Half Changed World

In her comment on yesterday’s post, Jody wrote "it’s worth asking what we mean by a middle-class life."  She points out that, due to the declining cost of manufactured goods, even people with relatively low incomes can have many of the material markers of a middle-class life — televisions, cars, etc.  This is a fair point — when measured by stuff, even poor Americans are incredibly well-off by both international and historical standards.

The statistical definition of "middle class" as the middle quintile of the income distribution makes the question of "is the middle class diminishing?" meaningless since, by definition, 20 percent of the population is going to be in that quintile.  And most Americans continue to describe themselves as middle class, even when their income seems to suggest that they’re outside that range.

What do I have in mind, then?  It combines a bunch of economic and psychological variables.  Being middle-class doesn’t necessarily mean you own your own home, but it means that you can reasonably expect to do so at some point in your adult life.  (I think the rising cost of homeownership in big cities is one of the reasons that people whose income in the $80,000 and up range don’t think of themselves as upper class.)  It means that you can’t afford everything you want, but that there’s room in your budget for non-necessities — a vacation, cable TV, an occasional restaurant meal.  It means that something going wrong — a kid getting sick, a car breaking down — is a hassle, but not an immediate disaster.  It means paid vacation days, health insurance, and some plan for retirement that doesn’t involve working until you drop dead.  It means either employment security, or at least a decent chance of finding a comparable job if you get laid off.  It means decent schools for your kids, and an expectation that they’ll have at least as good a life as you do.

Is this what you mean by "middle class"? 

I don’t have the energy to tie this all together into a thoughtful post tonight, but I’ve been reading some interesting articles about displaced workers and the economy.  They’re particularly resonant this week in light of the huge buyout that GM is offering its workers.

First up is Louis Uchitelle writing in NYTimes about the limited success of job training programs for displaced workers.  It’s adapted from a book he’s written, which I’ve requested from the library.

Second is Mark Schmitt, writing more broadly about the limits of education as a strategy for reducing income inequality.  It’s worth both reading the posts that he links to, and the comments he received — there’s a bunch of very big names in economics joining in the discussion.

I really think we’re reaching the end of an era in which even skilled blue-collar workers could count on a solid middle-class lifestyle.   There just are going to be fewer and fewer jobs that pay $30 an hour plus benefits for people who don’t go to college.  (The exceptions are likely to be things like plumbing, that can’t be outsourced to India and aren’t subject to mechanization.  But there are going to be fewer repair-type jobs too, as it become cheaper to just replace things than to fix them.)  But going to college isn’t a guarantee of a middle-class life either.  It may be necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

Moxie more or less tagged me to respond to this New York Times article, about upper-income black mothers, and their reactions to the whole work-family debate.

Jill at Feministe gives the Times credit for talking about race, but complains that once again, the discussion is limited to upper-income college-educated professionals.  She’s right, but the article is clearly framed in the context of the Times’ obsession with "the opt-out revolution" which is all about upper-income women with lots of choices.  So I’m willing to cut them some slack on that.

Overall, I do think that class probably matters more than race in determining who stays home.  I know Lareau deliberately studied a racially diverse population and found that parenting styles didn’t vary much across racial groups, holding class constant.  Edin and Kefales also didn’t find much racial differences.  (I think ethnicity/immigration status probably does matter; there are definitely ethnic groups where there’s still great cultural pressure against moms of young children working.)

Of course, "holding class constant" is a heck of an assumption.  As I’ve discussed before, stay-at-home parents are concentrated at the very high and very low income ranges.  And there are relatively few African-American families with a single wage-earner making over $100,000 a year.  And even holding income constant, African-Americans have significantly lower assets, making relying on a single income more risky.

The article suggests that there’s more support/pressure for African-American women, especially those who have higher education, to work outside the home.  That may well be true.  But it’s also true that, as Cashin argues, even well-off African-Americans are more likely to live places with higher crime rates, and worse public schools.  So that may provide an incentive to have a parent at home to keep an eye on things.  I don’t know what the net effect is.

Last week, I was reading and I must have made a noise, because T said "what?"  I said, "Nothing, I’m just feeling overwhelmed by the book I’m reading."  "Is it as bad as Bastard Out of Carolina?" he asked, that having set the standard years ago by leaving me staring into space and whimpering as I finished it.  "Almost."

The book I was reading was The Glass Castle: A Memoir, by Jeanette Walls and it is both heartbreaking and challenging.  It’s the story of her childhood with parents who simultaneously opened up worlds for their children — worlds of literature and art, of geology, natural history, and astromony — and who failed at the most basic tasks of parenting — keeping their kids fed and safe.  She writes of her first memory — catching on fire at age 3, as she cooked hot dogs for herself — and of her father giving her Venus for Christmas one year.  She writes of living in a leaking house, without heat, indoor plumbing, or electricity, and of stealing discarded lunches from the trashcans at school.  She writes of riding in back of a U-Haul truck, and of her father yelling at her and her siblings when they finally caught his attention and pointed out the that the doors had opened.  And she writes of her father bringing her to see the cheetah at the zoo, and bringing her up to the cage to let it lick the salt from popcorn off her hands:

"I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought?  None of them had ever had their hand licked by a cheetah."

Imagine Angela’s Ashes if, instead of doing her best to feed her family in spite of her husband’s drunkeness, Angela had been an artist who thought it was a waste of time to cook, thought it was unfair to expect her to hold a steady job, and hoarded food from the children.

But what makes the book so wrenching isn’t the depths of the poverty to which the Walls family sank, or even the domestic violence, alcoholism, and mental illness that shadowed their lives, but the moments of beauty and wonder that are interspersed with all of the above.  I don’t doubt that the Walls kids should have been in foster care, but Jeanette Walls makes clear that something important would have been lost as well as much gained.  (The one time that a social worker does try to investigate the family, the children cover up for the parents, fearing — probably with cause — that they’d be separated from each other.)

The other book that I was reminded of was The Mosquito Coast.  If you’ve only seen the movie, you won’t understand why, because in the movie, Harrison Ford’s character just seems like a egomaniacal lunatic.  But in the book, the story is filtered through the perspective of his son, who believes in him.  Like Allie Fox, Rex Walls is a man of a million plans.  (The "Glass Castle" of the title is the house that he was constantly designing blueprints for, even as their real house slid down the side of the mountain.)

The Glass Castle has at least somewhat of a happy ending, as the Walls children move away from their parents and at least three of the four grow into basically happy and functional adults.  (The youngest stabs their mother after an argument, is institutionalized for a year, and then moves away and loses contact with the family.)  The parents continue to live by their "ideals" (or their madness) choosing to live as squatters in New York rather than accept assistance from their children or anyone else.  And ultimately, Jeanette is more forgiving of her parents than I could imagine, accepting them for who they are.

Via Brad Plumer, I ran across this interview with Bob Moffit.  Moffit is a labor economist who does a lot of work on welfare and low-income populations, and generally has interesting things to say. 

In response to a question about why welfare reform passed in the 1990s, Moffit answers:

"As for the source of the increased conservatism on the part of voters, I think that the increased labor force participation of middle-class women was part of the cause. That transformation really changed the attitude of voters. Once a large percentage of middle-class women were working and putting their children into day care, the public began to question why we shouldn’t expect the same thing from poor women. There was no longer the support for paying women to stay at home with their children, which was the goal of the original legislation in 1935."

I think this is dead-on, in the sense that a lot of low to middle-income married parents thought "I’d love to [have my wife] stay home with our kids full-time, but no one’s handing me [or her] a check to do so. Why should I pay more taxes so these single moms can stay home?"

But I want to distinguish this claim from the similar-sounding one that Caitlin Flanagan made in her screed against female professionals:

"…women like herself [Chira], who have chosen to separate themselves from their children for long hours of the day, and who feel a clawing, ceaseless anxiety about this. Conflating the hardships of the working-poor mother with the insecurities of the professional-class mother ennobles the richer woman’s struggles (entirely self-inflicted). Describing how even poor mothers are "working and thriving," and extolling the benefits of passing a child around among family members while her mother is gone for hour after hour, makes the richer woman’s choices look not like what they are—a series of decisions often based entirely on providing herself with maximum happiness—but, rather, like the empirically proven superior way to raise children."

Today’s book is The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining The American Dream, by Sheryll Cashin.  (I had actually requested it from the library, but not started it, when Bitch PhD wrote about it.  Dorcasina is also reading it.)  It’s a very interesting book, but ultimately one that left me somewhat frustrated.

The first section of the book simply reviews the facts about residential segregation in the United States.  Little of this section is new research, but Cashin lays out the facts in a readable conversational tone.  She points out that much of what we consider "integration" consists of small number of well-off minorities living in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, as well as of neighborhoods that are in transition.    Very few whites — and even fewer whites with children — choose to live in neighborhoods that have a significant black presence, let alone that are majority black, even when such neighborhoods are less expensive than comparable majority-white neighborhoods.  (Cashin mostly discusses race in terms of black and white, although she notes that one type of stable integrated neighborhood is the multi-ethnic urban center.)  Cashin also notes that a significant number of blacks who could now afford to live in majority-white neighborhoods have chosen to live in majority-black communities where they are "more comfortable."

In the second section, Cashin makes a case that most of society is worse off because of the persistence of race and class segregation.  The ways in which poor urban minorities suffer have been well documented.  Cashin argues that middle-class whites also suffer because they have to spend more than they can afford and/or put up with horrible commutes in order to guarantee safe neighborhoods and decent schools for their kids.  (These sections echo some of the arguments from Perfect Madness and The Two-Income Trap.)  And for me, the most novel part of the book was Cashin’s discussion of how the problems of urban areas follow middle-class blacks into majority-black suburbs.  She spends a lot of time discussing Prince George’s County, MD, and why it still has mediocre schools and few retail shops, even though it is the most affluent majority-black county in the country. 

I found the third part of the book, in which Cashin discusses her hopes for the future, the weakest.  Cashin doesn’t really have much of a solution to offer to the problems she’s identified.  She calls for better enforcement of housing anti-discrimination laws, which I agree is a necessary, but not sufficient first step.  She supports school choice in the form of charter schools, but not vouchers, and talks approvingly of Raleigh’s busing scheme, but doesn’t directly address the issue that busing was a significant factor in pushing white families out of urban school districts.    She bewails our polarized political environment and the focus on suburban swing voters, but doesn’t discuss how gerrymandering penalizes communities that are geographically scattered. 

I like where Cashin’s aiming at; I just don’t see how we get from here to there.

Update: I really want to encourage anyone who is reading this in a feedreader to click over to the comments on this post and the next one.  If you’re only reading my posts, you’re missing out.

On Monday, Philip Klinkner at PolySigh posted a graph of labor force participation rates by race and gender for the past 50 years.

I was generally aware of the overall trends, but was surprised at how low the labor force participation rates were for black women in the 1950s.  Yes, they were a lot higher than for white women, but I’ve often heard comments to the effect of "black women have always worked; they didn’t have the privilege of being stay-at-home mothers even in the 1950s.

That’s certainly the impression that I got from reading The Street.  We returned the book to the library yesterday, so I can’t post a direct quote, but Lutie Johnson (and presumably Ann Petry) lays the blame for most of the ills of black people on the fact that whites wouldn’t give black men jobs, but would hire the women as domestic servants.  So the men felt emasculated and sought to prove themselves by fighting and sleeping around.  And the children were left unsupervised in dangerous neighborhoods, and got sucked in by the attractive menace of the Street.

Petry also suggests that at least some of the huge increase in single-mother households over the past 50 years is illusory.  Almost all of the women in The Street are technically still married, but living on their own or with men other than their husbands.  They’re only married because they can’t afford to jump through all the hoops required to get a legal divorce at the time.

Over the summer, Wayne at Rag & Bone Shop posted a list of 10 books he recommended.  One of them was The Street, by Ann Petry, a book I had never heard of.  Wayne wrote:

"If you want to encounter the volatile, turbulent issue of race in America, Petry’s novel offers a more relevant and authentic and comprehensive account of it, from the perspective of Lutie Johnson—intelligent, talented, brave, and doomed Lutie Johnson with her eight-year-old son. It’s coarse and claustrophobic and nearly hopeless—and very, very good."

Right away I requested it from my library, and eventually got it, and then I put it on the shelf with the rest of my library books.  And when it was due, I renewed it.  And when it was due again, I renewed it again, still without having picked it up.  They only allow two renewals, so I finally put it in my bag to read on the metro.  And then I started reading it, and I was hooked.

I don’t think it’s giving away anything of the plot to say that from very early in the book, it is quite clear that Lutie is doomed.  In many ways, The Street is a horror story, in which evil lurks around every corner but the heroine keeps escaping, until the end, when she doesn’t.  And even so, I didn’t see the final twist coming.

The edition that I got from the library has a cover blurb by Gloria Naylor, in which she says "Forty-five years ago Ann Petry brought the world to its feet with the artistry in this painfully honest and wrenching novel.  Once again a standing ovation is due for this American classic."  Nice of her to say this, since having read The Street, The Women of Brewster Place seems like a pale imitation.  (No pun intended — although I will note that this is one of the few English idioms where lightness is undesirable.)  While the story mostly follows Lutie Johnson and her dreams of a better life, some of the strongest parts of the story are where Petry changes perspective for a chapter, and dips into the point of view of one of the other people whose lives intersect with Lutie’s.  Suddenly someone who has seemed part of the scenery flickers into life as a full person, with dreams and fears of his or her own.

Lutie is a little too perfect to be fully believable as a character, and Petry gives her long interior monologues that are clearly speaking with the author’s voice.  But the anger and the frustration and the shattered hopes ring through as strongly today as they did almost 60 years ago:

"No matter what it cost them, people had to come to places like the Junto, she thought.  They had to replace the haunting silences of rented rooms and little apartments with the murmor of voices, the sound of laughter; they had to empty two or three small glasses of liquid gold so they could believe in themselves again.

"She frowned.  Two beers and the movie for Bub and the budget she had planned so carefully was ruined.  If she did this very often, there wouldn’t be much point in having a budget — for she couldn’t budget what she didn’t have.

"For a brief moment she tried to look into the future.  She still couldn’t see anything — couldn’t see anything at all but 116th Street and a job that paid barely enough for food and rent and a handful of clothes.  Year after year like that.  She tried to recapture the feeling of self-confidence she had had earlier in the evening, but it refused to return, for she rebelled at the thought of day after day of work and night after night caged in that apartment that no amount of scrubbing would ever really get clean."

This is the post I started last Tuesday, and then didn’t have the heart for.  Since it was the day that the Census Bureau releases the latest poverty statistics, I’m discussing two books about growing up poor.

First up is The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, by Terry Ryan.  It’s her memoir of how her mother, Evelyn Ryan, kept her family fed and housed by entering dozens of entries in every possible contest, winning everything from televisions and washer dryers to shopping sprees, trips and a new car (which they sold to pay the bills).  Mrs. Ryan had a determinedly optimistic outlook, which Terry emulates in this book, so she focuses on her mother’s determination, creativity, and humor, rather than dwelling on her father’s alcoholism and violence, or on the indignities, major and minor, of their persistent poverty.  The closest she comes to complaining is when discussing how the nuns who taught at the parochial school she attended registered her for all remedial classes when it was time to enroll in high school, in spite of her excellent grades.

Evelyn Ryan is an amazing character, and her story would have been a terrific magazine article, but the material runs a little thin by the end of the book.  The book has a great premise, but no plot or character development.  At the beginning, Evelyn Ryan is a plucky heroine who wins contests, and at the end she’s still a plucky heroine who wins contests.  There’s a movie of this book coming out at the end of the month; based on the trailer, it looks like they’ve reframed the story as about Evelyn’s defiance of her bullying husband. 

The second book is the provocatively titled Welfare Brat: a memoir, by Mary Childers.  Childers writes about the endless contradictions of her childhood, of loving her mother and not wanting to be anything like her, of fitting in neither among the kids in the gifted class (where she stuck out for being poor) nor among the kids in her neighborhood (where she stuck out for caring about school), of living in decaying neighborhoods where all the other white families were fleeing, but also of taking advantage of her white privilege to get department store jobs.  She writes of hiding the money she had earned so that her mother couldn’t take it, but also of giving up a birthday celebration so that there would be cake for her little sister.

Perhaps the most heartfelt passages in Welfare Brat are where Childers talks about her dreams of going to college, but also of her depths of ignorance about it.   Desperate to get away from her mothers’ overcrowded apartment, she’s horrified at the prospect of sharing a dorm room.  She doesn’t understand that "full scholarship" still usually means loans, and has no money to pay for the incidentals that colleges assume are too minor to mention.  Her family doesn’t understand why she’d want to go to college, and even her friends think she should just get a job.  After her guidance counselor pulls strings, she winds up at a "mediocre community college":

"Even in college, most people aren’t excited about ideas.  Outside of class I’m teased for obsessing about my difficulties finishing a paper comparing Martin Buber’s notion of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship to Picasso’s representations of how we are three- and four-faced, and thus slated for prismatic complexity interacting with others.  Several teachers drop hints that I would have no trouble transfering to a better school.  When I explain my scholarship and aversion to debt, they reply that practically everyone borrows to attend college, as if no one should refuse a common fate."

(For maximum effect, these passages should be read alongside this essay about class and college admissions.)

Childers finishes her book with a statement about welfare reform. She writes "It’s clear to me that I could develop from welfare brat to chip-on-the-shoulder chick to contributing dissident citizen because I had the good luck to come of age when many people in the United States approved of a war on poverty rather than what Herbert J. Gans calls ‘the war against the poor.’"  This statement may well be true, but it isn’t supported by anything that’s come before in the book. While Childers is sympathetic to her mother’s struggles, she seems to have suceeded in spite of the parenting she received, not because of it. 

Like almost everyone in the US who drives a gasoline-fueled car, I’ve been suffering from sticker shock when I buy gas lately.  The last time I filled up, I paid $2.49 a gallon, after driving past two stations at $2.69 and $2.83.

Unlike almost everyone in the US who drives a gasoline-fueled car, I don’t think the government should be doing something about it.  If anything, I think gas should probably be more expensive.  I don’t think people are ever going to take conservation seriously until it hits them in the wallet, and for both environmental and geopolitical reasons (e.g. not wanting to be dependent on oil-producing nations), I think it’s important that we consume less fossil fuels.

There’s very little evidence that people have started to change their driving patterns in response to the increased cost of gas.  At least in the short-run, fuel consumption is not very sensitive to price (e.g. it’s what economists call inelastic).  At the margin, people may do less leisure driving, but the cost of gas is still a pretty small fraction of the cost of a trip.  And driving is still cheap compared to train and plane tickets, at least for a family.  It’s going to cost us about $100 in gas to drive the minivan to NYC this weekend, but train tickets for the boys and me would be around $250, and that’s with N. riding for free.  And while I love taking the metro to work (I can read!), for most people, public transit is inconvenient if available at all; as Brett at DadTalk wrote: "despite a frugal streak that runs miles deep, I’m going to continue driving to work just to steal a few extra minutes each day with my family.

The big changes that people can make in response to higher fuel costs — buying more efficient cars, choosing houses closer to work or on public transit routes — all only happen over time, and if people think that gas prices are going to stay high.  And I don’t think people have gotten there yet.

I also worry a lot about the impact of higher gas costs on low-income families, for whom an extra $10 or so is a big hit on their budget, and means that they’ll have to cut back somewhere else.  I think any proposal to increase the price of gas needs to address this issue, and cushion the blow.  One intriguing possibility is Pay at the Pump car insurance, where the price of no-fault car insurance is built into the cost of gasoline.  It simultaneously ensures that everyone is covered and changes one of the major costs of car use from a fixed cost to one that varies with the distance you drive.  It would simultaneously promote conservation and make car ownership a lot more accessible to poor families.

And yes, in spite of my environmental leanings, I think making car ownership a possibility for poor families is generally a good thing.  Many jobs are inaccessible without a car.  Groceries are more expensive at the stores you can reach without a car.  And commutes by public transit often stretch to 2 or more hours a day, especially when you need to take a child to day care or school en route.  A bunch of welfare to work programs have tried to create specialized van routes to bring workers to remote jobs, but my sense in most cases is that it’s cheaper and more helpful to just buy people reliable used cars.