leftfielder.org

I’d like to touch briefly on a comment to Scott’s last post. The commentator states: “The obvious proxy for the cost prohibitive mechanism is outcomes. If people of different groups are able to achieve similar outcomes, we can rest assured that the doors are open. The problem is that the reverse logic doesn’t hold — if a group fails to be mobile, is it because of lack of opportunity, lack of ability, or lack of motivation? Hard to say.”

It is easier to describe a situation than to explain why it came to be. We can look at statistics that describe the way things are in terms of social mobility. Mike is correct. African Americans and Hispanics have been less mobile groups than other classes of people.

So, the commentator continues: “Right now Mike’s point is that looking at outcomes, it seems that the current system has failed (at least, that’s what I think he’s saying). While I agree that equality of opportunity (rather than outcome) is what we should be striving for, how can one ever measure the former? Is striving for equality of outcome as a way to ensure equality of opportunity a wise and/or useful societal goal?”

This argument is a tautology. Assumption 1: the success of the government depends on the outcomes. Assumption 2: if looking at the outcomes, certain groups are less mobile, then the government has failed. Conclusion: because the success of the government depends on the outcomes, you should focus only on equalizing the outcomes.

Further, the assumptions which have been credited to Mike, are inaccurate. This is the whole point about the extra-governmental factors influencing social mobility. Hypothetically, you could have complete equality of opportunity provided by the government and yet have divergent outcomes.

You could also have compete equality in outcome and have inequality of opportunity. For example, if affirmative action through a quota system worked and equalized the mobility percentages of African Americans and Hispanics as against Caucasians. It would work by increasing mobility of the former groups and decreasing mobility of the latter group. Affirmative action in this sense does little to limit the opportunities of rich and middle class Caucasians, but it does a pretty good job of limiting opportunities for poor Caucasians.

The government should focus on the opportunity aspect, because it can control that to a greater degree. Obviously, perfection will not be possible. A school in Seattle may have .4 desktop computers per student and good teachers while a school in Dothan, Alabama may have .2 desktop computers per student and mediocre teachers. The government can bridge the gap, but it can never make it competely equal. But this is not a fault, but just a manifestation of the fact of human imperfection.

I think the focus should be on how the government can come closest to providing equality of opportunity. The focus should not be on the outcomes because the outcomes do not reflect solely what the government can control.

Man, I don’t even know where to start on this topic. Well, okay, I do, but it’s not a product of any original thought on my part. I should start by linking to two articles, one in the Economist (sub. req.) and an op/ed by David Brooks in the NYT/IHT. One or both of these was the inspiration for Mike’s initial question, I suspect…

Here’s a quick-hit summary of the two articles: Income disparity has spiked to incredibly high levels recently. Social mobility may or may not have decreased lately, but in any case it has not spiked to keep pace with the increase in income disparity. Americans tend not to recognize this as a problem, for a couple reasons: 1) the American Dream/Horatio Alger myth is more or less still a potent meme, and 2) American are still hypercompetitive — just within their social class rather than between classes (think rich New Yorkers fighting to get their toddlers into prestigious preschools, or middle-class suburban teenagers fighting for college admissions [disclosure: that was me ten years ago]). Education isn’t the silver bullet it once was back when Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt roamed the earth, because — among other reasons — there’s a higher base of education across the country now and education no longer seems sufficient to bridge class divides.

Fair enough. Those are my base assumptions — quibble with them if you’d like.

Hiren says that social mobility and income disparity should be divorced conceptually. Mike says that they’re related and driven by the same forces. Me? I’ll take the lawyer’s way out and say that they’re both partially correct and that we need to add confusing analysis. I think it’s pretty clear that the two phenomena are driven by the same underlying forces, but that policymakers should place different priorities on them.

The discussion seems to be focusing more on social mobility, which is fine with me because it’s more interesting personally. But let me say this about income disparity: I don’t care about income disparity as much if the poorest elements of American society are provided for in the most basic of ways. That is, even if numerically the spread between our society’s richest and poorest is roughly identical to the spread around the turn of the (last) century or the Depression, I’m less concerned about it right now. Why? Well, by and large: The poor of our nation now are no longer sharecroppers. They are no longer crammed into tenements in dramatically unsanitary conditions. Child labor no longer exists/is prevalent. Education is available and used by our nation’s children until at least their teenage years, and usually beyond that. Discrimination in education and employment is no longer codified in law.

[Important caveat: I'm in no way asserting that such things no longer exist in the US. They do, and they are tragic, and we and our government should fight them at every turn. However, I feel quite comfortable in asserting that these practices are dramatically less prevalent than they were a century ago, which is the point I wish to make.]

Viewed from an absolute sense, we’re better off now than we were a century ago. We’ve taken what were the very bottom levels of our society socioeconomically and eradicated them. That we might have the same relative disparity currently simply means we’ve added commensurately higher levels of the hyperwealthy — which is a trade-off I’ll take every time. Income disparity isn’t as much of a concern as where the floor of that comparison exists absolutely. At least to me.

I’m tired now, and don’t have my thoughts put together on social mobility, so I’ll address it in a later post. Here’s what I’ll be thinking about, though:

• Mike’s statement that “Social mobility requires that money from the upper-classes be reinvested into the lower classes.” Tentatively, I’m thinking that’s an incomplete statement — too specific. Legacy university admissions is my counterexample at the moment — fixing whatever problems they may cause wouldn’t require redistribution of income.
• Hiren’s statement that “the choice to move up the ladder is affected by much more than whether the government provides the mechanism to move up the ladder.” Again, seems too broad — “much more” seems like an exaggeration. Hiren’s example seems to contain the seeds of its counterexample — had the government not provided the educational system within which our stereotypical Jewish immigrants succeeded, wouldn’t those immigrants been in largely the same boat as our stereotypical Italian immigrants, assuming (foolishly and unreasonably) that all other things were equal?
• What’s better, assuming the total societal weath is equal: a society with high social mobility but a low income floor, or a society with low social mobility but a higher income floor? (Would you rather have a shot at being a warlord in a banana republic, or a safe life as a paper-shuffler in a post-industrial republic?) Does income disparity factor into this at all?
• Inheritance taxes seem really unfair to me. I don’t buy Mike’s explanation at all — the parent’s incentive to earn to provide for their children’s and family’s future is a prime motivator, right? Isn’t taking away a chunk of what those individuals earned upon an arbitrary event like death just so whatever progeny they might have can be reset to zero pretty much antithetical to the American Dream — at the very least for the deceased? If it’s just redistribution of income you want, then monkey with the tax rates as I earn the dough — don’t take it away from me after I’ve already got it in my grubby little lawyer hands. I was glad to see the estate tax go away; the whole concept gives me the willies.
• How do you go about goosing social mobility? Is progressive taxation itself enough? Where should we redistribute the income (grants in kind? investment in government programs?)? Can the education system be tweaked to get the desired results? What about non-financial measures (affirmative action/elimination of legacies/etc.)?

To be continued… (Feel free to jump in during the interim, though! )