WCP: Equal Opportunity Is Not Enough

Posted in Visiting Scholars  |  Tagged American dream, Economic Inequality, Inequality, Jack Metzgar, John Russo, Richard Reeves, Sherry Linkon, Tax Policy, WCP, Working-Class Perspectives

There has been no shortage of explanations and proposed solutions to America’s growing class divide. A recent effort by Richard Reeves’ Dream Horders expands blame from the top 1% to the top 20% of incomes for manipulating the system to benefit their children. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Jack Metzgar critiques Reeves’ solutions for reflecting classist attitudes and neglecting transformational policies to generate shared prosperity.

“As misguided as I think Reeves is, Dream Hoarders is well worth reading because he pulls together a lot of recent research on how professional-middle-class privilege is being passed on across generations to such a degree that the U.S. has become an “hereditary meritocracy.”  In doing so, he shifts the focus from merely the top 1% of households whose average income tops $1.6 million to a much larger group ranging down to $121,000 a year (in 2016).  This is the top 25 million households, whom he rightly says are “the single most dangerous constituency to anger” because we are “wealthy enough to have influence, and numerous enough to be a significant voting bloc.”  While often humorously chiding his own behavior, he shows the wide range of ways middle-class professionals use our social and cultural capital to improve the chances of our children and grandchildren ending up in that top 20%.

He argues convincingly that that’s not fair and proposes a number of remedies that would make things somewhat more fair, such as eliminating legacy admissions to universities, forbidding unpaid internships, curbing exclusionary zoning, and rejiggering federal loans to make them more affordable for low- and middle-income college students.

But he is very chary when it comes to moving money around.  He wants to greatly improve K-through-12 public education, for example, but rules out spending a lot more money or reducing class sizes.  He even has a great little section on how federal income tax subsidies disproportionately benefit the top 20%, but concludes: “My point is not that we should tax our way to more income equality” but merely to illustrate “the fact that if we need additional resources for public investment, it is reasonable to raise some of them from the upper middle class.”  Note the weasel language here: the “if” leaves him uncertain about whether we actually need more money for public investment (as our roads and bridges crumble and our water systems sometimes poison children), but if we do, only “some” of it need come from the top 20%.  Reeves thinks he knows what will most piss off “the single most dangerous” voting bloc, and he tippy-toes around it.

Having excluded progressive tax reform and knowing that checking a whole series of class privileges like eliminating legacy admissions would not make much difference, Reeves has nowhere to go but to reform the working class’s “human capital formation.”  He seems to have no idea how fraught with conflict this has been in American working-class history.  From the Pullman Palace Car Company’s paternalistic rules for living in its company town to the Ford Motor Company’s infamous Sociology Department, workers have fiercely resented and resisted all attempts from people in authority who think they know how to make them better human beings.  If you want to convert the rest of the working class, including people of all colors, into Trump voters, systematic government “home visiting to improve parenting” among the bottom 80% is probably the way to do it.

It’s not that it couldn’t be helpful to have more parents reading to young children, more use of time-outs rather than spanking for discipline, or more parental involvement in schooling among working-class families. The problem is that the people doing the home visits would likely deliver a program that implicitly says the goal of life is to score well on written exams, go to college, and become one of those professional or managerial phonies so many working-class parents spend a lifetime trying to avoid or resist.  It may be hard to believe – and that’s a big part of the problem! – but many (probably most) folks  don’t want to be people like us, no matter how much they might envy our incomes and working conditions.

And this is Reeves’s biggest, but illustrative mistake.  He is trapped in an equal-opportunity frame that is perfectly applicable for blacks, women, and other groups who have been and still are being denied equal opportunities in education and jobs, in where they live, or who they love.  But to apply that framework to income classes, as Reeves quite rigorously does, doesn’t and can’t work.  His singular goal is to equalize people’s life chances to be in the top 20% of income-earners while, as his subtitle highlights, “leaving everyone else in the dust.”  He is quite clear in explaining that this is how relative social mobility works across income quintiles: upward mobility for those born in the bottom four quintiles requires an equal amount of downward mobility for those born in the top quintile.  This is a worthy goal for those who aspire to a genuine meritocracy where pay is related to performance, but it will not and cannot do anything to reduce our outrageous and still increasing levels of income and wealth inequality – which, by the way, are reducing most people’s life chances day by day and year by year.”

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