The Times has been running a series (for over month now, it seems) on class mobility within the United States. Its obvious intent has to depict the country as a place where it is becoming increasingly difficult to move out of the class one is born with; a new caste society where the rich rule over a stagnant lower class. Desperately it has been highlighting the need for additional welfare and government solutions; but today some light shone through the muck, as they tell the story of one Nurse Angela Whitikers, and bestow upon us an article of analysis:
The case of a welfare mother of six pulling herself into the ranks of the middle class is rare enough to compel experts on class and poverty to zero in on a single question: What would it take to create more Angela Whitikers?
"It shows the importance of work and marriage," said Sara S. McLanahan, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton who specializes in family and poverty. "She found a good man and a good job. The thinking now is, it takes both to move out of poverty."
Seems like an on-spot analysis to me; but alas, Harvard sociologists know best:
Why do we feel that promoting marriage will solve the problem when there are so few marriageable men?" asked William Julius Wilson, professor of sociology and social policy at Harvard. "We need to find ways to duplicate the kinds of support that come from an encouraging partner."
Of course, duplicated by government services…now back to marriage:
Of the small number of poor single mothers who marry, 56 percent are lifted out of poverty, according to a 2002 study conducted by Signe-Mary McKernan and Caroline Ratcliffe for the Urban Institute. Getting a job is more common, and 39 percent of poor people who are hired rise out of poverty, as against 35 percent who get at least a two-year college degree.
56% lifted out of poverty, not by a government grant or welfare, but by the age-old act of forming a marital bond. I’ll provide links to the articles at the end, but trust me, the Times is primarily concerned about the liberal canards of racism and additional social programs than on focusing on the positives of having people marry and form stable familiar bonds.
Thomas Sowell has written articles on this seemingly non-stop series run in the Times (although the Wall Street Journal also wrote a series in the class topic), and adds his own thoughts to this new non-issue:
The new trinity among liberal intellectuals is race, class and gender. Defining any of these terms is not easy, but it is also not difficult for liberals, because they seldom bother to define them at all.
The oldest, and perhaps still the most compelling, of these concerns is class. In the vision of the left, we are born, live, and die in a particular class -- unless, of course, we give power to the left to change all that.
Among men born in families in the bottom 25 percent of income earners only 32 percent end up in the top half of the income distribution. And among men born to families in the top 25 percent in income earners, only 34 percent end up down in the bottom half.
How startling is that?
More to the point, does this show that people are trapped in poverty or can coast through life on their parents' wealth? Does it show that "society" denies "access" to the poor?
Could it just possibly show that the kind of values and behavior which lead a family to succeed or fail are also likely to be passed on to their children and lead them to succeed or fail as well? If so, how much can government policy -- liberal or conservative -- change that in any fundamental way?
One recent story attempting to show that upward mobility is a "myth" in America today nevertheless noted in passing that many recent immigrants and their children have had "extraordinary upward mobility."
If this is a class-ridden society denying "access" to upward mobility to those at the bottom, why is it that immigrants can come here at the bottom and then rise to the top?
One obvious reason is that many poor immigrants come here with very different ambitions and values from that of poor Americans born into our welfare state and imbued with notions growing out of attitudes of dependency and resentments of other people's success.
The fundamental reason that many people do not rise is not that class barriers prevent it but that they do not develop the skills, values and attitudes which cause people to rise.
The liberal welfare state means they don't have to and liberal multiculturalism says they don't need to change their values because one culture is just as good as another. In other words, liberalism is not part of the solution, but part of the problem.
Let’s all say it together: liberalism is not part of the solution, but part of the problem !!! A multi-culti world cannot admit to itself that certain values actually are to blame for poverty (and, for instance, terrorism); and so unable to address the issue without sacrilege to the doctrine, liberals continue to provide solutions that are proven to be unworkable. Sowell writes a follow-up essay, in which he first makes an important definition:
Someone once defined a social problem as a situation in which the real world differs from the theories of intellectuals. To the intelligentsia, it follows, as the night follows the day, that it is the real world that is wrong and which needs to change.
Having imagined a world in which each individual has the same probability of success as anyone else, intellectuals have been shocked and outraged that the real world is nowhere close to that ideal. Vast amounts of time and resources have been devoted to trying to figure out what is stopping this ideal from being realized -- as if there was ever any reason to expect it to be.
I like that, a lot. Sowell now returns to the class mobility topic:
So long as each generation raises its own children, people from different backgrounds are going to be raised with different values and habits. Even in a world with zero barriers to upward mobility, they would move at different speeds and in different directions.
If there is less upward movement today than in the past, that is by no means proof that external barriers are responsible. The welfare state and multiculturalism both reduce the incentives of the poor to adopt new ways of life that would help them rise up the economic ladder. The last thing the poor need is another dose of such counterproductive liberal medicine.
Sowell is right, and the Times is wrong. The difference is that conservatives have the intellectual freedom to challenge existing ideas and posit new theories; but liberals are so locked in to the intellectual dogma of neutral values/victim status/government aid, that they cannot think out of that box.
And they wonder why the conservative party is the one seen as that with “fresh ideas”! So shocked are they when people turn to the Republicans candidates as their designated representative in order to have those ideas expressed as public policy, that the Left lashes out with conspiracy theories and cries of stolen elections; people cannot truly be rejecting their ideas!
The intellectual rot of the American Left and the Democratic Party, so ably represented by the New York Times and folks such as Charles Rangel (see post below), is going to continue and fester for some time, until they rid themselves of their own fundamentalist dogma which they have willfully allowed to enslave them.
I used this quote before; it's appropriate to to apply as a warning label on the liberal prescription:
"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." --Thomas Jefferson
Links to Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/national/class/12angelaside-final.html ; Angela Whitiker’s story is here http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/national/class/ANGELA-FINAL.html
Link to Thomas Sowell’s first excerpt here http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20050607.shtml ; second one can be found here http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20050609.shtml
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