Probably the last place you want to go for information about the causes of poverty is the New York Times. You can lump every liberal rag in there and just call it the ruling class propaganda organ. It’s not that they don’t know anything useful about poverty. It’s that they are obsessed with jamming everything into the preferred, self-serving narrative about white racism and white privilege. After all, the focus of their life is jostling for status amongst their peers about hating white people. Example.
Let’s imagine for a moment that there are no political pressures distorting our discussion of poverty and that we can look at it as a technical problem, not a moral one.
Maybe we would find that most explanations – left, right and center – are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing.
Before we take this thought experiment further, we should consider the ramifications of new research that provides insight into urban social disorder, worklessness, the rising salience of education and the shortcomings of government policy.
In ruling class circles, being non-ideological is sort of like wearing glasses without lenses. In both cases, it is a pose. No one seriously wants bad vision and no one seriously wants to abandon the one true faith or put it on equal footing with the mongrel faiths. It’s what drives the fake nerd fad and you see the signaling in the first graph.
He also gives the game a way a bit by assuming it is impossible to escape political pressure when discussing anything. That’s an identifying characteristic of every radical cult. For them, it is always about who? whom? so that means politics infuses every aspect of their lives. The author just assumes this is true of everyone.
David Autor, an economist at M.I.T. best known for exploring the costs to American workers of automation and trade with China, has recently expanded the scope of his research on unemployment to look at the consequences for men who grow up in a fatherless household.
In a paper published last year, Autor, working in collaboration with a fellow M.I.T. economist, Melanie Wasserman, found that “the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition; employment rates; occupational stature; and real wage levels.” The trends have been much worse for men than women because “the absence of stable fathers from children’s lives has particularly significant adverse consequences for boys’ psychosocial development and educational achievement.”
Autor and Wasserman cite data showing that “after controlling for a host of individual and family characteristics, growing up in a single-parent home appears to significantly decrease the probability of college attendance for boys, yet has no similar effect for girls.” The authors add that when raised with a nonresidential father, “boys perform less well academically than girls.”
Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins whose book “Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America,” will be published later this year, looks at much the same problem as Autor, but from a different vantage point.
For the non-college educated, Cherlin wrote to me by email, “the majority of their births will occur outside of marriage, often in fragile cohabiting unions that have high break-up rates.” Conversely, the overwhelming majority of men and women with college degrees marry before they have children, have experienced a drop in their divorce rate and have seen their incomes rise as both husband and wife work.
The result, Cherlin points out, is that a “bachelor’s degree is the closest thing to a class boundary that exists today.”
There are a few things worth pointing out here. One is how the Left tends to look at humans as an alien species. If you wanted to learn something about France, for example, you would go to France. If possible, you would quiz someone with knowledge of France. Our Progressive overlords talk long about the value of personal experience as a spiritual enhancer, yet they chuck it for the quackery of social science when it comes to dealing with their fellow humans.
Then we have the amnesia. Since forever, the ruling class has been pushing things like no fault divorce, non-traditional coupling, consequence free sex, drugs, etc. In the 60’s and 70’s these ideas blew through the lower classes like a tornado. The moral obligation of the ruling class is to espouse and enforce the unwritten rules that maintain order amongst the lower classes. The ruling class not only failed at this, they encouraged that which has done nothing but sow disorder amongst the people.
Finally, we have the self-congratulations. Class has been a part of human society since the beginning. The four year degree is not a class boundary. It is one of many class symbols. Thomas B. Edsall, like every old liberal warhorse has used credentials to attach himself to the ruling class like a barnacle. His employer requires a degree for secretarial jobs so they can avoid being in the same room with the riff-raff. If college is a class barrier, it is because guys like Thomas B. Edsall insist on it.
The emergence of a rough ideological consensus on the causes of poverty and inequality would increase the likelihood of, but by no means guarantee, agreement on such initiatives as raising the minimum wage, increasing and expanding the scope of the earned-income tax credit, programs promoting marriage and paternal involvement, as well as stronger efforts to improve the quality of education, especially in poor neighborhoods.
This is classic hive thinking. “If only those idiots outside the hive would come around to our way of thinking we can do all the stuff we want.” The fact that his hive has been in charge of poverty programs for 70 years and has tried all of these things over and over for decades, has no bearing on his outlook.
Poor people are poor for three reasons. One is they are on the left side of the bell curve, in general. There are plenty of exceptions, but not being very bright is a hard thing to overcome and it always has been. Unless you plan to euthanize the stupid, the poor will always be with us.
Second, poor people make poor decisions. They are impulsive and want what they want when they want it. A poor person comes into money and buys a car, new clothes and drinks at the bar. Mr. Edsall comes into money and he calls his broker. Delayed gratification is punishment in the ghetto. In SWPL-ville, it is a virtue and one of the highest ones. You can never fix this, but you can mitigate it by not promoting ghetto parasites like the hip-hop community.
Finally, a lot of people like being working class. This is something the Hive never understands nor tolerates. They hate poor people and they really hate working class people. The poor are a constant reminder of their failure to reach Utopia. The working class are a rebuke to the Hive. These are people who could embrace the culture of the hive, but choose not too. They could watch the English Premier League, but prefer the NFL and NASCAR. That’s why the Left hates them.
