Constructing A Decent Society?

This is a short follow-up to my long essay Moral Failure In Liberalized Market States.

Paul Krugman is a lot like the blind squirrel who finds an acorn now and again. And so it was today.

James Surowiecki makes an important point:

if you want a society in which everyone has a decent life, you need to construct a society in which everyone has a decent life — not a society in which everyone has a small but equal chance of living the lifestyle of the rich and famous.

Not that we’re anywhere close to the second condition, anyway — the most important factor in whether you can become rich is whether you chose the right parents. Most people are going to end up with socioeconomic status close to where they started.

But even if that weren’t true, those moving up the ladder would be matched by an equal number moving down. Since anyone could find himself or herself downwardly mobile, social mobility arguably actually strengthens the case for a strong safety net.

Yes, the call for greater opportunity to fix abject and ubiquitous moral failure is entirely empty. As Krugman points out, if such opportunity existed, a few people would become rich and successful but most would not, while many others would fall down rather than move up the social status ladder.

Surowiecki put it this way—

Increasing economic opportunity is a noble goal, and worth investing in. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that more social mobility will cure what ails the U.S. economy. For a start, even societies that are held to have “high” mobility aren’t all that mobile. In San Jose, just thirteen per cent of people in the bottom quintile make it to the top. Sweden has one of the highest rates of social mobility in the world, but a 2012 study found that the top of the income spectrum is dominated by people whose parents were rich.

A new book, “The Son Also Rises,” by the economic historian Gregory Clark, suggests that dramatic social mobility has always been the exception rather than the rule.

Clark examines a host of societies over the past seven hundred years and finds that the makeup of a given country’s economic élite has remained surprisingly stable.

If you've read my recent long essay and the two which came before, you  know how to interpret this kind of text. What comes next is entirely predictable.

More important, in any capitalist society most people are bound to be part of the middle and working classes; public policy should focus on raising their standard of living, instead of raising their chances of getting rich.

See the introduction of my Moral Failure essay. The phrase "raising the standard of living" is a euphemism for achieving greater economic growth. The obvious problem with the call for more economic growth is that such growth has not been generally inclusive since the late 1970s.

Over the last 40 years public policy focused on raising the standard of living of America's Elite, not its people. And clearly, that strategy was successful, which comes as no surprise

Suroweicki now makes the usual appeal to a bygone era which was exceptional in both American and human history.

What made the U.S. economy so remarkable for most of the twentieth century was the fact that, even if working people never moved into a different class, over time they saw their standard of living rise sharply.

Between the late nineteen-forties and the early nineteen-seventies, median household income in the U.S. doubled. That’s what has really changed in the past forty years. The economy is growing more slowly than it did in the postwar era, and average workers’ share of the pie has been shrinking.

It’s no surprise that people in Washington prefer to talk about mobility rather than about this basic reality. Raising living standards for ordinary workers is hard: you need to either get wages growing or talk about things that scare politicians, like “redistribution” and “taxes.” But making it easier for some Americans to move up the economic ladder is no great triumph if most can barely hold on.

See the last section of my Moral Failure essay.

Regarding Krugman's "decent society," we note that America is clearly a lot less decent than it used to be. The "let's increase opportunity" mantra, a rationalization used to maintain the status quo, is devoid of actual moral content, but that is the smaller point to be made here.

The larger point is that, outside the anomalous, more inclusive decades in America after World War II, there is precious little evidence that humans are capable of stiving for, constructing and maintaining a truly decent society, at least one which isn't relatively small and ethnically homogeneous.

And until such evidence is forthcoming—we need a real example lasting hundreds of years—I will continue to believe that humans simply don't have the wherewithal to get the job done.

Obviously Americans don't.

 

Comments

[Oliver]

The general approach with economists, political analysts and social commentators is to make statements that include should and must and need to. They look at dysfunctional human society from their ivory tower and pontificate about how it will improve if only X, Y or Z were to happen. What they don't either understand or admit is that no one with any influence on the direction of human society is listening, or will ever listen. The latter are the elite in every society, and to them things are just fine the way they are. (And if they do want change, it is only to compound their stranglehold on resources.)

So apart from Dave and a meager sprinkling of other clear minds on this sick planet who take the time to deal with the cold hard facts of human nature, the pontificators are doing the planet a disservice by wasting oxygen. Or should I say STFU.