Author: ken

Income Inequality and the Difference a New Lens Can Make

The U.S. Census Bureau has looked into its categories for income, and discovered: “100 million people — one in three Americans — either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.”

Responding to a request for more data from The New York Times, the Bureau discovered that its old measures of poverty did not do an adequate job.  “There are more people struggling than the official numbers show,” commented the Bureau’s Chief Poverty Statistician.

The Times noted that “the findings . . . convey levels of economic stress sharply felt but until now hard to measure.” (See, “Older, Suburban and Struggling, ‘Near Poor’ Startle the Census.”)

The important point is that, apart from unemployment figures, it has been very hard to see the true extent of the impact of The Great Recession on the poor.  But more and more of the signs are adding up to a more complete picture.  Retail sales figures released last week show “the divide between hard-pressed and prosperous Americans remained a defining characteristic of the retail economy.”

The Chairman and CEO of Saks noted:  “I feel good about the luxury consumer.”  On the other hand, the Chairman and CEO of Walmart, noted: “Our customers are still feeling pressured to reduce expenses wherever they can.” “Referring to the Wal-Mart shopper’s dependence on paychecks and government-assistance payments rather than savings,” he added, “going forward we really would not expect anything different.” (See, Retailers See a Split in Behavior of Shoppers.”)

Far more disturbing is the growing evidence that this difference is hardening into a permanent gap among the communities in which we live. According to a new study by Stanford University: “The portion of American families living in middle-income neighborhoods has declined significantly since 1970 . . . as rising income inequality left a growing share of families in neighborhoods that are mostly low-income or mostly affluent.”

The study noted that “children in mostly poor neighborhoods tend to have less access to high-quality schools, child care and preschool, as well as to support networks or educated and economically stable neighbors who might serve as role models.”  One effect is a “growing gap in standardized test scores between rich and poor children, now 40 percent bigger than it was in 1970. That is double the testing gap between black and white children,” according to one of the authors of the study. (See, “Middle-Class Areas Shrink as Income Gap Grows, New Report Finds.”)

As neighborhoods become more tightly stratified, that also has an impact on the identities of the children growing up in them.  They know they are “poor,” and “disadvantaged.”  Less is expected of them, and they come to expect less of themselves.

William Julius Wilson, a sociologist at Harvard who has seen the study, argues that “rising inequality is beginning to produce a two-tiered society in America in which the more affluent citizens live lives fundamentally different from the middle- and lower-income groups.

Different neighborhoods, different schools, different expectations mean that it will be increasingly difficult for us to see each other, and to grasp the fact that we actually live in one nation.

 

 

 

 

The Ground Is Shifting

Though Americans pay lip service to the idea that “all men are created equal,” as Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence, we have always taken huge inequalities for granted.  Obviously, some of us are smarter, stronger and prettier than others.  Jefferson’s point is that the playing fields of society should be level enough for us all to participate in games that are essentially fair.

Now, again, the shock waves from the contradiction between our ideals and our practice are destabilizing our world.  The Occupy Wall Street movement calls attention to the “1 percent” who control 40 percent of our wealth, and a rigged political system that protects their interests.  The other “99 percent” include not just the unemployed, the marginal and the ill but the whole middle class.

In America protests are spreading to other cities and college campuses.  But the issue is world-wide.  In the UK, demonstrators call attention to the disparity between the support government has given bankers and the drastic cuts in social benefits for students, workers and ordinary citizens.  The Arab world is marked by challenges to the hegemonic power of its ruling class.  In Spain, the “indignatos” have taken to the streets.  Israelis are camping out in Tel Aviv.  Indians protest corruption in Dehli.  Dozens of protests are erupting.

The old privileges were held in place by convictions, largely unconscious, that the inequalities were non-negotiable.  That is, they were wrong and galling, but they could not be challenged.  Several powerful psychological reasons stood min the way.  People tend to protect themselves from failure by not trying to do what they believe they can’t accomplish.  They also fear feelings of hopelessness, especially if their anger ends up making them feel even more impotent.  Finally, they fear destabilizing the accommodations they have made with their own communities.  It’s hard to go out on a limb in front of your neighbors.  Now, however, new forms of collective awareness make change seem possible.

Why is this happening?  Each movement has its own motivations and dynamics, of course, but they are influenced by two common factors.  Globalization has linked our economies together, usually with grossly different costs and benefits.  But, now, the financial crisis has spread economic pain around the world.  The Euro crisis, the American recession, widespread unemployment and economic stagnation are making the effects of these problems more and more apparent everywhere. The second factor is that with economic retrenchment has come a significant loss of opportunity.  With fewer ways out for individuals, more are feeling trapped in a system that is no longer working.

Regular citizens are noting the extraordinary salaries and bonuses of bankers, but establishment voices are speaking up as well.  Last week, for example, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote a comprehensive account of these world wide events and joined a growing list of world class economists calling for reform. (See “The Globalization of Protest.)

So the ground is shifting.  The rumblings from our growing economic inequality can no longer be suppressed.  We can’t know for sure how this surge of protests will end.  But, perhaps, where there was hopelessness and rage, some form of hope will emerge.

 

The line between religion and science seems to be increasingly sharp and abrasive these days, which is bit of a puzzle if you know something about history.  Scientists have not been atheists, by and large, and believers have not always been so certain of their beliefs.

Sir Isaac Newton devoted the major part of his energies to writing religious tracts, after he completed his monumental work on celestial mechanics and the laws of motion.  Blaise Pascal, noting that God’s existence could not be definitively proved, developed his famous wager:  it is better to believe in god as the benefits of belief outweigh the consequences of doubt.

But strident politicians today seem to have few scruples in asserting their fundamentalist convictions.  For them everything is black or white.

One historian of the evangelical movement referred to such beliefs, for example, as the world is 10,000 years old (based on a literal reading of Genesis) as an “intellectual disaster.” “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he wrote, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”

It appears to be contagious.  Political candidates refer to evolution as “a theory” as if other theories had just as much accumulated evidence to back them up.  Or they challenge global warming as a conspiracy.  Or they believe that Obama was not born on American soil because – well – it just doesn’t seem right to them that all those rumors could be wrong.

So it’s refreshing to hear different voices from the evangelical Christian community speak up about trying to maintain a balance between knowledge and faith.

Karl W. Gilberson, a former professor of physics, and Randall J. Stephens an associate professor of history, both evangelical Christians, have recently written:  “Within the evangelical world, tensions have emerged between those who deny secular knowledge, and those who have kept up with it and integrated it with their faith.”  (See. “The Evangelical Rejection of Reason.”)

Gilberson and Stephens note:  “Almost all evangelical colleges employ faculty members with degrees from major research universities — a conduit for knowledge from the larger world. We find students arriving on campus tired of the culture-war approach to faith in which they were raised, and more interested in promoting social justice than opposing gay marriage.”

War can’t be the basis of education.  You can’t learn anything new or complicated if you have to defend established ideas at all costs.  Yes, someone may “win” the battle in the sense that the enemy of the moment will retire from the field silenced and shaken.  And the enemy may even be sufficiently discouraged to give up trying altogether.  But ideas are resilient and indestructible, and someone else is likely to take them up again.

Common sense suggests we could be wrong, or we could change our ideas.  It has happened before – and can happen again.  What is the threat that makes such openness feel so dangerous?

On the other hand, to know everything with such certainty is to live in a very dark place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Voter Fraud and Income Inequality in the Voting Booth

How could anyone object to a campaign against fraud?  In a society mesmerized by the presence of fraud everywhere – on Wall Street, in corporate headquarters, in politics and, of course, on street corners – it looks all too plausible for government to mount a campaign against voter fraud as well.  But looking closer reveals that the campaign itself is fraudulent.

Risa Goluboff, a law professor at the University of Virginia, and Dahlia Lithwick, a Senior Editor at Slate, pointed out:  “There is no evidence for widespread vote fraud, despite Bush administration efforts to find some.”  They add: “a major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop. (See, in Slate, “A Fraudulent Case.”)

The real purpose of the campaign, they argue, is to disenfranchise African Americans.  Take the proposed requirement that voters show a government-issued photo ID:  “The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that while about 12 per­cent of Americans don’t have a government-issued photo ID, the figure for African-Americans is closer to 25 percent, and in some Southern states perhaps higher.”

But it looks to me, more broadly, like a campaign against the poor.  To be sure, a disproportionate number of blacks are impoverished, but they are far from the only ones.  The usual photo IDs are a drivers licenses and passports, both of which reflect a certain social and economic standing.  People who don’t travel for business or pleasure won’t usually bother to get passports.  And a usable drivers license suggests access to a car — and lots of people don’t have those.

There was a time when only those who had property could vote.  That time is long past.  But this amounts to a newer version of the property requirement.  Earlier there were poll taxes, then literacy tests, residency requirements or other complex tests of residency.  All of those made it easier for those who have money to get into the polling booth.  The new requirements proposed to combat “voter fraud” are more subtle, but they also work to discourage and sometimes prevent the poor from casting ballots.

As the poor get poorer and the rich richer, there is a growing likelihood that the disparity will become a political issue.  The rich of course have a disproportionate influence on the electoral process, as it is, as candidates need their contributions to mount expensive campaigns.  Finding clever ways of disenfranchising the poor is another strategy for the rich to protect their wealth.

This can happen because most of us are governed by unconscious assumptions about fraud, about race and about poverty.  A campaign against voter fraud looks good on the surface.  But is actually caters to our prejudices, while promoting a conservative agenda.

Frankly, I don’t think that the poor will be misled.  They are used to reading between the lines.  It’s the rest of us who might unwittingly be taken in, allowing this campaign to succeed.

 

 

 

The Reactions

Those who took the “carnival” on Wall Street seriously seem to have been right.  The protestors camping out in lower Manhattan and other financial sites around the world have struck a deep chord that continues to resonate.

They may not have a coherent program or set of proposals, and they may not link to conventional politics as many think they should, but they have a theme that no one else is raising: the runaway influence of the finance industry in our society and the failure of our political system to make it accountable.

When I first wrote about Occupy Wall Street two weeks ago, I drew the analogy with the canaries in coal mines that signal the presence of deadly fumes.  Now it’s more than that – and far more than can be summed up in one image or metaphor.  And it has generated enough support to get New York’s government to cancel its plans to “clean up” the park it has taken over.

The Democrats, seeing a counter-weight to the Tea Party, seek to make connections with a movement that has an astonishing 56 percent approval rating, according to Time.  Last week, Bill Clinton commented in Chicago:  “The Occupy Wall Street crowd basically is saying, ‘I’m unemployed and the people that caused this have their jobs again and their bonuses again and their incomes are high again. There’s something wrong with this country. This is not working for me.'”  For their part, the Republicans have been speaking of “mobs,” “Nazis” and “commies.”

There are interesting individual anomalies. The Wall Street Journal noted yesterday that the CEO of Citigroup, Vikram Pandit, expressed sympathy with the occupiers, and today’s New York Times quotes him as saying “that trust has been broken between financial institutions and the citizens of the U.S.”  He added, “The protesters should hold Citi and others ‘accountable for practicing responsible finance.’” And some Tea Party members have noted parallels between the two grass-roots movements, their opposition to the bank bailouts.

But generally, according to The New York Times, “bankers dismiss the protesters as gullible and unsophisticated. Not many are willing to say this out loud, for fear of drawing public ire — or the masses to their doorsteps.” (See, “In Private, Wall St. Bankers Dismiss Protesters as Unsophisticated.”)

The media, predictably, are focused on various human-interest angles:  who started the protest, how they make decisions, their eating habits, and their hygiene.  (See, “From Canada to Meetup.com, the Journey of a Protest Meme.”)  But they don’t seem to know what to make of the movement itself.  It is too multifaceted and elusive, too much a collection of incongruities.  It’s just not like the other forms of political action they have come to know over the years.

Perhaps, though, it should be viewed as not political at all.  Perhaps, as the protestors themselves say, it’s about justice and morality.  They are less interested in a political agenda than in bearing witness to a profound ethical violation of our social contract.  Some might want to get arrested, but many just want to be seen.  A better analogy might be those who conduct a vigil at an execution, or the mothers of the “disappeared” who showed up regularly in mourning to reproach the Argentine generals for their crimes.

Clearly they are saying something important, but not the kind of thing that politicians usually find themselves thinking.