even though poverty has become less materially miserable, it is no less common. In Martin County, just 27 percent of adults are in the labor force. Welfare is more common than work. Caloric deficits have been replaced by rampant obesity. Meanwhile, things aren’t much better on the national level. In 1966, when the War on Poverty programs were finally up and running, the national poverty rate stood at 14.7 percent. By 2014, it stood at 14.8 percent. In other words, the United States had spent trillions of dollars but seen no reduction in the poverty rate.
Of course, the poverty rate doesn’t take into account rising consumption standards or a variety of government transfers, from food stamps to public housing to cash assistance. But the calculations that determine it do include most of the income that Americans earn for themselves. So although the rate is a poor tool for gauging material conditions, it does capture trends in Americans’ ability to earn success. And what it shows is that progress on that front has been scant.
Read the whole essay, because it was hard to find a summary excerpt. He argues that the policy focus should be less on providing handouts and more on providing the dignity of employment.
This is easier said than done, of course. Most of Brooks’ suggestions strike me as reasonable, but I am skeptical that they would prove effective. And note that one approach, more vocational education, has a not-surprising down side, which is that today’s vocation can become obsolete tomorrow. Tyler Cowen points to an article by Hanushek and others.
with technological change, gains in youth employment may be offset by less adaptability and diminished employment later in life. To test for this tradeoff, we employ a difference-in-differences approach that compares employment rates across different ages for people with general and vocational education. Using microdata for 11 countries from IALS, we find strong and robust support for such a tradeoff, especially in countries emphasizing apprenticeship programs.
In The Diamond Age, the Thetes do not have much dignity.
America in particular, and the West in general, lost the ability to have a functional left half of the bell curve starting around the ’60s. This became most apparent wherever concentrations of the left half of the bell curve were. So inner city blacks got it first, followed by “fishtowns” and rural Appalachia. Immigrants, primarily Latinos, were brought in to do the work the left half wouldn’t do anymore (at least for the wages the right half wanted to pay), but they quickly assimilated into the underclass norms of left half natives (2nd+ generation Latinos committee more crime, have less successful marriage rates, etc). Every generation a new batch is brought in, its cultural capital is eviscerated in the support of low low prices, and it goes on the dole too.
As our underclass grows larger and more diverse it becomes harder and harder to come up with any sort of workable solution that would reintegrate this large swath of the population. It’s not just enough to say its robots or anything like that, because some of the most pressing problems have nothing to do with robots. Robots certainly affect economics and that spills over into sexual economics, but they don’t make marriages fall apart all on their own. Japan has lots of robots, and I note a distinctly higher level of dignity in its left half of the bell curve.
This is the great tragedy of our age, but we aren’t going to face it, and griping about being a cosmopolitan world citizen is one of the ways in which responsibility it dodged. The professional class needs such excuses because from a spiritual, evolutionary, artistic, and cultural POV they are nothing special. They produce no beauty, no truth, and no transcendence. They are mostly responsible for “Cost Disease”, and they aren’t even creating a new generation of themselves that might one day solve these problems. It’s pretty pathetic that the most they can produce on the other side of the balance sheet is strip malls full of ethnic food. But hey, dudes with an IQ of 90 have an Oxycontin problem (produced and marketed by professional cosmopolitans) so I guess we can feel better by comparison.
Two income households are much more the norm than in the 1960’s and prior. Not suggesting we march back, but I bet it has rearranged national income considerably over time.
The particular form dignity took in Eastern Kentucky prior to the war on poverty was captured in native songs such as Coal Miner’s Daughter by Loretta Lynn or Floyd County by Dwight Yoakam. Each describes coal miners who also farmed. I would guess it is the same as the survival instinct that Tolstoy identified in Russian peasants in his Confession. Nothing glamorous or enviable, but probably not as socially destructive as opiates and Disability.
Articles like the one you exerpted particularly annoy me because they gloss over how “poverty” is defined. By definition the “Poverty Line” is calculated so that a certain percentage of folks are considered to be in poverty. Actually, this is a slight oversimplification because the cslculation is linked to the price of food, which is not perfectly correlated to wealth or income. But to a first approximation, the percentage of folks “in poverty” definitionally remains relatively constant no matter how wealthy a society becomes. Stated differently, the poverty line is intended to show relative income levels. It is not designed to measure absolute levels of poverty across time.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is a particular pet peeve of mine.
…along with articles that neglect to define “wealthy” and “high income,” or that ignore wealth and/or unearned income when discussing “income inequality.”
The official measure of poverty developed for the war on poverty is an 3 times the cost of a minimal food diet. This pretty much an absolute definition which allows for 0% rate of poverty with the lowest level living a 1950’s middle class life style while most people have self driving cars.
Yes, I’m aware of that.
The model of education as something you do at the beginning of your life, and then never again may not be the best model. Repeated vocational education is not necessarily a bad thing. Many jobs have regular training requirements to keep up with changes in technology and regulation.
Voluntary National Service — everybody gets a job. Paid by the gov’t — sent out to help other orgs.
This Nat Serve org becomes like a temp agency, apprenticeship, local human resource provider to various local, or national, orgs requesting more help. Including jr military training, jr police training, jr nurse assistant training, jr teaching assistant training; and life skills training. How to shop, how to cook food.
Non-profit orgs which claim to favor reduction in poverty could be required to take in some 10%-20% of their workforce headcount from such previously “poor” people, and find out how to help them be productive.
In Slovakia, some companies have small coffee shops inside — some of the coffee shops include physically or mentally disadvantaged folk who are, with training and light supervision, quite capable of making delicious coffee.
Charles Peters of the old Washington Monthly proposed something like this back in the1970s. The depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps was similar. But Peters felt that government unions would never allow it–because the people would have to be paid well below union wages.
To build on the comment above … For most everyone reading this blog, high academic standards were a chance to succeed. But for a significant proportion of young, they are not. In fact, they are a guarantee of failure. Forcing young people to be failures is not a nice thing to do.
Imagine that you were required to attend athletic practice for several hours a day 180 days a year between the ages of 5 and 18. See, it’s to give you the opportunity to gain the status and income of a professional athlete. And to be a sound mind in a sound body. Doesn’t everyone need that? What? You never expect to be a professional athlete? You don’t have the interest? You don’t think you have the talent? Tough.
Imagine how much worse your life would be in a world like that. Now imagine yourself being in the lower half of interest in academics and/or in academic smarts. School becomes a pretty crappy place to spend much of your youth.
Who here is a big compulsory education booster?
The main point of school is a cheap place for people to go that does as little damage as possible. If you want to teach the welding, huzzah!
Also, I liked Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut on this topic.
I responded to Arthur Brooks’ last push on vocational ed here: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/vocational-ed-and-the-elephant/
I give some history of vocational ed in this country. Short version: it never had a golden age, Nation At Risk killed the traditional auto-shop version, and No Child Left Behind brought back the higher skilled CTE we have now. But I also mentioned what Brooks consistently ignores, which is odd given he has both Charles Murray and Rick Hess in his talent stable:
“The latest cycle began when 1983’s Nation at Risk forced radical changes in high school education in a failed attempt to raise standards. Nation badly damaged what successful vocational ed we had by arguing we needed rigorous preparation and high expectations to get more high school students ready for college. Of course, not everyone could meet the higher standards, because otherwise there’d be no point to the higher standards. The authors expected that students who weren’t ready for college would be well-trained by rigorous vocational education; they just didn’t think about the elephant.
See, Nation‘s call for high standards, joined five years later by Bill Bennett’s report update , dismissed any notion of an achievement gap. The achievement gap, according to these Ur-reformers, owed its origins not to poverty and ability, but unprepared teachers with low expectations and parents who didn’t care as much. Over time, education reformers stopped blaming parents.
But really, blame is irrelevant. Everything is irrelevant, there sits the elephant firmly in the center of unspoken space: large, cranky, completely ummovable. The kids who couldn’t, and still can’t, manage college prep curriculum are disproportionately black and Hispanic and, (often separately, alas) poor. So the insistence that “everyone could succeed”, with “succeed” meaning “go to college” led to that form of accountability otherwise known as lawsuits, which found that tracking resulted in disparate impact, which meant that tracking ended. Everyone took or tried to take college prep, and high school standards declined. Since everyone was taking college prep, no need for vocational ed, which became more of a dumping ground than usual. The low quality and already weak statistics eventually killed funding for the highest quality career training of the 80s and early 90s.
…..
I’m not sure anyone really understands why, until they have their noses shoved into it like Petrilli did. People just don’t understand the degree to which many high schools are forced to choose between failing most of their students year after year, with no hope of ever achieving three years of advanced math or English—that it’s not a matter of trying harder, or teaching better, or that the kids weren’t taught. They lack any real understanding of the layers of cognitive ability. They don’t realize there are perfectly normal folks who aren’t smart enough to be plumbers, welders, or dental hygienists. “
The additional elephant is that ‘college prep’ by today’s standards wouldn’t be college prep by the standards of the 1800s. Two ancient languages, etc etc.
I don’t know. The only useful skill I was taught was typing. And I’m a good typist.
A few years ago, I touched what I think is the biggest challenge in our society today in this piece (https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/philip-dick-preschool-and-schrodingers-cat/):
“What the results of such a study would do, I hope, is force everyone to stop thinking of low test scores as a missed opportunity to create more computer programmers or doctors but rather as a natural outcome of IQ distribution. With luck, well-meaning reformers will realize that they must stop looking at low test scores as an indictment of the educational system. Well-meaning progressives might cease their declarations that poverty and the evils of income inequality are stopping our poorest children from achieving college. Perhaps the results would stop educators from making low IQ kids feel utterly hopeless by declaring that more school, more learning, is their only possible chance for success, and end permanently the moralistic drumbeating for “lifelong learning”. Maybe we’d start using our considerable creativity to address the obvious pitfalls that could come about if we accepted the reality of low IQs. We don’t want to return to a educational world in which such kids are relegated to dreary, regimented education, because we must give all our kids as many skills and as much knowledge as they can absorb. Acceptance does not mean resignation and abandonment.”
But no. Instead, we pretend, as Brooks does, that schools are failing due to inept teachers and low standards because no one will let us research the best ways to educate that left half of the bell curve.
I second the comments complaining about the meaning given by Brooks and the government to ‘poverty’. It’s no longer a good proxy term for the phenomena we are trying to discuss and analyze.
And even the purpose of the ‘war on poverty’ seems confused to me, taking the war metaphor entirely too literally. Most people don’t think of the welfare-state’s ‘war on poverty’ like a ‘war on smallpox’ through which some extraordinary but temporary efforts can lead to self-perpetuating and permanent eradication.
It is more like a ‘war on facial hair’ you win by constantly shaving, or a ‘war on long grass’ you win by regularly mowing. That is, the government ‘fights’ the war on poverty forever by taking over the formerly more private and voluntary social charity function, and continuously and coercively redistributing money from higher earners to those households which we expect would be destitute were it not for those subsidies.
Think how absurd it would sound for some historical figure to say, “We’ve given away all this charity, and still the poor we have with us! Clearly we’ve failed.”
Brooks also uses ‘dignity’ in a way that doesn’t help us to penetrate into the nature of the problems we face, and which also explains his naive optimism regarding educational reforms. The problem isn’t just the irremediable issue of the unequal distribution of market-favored talents and personality traits crashing into an increasingly Average Is Over economy. That’s bad enough.
But there is also a motivation problem, and here we get into some complicated and thorny issues. Why are increasing numbers of people – especially young men – dropping out of the ‘life script’ strategies we tend to associate with the “twentieth century American Middle Class” version of a ‘dignified existence’?
The truth is that social status is part of the ‘total compensation’ of work apart from mere money. Income is of course an important component of social status, but hardly the only one. Money helps you buy things and pay the rent and provide for others, but status – especially a gap in relative status is what is important for ‘buying’ stable relationships. The most durable patterns of economic interaction are supported by gains from trade so large that they approach the co-dependency of symbiosis. Healthy long-term relationships aren’t that much different (part of what Tolstoy was getting at), though of course we all like to pretend otherwise.
The trouble is that current economic, technological, social, political, legal, and cultural conditions have raised the minimum money+status threshold for ‘non-loser’ above what an increasing proportion of men could earn from any of the jobs they could potentially do. The old vision of a dignified existence is a “hard work for high reward” bargain, but if the reward is completely out of reach, the incentives disappear, and people start dropping out and engaging in behaviors that generate all kinds of negative externalities.
There is no option above ‘loser’ if these people literally cannot do anything to ‘win’, and so first world poverty is best defined as being unable to afford to form a stable, traditional family. Many of those people could exert the effort needed to support themselves above the poverty rate, but they won’t see the point in trying.
If you are going to be a loser not matter what you do, then there’s little point in working hard to slightly improve your material condition, and you might as well settle for subsidized subsistence and vice. The disincentives of welfare and effective marginal tax rates are there, sure, but they only matter so much, and are probably not nearly as important as this issue.
So, plenty of able-bodied folks will not work hard even when the alternative is an ‘undignified’ existence mooching or on welfare. And the more common that becomes, the more normal it seems, and the less social approbation one is likely to experience.
Brooks barely touched on these big, key issues, which is like trying to predict the motion of the planets while denying the existence of Jupiter.
Are young working class white men dropping out of the effort to attain social status solely because it is not economically available to them or, at least in large part, because of social/cultural/legal changes that make what used to be considered a “respectable” life the existence of a loser?
I think you’re saying that maybe a Leave It To Beaver lifestyle seems so undesirably ‘square’ in some communities and subcultures that it is socially discouraged or stigmatized to the point of suppression. Maybe, but I don’t think that’s a very important factor. In contrast to many of their professed beliefs about it, the bulk of the most successful and high status people in our society still organize their family life along those traditional lines, and their example is very potent in shaping attitudes. “Life is a Psychological Operation.” That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since traditions usually embed subtly useful feature conducive to life success.
Like wealth and health, status is both instrumental and a psychologically pleasing end in itself. Though the reason we are built to instinctively enjoy it – as with most things – is because it was a useful thing to have for our ancestors. So a subconscious judgment regarding personal usefulness is what is often driving the train of of our motivations.
Consider physical fitness. A man might keep himself fit in part because he simply enjoys being fit. Being fit feels healthy and good, and it is also a source of pride. Maybe he also finds it useful for doing other things he enjoys, like playing fun sports, or folk dancing, or hiking or being successful at a job that has a physical component.
And maybe he also finds it useful for showing off and impressing potential male friends and attracting potential female mates. Looking fit triggers typical aesthetic instincts, and also signals many desirable features, e.g. as the philosopher and statesman Arnold Schwarzenegger once said
All those incentives sum to total motivation. But now take away the social factors – perhaps he’s a marooned castaway – and the sum may drop below a critical threshold. That same man may not have enough non-social motivation to keep up the hard work, and he might therefore ‘let himself go’. Happens all the time.
That can happen with work too. The motivation to work hard comes from a combination of factors. Many men want to form families and they would be willing to work hard if they earn enough money to provide materially for them, and earn and maintain enough social status to maintain the affections of his partner. The combination is his ‘purchasing power’ in what you might call ‘the market for stable family formation’.
If a man can’t reach this threshold, then his ‘production possibility frontier’ lacks a particular, high-utility solution where he is willing to work and sacrifice lots of leisure for income. Without that solution, the material benefits of hard work and extra income aren’t as attractive as the leisure and vices he can enjoy under welfare-subsidized subsistence. So he drops out, and ‘lets himself go’.
I’m just questioning whether the decline of the working class is because men simply cannot meet the productivity threshold you’re talking about. There are indications that this is not entirely what’s going on here. For example, in the recent book about modern-day “hillbillies” in the Midwest (I forget the title and name of the author, but it was widely reviewed a few months ago), the people described actually have upper middle class incomes. Yet their family structure has fallen apart.
The book I was thinking of is Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance.
Nice sub-thread to the discussion here. I wish I had something to add but mostly I would just babble.
Putnam in “Our Kids” talked about “air bags” used by the Upper Middle Class–psychologists, rehab, the hectoring mother, etc.
In a more general sense, Charles Murray wrote an essay entitled “The trouble with taking the trouble out of everything.”
It would be nice to have good data on the issues–longtitudinal studies are probably the best.
Along with long followup after “treatments” to see “fadeout.”