Thelen on the prospects for egalitarian capitalism

source: Kathleen Thelen, Varieties of Liberalization (kl 3310)

There is a version of economic historical thinking that we might label as "capitalist triumphalism" -- the idea that the institutions of a capitalist economy drive out all other economic forms, and that they tend towards an ever-more pure form of unconstrained market society. "Liberalization," deregulation, and reduction of social rights are seen as economically inevitable. On this view, the various ways in which some countries have tried to ameliorate the harsh consequences of unconstrained capitalism on the least well off in society are doomed -- the welfare state, social democracy, extensive labor rights, or universal basic income (link). Through a race to the bottom, any institutional reforms that impede the freedom and mobility of capital will be forced out by a combination of economic and political pressures.

The graphs above demonstrate the current structural differences among Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, and USA when it comes to training and income support for the unemployed and underemployed. It is visible that the four European economies devote substantially greater resources to support for the unemployed than the United States. And on the triumphalist view, the states demonstrating more generous benefits for the less-well-off will inevitably converge towards the profile represented by the fifth panel, the United States.

Kathleen Thelen is a gifted historical sociologist who has studied the institutions of labor education and training throughout the past twenty years. Her book How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan is an important contribution to our understanding of these basic economic institutions, and it also sheds important light on the meta-issues of stability and change in important social institutions. With James Mahoney she also edited the valuable collection Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power on this topic.

Thelen's most recent book, Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity addresses the question of capitalist triumphalism. (That isn't a term that she uses, but it seems descriptive.) She locates her analysis within the "varieties of capitalism" field of scholarship, which maintains that there is not a single pathway of development for capitalist systems. "Coordinated" capitalism and neoliberal capitalism represent two poles of the space considered by the VofC literature.

From the beginning, the VofC literature challenged the idea that contemporary market pressures would drive a convergence on a single best or most efficient model of capitalism. (kl 228)

Thelen is interested in assessing the prospects for what she calls "egalitarian" capitalism -- the variants of capitalist political economy that feature redistribution, social welfare, and significant policy support for the less-well-off. She focuses on several key institutions -- industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market institutions, and she argues that these are particularly central for the historical issue of the development of capitalism towards harsher or gentler versions.

Different varieties of liberalization occur under the auspices of different social coalitions, and this has huge implications for the distributive outcomes in which many of us are ultimately interested. (kl 243)

This point is key to her view of the plasticity and path-dependency of basic economic institutions: these institutions change as a result of economic imperatives and the strength of various social groups who are in a position to influence the form that change takes. "The conclusions I reach here are based on a view of institutions that emphasizes the political-coalitional basis on which they rest" (kl 259). But there is no simple calculus proceeding from power group to institutional outcome; instead, the results for institutional change are a dynamic consequence of strategy, coalition, and constraint.

I suggest that the institutions of egalitarian capitalism survive best not when they stably reproduce the politics and patterns of the Golden Era, but rather when they are reconfigured -- in both form and function -- on the basis of significantly new political support coalitions. (kl 330)

A key finding in Thelen's analysis is that "coordinated" capitalism and "egalitarian" capitalism are not the same. Coordinated capitalism corresponds to the models associated with social democracies of the 1950s and 1960s, the "Nordic" model. But Thelen holds that egalitarian capitalism can take more innovative and flexible forms and may be a more durable alternative to neoliberal capitalism.

Is a more "egalitarian" capitalism possible? The data on labor markets that Thelen presents shows that there are major differences across OECD economies when it comes to wage inequality. Here is a striking chart:

Source: Thelen, Figure 3.3. Share of Employees in Low-Wage Work, 2010

Fully a quarter of US workers are employed in low-wage work in 2010. This is about double the rate of Denmark and quadruple the rate of low-wage workers in Sweden. Plainly this reflects a US economy that is creating substantially greater numbers of low-income people than any other OECD country. And yet all of these countries are capitalist economies, some with rates of growth that are higher than the United States. This demonstrates that there are institutional and policy choices available that are consistent with the imperatives of a capitalist market economy and yet that give rise to more egalitarian outcomes than we observe in the US, Canada, and the UK.

A key element in common among the more egalitarian labor outcomes that Thelen studies (Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany) is the expansion of part-time work, mini-jobs, and "flexi-curity". This phenomenon reflects a combination of liberalization (relaxation of work rules and requirements of long labor contracts), with a set of arrangements that allows a smoother allocation of labor to jobs and an improvement in income and security for the lower end of the labor market. This trend is part of what Thelen calls a strategy of "embedded flexibilization", which she regards as the best hope for a pathway towards equitable capitalism.

Thelen closes with a realistic observation about the uncertain coalitional basis that is available in support of the policies of embedded flexibilization. Xenophobic tendencies in countries like the Netherlands and Denmark have the potential for destroying the social consensus that currently exists for this model, and the leaders of nationalistic anti-immigrant parties have made this a key to their efforts at political mobilization (kl 5541). Maintenance of these policies will require strong political efforts on the part of progressive coalitions in those countries, and organized labor is key to those efforts.

This analysis is deeply international and comparative, but it has an important consequence for the political economy of the United States: where are the coalitions that can help steer our economy towards a more egalitarian form of capitalism?

(Readers may be interested in an earlier discussion of the Nordic model; link.)

Public attitudes towards market fundamentalism

Several recent posts have raised the question, what would be needed to move US public policy towards a more equitable treatment of the bottom 75% of American society? Conditions for much of this super-majority of society have gradually declined in the past several decades, and public programs designed to ameliorate conditions of health, education, nutrition, and housing have come under severe attack from the right. Why have public policies turned away from active efforts towards improving the life conditions of the lower portion of society? And can we learn anything useful from international comparisons of attitudes on social welfare policies?

One key factor in understanding the politics of inequality in a country is the distribution of social attitudes across the population. How do Americans feel about government policies aimed at helping the less-well-off? How do we feel about the "social contract" that we have with each other over an economically, racially, and regionally diverse country?

The Pew Research Center has done a lot of research on this family of questions, and some recent results are summarized by Bruce Stokes in "Public Attitudes Toward the Next Social Contract" (link). Here are a few basic facts. The US spends a substantially lower share of its GDP on social expenditures than other OECD countries (19.4% versus 28.2% (Sweden) and 26.2% (Germany) (1)). And, as is now well familiar, wealth and income are highly unequal in the. US -- the top 1% gained 38.3% of all wealth growth in the US in the period 1983-2010, and the bottom 60% lost ground in wealth ownership (2).

So how do Americans feel about a social safety net? Consider this basic statement: "It is the responsibility of the government to take care for those who can't take care of themselves." A Pew Global Attitudes survey in 2007 found that 56% of Swedes and 52% of Germans strongly agreed with this statement, whereas only 28% of Americans as a whole strongly agreed with the statement (6). Moreover, this is one area where American society is most polarized. The percentage of people who identify as Republicans who agreed with a somewhat broader statement in 1987 was 62%; in 2012 this percentage had dropped to 36%. By contrast, Democrats have remained fairly constant in their support for this statement (75%).

Stokes closes with this summary statement:

Americans do have a social contract with each other and with their government. But this bond is currently under great strain. Americans' conflicting values and goals and deep partisan divisions over the specifics of the social safety net, along with worries about how to pay for it, suggest that the tensions surrounding the social contract will continue for some time. (13)

So how have American public attitudes about the key elements of the social safety net changed in the past fifteen years? Support has both polarized and declined. Here is a graph from the Pew study:

Now contrast this situation with that of Sweden. Stefan Svallfors provides an analysis of social attitudes in Sweden between 1981 and 2010, and he finds high and unwavering support for Sweden's extensive welfare state (link). His work is based on analysis of the Swedish Welfare State Surveys, replicated five times since 1981. Here is the most dramatic summary table.

Support for additional public spending on health care increased from 45% to 66% in 2010. Increased support for the elderly went from 30% who favored additional public support to 70%. Support for more spending on schooling increased from 26% to 60%. And support for increasing social assistance went from 16% to 22%. What this documents is strong and rising support for using public moneys to provide public benefits to all members of Swedish society, poor and rich alike. And that in turn demonstrates a very strong commitment to the social contract. Here is Svallfors' conclusion:

In conclusion, what may be said about the state of Swedish attitudes towards the welfare state? First, there are absolutely no signs of any decreasing public support for welfare policies. Overall, there is a large degree of stability in attitudes, and where change is registered, it tends to go in the direction of increasing support. More people state their willingness to pay higher taxes for welfare policy purposes; more people want collective financing of welfare policies; and fewer people perceive extensive welfare abuse in 2010 than was the case in previous surveys. Class patterns change so that the salaried and the self-employed become more similar to workers in their attitudes. (819)

Finally, here is a summary of recent research on Swedish attitudes towards immigrants (link).

Here too the bonds of social solidarity remain strong. The summary finding is that Swedes strongly support their country's rising ethnic diversity. 74% of Swedes expressed a positive attitude towards rising ethnic diversity in 2013, up six points from the prior year. Unlike other European countries where rising nationalist parties are cultivating an ugly anti-immigrant politics, Swedish society is strongly supportive of the increases in diversity that it is witnessing.

These are striking data for both societies. People in the United States show significantly lower (and declining) support for the social safety net than in many other countries, while the Nordic populations have sustained and even increased their high level of support for these public programs. The difficult political question is this: what sorts of things need to happen in order to inflect American attitudes and values in a more positive direction when it comes to empathy and social solidarity?

Basic social institutions and democratic equality

We would like to think that it is possible for a society to embody basic institutions that work to preserve and enhance the wellbeing of all members of society in a fair way. We want social institutions to be beneficent (producing good outcomes for everyone), and we want them to be fair (treating all individuals and groups with equal consideration; creating comparable opportunities for everyone).  There is a particularly fundamental component of liberal optimism that holds that the institutions of a market-based democracy accomplish both goals.  Economic liberals maintain that the economic institutions of the market create efficient allocations of resources across activities, permitting the highest level of average wellbeing. Free public education permits all persons to develop their talents. And the political institutions of electoral democracy permit all groups to express and defend their interests in the arena of government and law.

But social critics cast doubt on all parts of this story, based on the role played by social inequalities within both sets of institutions. The market embodies and reproduces a set of economic inequalities that result in grave inequalities of wellbeing for different groups. Economic and social inequalities influence the quality of education available to young people. And electoral democracy permits the grossly disproportionate influence of wealth holders relative to other groups in society.  So instead of reducing inequalities among citizens, these basic institutions seem to amplify them.

If we look at the fundamentals of social life in the United States we are forced to recognize a number of unpalatable realities: extensive and increasing inequalities of income, wealth, education, health, and quality of life; persistent racial inequalities; a growing indifference among the affluent and powerful to the poverty and deprivation of others; and a political system that is rapidly approaching the asymptote of oligarchy. It is difficult to be optimistic about our political future if we are particularly concerned about equality and opportunity for all; the politics of our time seem to be taking us further and further from these ideals.

So how should progressives think about a better future for our country and our world? What institutional arrangements might do a better job of ensuring greater economic justice and political legitimacy in the next fifty years in this country and other democracies of western Europe and North America?

Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson’s recent collection, Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond contains an excellent range of reflections on this set of problems, centered around the idea of a property-owning democracy that is articulated within John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. A range of talented contributors provide essays on different aspects and implications of the theory of property-owning democracy. The contributions by O'Neill and Williamson are especially good, and the volume is a major contribution to political theory for the 21st century.

Here is one of Rawls's early statements of the idea of a property-owning democracy in A Theory of Justice:

In property-owning democracy, ... the aim is to realize in the basic institutions the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal.  To do this, those institutions must, from the outset, put in the hands of citizens generally, and not only of a few, sufficient productive means for them to be fully cooperating members of society on a footing of equality. (140)

One thing that is striking about the discussions that recur throughout the essays in this volume is the important relationship they seem to have to Thomas Piketty’s arguments about rising inequalities in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty presents rising inequality as almost unavoidable; whereas the advocates for a property-owning democracy offer a vision of the future in which inequalities of assets are narrowed. The dissonance disappears, however, when we consider the possibility that the institutional arrangements of POD are in fact a powerful antidote to the economic imperatives identified by Piketty. And in fact the editors anticipate this possibility in their paraphrase of Rawls's reasons for preferring POD over welfare state capitalism:

Because capital is concentrated in private hands under welfare state capitalism, it will be difficult if not impossible to provide to call "the fair value of the political liberties"; that is to say, capitalist interests and the rich will have vastly more influence over the political process than other citizens, a condition which violates the requirement of equal political liberties. Second, Rawls suggests at points that welfare state capitalism produces a politics that tends to undermine the possibility of tax transfers sufficiently large to correct for the inequalities generated by market processes.(3)

These comments suggest that Rawls had an astute understanding of the ways that wealth and power and influence are connected; so he believed that a more equal prior distribution of assets is crucial for a just society.

The primary aim of this public activity is not to maximize economic growth (or to maximize utility) but rather to ensure that capital is widely distributed and that no group is allowed to dominate economic life; but Rawls also assumes that the economy needs to be successful in terms of conventional measures (i.e., by providing full employment, and lifting the living standards of the least well off over time). (4)

The editors make a point that is very incisive with respect to rising economic inequalities.

The concentration of capital and the emergence of finance as a driving sector of capitalism has generated not only instability and crisis; it also has led to extraordinary political power for private financial interests, with banking interest taking control in shaping not only policies immediately affecting that sector but economic (and thereby social) policy in general. (6)

In other words, attention to the idea of a property-owning democracy is in fact a very substantive rebuttal to the processes identified in Piketty's analysis of the tendencies of capital in the modern economy. As the editors put the point, the idea of a property-owning democracy provides a rich basis for the political programs of progressive movements in contemporary politics (5).

Two questions arise with respect to any political philosophy: is the end-state that it describes a genuinely desirable outcome; and is there a feasible path by which we can get from here to there? One might argue that POD is an appealing end-state; and yet it is an outcome that is virtually impossible to achieve within modern political and economic institutions. (Here is an earlier discussion of this idea; link.) These contributors give at least a moderate level of reason to believe that a progressive foundation for democratic action is available that may provide an effective counterweight to the conservative rhetoric that has dominated the scene for decades.

The global city -- Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen is the leading urban theorist of the global world. (Here are several prior posts that intersect with her work.) Her The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (1991) has shaped the concepts and methods that other theorists have used to analyze the role of cities and their networks in the contemporary world. The core ideas in her theory of the global city are presented in a 2005 article, "The Global City: Introducing a Concept" (link). This article is a convenient place to gain an understanding of her basic approach to the subject.

Key to Sassen's concept of the global city is an emphasis on the flow of information and capital. Cities are major nodes in the interconnected systems of information and money, and the wealth that they capture is intimately related to the specialized businesses that facilitate those flows -- financial institutions, consulting firms, accounting firms, law firms, and media organizations. Sassen points out that these flows are no longer tightly bound to national boundaries and systems of regulation; so the dynamics of the global city are dramatically different than those of the great cities of the nineteenth century.

Sassen emphasizes the importance of creating new conceptual resources for making sense of urban systems and their global networks -- a new conceptual architecture, as she calls it (28). She argues for seven fundamental hypotheses about the modern global city:

1. The geographic dispersal of economic activities that marks globalization, along with the simultaneous integration of such geographically dispersed activities, is a key factor feeding the growth and importance of central corporate functions.
2. These central functions become so complex that increasingly the headquarters of large global firms outsource them: they buy a share of their central functions from highly specialized service firms.
3. Those specialized service firms engaged in the most complex and globalized markets are subject to agglomeration economies.
4. The more headquarters outsource their most complex, unstandardized functions, particularly those subject to uncertain and changing markets, the freer they are to opt for any location.
5. These specialized service firms need to provide a global service which has meant a global network of affiliates ... and a strengthening of cross border city-to-city transactions and networks.
6. The economic fortunes of these cities become increasingly disconnected from their broader hinterlands or even their national economies.
7. One result of the dynamics described in hypothesis six, is the growing informalization of a range of economic activities which find their effective demand in these cities, yet have profit rates that do not allow them to compete for various resources with the high-profit making firms at the top of the system. (28-30)

Three key tendencies seem to follow from these structural facts about global cities.  One is a concentration of wealth in the hands of owners, partners, and professionals associated with the high-end firms in this system. Second is a growing disconnection between the city and its region. And third is the growth of a large marginalized population that has a very hard time earning a living in the marketplace defined by these high-end activities. Rather than constituting an economic engine that gradually elevates the income and welfare of the whole population, the modern global city funnels global surpluses into the hands of a global elite dispersed over a few dozen global cities.

These tendencies seem to line up well with several observable features of modern urban life throughout much of the world: a widening separation in quality of life between a relatively small elite and a much larger marginalized population; a growth of high-security gated communities and shopping areas; and dramatically different graphs of median income for different socioeconomic groups. New York, London, and Hong Kong/Shanghai represent a huge concentration of financial and business networks, and the concentration of wealth that these produce is manifest:

Inside countries, the leading financial centers today concentrate a greater share of national financial activity than even ten years ago, and internationally, cities in the global North concentrate well over half of the global capital market. (33)

This mode of global business creates a tight network of supporting specialist firms that are likewise positioned to capture a significant level of wealth and income:

By central functions I do not only mean top level headquarters; I am referring to all the top level financial, legal, accounting, managerial, executive, planning functions necessary to run a corporate organization operating in more than one country. (34)

These features of the global city economic system imply a widening set of inequalities between elite professionals and specialists and the larger urban population of service and industrial workers. They also imply a widening set of inequalities between North and South. Sassen believes that communications and Internet technologies have the effect of accelerating these widening inequalities:

Besides their impact on the spatial correlates of centrality, the new communication technologies can also be expected to have an impact on inequality between cities and inside cities. (37)

Sassen's conceptual architecture maintains a place for location and space: global cities are not disembodied, and the functioning of their global firms depends on a network of activities and lesser firms within the spatial scope of the city and its environs. So Sassen believes there is space for political contest between parties over the division of the global surplus.

If we consider that global cities concentrate both the leading sectors of global capital and a growing share of disadvantaged populations (immigrants, many of the disadvantaged women, people of color generally, and, in the megacities of developing countries, masses of shanty dwellers) then we can see that cities have become a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions. (39)

But this strategic contest seems badly tilted against the disadvantaged populations she mentions. So the outcomes of these contests over power and wealth are likely to lead, it would seem, to even deeper marginalization, along the lines of what Loic Wacquant describes in Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (link).

This is a hugely important subject for everyone who wants to understand the dynamics and future directions of the globe's mega-cities and their interconnections. What seems pressingly important for urbanists and economists alike, is to envision economic mechanisms that can be established that do a better job of sharing the fruits of economic progress with the whole of society, not just the elite and professional end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

 

Institutional designs for progressive reform

One place where Jon Elster's philosophical thinking intersects with empirical social science is in the field of institutional design. This involves an important question: What features of institutional design can be identified as having beneficent features of operation when exercised by normal groups of individuals?

This topic has cropped up several times in Elster's career. One important instance is the work he highlighted about alternatives to market society in Alternatives to Capitalism (Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds., 1989).  Here is how Elster and Moene put the point in their introduction:

Capitalism -- actually existing capitalism -- appears in many respects to be an ugly, irrational, wasteful way of organising the production and distribution of goods and services.... Five of the essays in the present volume discuss whether there could be alternatives to presently existing capitalism other than central planning. Could, for instance, central planning be tempered by the market, or capitalism tempered by planning? (1-2) 

So the core questions that arise here are these: Are there workable alternatives concerning the coordination of work and the management of property that work better than laissez-faire capitalism and wage labor? And what does "better" mean in this context? A partial answer to the "better" question might go along these lines: we want workable institutions that better embody equality and self-control than an unregulated market. "Workable" means "reasonably efficient and productive", and self-control means something like "shop floor self-determination."

It is important to be specific about the normative aspects of institutional design. In order to assess the goodness or badness of an institution, we need to have specific virtues that we hope it will fulfill. Here is the list of virtues that Elster and Moene identify for basic economic institutions:

We discuss some of the main normative criteria that are relevant to a comparison of different economic systems. These include static efficiency (including full employment), dynamic efficiency, self-realisation, participation, community, quality of preferences, stability, economic freedom, and income distribution. (3)

These desiderata need to be spelled out more fully. Static and dynamic efficiency as well as stability have to do with the economic performance of a set of institutional arrangements when populated by normal human beings. Are resources allocated across productive activities in an efficient way? Is labor productivity high? Do the institutions encourage high-quality production? Self-realization, participation,  economic freedom, and community are all normative goals we may have for basic social institutions. Do the institutions provide ordinary human beings the opportunities they need to fulfill their human talents and aspirations? Do the institutions provide opportunities for all participants to take part in the decision-making processes of the institution? Do these institutions afford individuals a broad range of choice in terms of how they conduct their lives?  Do the specific arrangements of the institutions promote trust, solidarity, and mutual respect among the persons involved in them? Quality of preferences has to do with the effects these institutions have on the formation of the goals and desires of the individuals involved. Do the institutions help to cultivate an appetite for what J. S. Mill described as the higher pleasures -- a preference for Pushkin over push-pin? And income distribution is a feature that has both normative and empirical characteristics; highly unequal distributions may undermine stability, and they may also undermine self-realization and participation.

One alternative economic institution that is considered in detail in the volume is workers' cooperatives -- systems where the cooperative owns the capital of the enterprise and democratic rules of decision-making permit cooperative members to define work rules and income distributions. Karl Ove Moene explores this institutional variant in his contribution. Here is how Elster and Moene introduce the idea of a cooperative in the introduction:

What is a cooperative? The answer to the question might seem obvious: A cooperative is a firm in which the workers own the means of production and have full control over all economic decisions. Yet the answer, as it stands, is ambiguous and incomplete. It fails to capture the variety and complexity of existing cooperatives. (22)

A more complete and differentiated taxonomy of cooperatives is needed, since variations in institutional design can have very large consequences for the behavior of the overall institution. Here are some of the ways that cooperatives vary in the historical record:

• Full ownership by workers or just workers' control over decisions? (22)
• Equal ownership rights or stratified ownership rights? (24)
• Shop-floor democracy for all workers, or professional management team selected by the workers? (24)
• Static business environment or rapidly changing business environment? (27)
• Large firms or small firms? (27)
• Production process that permits high/low level of monitoring by other workers (27)

Elster and Moene suggest that these variations of internal design and external business and technical environment make a large difference to the effectiveness of cooperative firms.

Elster and Moene argue that the workers' cooperative alternative needs to be carefully evaluated with respect to the desiderata mentioned here.  They argue that this evaluation needs to be comparative, and it needs to proceed along two tracks -- observation of the actual experience of such institutions, and application of economic theory to the fundamentals of the institutional arrangement. The economic theory of cooperatives is weak, in their assessment, but there is a fair amount of empirical data about how they work. And the empirical data is favorable to cooperatives. "The empirical literature suggests, but far from unambiguously, that cooperation and participation increase productivity" (29). They cite studies documenting lower turnover of the labor force, lower rates of absenteeism, and no strikes (29).

Also worth highlighting is Elster's own contribution to the volume, "Self-realisation in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life" (127 ff.). Here Elster takes issue with several foundational premises of the pro-capitalist argument as a normative position: "(a) The best life for the individual is one of consumption ... (b) Consumption is to be valued because it promotes happiness or welfare, which is the ultimate good" (127). Against these comsumerist ideals, Elster argues for the importance of self-realization -- the full and free development of one's talents and aspirations, to a reasonable extent. He contrasts self-realizing activities (mastering the piano) with activities of pure consumption (eating a tuna sandwich at your desk) and drudgery (sweeping the streets for forty years). This is plainly a normative position: a life involving self-realization is better than a life of consumption and drudgery. And it has a long pedigree, from J. S. Mill and J. J. Rousseau to Kant to Sen and Nussbaum. What Elster adds to the tradition is important, though: the idea that our ideal of personal fulfillment and a good human life is in fact a key element of the matrix by which we should evaluate alternative institutions.

This is a very interesting volume, for several reasons. The individual essays are very good, by experts like G. A. Cohen, Alec Nove, and John Roemer as well as Elster and Moene. But even more interesting is the shock value of its topic in the neo-liberal environment in which we have found ourselves for the past twenty years or so. To have serious scholars making careful, rigorous efforts to explore and evaluate "alternatives to capitalism" is very surprising in today's environment; and yet the essays were written as recently as the late 1980s. Plainly there was practical and political interest in the topic of alternatives to capitalism in those years that has largely disappeared in today's discourse. This suggests that somehow serious progressive thought has been muffled for the past twenty years. It is time to resurrect it.

Critical theory in the Frankfurt School

An earlier post raised the question of the meaning of the word "critical" in Roy Bhaskar's theory of critical realism. The most extensive discussions of the epistemology of critical theory occurred in the post-Marxist debates within the Frankfurt School, and Raymond Geuss presents those debates with great clarity in The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (1981).

Here is the general definition that Geuss offers:

A critical theory, then, is a reflective theory which gives agents a kind of knowledge inherently productive of enlightenment and emancipation. (2)

Critical theories aim at emancipation and enlightenment, at making agents aware of hidden coercion, thereby freeing them from that coercion and putting them in a position to determine where their true interest lie. (55)

The idea of enlightenment here is related to achieving accurate knowledge of one's place in the world -- "to determine what [one's] true interests are". And emancipation in this context means having the epistemic tools necessary to make one free -- to change the world and the structure of governing social relations in ways that increase one's ability to live and develop freely. So critical theory is a body of knowledge that permits people to move in the direction of greater autonomy and self-definition. And it is a body of knowledge that penetrates through the obstacles and forms of mystification that prevent individuals in dominating social relations to accurately perceive their situation.

The paradigm case of a critical theory, according to Frankfurt School theorists, is Marx's presentation of the political economy of capitalism. Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy provides a basis for understanding how exploitation takes place within the ostensibly free social relations of capitalism; how the class system works; how the fetishism of commodities works to systematically obscure th exploitation and inequality inherent in the property relations of capitalism; and how the dynamics of capitalist competition lead to central tendencies in capitalist society (industrial reserve army, falling rate of profit, immiseration).

The critique of ideology is a core function of critical theory. Ideologies are the systems of ideas and belief that class societies have developed to redescribe and conceal the real workings of the social order. Individuals in every historical period require mental frameworks in terms of which to understand and represent the social structures and relations within which they live. Human beings are reflective, cognitive actors. They need to make sense of the things that influence their lives -- the powers of others, the access they have to material resources, the forms of respect or disrespect that characterize interpersonal relations. Marx and the theorists of the Frankfurt School described these mental frameworks as ideologies; and they worked on the assumption that ideologies are tilted in favor of specific powerful groups in society. Religion and myth serve ideological functions; but so do large, pervasive social assumptions about how things work. In the United States there are certainly ideological systems of belief in terms of which many people understand immigration, race relations, and urban-rural inequalities.

Geuss provides a very careful and illuminating discussion of the nuanced ideas about ideology that were constructed by Frankfurt School theorists, including Jürgen Habermas. This is useful for a number of reasons. First, the concept of ideology is often brought forward without a very specific meaning, and Geuss's analysis is useful in this context. But Geuss's analysis is also a valuable contribution to an issue that has come up frequently in earlier posts in UnderstandingSociety: the need to have more nuanced and adequate theories of the subjectivity of the actor. The social frameworks of knowledge through which individuals make sense of their social relations are certainly an important component of this topic.

Critique of ideology is an essential part of critical theory in the definition offered above. When individuals are preoccupied with social beliefs and expectations that conform badly to the real nature of their social relations, they achieve neither enlightenment nor emancipation. Here is Geuss's analysis of ideological critique as developed by the FS.

1. Radical criticism of society and criticism of its dominant ideology are inseparable; the ultimate goal of all social research should be the elaboration of a critical theory of society of which ideology critique would be an integral part.
2. Ideology critique is not just a form of "moralizing criticism," i.e. an ideological form of consciousness is not criticized for being nasty, immoral, unpleasant, etc. but for being false, for being a form of delusion. Ideology critique is itself a cognitive enterprise, a form of knowledge.
3. Ideology critique (and hence also the social theory of which it is a part) differs significantly in cognitive structure from natural science, and requires for its proper analysis basic changes in the epistemological views we have inherited from traditional empiricism (modeled as it is on the study of natural science). (26)

Geuss raises a key question about critical theory: what is the epistemic status of such theories? To what extent can evidence and logic allow us to argue for the truth or falsity of a given critical theory?

If a critical theory is to be cognitive and give us knowledge, it must be kind of thing that can be true or false, and we would like to know under what conditions it would be falsified and under what conditions confirmed. (75)

In other words, critical theories are aimed at furthering a set of fundamental human values (freedom, emancipation, enlightenment); but they are intended to have rational epistemic force as well. It is expected that theorists and users of theory will give an honest allegiance to evidence and logic, and will be prepared to abandon aspects of their theories if they are refuted. And Geuss admits that this set of epistemic values are in some tension with the democratic and enlightenment values embodied in the critical theory (78).

There is one more idea associated with the general definition provided above, the idea of a reflective theory. Here the idea is that a critical theory needs to pay attention to its subject matter; but it also needs to pay attention to the conditions of knowledge that surround the theory as well. The critical theory should give us some idea of how it could be arrived at in normal social circumstances.

A critical theory is structurally different from a scientific theory in that it is "reflective" and not a "objectifying", that is, it is not just a theory about some objects different from itself, it is also a theory about social theories, how they arise, how they can be applied, and the conditions under which they are acceptable. (79)

So reflective here means "attentive to the conditions and processes through which the theory itself is discovered and assessed".

This is an important set of ideas that helps the problem of better understanding and changing society. One way of thinking about the Frankfurt School is that they were post-positivist and provided some new ideas about how to think about social science and social theory in ways not chained to the assumptions of positivist philosophy of science. But many of these theorists presented ways of framing the nature of contemporary society that were post-Marxist as well. They continued to be concerned with key Marxian ideas like exploitation, alienation, and false consciousness. But they also sought out theoretical frameworks that went beyond economics and historical materialism.

Mechanisms of racial disparities

A fundamental fact about American society is the persistence of disparities between African-American and European-American populations. These disparities are manifest in the most important aspects of social life: income, wealth, education levels, health status, and incarceration rates. And several of these areas of disparity persist even when we control for income. Most observers interpret these disparities as the continuing legacy of facts of racial discrimination and oppression, including the racial system of the Jim Crow South. But often the mechanisms that perpetuate racial disparities are less visible and less intentional than they were in the 1940s and 1950s.

Here I want to consider what some of those mechanisms are in contemporary America. Chief among these is the continuing fact of residential segregation based on race. Elizabeth Armstrong makes this point strongly in The Imperative of Integration, and so did Massey and Denton in American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Access to social goods in the United States is highly dependent on where you live. And cities in the United States continue to be highly segregated by race. If poverty, crime, and poor schools are likewise concentrated, then it follows that the opportunities available to black Americans will be, on average, distinctly inferior to those available to white Americans. This is most evident in quality of schooling. But it also shows up in access to nutritional food, health services, and jobs, and vulnerability to heightened rates of crime. A young person's life prospects are very much affected by where he or she grows up. (Here is a good study by DataDrivenDetroit on the availability of grocery stores in Detroit; link.)

These intuitive observations are very consistent with the arguments about neighborhood effects that Robert Sampson has put forward (link). Sampson documents that neighborhoods have significant effects on the behavior and outcomes of the people who live there. When we combine this finding with the facts of segregation in most American cities and the generally poor status of many inner city neighborhoods, once again we come to the conclusion that black individuals and families are likely to have lessened prospects relative to their white counterparts.

One of the most troubling and persistent disparities along racial lines is in the area of health status, including disease rates, infant mortality, and longevity. Black individuals have higher rates of disease and morbidity than their white counterparts.  And these differences across racial groups persist even when we control for income, so they are not simply a secondary effect of poverty. There has been a great deal of research in schools of public health as to why this is so. Some factors are obvious -- differential rates of health insurance, different levels of access to hospitals and clinics, and different levels of quality of neighborhood healthcare resources. But given that even affluent segments of the black community have higher rates of various diseases than their white counterparts, there must be more to the story. One possibility is that there are differential patterns of treatment by health providers across racial groups. Do black women receive mammograms at the same rates as white women? Not everywhere. Another possible mechanism is the factor of stress as a determinant of health. Some public health scholars have explored the possibility that daily lives for black people within a highly racialized society incorporate a background level of personal stress that impairs health (link).

Some observers attempt to explain the persistence of racial inequalities on the basis of cultural differences across white and black communities.  Different attitudes towards education, family, and work have been cited as causes of racial disparities across communities. These explanations, generally from a conservative political position, claim that there is a "culture of poverty" that holds back young black men and women from striving for success in school and work. Here is an earlier post on the pro's and con's of this approach (link). Generally speaking, I don't find it impossible that there are cultural factors that play a role in social inequalities; but it is too easy for conservatives to slide from this apriori possibility into a single-factor rant that absolves the structure of American society from continuing involvement in racial inequality. And yet it seems obvious that the situation of white and black America would be fundamentally different if educational and employment opportunities were genuinely equal for white and black young people -- which they are not. A much better approach to this complex of hypotheses about culture and structure in racial outcomes is that taken by Alford Young in his research on the ideas and horizons of young black men in The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances (link).

What about inequalities of employment opportunities for white and black workers? Here there are at least three important mechanisms.  First is proximity to where the jobs are, and the availability of public transit. Second is the educational qualifications of the workforce. And third is the workings of discrimination at the point of hiring and evaluation. Each of these dimensions places poor black workers at a disadvantage. If transit from the inner city to the jobs in the suburbs is poor, then inner-city workers will have a harder time gaining access to those jobs. If the quality of education provided for inner city black students is poor, these young people will be disadvantaged when it comes to finding a job as well. And, of course, if black applicants are treated differently -- either consciously or unconsciously -- by the hiring process, they will be underrepresented as well. (Here is a review of the sociology of discrimination by Devah Pager and Hana Shepherd, sociologists at Princeton; link.) All these factors appear to be involved in the current disparities that exist when it comes to employment across racial groups.

In short, there seem to be a great number of mechanisms of racial differentiation that are at work in American society that don't generally presuppose explicit racial antagonism, but that work to channel black individuals into worse outcomes than their white counterparts. These are structural factors that the population faces, not personal factors; and they have pronounced effects when it comes to generating racial disparities in a number of crucial social dimensions.

Here is an earlier post that documents some current research on inter-generational social mobility for the black community (link).

Remembering the struggle for racial equality

We celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on January 21. Here is a curated set of film clips that serve to recall the major challenges of inequality, segregation, and violence that faced the African American community in the Jim Crow racial system of the 1940s and 1950s.  These videos capture some of the signal moments in that struggle through the 1960s. Dr. King's contribution to American history is truly pivotal in this "second American revolution". 

Dr. King on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955

  

Little Rock Nine, 1957

 Freedom Riders, 1961 video

The integration of Ole Miss 1962

Voter registration in Mississippi, 1963

The March on Washington 1963




The Birmingham Church Bombing 1963

  

The murder of Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner 1964 [1:22]

  

Dr King in Selma, 1965

  
Dr King in Montgomery, 1965




Bloody Sunday, Selma 1965

Martin Luther King, I'm tired of violence, Yazoo, 1966

Martin Luther King, Montgomery to Memphis 1965 documentary
(with video of "I have a dream" speech" at the end)

Here is a Prezi version of this collection; link.

Durable inequality

Chuck Tilly was an enormously creative historical sociologist, and he also had a knack for a good title. This is certainly true of his 1998 book, Durable Inequality. The topic is of particular interest today, in the contemporary environment of ever-more visible and widening inequalities that pervade American society.

The contemporary facts in the United States are more clearly understood than ever: an increasing separation between the top decile of income and the bottom forty percent of the income distribution, a low level of social mobility relative to European countries, and a high degree of permanent poverty. The Pew Economic Mobility Project provides an important snapshot of social mobility in the United States; link; in brief, the likelihood of the child of parents from the bottom quintile to remain in the bottom quintile is 43%, while the likelihood of a child born to the top quintile remaining there is 40%.

source: Lane Kenworthy, Consider the Evidence  blog (link)

source: Pew Report, Pursuing the American Dream (link)

So the inequalities we confront in the United States are indeed "durable" and multigenerational.  But how do economic and social inequalities come about?

This is a large part of the agenda of Durable Inequalities. Here Tilly looks at social and economic inequalities from a historical point of view. He is concerned with "categorical inequalities" -- that is, inequalities across groups of people defined by relatively rigid social discriminators. "Durable inequality depends heavily on the institutionalization of categorical pairs" (8). Relevant social categories include gender, race, immigrant status, or rural-urban origins.  Tilly begins his book with an astounding statistic about durable inequalities in nineteenth-century England: "poor boys of fourteen averaged only 4 feet 3 inches tall, while aristocrats and gentry of the same age averaged about 5 feet 1 inch" (1).

The central intellectual task of the book is to account for how social categories often result in categorical inequalities.  Not all categorical distinctions among people result in economic or political disparities across the resulting groups -- for example, "good sense of humor/bad sense of humor" doesn't appear to result in income disparities across the humorous and the humorless.  But the male-female wage gap, the black-white wealth gap, and the white-latino education gap all are examples of inequalities that follow from, and are presumably caused by, the categorical status possessed by the two groups.

Categorical inequalities are particularly important because they appear to be wholly indefensible.  The fact that "skilled/unskilled" workers have differential incomes is not surprising on grounds of productivity and value-added work; but the fact that equally well educated women and men have differential incomes is indeed surprising.

The social mechanisms that Tilly identifies as being primarily responsible for inequalities across social categories are exploitation and opportunity hoarding (10).

• Exploitation, which operates when powerful, connected people command resources from which they draw significantly increased returns by coordinating the efforts of outsiders whom they exclude from the full value added by that effort.
• Opportunity hoarding, which operates when members of a categorically bounded network acquire access to a resource that is valuable, renewable, subject to monopoly, supportive of network activities, and enhanced by the network's modus operandi. (10)

Here are a few summary observations about these two mechanisms and how they work within institutions and organizations.

• Exploitation rests on unequal distribution of rewards proportionate to value added among participants in the same enterprise.
• Organizationally installed categorical inequality facilitates exploitation.
• Organizations whose survival depends on exploitation therefore tend to adopt categorical inequality.
• Because organizations adopting categorial inequality deliver greater returns to their dominant members and because a portion of those returns goes to organizational maintenance, such organizations tend to crowd out other types of organizations.
• Opportunity hoarding by collaborative agents complements exploitation.
• Opportunity hoarding operates more effectively and at lower cost in conjunction with categorical inequality.
• ...
• Seemingly contradictory categorical principles such as age, race, gender, and ethnicity operate in similar ways and can be organizationally combined or substituted within limits set by previously established scripting and local knowledge. (85-86)

What Tilly is trying to accomplish in this work is genuinely ambitious: it is to establish both a natural history and a causal dynamics of socially generated inequalities.  Inequalities are not solely the natural outcome of differences in abilities, talent, and motivation (individual characteristics); instead, they are the result of institutions and social relations that have been strategically crafted over time by individuals and groups for their ongoing advantage.

Exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation that incorporate asymmetrically paired categories have for millennia promoted most of the inequality that historians commonly attribute to individual differences in capacity or enterprise. These causal principles combine with a vast historical record to provide the means of constructing counterfactual accounts of durable inequality: forms of inequality or equality that have existed in some times and places, that could have existed, that could exist now, that could take shape in the future. (230)

And the forms of group discrimination that go along with categorical differences play a key role in these inequalities.

How does this analysis fit with the two graphs provided above of income inequality and slow social mobility in the United States? A careful analysis of the social mechanisms that impede social mobility will certainly include the processes of exploitation and opportunity-hoarding that Tilly discusses; it will include the impact of social categories like race, gender, and ethnicity; and it will include the exclusive social network mechanisms that permit the top segment of the society to retain its place through selection and limited opportunities for the rest of society.  So Tilly's historical analysis in Durable Inequalities is highly relevant to our current efforts to understand and address the widening inequalities that we see around us.

Polarization of American politics

If anything seems self-evident about recent American politics, it is the fact that our discourse and policy debates have become more polarized. Commentators and politicians seem to have moved to more extreme positions over time so that bipartisanship and compromise are all but impossible. As for rational, honest and fact-based debate about policies like taxes, healthcare, or Social Security in the Congress -- forget it. Instead we have strident conspiracy theories, ignorant birthers with funny hair, and hateful shrieking about the President -- all intended, presumably, to whip up the faithful.

That's how things look to us as participants in the American scene. Is it possible to study this question with some degree of scientific objectivity and clarity? Can we measure polarization? Somewhat surprisingly (to me anyway) it is possible, and political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal present their often surprising findings in Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Walras-Pareto Lectures).

The biggest surprise in the research for me is that it is possible to create an instrument for "measuring" the political positions taken by legislators over their elected careers based on the totality of their voting records. It is then possible to observe the process of separation and polarization of individuals, groups, and parties over time. Along with other researchers in the field, the authors have applied a comprehensive statistical measure of relative positions on one (or two) dimensions, based on a complete set of roll call votes. Using roll call data, they compute an "ideal point" for each legislator along a scale of -1.0-1.0. This approach is a powerful one that permits calculation of a legislator's score from liberal to conservative. This permits comparison of the liberalness / conservativeness of legislators, including those whose careers did not overlap, and it allows an aggregate assessment of the relative positions of the parties over time.

A second dimension of political ideology they consider is race and civil rights issues. They find that adding this dimension increases the classification success of the system -- but only by a few percent. The salience of the race dimension peaked in the late 1960s, adding 6% and 8% classification success for the House and Senate respectively in 1965, but then declined sharply to under 1% for both houses by 2005.

Their results are very striking. Here are a couple of graphs that tell the main story of their results. The first graph measures the standard deviations of the Chamber, the Democrats, and the Republicans. The graph demonstrates the widening separation of the Chamber as a whole and the narrowing of division within the parties, culminating a process of separation that began in the seventies. The parties become more unified and the Chamber becomes more sharply divided between them. And the second graph demonstrates the complete separation between the parties on ideological grounds. There are no cross-over politicians.





Once the authors have worked out a measure of political ideology for each legislator and party, they are also interested in assessing causes. Why has the ideological distance between the parties increased so dramatically since the 1970s? The most important cause they consider over time is degree of income stratification present at a point in time (national inequalities).

The results are genuinely striking. Through a series of graphs they demonstrate a very high degree of correlation between polarization and inequalities. And they argue that this is causal: politics has become more polarized as the stakes rise for those at the upper part of the distribution.


They also argue strongly that the polarization of politics tracks relative income levels: more conservative policies are supported by higher-income voters and more redistributive policies are supported by lower-income voters. More bluntly: the higher the income of the voter the greater the likelihood of conservative voting behavior.

Policy appears not to have followed this logic, given that median income has fallen in recent years as inequalities have ramped up. In chapter 4 they argue that this has to do with the increasing numbers of poor non-citizens. Non-citizens can't vote, and therefore their interests are not reflected in policy competition between members of Congress. So immigration has an unexpected consequence for policy: though the percent of poor people in the country increases, policy becomes more anti-poor.

The book is a remarkable and complex argument in which the authors use sophisticated statistical tools to tease out connections between their core data set -- the ideological scores of virtually all national-level legislators since the 1870s -- and other factors (constituency characteristics, party, personal characteristics, etc.). They succeed in cutting through the seemingly crazed rhetoric of conservative extremists in and out of Congress and reveal what it's really all about: protecting the economic interests of the wealthy. For all its quiet restrained tone, it's an important contribution to the Occupy argument.

What is really interesting about this analysis is that it implies that the sizzling rhetoric coming from the right -- personal attacks on the President, anti-gay rants, renewed heat around abortion and contraception -- is just window dressing. By the evidence of voting records, what the right really cares about is economic issues favoring the affluent -- tax cuts, reduced social spending, reduced regulation of business activity, and estate taxes. This isn't to say that the enraged cultural commentators aren't sincere about their personal belief -- who knows? But the policies of their party are very consistent, in the analysis offered here. Maybe the best way of understanding the extremist pundits is as a class of well-paid entertainers, riffing on themes of hatred and cultural fundamentalism that have nothing to do with the real goals of their party.

How things work

Social scientists have a set of abstract goals in approaching their work.  They want to formulate specific research questions about limited aspects of the social world and then arrive at empirical and explanatory insights into those matters. They look for the evidence of social structures and systems, regularities of social behavior in populations and groups, and so on. They are looking to provide abstract, general knowledge about how society works. They would like to arrive at clear "diagrams" of the social structures and mechanisms that constitute the contemporary social world.

But think about the challenge of understanding society from the other end of the stick -- the perspective of the ordinary participant. From the participant's perspective the situation often looks more like an environment of black boxes: how will the world respond if I do X, Y, or Z? And for a significant part of society, how the boxes work is a life-affecting mystery.

There is a significant proportion of almost any society for whom these kinds of questions can be answered with a satisfying routine: if I go to work today I can count on getting a day's pay; my pay will permit me to satisfy my ordinary needs reasonably well; and tomorrow will be equally routine. The police won't hassle me, my home won't be broken into, my health is good, and my children's school situation is good.  So there isn't much at stake for this group of people as they consider how the social world around them works.

What about people for whom life is not routine and comfortable, however? Put yourself in the position of an African-American high-school-educated worker who has just lost his job in Taylor, Michigan. Suppose you've got an apartment for your family of five that costs $750/month. You've got an old car that breaks down frequently. While you've been working your family has just barely scraped by. Now that you've lost your job things are no longer routine. Unemployment insurance brings in less than 60% of the wages you'd been making. That's not enough to cover all the bills you've got -- rent, food, clothes for the children, gas for the clunker, a few medical bills.

So what choices does the environment offer now? The largest part of the family budget is the apartment. So maybe moving out early is a good choice -- find something even cheaper, live in a shelter for a few months, live in the clunker. These are desperate choices -- being homeless is desperate, and it's hard to find an apartment for less than $500. Also, the landlord will probably want first and last month rent deposit as well as proof of employment, and you haven't got that. So maybe it's the shelter or the car.

Looking for a new job is an obvious choice. But the unemployment rate in Wayne County is much higher than the rest of the state and the nation. So that's iffy. How about borrowing? Like many of your friends and family, you don't have a credit card and you don't have assets that could be the basis for borrowing. There's nothing in the house that can be sold. And you've got about $1000 in cash. So what to do? Your landlord won't be patient after a few months of missed rent checks.

Maybe looking for work outside of Wayne County will occur to you. Maybe there are jobs in Texas. But how would you find out? Would you use part of the thousand dollars and take a bus to Houston where you have a cousin, or to Dallas where you don't know anyone? That leaves about $800 for your family to survive on while you're gone -- is that a good risk? And how likely is it that you'll find work in Texas that will permit you to send enough money back home to make the difference?

Or maybe another part of Michigan might have more jobs. Not Flint, that's for sure. But what about Grand Rapids? Now the question of race comes into the picture. How receptive is Grand Rapids to an unemployed black man looking for work? How will the police treat you when you arrive in the bus station? Are there social services that might help out till you found work? How would you know? Have you got any friends in GR who might be able to get you started?

You might be very well aware that a lack of education is holding you back. So maybe you can get some training at a community college to boost your job skills -- welding or health tech, perhaps. But that takes time, and you've only got a thousand dollars and an unemployment check. That would have been a good idea a while ago, but it's hard to see how to make it work now.

And what about the criminal options? Maybe you know some guys who sometimes break into stopped rail cars in Detroit. Once in a while they find stuff that can be sold. Does that make sense? What's the likelihood of being caught? Is there money in this kind of racket? How would you sort that out?

My point in this thought experiment is to draw out how different the "social epistemics" are for the marginalized 30-40% in our society from the rest of us. The routine relationships they have with the social world around them don't satisfy their most basic needs. They've got to do something different. And none of the options are obvious in their mechanics or outcomes. There are uncertainties everywhere, and every choice is a bet against disaster. This is a very personal kind of social calculation: it requires figuring out which play may push destitution off for a few weeks or months.

And yet in one sense they're dealing with the same realities as the social scientist: large institutions (labor market, state social service agencies), informal social practices and networks (networks of people willing to share what they've got, networks of people preying on the formal economy), large social realities like racism and police violence.

One of the things I appreciate in Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels is the care Mosley takes to work out the ordinary street knowledge that Easy needed -- and mastered -- as he survived and thrived in the gritty world of Los Angeles in the fifties and sixties. Easy had a very strong street epistemology, not as a sociologist but as an intelligent observer of a complicate set of social black boxes. Here is one good example, A Little Yellow Dog : Featuring an Original Easy Rawlins Short Story "Gray-Eyed Death".

How much inequality?

How much inequality is too much?  Answers range from Gracchus Babeuf (all inequalities are unjust) to Ayn Rand (there is no moral limit on the extent of inequalities a society can embody). Is there any reasoned basis for answering the question?  What kinds of criteria might we use to try to answer this kind of question?

John Rawls offered a fairly simple criterion of the extent of inequalities that a just society can tolerate in A Theory of Justice.  His background assumption is that the wealth of a society is a joint product of all members of society.  The rules of distribution create more or less inequality among citizens.  Citizens are concerned to "protect" their interests in case they wind up being in the worst-off positions in society.  So justice requires that institutions should create the least degree of inequalities subject to maximizing the position of the least-well-off position in society.  (He also stipulated an equality of opportunity principle: positions need to be open to all through a fair system of competition.)  If the empirical theory is true that economic inequalities sometimes create more wealth (through incentive effects), then it is just to increase inequalities up to the point where any further increase would leave the position of the least-well-off member of society unchanged.  This is the least system of inequalities subject to maximizing the position of the least-well-off.  Rawls justifies this principle (the difference principle) on the ground that it expresses an important sense of fairness: everyone is fairly treated when higher incomes are assigned to some individuals only when doing so benefits all individuals.

By this principle, current inequalities in the United States and Great Britain are demonstrably unjust: it would obviously be possible to lower the incomes of the 1 percent without lowering the income of the bottom forty percent.  So current inequalities are plainly more extensive than they need to be for the purpose of increasing overall output and improving the condition of the least-well-off.

Joseph Stiglitz offers a different kind of theory of inequality in his recent The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. (Here is the anchor essay as it appeared in Vanity Fair; link.) His argument is a pragmatic one based on a theory of social stability.  Essentially he argues that when inequalities become too extreme in a given society they breed social conflict and instability. This happens perhaps because of raw deprivation -- the bottom 40% really do have pretty desperate lives -- but more because of what Stiglitz identifies as erosion of the social contract.  Here is how he puts the point in the Vanity Fair article:

Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them. It is this sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: rising food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from “food insecurity”)—given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted “trickling down” from the top 1 percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect of creating alienation—voter turnout among those in their 20s in the last election stood at 21 percent, comparable to the unemployment rate.

So for Stiglitz, inequality is not simply a moral issue, but is also an issue of social stability and cohesion.

Here is another way of answering the question: perhaps extreme inequalities are actually bad for a population's health.  There is one sense in which this is obviously true: extremely poor people have worse health outcomes than affluent people.  But maybe the simple fact of inequalities is itself a toxic influence on public health, for poor and rich alike.  This is the argument that Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett make in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.  Their argument is a complex one that suggests several causal explanations for why this might be the case; but their core idea is that great inequalities create widespread "stress" that is harmful to each individual's health.  Wilkinson and Pickett are public health experts and their argument is a cross-national statistical one.

So we might adapt their analysis into an answer to the question posed above: inequalities should be reduced until there is not measurable harm to public health.  (These arguments are considered in earlier posts.)

There is even a utilitarian argument for greater equality of income.  If we accept the plausible point that income makes a diminishing marginal contribution to happiness as income rises (perhaps after some inflection point), then under many realistic circumstances a more equal society with lower GNP will have a higher level of happiness than a more unequal society with higher GNP.  Lower-income people have more to gain from an additional $1000 of income than higher-income people.  So if we think it is a good thing to maximize happiness, then we ought to regulate inequalities accordingly.  Benjamin Page makes some of these arguments in an Institute for Research on Poverty position paper, "Utilitarian Arguments for Equality" (link).

Are we forced to choose among these frameworks in order to conclude that our economy has generated vastly too wide a set of inequalities of wealth and income?  No, we aren't, because these arguments are mutually supportive.  A system of greater equality, regulated by a tax system designed for that purpose, would be more fair, more supportive of equality of opportunity, more harmonious, likely healthier, and likely happier.  We have lots of good reasons for preferring greater equality of wealth and income and lots of good reasons to reject the "anything goes" philosophy that currently drives much of the political discourse on the right.

Culture or jobs?

Stephen Steinberg contributed a provocative but important piece to Boston Review a year ago on current academic thinking about race and poverty. The piece is titled Poor Reason: Culture Still Doesn't Explain Poverty, and it is now available as a short Kindle publication. The topic Steinberg focuses on is deeply important -- fundamentally, how to explain and remediate the persistent fact of poverty in the African American population in the United States. And anyone who is paying attention to urban America knows that the economic and social situation of much of the African-American population of the United States is bad, and in many respects barely improved over the past 40 years.

Putting the point most bluntly: is the primary explanation of persistent urban African American poverty the cumulative workings of a set of racially discriminatory economic and social structures? Or is it some set of factors that have been internalized within African American culture and values, persisting long after discrimination has disappeared?

Steinberg's polemic is a response to a special 2010 issue of Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science on "new" approaches to the role of culture in poverty in a racialized America.  The old approach was stimulated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's assertions about the black family offered in The Negro Family: The Case for National Action in 1965. Moynihan's position paper for the Johnson administration provoked a firestorm of criticism when it was leaked, and some observers believe that the ensuing divisiveness, between progressives and conservatives and within the progressive movement itself, contributed to the failure of the Johnson administration to seriously address the structural issues of race that our country faced then (and now). One version of the view attributed to Moynihan is that it is difficulties with the African American family that are the root cause of persistent African American poverty. This is the "culture" end of the story. (I'll note below that most of the contributors do not agree with this reading of Moynihan.) The "jobs" end is the view that the key issue of racial disadvantage in American society was (and is) the lack of economic opportunities and jobs for many millions of young African Americans, and that cultural and family characteristics are shaped by this basic fact.

Steinberg takes a very sharp stand against the "culture" stream of research on the question of persistent African American poverty:

These myths add up to something -- a perverse obfuscation of American racial history.

Instead, he believes our attention needs to be directed to the structural disadvantages created for African Americans within our economic and social system:

Or do we have to transform the ghetto itself, not by reconstructing the identities of its people, but through a wholesale commitment to eliminating poverty and joblessness?

And he maintains that the "culture" myth originated with Moynihan's report in 1965:

Moynihan made the fatal error of inverting cause and effect. Although he acknowledged that past racism and unemployment undermined black families, he held that the pathology in "the Negro American family" had not only assumed a life of its own, but was also the primary determinant. 

Steinberg's central conviction here and elsewhere in other writings is surely correct: the root cause is the political economy of race and the persistent limitation of economic opportunities for African Americans. American society continues to present very high obstacles to African American young people when it comes to gaining admission to the job system, including residential segregation and chronically poor schooling.  And as a society and a generation of commentators, we don't pay nearly enough attention to these facts about the political economy of race in America. In particular, Steinberg faults the sociologists and ethnographers included in the 2010 Annals collection for this reason:

Aren't we asking the wrong questions? Do the answers bring us any closer to understanding why this nation has millions of racial outcasts who are consigned to a social death?

Against this background, the ballyhooed "restoration" of culture to poverty discourse can only be one thing: an evasion of the persistent racial and economic inequalities that are a blot on American democracy.

So Steinberg harshly faults anyone, including especially conservative commentators, who put the primary causal role on culture.  But Steinberg also attributes this blindness about the structural causes of racial inequality and poverty to the current poverty and race research community as represented by this Annals collection, and I'm not persuaded this is justified.

In fact, it doesn't seem to be true to say that Moynihan himself disagreed with Steinberg about which factor is most important. Rather, Moynihan described the problems with the African American family that he identified as endogenous -- caused by the facts of racial discrimination and economic disadvantage -- rather than exogenous -- an independent cause of poverty. The original cause, persisting into the present, is the structural circumstance of high unemployment and limited economic opportunities for African American young people.

The 2010 Annals volume was followed by a second collection in 2012, edited by Douglas Massey.  Massey's volume, The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades (link), is also focused on the Moynihan report and is a contribution of at least equal importance.  This collection too focuses on the contrast between culture and structures as explanations of persistent poverty.  But unlike the 2010 collection, this collection gives greater attention to structural factors that appear to be at work.

Massey and Robert Sampson point out in their introduction to the 2012 volume that Moynihan's original argument invoked both family and jobs; and in fact, Moynihan got the arrow of causation going in the same direction as Steinberg wants it to go.  They claim that Moynihan's argument was that it was necessary to break the cycle of poverty by creating abundant opportunities for jobs for young African American men. The logical implication of his argument was establishment of a massive Federal jobs program to break the logjam of African American unemployment.  Massey and Sampson paraphrase his theory: "If full employment for black males—especially young black males—could be achieved, he thought, then family stability could be restored and government would be in a better position to attack more entrenched problems such as discrimination and segregation."

The 2012 volume focuses on more of the structural causes at a range of levels of African American poverty and reduced opportunity.  Harry Holzer reviews current research on the ways in which young African-American men are incorporated (or not) into the labor market.  Devah Pager and Diana Karafin examine the workings of discrimination and stereotypes in employer decisions about hiring. Andrew Cherlin et al attempt to assess the effects of welfare reform on African American and Hispanic families in the 2000s. In "Racial Stratification and the Durable Tangle of Neighborhood Inequality" Robert Sampson reviews empirical work on the ways in which residential neighborhoods influence behavior and outcomes.  Sampson finds that Moynihan offers some ideas that are very consistent with current thinking about the "ecological" influences on poverty and the characteristics of poverty in an urban location.  Almost all these authors give credit to Moynihan for accurately perceiving the reality of racial inequality and African American poverty in the 1960s, and they confirm that Moynihan emphasized the primacy of jobs as an instigating cause of these outcomes.

So it seems that the current wave of social science research on race and poverty is doing a much better job of addressing the causal factors involved than Steinberg allows.  To me, anyway, it seems that Steinberg's critique confuses two things: the urgency of addressing structural racism (yes!) and the value of attempting to better understand the cultural systems through which poor communities navigate their lives (also yes!).  Steinberg puts it forward that we need to choose one to the exclusion of the other; but that is unconvincing to me.  When Al Young offers an empirical and theoretical account of the role of "framing" in the choices made by poor people in the 2010 volume, he is adding something of real value to our understanding of the workings of economy, culture, and race within the circumstances of urban poverty. This understanding can then be deployed in the design of a variety of policy efforts, including programs aimed at improving the health status of young African American men.  But Steinberg dismisses this work:

Enter the sociologist, to record the agony of the dispossessed. Does it really matter how they define a "good job" when they have virtually no prospect of finding one? 

Rhetoric aside, I'd say that the analysis of the experience of poverty and the repertoires employed to survive in that environment is indeed important; it really does matter.

In short, it seems to me that Steinberg's criticisms are properly addressed to conservative commentators on African American poverty who do indeed blame the victim; but that virtually none of the scholars included in either of these Annals volumes are guilty of this injustice.

(Steinberg spells out more of his critique in Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy.)