Basic Human Dignity Conclusion

It would seem, in short, that the redemptive value of labor, and the mythologies that support it, are being challenged on a number of fronts.  This may still be the land of opportunity, but it is a land of significantly diminished opportunity.  For some, of course, diminished opportunity means no opportunity, at least not within the legitimate economy, and this is particularly true of uneducated males, those who would have performed unskilled or semi-skilled labor in the past.  It is not surprising that an economy lagging the population in the creation of jobs with decent wages and benefits conversely, and perversely, creates greater and greater opportunity for the sorts of moral decay that Murray and others point out.  If the need for basic human dignity cannot be satisfied in one context, it is likely to be satisfied within another, and it is perhaps not surprising that those who populate the drug gangs of Detroit and the militias of the upper peninsula are largely under-educated, marginalized males.

The problem, such as it is, will not be solved with the repatriation of factory jobs.  The factory is not your grandfather's factory, which demanded and paid reasonably well for unskilled and semi-skilled labor of the sort that could be learned on the job. It worth reminding ourselves that life on the factory floor was not peaches and roses.  Inter-generational upward mobility, in the pop culture mythologies, was often about escaping the mind numbing, soul destroying work on the factory floor.  As someone has said (I forget who) Marx was wrong about communism and the sweeping imperatives of history, but he was right in his observations about the industrialized capitalism that exploited labor.  If the factory jobs requiring unskilled and semi-skilled labor were repatriated from China and India, it is quite likely that we would need to import labor for exploitation, as we do now for those farm jobs that cannot be mechanized, in part because few Americans would submit to the conditions of life required by those jobs.  The factories today do provide good jobs, but they are jobs that require education, and rather sophisticated education at that.  When someone like Nicholas Kristof writes that "eighty percent of the people in my high school cohort dropped out or didn't pursue college because it used to be possible to earn a solid living at the steel mill, the glove factory or sawmill," the economic pressures that sent the glove factory elsewhere is only half the picture.  The eighty percent made a choice that may well mask another reality.  For them, the immediate opportunities of "glove work" was preferable to the deferred opportunities of "school-work," but why?

The answers to that question are varied, and complex, and structural, and difficult, and that is part of the problem.  If Kristof and others are correct, if we are "facing a crisis in which a chunk of working class America risks being calcified into an underclass, marked by drugs, despair, family decline, high incarceration rates and a diminishing role of jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility," then we also need more, not less social policy.  While there is reason to avoid discussion of an "underclass," there is also a mounting body of evidence to suggest that war zone trauma is real, and many of our children are being raised in the equivalent of a war zone where the damage done is perhaps more real, more extensive, and more permanent than we might want to imagine.  As Kristof put it, "the pathologies are achingly real," and for many those pathologies may put jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility, the intellectual and cultural skills necessary to pursue jobs and education, as permanently out of reach as the escalators to the third floor of Tiffanys.  Moral disapprobation will not solve their problems, and may well exacerbate them, though again I hardly need to point out that, within our political discourse, there is an ever greater tendency to assign blame, not to structural deficiencies within within our economic systems and social structures, but to the moral failings of those individuals trapped in violent neighborhoods, with decaying schools, and fewer and fewer opportunities of escape.  When Kristof counsels us to "get real" and suggests that "the solution isn't finger wagging, or averting our eyes -- but opportunity," he points to a crises of faith, of liberal faith.  It is the faith that has animated American secular life and provided a center that allowed various religious and cultural backgrounds to flourish under the same flag.  If our gods were disparate, we could all believe and seek some measure of redemption in the eyes of others from meaningful and productive labor.  If there is a crises of faith in America today, it is not that we have fallen away from "traditional Christian values" or anything of the sort.  It is rather the growing realization that a growing number of Americans have no path to redemption -- the way has been permanently closed -- and it is easier and more satisfying to blame them than find solutions.            

Basic Human Dignity Continued

If we can smugly marginalize those not working, a marginalization helped along by racial attitudes, the emergent structures of the job market make it difficult to apply the old standards of blame.  When 60 minutes features a panel of heretofore middle class people who have lost work, who desperately want to work, but because they have struggled to find work over an extended period of time, find themselves not only unemployed, but increasingly unemployable.  The 60 minutes panelists, black and white -- nearly all of whom looked comfortable in suits -- nearly all of whom were educated, well-spoken and professional -- nevertheless found themselves in line for food stamps.   Nearly all articulated well the sense of shame, the loss of recognition and personal identity that came with the loss of work, the nagging sense that "they are right, something must be wrong with me that I find myself in this situation, that I cannot extricate myself from this situation."  The likes of Herbert Caine as a viable (if only briefly) conservative presidential candidate points to the deeper structure, the persistent belief that, no matter the structural barriers, no matter the overt (and covert) bigotry, upward mobility is not only possible, but the likely reward for cleverness and hard work.  As many have pointed out, Caine has allowed conservatives to reassure themselves that it's not about race, rather it is about values, and people who are entangled in the socialist safety net and cannot extricate themselves are there because they lack some intrinsic quality.  For those with pluck (and here it helps to remind ourselves of the luck in pluck) it is possible that they will get ahead on the strength of initiative alone, and even more likely in the absence of the regulatory state's rolls of red tape.

The difficulty, of course, is that there is only the anecdotal exception to support the mythology of upward mobility.  It is still possible, though less and less likely.  In the recent issue of the New Republic, Timothy Noah writes, "when American's express indifference about the problem of unequal incomes, it's usually because they see the United States as a land of boundless opportunity," particularly compared to the likes of western Europe.  As he points out, however, it just isn't true.  "Most of western Europe today is both more equal in incomes and more economically mobile than the US."  Likewise, in a recent edition of the New York Times (Jan 4, 2012), Jason DeParle writes, "despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62% of American's (male and female) raised in th top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths."  He goes on to point out, that "similarly 65 percent of those born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths."  There is some residual mobility of the middle incomes, as DeParle reports, "even by measures of relative mobility, Middle America remains fluid. About 36 percent of Americans raised in the middle fifth move up as adults, while 23 percent stay on the same rung and 41 percent move down, according to Pew research. The “stickiness” appears at the top and bottom, as affluent families transmit their advantages and poor families stay trapped."  While it is encouraging that 36 percent of Americans have moved up, it is disturbing that slightly more Americans, 41 percent, are moving down into the bottom two-fifths.   There is as much, and slightly more, downward mobility.  I won't belabor the point, except to point out that, as income inequality increases, income mobility decreases. The mechanism may not be clear, but the correlation is clear enough and ominous.  It is worth pointing out that those in the bottom two-fifths, in sheer headcount, outnumber those in the top two-fifths by a considerable margin.  At what point will the majority of Americans be low income, and poor?

To be Continued 
   

Basic Human Dignity Continued

If labor is indeed to be redemptive, both materially and ethically, it must be available, and therein lies the first rub.   There is, of course, the persistent belief that America is the land of opportunity.   I won't unpack it fully, but the basic outline is this:  the American economy may not produce equal results, but it does offer up equal opportunity to all who apply themselves, those who are able and willing to work hard in pursuit of happiness or as the contestants of American idol, one after another, put it, "in pursuit of my dream."  Anyone who spends over five minutes thinking about it realizes that the American economy produces neither equal results, nor does it offer up equal opportunity, if by opportunity we mean something less grandiose than rock stardom and more conducive to day-to-day life -- the availability of "jobs with decent wages and good benefits."  Even though employment of late has shown some signs of recovery after the great recession of 2008, there remain significant causes of concern.  The Economic Policy Institute headlined a recent report that "The US labor market starts 2012 with solid positive signs, but fewer jobs than it had in 2001."   The most discouraging sign is job growth relative to population.  As the Institute reports, "the labor force has grown by less than half a million workers since the recession started, though working age population has grown by 10 million in that time."  If the number of jobs available does not keep pace with the population, and it shows few signs of doing so, then a significant percentage of our population does not now, and may never have opportunity for legal employment of any sort, much less "jobs with decent wages and benefits."

I should point out that a significant percentage of our population has not had access to work for some time now, and the disappearance of opportunity disproportionately afflicts those who have been historically at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, particularly the African American community.  In this regard William Julius Wilson's study, When Work Disappears: the World of the New Urban Poor, is instructive.  He describes what is, in effect, a vicious cycle of despair, noting "where jobs are scarce, where people rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to help their friends and neighbors find jobs, and where there is a disruptive or degraded school life purporting to prepare youngsters for eventual participation in the workforce, many people eventually lose their feeling of connectedness to work in the formal economy."  When pundits like Krugman express alarm that "long-term unemployment -- the percentage of workers who have been out of work for six months or more -- remains at levels not seen since the Great Depression," there is a clear and present danger that more and more neighborhoods will be sucked into the vortex, described by Wilson, that more and more Americans will "no longer expect work to be a regular, and regulating, force in their lives," and that such "circumstances also increase the likelihood that the residents will rely on illegitimate sources of income, thereby further weakening their attachment to the legitimate labor market."  It is perhaps a mark of our clandestine racism that writers like Murry, in Coming Apart, when the blight associated with inner-city, black ghettos seems to be spreading into white neighborhoods and the increasingly meth-infested small town America.  When the blight is confined to the inner-city ghetto, it is easier to focus current policy discussions of the welfare state on "the shortcomings of individuals and families and not on the structural and social changes in the society at large that have made life so miserable for many inner-city ghetto residents,"  changes in society that have produced "certain unique responses and behavior patterns over time" of the sort reflected in hardcore hip hop.   When the blight is no longer the problem of third world America and is bleeding into the larger population, the conservatives it seems are doubling down on the "shortcomings of individuals," with Rick Santorum talking about "the narcotic of dependency" and Mitt Romney suggesting that government programs "foster passivity and sloth."  This may well be true, but the path to redemption is narrower of late, and there is little to suggest that dismantling the various safety net programs will do much to foster engagement and industry without improving opportunity.

To be Continued