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Michael Meeropol: Upward Mobility On The Decline

Last month (May, 2015) I watched a video of a discussion about childhood poverty at Georgetown University featuring President Obama, the head of the American Enterprise Institute (Arthur Brooks), and Harvard  University Professor Robert Putnam. 

For a full video of the event see http://www.georgetown.edu/news/poverty-summit-2015-with-obama.html

I was moved by Putnam’s presentation and went out and got his book OUR KIDS, THE FRACTURING OF THE AMERICAN DREAM.  (NY:  Simon and Shuster, 2015)  I cannot recommend that book more highly.  With both national statistics and starkly drawn individual portraits, Putnam attempts to shake most comfortable Americans out of our lethargy into demanding of our politicians, civic leaders and voluntary organizations that they focus attention on a national disgrace.    That is, upward mobility has declined dramatically in the last two generations.  Children born to the wrong parents just have too tough a life journey to succeed.  Kids born into poverty are more likely to remain there than similar kids forty or fifty years ago.

The national statistics are illustrated by what Putnam calls “scissors diagrams”.   Dividing the population into families with college educated parents and those parents with only a high school degree, Putnam shows that during the period roughly between World War II and the late 1970s, both sets of families experienced similar ups and downs in income growth and other opportunities.   However, beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the fortunes of these families diverged sharply seriously dashing hopes for the children of the poor.

[Two examples refer to Children living in single parent families between birth and the age of 7 and the employment of mothers.  In both cases, those with high school or less vs. those with college or less were in parallel up to about 1970 when they began to diverge – with the gap becoming a yawning chasm by the end of the 1980s.   See Putnam, pages 70 and 71.]

Here’s a real shocker.   One figure shows that smart poor kids (those who measure in the top 25% of test scores) are less likely to graduate from college than rich kids who score in the bottom 25%.   (See Putnam, P. 190)  Of course that doesn’t mean that bright kids from low income families never graduate from college or that all rich kids no matter how poorly they do on test scores graduates from college.   But the averages are striking.  This one figure illustrates how deep and long lasting is the influence of the accident of birth in our society.   Putnam’s book shows in great detail how so many of the problems kids face because they are born to parents who have not finished high school compound to put for large percentages of the insurmountable roadblocks in their way.   Let us remember, we are a country that prides itself on the myth that supposedly ANYONE can “make it” in America if they just try hard enough.   And interestingly enough, for white Americans this was much more likely to be true in the decades after World War II than it is today.

Putnam reminds us again and again --- and particularly at the end where he addresses the question of what we as a nation should do about the shocking trends his book revealed --- that these trends did not “just happen.”   There were public policies that had created the more equal opportunity society of the quarter century after World War II --- and there are public policies that helped create the widening scissors gaps since 1980.   From an economic policy perspective, over the years in these commentaries I have emphasized the rise in inequality (the stagnation of wage growth in particular) and the starvation of the public sector.   (My book SURRENDER deal with that as does the very interesting book by Paul Krugman The Conscience of a Liberal.  [NY:  W.W. Norton, 2007] which details the macro-economic (as well as some political) differences between the immediate postwar period and the period since 1980.)  

In my March 2015 commentary I referenced a book THE RISE AND FALL OF NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM by David Kotz.   The following is a quote from that commentary:  “Neo-liberalism involves cuts in taxes for businesses and higher income Americans, reductions in regulations, policies to restrain wage growth (increasing the ability to import manufactured goods puts downward pressure on blue collar wages while pursuing policies decidedly unfriendly to unions makes it difficult to capture productivity increases as wage increases) and a whole host of other policies.  Since the early 1980s, neoliberalism has led to the increases in inequality as documented by Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez and referenced many times in these commentaries.   (For those who have not seen the famous diagram just go to the Emanuel Saez website and check out the article “Striking it Richer”  http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2013.pdf).”

According to Putnam, one particularly perverse way the public sector is starved (and inequality enhanced) is the creation of “pay to play” policies for extra-curricular activities in public schools.  Due to budget constraints, public school districts are requiring fees for students who want to participate in various extra-curricular activities.   Putnam scoffs at the existence of “waivers” permitting low income families to request being exempted from those fees.  He argues that this creates a “brand” as an “economic loser” for all those who exercise that option – thus, in fact, waivers actually mean nothing because there is such a stigma attached to seeking them.

Putnam urges every reader that if they do nothing else, they should go to their local school district and demand an end to “pay to play” and the return to a sufficient to fund activities for everyone.   His point is not restricted to this particular example.  Some might find it significantly less important than, for example differences in nutrition or the impact of the mass imprisonment of men of color (many of the poorer individuals profiled in the book have a father or uncle or brother in prison).   At the other end of the economic spectrum, some might find a more important disturbing trend that Putnam notes as well.  This trend was originally described over 20 years ago by Robert Reich in his book THE WORK OF NATIONS (NY:  Knopt, 1991) -- the self-segregation of the highly successful upper middle class from the rest of society.   This self-segregation contributes to a growing lack of empathy and understanding on the part of the highly successful members of society of the challenges facing children born into families with a high school education or less. 

However, despite the fact that there may be more dangerous and outrageous trends revealed in Putnam’s statistics and individual family narratives, because “pay to play” impacts many families in those public school districts that encompass different levels of economic achievement and security, his focus on that issue is a concrete attempt to remind us that every child growing up in America is “our” child (hence the title of his book).   It also is something that anyone and everyone can “do something” about --- namely, going to the local school board and making the case for complete inclusiveness for extracurricular activities.  (Putnam gives a good rationale for taking such action towards the end of the video linked above.)

We as a society, continue to abandon these kids to their fates at our peril.  When I began making comments related to the Presidential campaign, I asked listeners and readers to attempt to make candidates address these issues and not hide behind focus-group tested sound bites.   I hope that some readers will take the trouble to read Putnam’s book and then make it their business to get Presidential candidates to address this problem with concrete proposals.

Michael Meeropol is professor emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. He is the author (with Howard Sherman) of Principles of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. Austerity Policies.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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