Belief Systems

The fox is very clever and knows many things; the hedgehog knows only one thing, but it is a big thing.

Okay, I admit it, this is going to be a blog of free association. But if you cannot ruminate on a blog, what is left?

Nicholas Lemann got me going with his review of books about the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States, in the April 23rd New Yorker.

As I read through this, various images popped into my field of vision. But, if you are like the hedgehog and you want the one big thing to tie all this together, it would be that people believe what they want to believe for their own reasons and then they use numbers, and statistics to make these beliefs sound more respectable and convincing to others.

This idea was explored a week or two ago in the New York Times Review of Books about "reasoning" and how we come to our own beliefs. What I got out of all that was something I have come to understand through years at my own journal club, where we review articles in the medical literature, about things like whether T cells are good for killing malignant tumors, or whether or not a given drug will benefit diabetics or whether fiber in foods can prevent colon cancer. There is always a background reason the study was done--somebody has tenure riding on the outcome, or some drug company stands to make money. Even in this arena, where you would think people could be disinterested, doing the experiment and letting the facts lead them where they may--no, all too often there are unseen reasons for the author to want to come to a particular conclusion.

More dramatically, and far more obvious has been the United States Supreme Court, where for years, the "judgments" are forgone conclusions. No one has ever answered my question, posed many times on this blog: If you can read a one paragraph description of any case with significant social implications, and you can predict with 95% accuracy how 8 of the 9 justices will vote, how much could the law be guiding the process and how much of all this is simply people circling around back to their own dearly held beliefs?  For the Court, these beliefs usually come down to   the importance of maintaining order in society versus the rights of the individual to dissent.

So here we have a spate of books considering the distribution of wealth in the USA. One thing nobody seems to dispute is the pie graphs showing huge slices of wealth and income (not necessarily the same thing) belonging to small numbers of people in the USA, and a distribution of wealth we used to associate with countries like Brazil and Argentina.

The first question is: Is this a bad thing, a social or national ill?

The next question is: How did/does this happen?

The last question is: If it is a bad thing, what can/should be done to fix it?

Timothy Noah has written The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We can Do About It. He notes 93% of the gains in wealth since 2010 went to the richest 1% of the population. He points out that when people do express outrage at this, they tend to blame the government.

Charles Murray says in Coming Apart:The State of White America, 1960-2010 that the lower income part of our population has been imprisoned, divorced, jobless and having children out of wedlock at substantially higher rates over the past decade. Poor people have lost the ethic of work and family, he says, and in prior books he blamed this on a government program, Aid to Dependent Children, which no longer exists. 
So now Murray says the reason for the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is the rich are hardworking, dedicated to their children and see no connection or obligation to those who are failing and falling behind. Trying to shift resources away from the elite is doomed to failure because this is a case f the cream rising to the top. It's the old British thing: successful people are successful because they are the elect; they are destined by genes to do better; they are chosen by God to pull that sword out of the stone and to go forth and rule over the dominion, just as man is meant to rule over cows and pigs and to eat them.
 If there is a solution, Murray says, it's for the non elite, (those failing, jobless, divorced poor) to get better values.

Murray describes the super elite as living in Chevy Chase, Maryland (and places like it) obsessing over what schools their children will go it. From the upper West Side of Manhattan to Shaker Heights to Scarsdale and Darien, we have high IQ people who've met other high IQ people at elite colleges, breeding and producing highly gifted children who are driven to succeed. They will marry, not divorce, remodel their kitchens and suck up the great part of the nation's wealth. All this is as it should be and we couldn't change it if we tried.

When I look at Chevy Chase, and its sister communities, places I know well, that is not an unfair description. 
And when I look at the folk I now live among, people from families of eight, whose parents never finished high school, or did just barely and got jobs in factories which no long exist in New Hampshire, or, if they were lucky, they  got federal jobs at the Portsmouth shipyard, got married before age twenty, had five kids, got divorced, lost their jobs. The lives of the lower 80% in New Hampshire sure do look different from the lives of the people living in the 20815 zip code of Chevy Chase.

I once wandered through a State University of New York campus at New Platz and chatted with students and listened to them and I thought, with considerable disquietude, "This is where the C students wind up." And it was a very depressing experience. The vitality and the energy of the Ivy League campuses, where people felt they were winning and, if they kept trying, were destined to live great lives, were conspicuously absent at New Paltz.

And you have to wonder, how is it Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both wound up at Harvard?

Was there some way of identifying these people who would pull the sword out of the stone? Are SAT exams really that good?
And how does Stanford pick all those winners?

By this line of thinking, the successful are successful for Identifiable  reasons; conversely the failures are failures for the same reasons.

David Rothkopft in Power, Inc. doesn't believe success is all nature and no nurture. He says the reason some succeed is the winners had been able to change the rules of the game once they win, and they can then ensure their ongoing success and they can ensure the  failure of others. 
 It goes beyond the experience of the board game Monopoly, where everyone plays the game by the rules but some people gain an advantage and use that to put hotels on Boardwalk and then suck the money from those who land on their space and use their early success to bleed others dry. It is more a case of the winners having changed the rules so they get to roll the dice twenty times before their competitors get a chance to roll even once. 
 In Rothkopft's analysis, supercitizens (multinational corporations, global corporations) have become more powerful than governments and take over control of the parts of governments most useful to them and change the rules to ensure their continued success.

Rothkopft's solution is for government to refuse to allow the rules to be changed to ensure the success of the supercitizens, and in fact to change the rules to allow the downtrodden a better chance. Of course, this brings to mind Affirmative Action, an anathema to Justice Clarence Thomas and his three like minded colleagues, not to mention Rush Limbaugh.

Tony Judt in Ill Fares the Land argues the rise and domination of the one percenters did not occur because they were God's elect, or because they were selected by natural selection of the most brilliant or because it was inevitable cream would rise to the top. In fact, looking at a time when income and wealth were distributed more evenly, this was a time when government vigorously supported health care, old age pensions, public transportation and education. Government created a rising tide which lifted all boats, not a tsunami which sent some boats soaring to safe high peaks and swamped everyone else.

David Cost sees government as an inevitable failure machine, in Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic. For him, government always does great damage. It's easy to understand the argument, which has some merit but not all that much. Daniel Patrick Moynahan had a subtle enough mind to see the problems with the welfare system as it had evolved until the Clinton presidency.

I saw what he saw in an inner city clinic where 13 year old girls came to clinic pregnant and when I asked them how they planned to raise the child, they shrugged and said, "Welfare." The new baby was handed off not to grandmother, who was 20 something and had a government job to go to, but to great grand mother who was 46 and living at home on welfare and getting government pay outs to provide care to her great grandchild's new baby. When the government rules changed, that sort of behavior was no longer a good financial option and abortion rates rose.

So where does all this leave me, you and me?

The easiest thing is to say, well, it's all written. Those low IQ people we meet every day in New Hampshire will have 8 kids they cannot educate or adequately support and they will live lives of failure, in mobile homes, in and out of jobs. At best, they'll marry and stay married to their childhood sweet hearts and they'll be reasonably content living on Social Security, listening to Rush Limbaugh every day, convincing them they are superior to the liberal elite snobs who have kept them down.

The harder thing would be to say, we've got to do something to change the lot of the losers. But changing the lot of the losers is hard and often perilous and full of risk and discord. Changing the lot of the slaves, the biggest losers in the history of the Americas (next to the Indians), took a Civil War. Changing the lot of the descendants of those slaves tore the nation apart in the 1960's, a hundred years later.

It's so much easier to just let the winners be winners and the losers losers. Everyone knows his place.

I remember all those arguments occurring on campus in the mid 60's when some of my professors argued if you try to change things, if you try to integrate restaurants, to allow Negroes to eat at lunch counters next to whites, to use white only bathrooms, to go to college, to move into white only neighborhoods, to marry white women, to get jobs in police and fire departments, to become officers in the military, why then the expectations of the Negro will soar, and, inevitably, they'll be disappointed and they will explode.

Of course, it was not the Negroes who exploded when they got all that. It was the Whites who found their own position had changed.

That story of the white farmer who shot the mule of his Black neighbor stays with me. The Black farmer got a new mule and with that mule he was able to plow straight rows and grow more corn and cotton than the white farmer. So the white farmer took his gun and sot the Black farmer's mule. When the white farmer's son asked why he had done that the white farmer replied, "If I ain't no better than a nigger, then what am I?"

So, all these authors have looked at details and come to the conclusions they started out to prove. 
For me it's this: The world is a better place when we make efforts to help those who have been the losers. It's not as comfortable and it's not an unalloyed success when you try to change the lot of other people, but, over time, I'd much rather live in the integrated United States of American than the racially segregated America I grew up in. And I'm grateful there was a City College of New York which allowed my first generation immigrant parents to get a college education and to assimilate into America. When they went to CCNY, the glittering prizes still went to the children of parents who went to Harvard, Yale and Princeton, but college still made a difference to the first generation who went to CCNY.

Change toward equality made this country a better place.

And as nasty and blood stained as our nation's history is, it still gives me a chill to think no other nation in the history of the planet ever fought a Civil War on the scale we did to raise up an underclass they way we did. People have argued that's not what motivated Northerners to fight. But I'll take Lincoln at his word when he remarked in his Second Inaugural address that the slaves, ultimately were the cause of the war. And he remarked, on the occasion of the visit of Harriet Beecher Stowe to the White House, leaning down from his six foot height to shake the hand of the diminutive author of Uncle Tom's Cabin

"So this is the little lady, who wrote the book, that started the great big war."

What other country can say that? That is the big thing.