The Sticky Ladder -- by David Brooks: a response

I'm always a little wary of Brooks. He always comes out of the gate and says something intelligent, and I say to myself "Am I reading this right? Does he appear to be turning into a sensible person?" I am always disappointed by the end of his piece and this column is no different.

Brooks seems to think that "there are some indications that it is becoming harder and harder for people to climb the ladder of success." Really? Who told him so? The Economist, that's who. And, those living in Europe, a continent which "[seems] more class riven and less open," are just as socially mobile as we are in the United States. Gasp. This is a problem for him. The US should be about social mobility, a place where the next generation is better off than the previous.

I'm glad that he is pointing this out, but he sure is underselling the argument. Differences between quintiles have been growing for decades now, producing not so much an underclass of perpetually poor, but an overclass of perpetually wealthy (although to really see the effect, quinties are too broad -- it is best to look at the differences in wealth from percentile to percentile). Some people are wealthy enough to shut themselves off from normal society. People who don't rely at all on normal government social programmes like schools and medicine, let alone welfare and social security. It is these people that the current deregulatory push is aimed at pleasing.

But, the rich are running away with the show. According to Brooks, there is a causal link between the family income and childhood education. Rich kids, say Brooks, do better because they have more money to spend on, say, a Harvard education. Those kids will inevitably do better in life than their poorer counterparts who, say, went to the state university. In turn, the kids of Harvard grads will do better than the kids of state schools graduates, and so on.

All of this comes clumsily to a point at the end, when his true intent is revealed: "We can spend all we want on schools. But if families are disrupted, if the social environment is dysfunctional, bigger budgets won't help." Meaning, of course, why fund schools when it is one's place in society that really determines a kid's future?

So, he is really invoking a favorite argument -- breakdown of society/family. He drops the name of James Coleman, who wrote some very influential sociology/rational choice/economics pieces during the last part of the 20th century. Coleman wrote on social capital. Social capital, defined in varying ways, generally means the value of the social connections between people, which helps the mechanisms of society function smoothly. One could, with some necessary qualifiers, boil it down to "it isn't what you know but who you know." Old boys networks are rich in social capital, as are block clubs and church groups. In a way, gangs are rich in social capital, but they use that capital for ends, which are generally at odds with the rest of society. The ends of the capital must be defined for social capital is the same as monetary capital -- it can be used to purchase anything.

Social capital is not necessarily related to ones income. Just as one cannot form a tight bond with ones neighbor when one works two minimum wage jobs, a bankers who logs 80 hour work weeks can't really pop over for a cup of tea. The effect is widespread across the US; it prompted Robert Putnam to write a book titled Bowling Alone, because of the steep drop-off in bowling league attendance, and indeed all civic participation, across America. (Although Putnam deems pop culture to be the main culprit.)

The guy working two minimum wage jobs probably doesn't live in a rich NYC suburb or on the North Shore of Chicago. And, where education is concerned the banker would probably have to send his or her kids to the local public school, if better private option were available. The struggling worker has no option but the local public school.

So social capital can't be used as a scapegoat for poor performance. How much should schools be funded, I can't say, but it certainly can't be in relation to the surrounding society.

That, of course, brings me to an even larger problem – the fact that most public schools are funded by local property tax. Rich kids in rich schools live in rich neighborhoods while poor kids go to poor schools and live in poor neighborhoods. Maybe that imbalance should be addressed as well as Brooks’ perceived social breakdown.

I agree with him that the lack of a rigid class structure is good. We have no defined royalty, and we don't go around referring to someone as Lord This, Lady That or Sir What’s-his-name.

Indeed the irony of the US is that because we all have the idea that we could one day be multi-millionaires, we don't want to tax those who already are, lest we be taxed one day at that same rate.