Half Changed World

Today’s book, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, by Barbara Ehrenreich was published in 1989.  I picked it up because I read a reference somewhere that made me think that Ehrenreich might have made the connection I’ve been trying to draw between high-intensivity parenting and the increasingly competitive economy.

Ehrenreich does argue that middle class parents are highly insecure about their ability to pass their class status on to their children, but doesn’t really go with it in the direction that I’m interested.  Rather, she suggests that middle-class status is largely a function of the willingness to defer gratification, whether in the form of extended education and low-paid entry level jobs or in the form of the savings needed for homeownership.  Parents are anxious because there is little they can do to assure these values among their children.  Ehrenreich argues that this is why the 60s were so unsettling to middle class adults — their children were rejecting the very values that made them middle class.

While the book made some interesting points, overall, it was so dated as to be of little interest.  Fundamentally, Ehrenreich is trying to explain the shift to the right of American politics in the 1980s.  She rejects the idea that it was due to a significant shift of the working class (the Reagan Democrats) and argues instead that it’s because the upper middle class chose to identify with the upper class corporate elite, rather than joining in solidarity with the middle and working class.  I find that an unconvincing argument.

I also think it’s absurd to talk about the increased appeal of investment banking and law to college graduates in terms of an ideological shift without any acknowledgment of the increased burden of student loan debt.  And as a Gen X-er myself, I found myself irritated by her idealization of the 60s without any acknowledgment that the boomers didn’t exactly live up to their youthful promises to build an egalitarian society.  Ehrenreich also discusses the middle-class "discovery" of poverty in the 60s without any mention of the role that poor people played in the war on poverty.

So, I can’t recommend the book.  But I don’t regret taking the time to read it.  I found parts of it very interesting, especially the discussion of how the media hyped the idea that blue collar workers were opposed to the social activism of the 60s, and downplayed the role of unions in progressive coalitions.

Via Margy Waller at Inclusionist, I’ve been reading some reports about the "framing" of low-wage work in the media.

I have to say, I’m sort of dubious.  The media consultants (Douglas Gould and Co) are saying that it’s bad when newspaper articles or magazine reports start off with stories about individuals or families who are struggling to get by.  The argument is that even if the subjects are highly sympathetic, this pushes the reader into a frame of "sympathy for the poor" and they get stuck on the merits (or flaws) of the individual example, rather than looking at the social and economic system that leads to the problem.

Ok, they’re the experts, and this is based on research on the subject.  And I know that when newspapers run these stories about, for example, people who are about to lose their homes because of medical bills, they often get donations for that specific family.  But my question is how many people read the stories — my guess is it’s higher for the ones that start off with the compelling story.  As Gould and co acknowledge, reporters certainly think that it’s better journalism that way, and that more people will read the stories than if they lead with straight economic analysis.  And a story that no one reads doesn’t do you much good, right?

I was also a little dumbfounded by the statement that it’s "highly advantageous" that welfare has essentially disappeared from news stories "as welfare tends to call forth negative stereotypes about low-wage work and workers."  Wow.

I did think that it was interesting that they found that stories about family leave and low wage work were disproportionately likely to be framed as personal rather than as a question of workforce policy.  I’m not sure if this is a statement about the issue per se, or about the lack of specific legislative proposals that encourage the use of a systemic frame.

This weekend, I watched 49-UP, the most recent in Michael Apted’s series of movies about the lives of a group of people who were first interviewed as 7 year old schoolchildren in Britain and have been reinterviewed every 7 years since.

Interestingly, Tony, who grew up in working class poverty and now appears to be solidly middle class (with a second home in Spain), expresses what I would consider the most "conservative" views about the appropriate role of government in society, saying essentially "I made it, why can’t they?"  Upper-class John, who always seemed quite the snob and is now a Queen’s Counsel, describes Tony Blair as a "conservative" and says that his concerns about the government are about the attacks on due process.  And upper class Andrew points out, as I did previously, that you can’t imagine any 7 year old today being able to confidently (and accurately) predict where he was going to go to university, the way they did now.

But overall, the whole question of class seems to have faded in importance.  The time-lapse aspect of the show — watching the same people at 7 and 21 and 49 — is just overwhelming.  (Among other things, it makes me want to grab the video camera and ask my kids what they want to be when they grow up and if they want to marry and where they want to live.)  It helps me imagine the next decades of my life far more vividly than anything else I’ve seen or read.

It’s also far more of a positive picture of middle age than is generally provided.  Those who are married (either still married or remarried) seem genuinely happy with their spouses, not just partnering off because it’s expected.  And those who are single mostly seem to have made their peace with that.  Suzy, who was so awkward as a teen and then seemed to disappear into the role of mother, finally seems to be comfortable in her own skin.  Nick’s research has hit a dead end, but he clearly loves teaching.  Bruce has compromised his ideals somewhat, but also thrives on teaching.  Lynn starts crying at the prospect of being pushed out from her job as children’s librarian.  Andrew has made a late-in-life career change.  Jackie challenges the picture of her from 42-Up as being overwhelmed by her physical limitations.

And Neil.  Neil, who was so bright and lively as a child, who wound up homeless and questioning his own sanity, has found a niche as a small town politician.  I can’t help but thinking that he’s a walking advertisement for the welfare state, since I have little doubt that he’d be homeless and addicted in the United States, if not dead.

If you’ve got the time, I recommend watching the whole series from the start. But if you don’t, there’s enough clips from the earlier shows to provide some context.  It’s worth watching.

The NY Times Magazine cover story yesterday was on the disadvantage faced by low-income students and what it would mean to take seriously the idea of "no child left behind."  It’s an interesting article, pulling together a lot of different strands of research and thinking.  I want to try to pull the different strands apart, though, because I agree with some of the assumptions behind the article, but not all.

1)  The first claim is that low-income children enter school at a significant disadvantage compared to middle-income children.  I think there’s pretty much broad consensus behind this one.  Anyone care to argue it?

2) Next, Tough argues that this disadvantage is primarily due to differences in parenting styles, especially the use of language.  There’s not a consensus on this one.  On the one hand, there are those (cf. The Bell Curve) who argue that the differences in performance are larguely genetic.  I think that’s wrong — there’s good evidence that genetics is a strong driver of differences in IQ among middle- and upper-class children, but that poor kids often don’t get to develop up to their full potential.  On the other hand, there are a lot of liberals who would reject Tough’s claim that parenting style matters more than the material deprivation that poor kids experience.

(Tough doesn’t entirely dismiss the role of poverty, but concludes that parenting matters more: "True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey.")

As Jal Mehta points out at TMPCafe, this isn’t just an academic dispute — it has real policy consequences.  If you think that material hardship is the main reason poor children are lagging, it points you in the direction of child allowances and other income redistribution schemes.  But if parenting matters more, just giving poor parents more money won’t solve the problem.  You either need to somehow change their parenting practices (possibly through some form of home visits), or compensate for them (through programs like Head Start and redesigned schools).

I think the evidence that there are class-based differences in parenting practices is strong (I’ve written about Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods here before), but am not quite willing to write off the role of money. 

3)  The next question is whether poor kids are entering school so far behind that they couldn’t succeed if given schools with the resources of the average American public school.  Tough suggests that they can’t, because there are so few examples of schools that are succeeding with overwhelmingly poor, minority populations.  I’m not convinced that makes his point — as Kozol argues in Shame of the Nation, it’s essentially an experiment that has never been tried.  The best argument for Tough’s position, I think, is that the small number of low-income kids in predominently middle-class schools have generally not done particularly well.  (And I think the strongest part of NCLB is the attention that it has forced school administrators to pay to that achievement gap.)

Tough argues that the kinds of schools that have succeeded — and are needed for widespread success — provide three key components: extended school days and years, highly structured lesson plans, with frequent testing to make sure that the desired skills are being aquired, and an explicit focus on affecting the behavior and values of the students by "teaching character."  He writes:

The message inherent in the success of their schools is that if poor students are going to catch up, they will require not the same education that middle-class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better-trained teachers and a curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually, for the challenges ahead of them.

But is this a better education?  It’s certainly a more costly education, once you burn through the supply of true believers who are willing to subsidize such schools by working extra hours for no extra pay.

But I’m reminded of Scrivenings’ post about his horror at a New York Times story about a kindergarten class that is operated along such lines.  While some parents would welcome the eased demand for after school care, I think an equal number of middle-class parents would be outraged if their kids’ schools added another 3 hours of classes a day, especially if that time were spent on core reading and math rather than "enrichment" activities.  I know that my biggest concern about sending D to a school with lousy test scores was fear that they’d adopt a drill-and-kill approach.

And I know a lot of good teachers resist such a highly structured approach, prefering the flexibility to follow the children’s interests and take advantage of teachable moments.  Kozol argues that schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods get caught in vicious cycles, where they get the least experienced teachers, so the administrators rely on scripted lessons, which makes the schools even less attractive for creative teachers.

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Edited to add that none of this says that any individual child can’t succeed.  There are certainly kids who overcome mediocre parenting and indifferent schools to achieve great things.  And there are poor parents who devote all their limited resources to making things better for their kids.  All this is about averages.

Last week, MC Milker (from the Not Quite Crunchy Parent) commented that one of the advantages of wooden play kitchens is that they’re sturdy enough to last through several kids, and can be sold on eBay when you’re done with them.

I certainly know people who use the high potential resale value as a justification (excuse?) for buying high end baby and kid stuff, from Bugaboo strollers to Hanna Andersson clothing.  But I wonder how many of them actually wind up reselling things?  The most cost-effective thing to do is probably to both buy things used and resell them.

I’ve sold some baby stuff, but I’ve given away far more.  For t-shirts and the like, I just can’t be bothered to carefully wash, photograph, advertise, respond to questions, and then either schlepp to the post office or make arrangements to meet the buyers.  I’m  curious about the people who do find this worthwhile.  Some people are clearly doing this on a semi-professional basis, buying things at end of season sales specifically in order to sell them online the next year.  But others are just listing a few items, as their kids outgrow them.  It’s a high tech yard sale.

I try to give things to friends or family, but if they’re not interested, or if I’m just desperate to get something out of the house, it goes to Value Village.  We just gave our jog stroller to a friend who is expecting her first baby.  Yes, we probably could have gotten some money for it, but the money isn’t make-or-break for us, so we decided to just give it to her.  Things have to be pretty beat up before I just put them in the trash.

We buy the vast majority of the boys’ clothes on ebay.  I refuse to spend $8 on a t-shirt.  Some day maybe they’ll figure it out and protest, but as long as we can get away with it, we will.  I focus on the large lots, since otherwise the shipping makes it less of a bargain.  When I’m paying $2 each for pants, I don’t sweat it if one or two pieces don’t fit.  I know it’s more expensive than the thrift store, but I’m willing to pay a few dollars for the convenience.

I happened to be looking at my eBay profile today, and discovered that I’ve been a member since June 1999.  That surprises me — I wouldn’t have guessed that I’d been on it so long.  I’ve got a feedback level of 71, but I’ve probably bought closer to a hundred things (not everyone gives feedback).  Of all the things that I’ve bought on eBay, I’ve only really been disappointed once (by a used computer where the battery wouldn’t hold a charge).  At this point, I’m surprised when I run into people who have never bought anything on eBay.

In 1999, Katherine Newman published No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City.  This book examined the experiences of 300 individuals who had applied for minimum wage jobs at fast food restaurants in Harlem during the early 1990s.  Newman found that competition was fierce for these jobs, with as many as 14 applicants for each position, and high school graduates in their 20s crowding out teens and high school dropouts.  Moving back and forth from generalizations drawn from the broad study to detailed profiles of individual workers, she reported on the fast food workers’ pride in being part of the legitimate economy — even in low-status, low-paid jobs where their friends teased them and they came home stinking of grease.   They valued the semi-independence that paying their own way gave them, even though almost none could afford to live on their own.  Published just after welfare reform, the book was a stinging rebuke to those who said that the poor didn’t want to work.

Seven years later, Newman is back with Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market.  She’s followed a subset of the workers she first met in 1993 and 1994 and is back to tell us how they fared during the boom years of the late 1990s and the recession of 2001-2002.  The book opens with an update on the workers who were most prominently featured in the first book. Jamal is now working at a lumber yard in a small town in Northern California, having followed his new wife back to her family out west.  Kyesha has a union job as a janitor for the NYC Housing Authority.  Carmen is out of work, having been fired from her department store job for a rules violation, but her husband Sal is the manager of the video store.

Newman divides the workers into three groups — "high flyers," "up but not outs" and "low riders."  While many, even most of the workers are still struggling, perhaps the biggest surprise in the study is how many high flyers there are in a group that once seemed so disadvantaged — about 20 percent of those Newman was able to track over time.  (She also uses a national sample for comparison, and estimates that the figure is closer to 10 percent for overall minimum wage workers in retail food industries.  She also argues that this figure is not much lower in economic bad times than in boom years.)   Although Newman doesn’t explicitly make the connection, one of the points I took away was that the "welfare reform success stories" that various governors liked to flaunt were neither as rare as the opponents of welfare reform suggested, nor as much the result of welfare reform as the supporters implied.

Newman concludes the book with a review of suggestions for how to improve the lives of the working poor, and generally I agree with them (expand the EITC, make higher education more affordable, support quality child care).  But the book left me with many unanswered questions about what made some of these workers succeed while others struggled.  By and large, formal education wasn’t the answer — the high flyers were more likely to have succeeded by getting into a unionized position or a skilled trade than by getting a bachelor’s degree.  (Those pursuing advanced degrees may not yet have seen the payoff, since they were usually only able to go to school part-time.)

In addition to the core ethnographic study, Newman pulls in a lot of data and information from related studies.  I’m a policy wonk, and even I found myself glazing over at times.  But the book is well worth reading, mostly for how it will undermine your preconceptions, whether you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative.

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By the way, I’ve set up an Amazon aStore as a way to display the books that I’ve reviewed by category.  It’s a work in progress, so let me know if you have requests.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to view the Motherhood Manifesto documentary.  (I work for one of the Moms Rising aligned organizations, so we set it up in the conference room during lunch and brought popcorn.)

It’s very well done.  For each of the letters in the MOTHER agenda, they have a funny pseudo-fifties animated clip, a feature about someone affected by the issue, and brief interviews with experts who are working on the issue with aligned organizations.  It’s a nice mixture of wrenching personal stories with just a touch of policy wonkery and, unlike many discussions of work-family issues, they leave viewers with hope that progress is being made rather than with handwringing over the current state of the world.

When the movie was done, we sat around and discussed it.  Some in my organization (which focuses on low-income individuals and families) were concerned that there weren’t more low-income mothers featured in it, but I’m pretty sure that was a deliberate choice.  I think it’s almost certainly true that the way to get more affordable child care, health care, etc. for poor families is to get middle- and upper-income families to fight for changes in the system, out of self-interest as well as altruism.  But I think it’s also important to make sure that the solutions then work for everyone.  (Recently, there was a discussion on one of my parenting email lists about the high cost of child care in the DC area, and the solution that someone suggested was to increase the amount that could be put aside tax free for child care in Flexible Spending Accounts.  I tried to be polite in pointing out that FSAs don’t help people who don’t make enough to owe federal income taxes.)

The more interesting question that was raised was whether it’s limiting to frame this as a mothers’ organization rather than as a caregivers organization, since many of the proposals are needed by people caring for the elderly or sick as well as by parents.  And someone — not me — did ask my favorite question of Where Are The Dads?  I’m really ambivalent about this one.  On the one hand, I do think that always talking of these issues as mothers’ issues lets fathers and others off the hook.  But I do think that being a mother is a very salient part of lots of mothers’ identities, and so it’s a good way to mobilize them.  In particular, there are a lot of people who don’t think of themselves as activists, but if you convince them that being politically engaged is an important part of being a mother, they might do it.  And I’m not sure that a broad "caregivers movement" would engage people in the same way.  What do you think?

In any case, the documentary is worth watching.  If you’re in the DC area, and want to see the movie, the Women’s Information Network is having a screening and discussion tonight at AFSCME.  (Sorry, I won’t be there — I’ll be at D’s soccer team dinner.)  If that doesn’t work for you, let me know if you’d like me to arrange a kid-friendly viewing at my house some time.  (Probably not until January.)

Today’s book, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us, by Robert Frank and Philip Cook, is somewhat dated in the details (it was first published in 1995) and can be repetitive at times, but is nonetheless a must-read for anyone interested in inequality in American society.  Frank and Cook were among the first to note that the biggest driving force in inequality today is not the gap between the very poor and everyone else, but the one between the very rich and everyone else.  Paul Krugman is probably the person who has spent the most time in recent years discussing this fact.  As Krugman noted in the NY Times in February:

"Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn’t a ticket to big income gains.

But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that’s not a misprint."

Frank and Cook labelled this phenomenon "the winner-take-all society" and argued that a variety of technological, political and economic factors have combined to create highly competitive national or global markets in which relative position is more important than absolute skill, and in which the very few top performers in any given field capture the vast majority of the returns.  The most obvious examples are in sports and the arts — while the superstars get millions in endorsements and appearance fees, no one can name the 100th best tennis player or violinist in world.  Frank and Cook argue that the same thing is going on for doctors, lawyers, authors, and CEOs. 

While I’m not entirely convinced by their explanations for why this happens (for one thing, in most fields it is not possible to rank people’s performance as accurately as in pro golf), I don’t think there’s any doubt that the description of the phenomenon is dead on.  The math is beyond me, but I am assured by people I generally trust that there are a wide variety of occupations in which the earnings distribution can best be explained by assuming that there are a series of "tournaments" in which only the winners proceed into the next rounds, and that small differences in skill thus are magnified into huge differences in earnings.  This probably explains a significant portion of the penalty for part-time work — it handicaps people at early levels of the tournament and makes it unlikely that they’ll get into the "leagues" with the really high payoffs. 

It’s hard to pin Frank and Cook down on a left-right scale.  They are economists, and I think they overstate the role of markets and understate the role of institutional structures in creating the outcomes that they describe. (See this American Prospect article for a good sample of their approach.)  But they believe that there are huge inefficiencies in this distribution — because people don’t take into account the effect of their entry into competition on other people, more people than is economically efficient compete for the few prestigious slots — and thus argue for progressive taxation, especially if tied to consumption.

After I finished this book, I had a really interesting conversation with T. about how the idea of the winner-take-all society interacts with the long tail — the ability for even very small niche products to find their audience using the powers of the internet.  I think our conclusion is that the long tail makes it possible to opt from the tournaments without giving up entirely on being in the game.  T’s example is that while it’s harder and harder to get a book (commercially) published these days, he thinks he makes more money self-publishing his game than he could make if it were picked up by a publisher, even recognizing that they could get it into distribution channels that he can’t reach.  But I think that for most people, the money they are going to make from their piece of the long tail is for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from zero.

"At virtually every level, education in America tends to perpetuate rather than compensate for existing inequalities."

Anyone who believes that opportunity — the ability of children to have a future that isn’t defined by their parents’ socio-economic position — is an important value should read Isabel Sawhill’s issue brief on Opportunity in America: The Role of Education.  The whole volume of The Future of Children on Opportunity is worth reading, but the issue brief is only 5 1/2 pages, so there’s no excuse for not reading it.

Sawhill begins by discussing how, contrary to the public image, the US does not have particularly more intergenerational mobility than other industrialized countries, and how such mobility is declining over time.  She notes that Americans are quite resistant to more progressive schemes of taxation and benefits, but — in theory — are highly supportive of the role of education in creating equality of opportunity.  And then she makes the statement I quoted above: "At virtually every level, education in America tends to perpetuate rather than compensate for existing inequalities." 

First, she argues that the K-12 system is generally weak, and "a society with a weak educational system will, by definition, be one in which the advantages of class or family background loom large."  Then she notes that because of the ways that public schools are funded, poor kids go to worse schools than well-off kids.  And finally, she notes that "access both to a quality preschool experience and to higher education continues to depend quite directly on family resources."

Sawhill goes on to mention some possible ways to address these deficiencies.  This part of the essay is not as convincing.  I’m not sure I think all of the proposals are good ideas, and I’m fairly confident that they don’t add up to enough to eliminate the systemic problems that Sawhill has identified.

But go read the brief, because the description of the problem is spot-on.  And then come back and we can discuss whether it’s possible to change any of this.

Today’s book is The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement And How You Can Fight Back, by Jacob Hacker.  Can I just say that I wish I had written this book?  It answers the question that a bunch of us wrestled with in the spring — how can we be so affluent, and yet feel like a "middle-class" life is out of our reach?  Hacker’s answer is that we’re facing more risk than ever before, so even if we’re doing well today, we worry that it could slip out of our grasp tomorrow.

Specifically, Hacker shows how a range of economic and political forces have combined to increase risk in almost every aspect of our lives:

• Income volatility has increased significantly, and has increased more among the middle- and upper-class than the poor.  (The poor still have higher levels of income volatility.)
• Job loss is more likely to lead to long-term unemployment, and re-employment at significantly lower wages and/or in a different industry.
• Marriages are more likely to end in divorce.
• Education is an excellent investment, but also a risky one — students are borrowing more than ever, and going to college doesn’t guarantee a high income.
• Defined benefit pensions are rapidly disappearing, replaced by 401ks.
• More people are uninsured than ever before, and even people with insurance have a higher probability of being hit by large uncovered bills than in the past.

Hacker’s not the first one to say any of this, but he does a really nice job of pulling it together in one package.  (One of my few complaints about the book is that when Hacker incorporates true-life stories that illustrate his points, the stories are oddly familiar, because he picked most of them them up from the same newspaper articles that I’ve read.)

The most immediately politically salient part of this book is where Hacker takes on the proposals to privatize Social Security and to shift people from standard health insurance into Health Savings Accounts.  Hacker argues that these are part of an ideologically driven "Personal Responsibility Crusade" that is designed to increase risk, even though most people feel like they have too much risk in their lives, thank you very much. 

Hacker also makes some proposals for how to reduce risk from its current levels.  The simplest is probably his proposal for universal 401ks, that could be portable across jobs, and that workers would be automatically enrolled in unless they opted out.  He also proposes that the government would annuitize these accounts when people reach retirement.  He also proposes to open up Medicare for people under 65 and to create a system of Universal Insurance that would cover people against sharp drops in income.  (Neither of these proposals are described in any detail in the book, which attempts to reach a general audience and so tries not to scare people off with too many formulas.)

Like Warren and Tyagi, Hacker also offers some practical advice — build up some savings, sign up for a 401k if you can, buy life insurance, don’t buy a house that you can only afford with a variable rate mortgage, don’t enroll in a college that you can’t afford to stay in until you finish.  He also points out the significance of "loss aversion" — that it’s more painful to give up something that you have than to never have had it in the first place.

If all this isn’t familiar to you, read the book.  And if it is, send it to your Congressman.