What's Class Got to Do, Got to Do with It?

More and more talk these days about growing socioeconomic inequality.  For example, according to the Pew Research Center:

In 1982, the highest-earning 1% of families received 10.8% of all pretax income, while the bottom 90% received 64.7%, according to research by UC-Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez. Three decades later, according to Saez’ preliminary estimates for 2012, the top 1% received 22.5% of pretax income, while the bottom 90%’s share had fallen to 49.6% — the lowest level since at least 1917.

Inequality is higher in the US in comparison to other developed economies (2nd highest income inequality, after taxes and transfers, out of 31 OECD countries).  The income gap between whites and blacks and Hispanics has grown.  Inequality of wealth is even more skewed.  And notably, says Pew, "Americans are relatively unconcerned about the wide income gap between rich and poor" (see 2013 global attitudes survey here).

Why not?  Maybe because we're so good at rationalizing it?  Matthew Hutson suggests this in his piece for Slate, Social Darwinism Isn't Dead.

New research indicates that in order to justify your lifestyle, you might even adjust your ideas about the power of genes. The lower classes are not merely unfortunate, according to the upper classes; they are genetically inferior.

Hutson summarizes this research, and gives some examples of social darwinist talk, such as that of former Lt. Governor of South Carolina, Andre Bauer.  During a 2010 town hall meeting, he said this in response to a question about school lunch programs:

My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. . .You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better.

The problem with this example--aside from the grotesque lack of empathy--is that Bauer isn't a member of the elite, those one percenters, and probably not in even the top 5% in terms of wealth and income (check out this NY Times site where you can guestimate your class position).  This brings me to what I think is the cognitive obstacle to reducing socioeconomic inequality.  It's not so much the elite, who have always rationalized their disparate wealth (or never deigned to to explain it).  It's that swath of people constituting the amorphous middle class--from employed working class folks on up to the upper middle class (where Bauer probably sits).  These are the ones who live on various comfortable rationales for inequality.

This large group includes people who are happy with inequality, even revel in it, as long as they're on the winning side of the movement of capital, from the schmucks who have little to the dashing buccaneers who evidently deserve a lot.  Back in 2004, CBS News acquired the following from the Justice Department, a recording of two Enron employees gloating over all the money they made for their company by driving up energy rates under false pretenses, and joking about a California utility's effort to recover some of that money:

Employee 5: They f_ _ _in' takin' all the money back from you guys?  All the money you stole from those poor grandmothers in California?
Employee 6: [chuckling] Yeah, grandma Millie, man. . .
Employee 5: Yeah, now she wants her f_ _ _in' money back for all the money you charged, jammed right up her ass for f_ _ _in' $250 a megawatt hour. . .
[both chuckle a bit]

(You can learn more about this affair in the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room)

Or I could cite the more recent home mortgage crisis, where educated middle class people in the housing, mortgage, banking and financial industries--wittingly or not--colluded in screwing over other people and fomenting an economic crisis (listen to This American Life's excellent report on this in "Giant Pool of Money").

This large group includes managerial staff who think their paternalistic gesture towards underpaid employees is noble.  Even Forbes, hardly a bastion of liberalism, couldn't believe that Ohio Walmart managers last Thanksgiving ran a food drive for their employees.  "Associates?"  Orwell would roll his eyes.

Photo courtesy of Our Walmart
at http://www.today.com/news/wal-mart-defends-controversial-food-drive-employees-2D11618754

This large group includes all of us that consume media that routinely celebrate individualism and deny the effect of socioeconomic origins.  Bill Murray does a nice job of satirizing this in this clip from the 1979 movie, "Meatballs."  "It, meaning class, "just doesn't matter," he repeats, though the movie goes on to reward the lower class Camp North Star its first victory over the nearby upper class Camp Mohawk in the annual Olympiad.  That's the kind of story we tell ourselves over and over again.

And there's some truth to it, for sure.  There is more social mobility in the US than most countries in the world, though that mobility has declined in recent decades, in part because of growing inequality in our educational system (see this Brookings report).  But those of us who have not fallen down the class ladder tend to explain our success, and the failures of those on lower rungs, in individualistic terms.  We worked hard.  We earned what we have.  We acted responsibly.  They didn't.

Never mind that we probably went to better high schools, grew up in more stable communities, with families and sets of peers that socialized us to maneuver well in our economy.  But we didn't work hard for that.  We didn't earn it.  It came our way because we were born in a particular socioeconomic stratum (and in my case, I got more unearned entitlements because I'm white and male).

Am I arguing that economic outcomes for people are all structural?  No, clearly they're not because people from the same social class can go in different directions on the ladder (though the great majority stay in the same place), and people from the same social class can end up in very different economic niches (say, a political science professor compared to a bank manager or a chemist).  But I am saying that our staunch individualism, and our faith in the myth of 'pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps,' contributes to the widespread sentiment that socioeconomic inequality is nothing to worry about, or nothing we can can or should address, even as it continues to grow.

It's not the odd politician spouting silly social darwinist stuff who is really behind our inaction on inequality.  It's that "silent majority" Nixon loved so much who has turned a blind eye to the causes and consequences of inequality.