what our friends are saying a lot less than we think, and it matters a lot less than we think.
however i don’t follow your logic. if there is regression to the mean the number of folks moving up should equal the number of folks moving down… as long as your measure is “relative to the mean.”
i think we saw a lot of both absolute moving up and relative moving up in the past in America because we were “the land of opportunity” with riches lying on the ground waiting to be picked up after the army killed the indians, but also because the formerly poor had a chance to strike out on their own and not be held down by the actual aristocracies of europe and the defacto aristocracies that arise by the second or third generation in any community without a frontier.
don’t think it is logically possible for “people” to move out of RELATIVE poverty.
i don’t see institutioinal barriers to moving out of poverty on an individual basis. if you do, you need to describe them not rely on “statistics” to “prove” them by remote sensing. As for moving into the top 1%, the reason for the glass ceiling is to provide the illusion you could get there if only. the fact is no one gets to the top without being willing to kill.
i do not approve of “envy” as a guiding principle for individual behavior or social policy. we would have plenty to do just mitigating the worst evils of such poverty as results from “opportunity.”
Coberly:
” institutioinal barriers to moving out of poverty on an individual basis. if you do, you need to describe them not rely on “statistics” to “prove” them by remote sensing.”
You need to read the link in the article and the article I cited.
run
i will try. but as i say again and again. i have a slow modem. it’s hard for me to read links and most of them are not worth reading. i think it would do you good to learn to abstract what the link says and make the argument in 25 words or less.
[the 25 words or less is a joke folks much younger than me might not get. i’d settle for 250.]
didn’t see no link.