But the basic point is this: In a substantially poorer American past with a much thinner safety net, lower-income Americans found a way to cultivate monogamy, fidelity, sobriety and thrift to an extent that they have not in our richer, higher-spending present.
For Poorer and Richer
International New York Times | 14 March 2015
This argument recurs whenever there’s a compelling depiction of that crisis. In 2012, the catalyst was Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart,”
with its portrait of the post-1960s divide between two fictional
communities — upper-class “Belmont” and blue-collar “Fishtown.” Now it’s
Robert Putnam’s “Our Kids,” which uses the author’s Ohio hometown to trace the divergent fortunes of its better-educated and less-educated families.
Murray
belongs to the libertarian right, Putnam to the communitarian left, so
Putnam is more hopeful that economic policy can address the problems he
describes. But “Our Kids” is attuned to culture’s feedback loops, and it
offers grist for social conservatives who suspect it would take a cultural counterrevolution to bring back the stable working class families of an earlier America.
That idea makes some people on the left angry. As they see it,
it’s money and only money that Murray’s Fishtown and Putnam’s hometown
lack and need. And it’s unchecked capitalism and Republican stinginess,
not the sexual revolution, that has devastated working-class society
over the last few decades. Fight poverty, redistribute wealth, and
you’ll revive family and community — it’s as simple as that.
Their
argument gets some things right. The American economy isn’t performing
as well as it once did for less-skilled workers. Certain regions — like
Putnam’s Ohio — have suffered painfully from deindustrialization. The
shift to a service economy has favored women but has made low-skilled
men less marriageable. The decline of unions has weakened professional
stability and bargaining power for some workers.
And
yet, for all these disturbances and shifts, lower-income Americans have
more money, experience less poverty, and receive far more safety-net
support than their grandparents ever did. Over all, material conditions
have improved, not worsened, across the period when their communities
have come apart.
Between 1979 and 2010, for instance, the average after-tax income
for the poorest quintile of American households rose from $14,800 to
$19,200; for the second-poorest quintile, it rose from $29,900 to
$39,100.
Meanwhile, per-person antipoverty spending at the state and federal level increased sixfold between 1968 and 2008
— and that’s excluding Medicare, unemployment benefits and Social
Security. Despite some conservative skepticism, this spending did reduce
the poverty rate (though probably more so after welfare reform). One plausible estimate suggests the rate fell from 26 percent in 1967 to 15 percent in 2012, and child poverty fell as well.
These trends simply do not match the left-wing depiction of a working class devastated by Reagonomics. Nor does the long-term trend in insurance coverage, or per-student spending,
or other data. The left sometimes claims that the income instability of
working Americans is unprecedented, for instance — but a 2007
Congressional Budget Office estimate found “little change in earnings variability” over the preceding decades.
This
is a dense debate whose surface I can only skim. (Inequality as well as
absolute income enters into it, as does immigration, cost inflation for
key goods — including weddings! — and more.)
But
the basic point is this: In a substantially poorer American past with a
much thinner safety net, lower-income Americans found a way to
cultivate monogamy, fidelity, sobriety and thrift to an extent that they
have not in our richer, higher-spending present.
So however much money matters, something else is clearly going on.
The
post-1960s cultural revolution isn’t the only possible “something
else.” But when you have a cultural earthquake that makes society
dramatically more permissive and you subsequently get dramatic social
fragmentation among vulnerable populations, denying that there is any
connection looks a lot like denying the nose in front of your face.
But
recognizing that culture shapes behavior and that moral frameworks
matter doesn’t require thundering denunciations of the moral choices of
the poor. Instead, our upper class should be judged first — for being
too solipsistic [Solipsism: a theory in philosophy that your own existence is the only thing that is real or that can be known] to recognize that its present ideal of “safe” permissiveness works (sort of) only for the privileged, and for failing to take any moral responsibility (in the schools it runs, the mass entertainments it produces, the social agenda it favors)
for the effects of permissiveness on the less-savvy, the less
protected, the kids who don’t have helicopter parents turning off the
television or firewalling the porn.
This judgment would echo Leonard Cohen:
Now you can say that I’ve grown bitter but of this you may be sure /
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor.
And
without dismissing money’s impact on the social fabric, it would raise
the possibility that what’s on those channels sometimes matters more.
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