hysterical hobby: Decrying Inequality's Effects While Ignoring The Cause

by Rick McGahey, SCEPA Faculty Fellow

Charles Murray is back. The notorious co-author of 1994's The Bell Curve, who claimed that racial differences in IQ tests and socio-economic status could be explained in part by genetic transmission of intelligence, is out with a new book. Coming Apart looks at growing differences between lower and upper-income whites, and notes that social problems?crime, divorce, unemployment?are growing for the lower income, while the upper income group prospers and is more socially stable.

Murray blames this not on income gaps, but, as a good neo-conservative will do, on liberals in the 1960s. "The '60s were a disaster in terms of social policy," Murray argues, saying that work and morality were de-incentivized, creating negative trends that "soon became self-reinforcing."

You would think the ensuing policy discussion would focus on how to get better-paying jobs for low income people, and how to improve schools that serve the poor, but instead (at least in The New York Times) it is about cultural difference between the rich and poor and early childhood education.

Columnist David Brooks said he'll be "shocked if there's another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society." And the Times' Nicholas Kristof reflected on the social dysfunction of people with lower educations and income in his rural Oregon home town, and worried that "we're facing a crisis in which a chunk of working-class America risks being calcified into an underclass."

So lower-income families and workers are under increasing stress, and facing cascading social problems? What are the solutions? Brooks calls for a National Service Program where all classes can get to know each other, while Kristof talks about early childhood education and drug treatment programs. There is not a single mention of creating more decent jobs with wages and benefits that can support a family.

This ignoring of the core issue continues in a Times story yesterday, February 10, on inequality in educational outcomes, where the growing gap is now not between races, but tied to family income." After documenting the problem, the story quotes two conservative leaning scholars (James Heckman and Doug Besharov), and also Murray, and concludes with Besharov saying, "No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare."

The lack of attention to economically-oriented solutions-- job creation, unionization, a higher minimum wage, health care and pensions for all families?is stunning. Recent work sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation on how cities and states can create decent jobs is absent. And even on the educational inequality issues, progressive scholars like Martin Carnoy, Richard Rothstein, or Linda Darling-Hammond are not mentioned at all, nor is the work of progressive foundations, such as the Ford Foundation's efforts to create "more and better learning time in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty."

Kristof at one point says that "liberals are too quick to think of inequality as basically about taxes." No, liberals and progressives don't think inequality is basically about taxes. We think it is basically about decent jobs and adequate incomes, and improving our public systems that currently provide inadequate services to the poor. A policy discussion that ignores those factors is avoiding the main issue and the real sources of these social problems, in favor of hand-wringing about a growing "underclass."