Haskins's ultimate conclusion:
[A]lthough there is room for government to help advance the cause of economic mobility in America, it can do so mostly by encouraging personal responsibility. Poverty in America is a function of culture and behavior at least as much as of entrenched injustice, and economic mobility calls not for wealth-transfer programs but for efforts that support and uphold the cultural institutions that have always enabled prosperity: education, work, marriage, and responsible child-rearing.
Thus, the inequality debate is not nearly as relevant to the more important question of mobility as it sometimes seems to many advocates and politicians. Inequality is a cloudy lens through which to understand the problems of poverty and mobility, and it does not point toward solutions. Great wealth is not a social problem; great poverty is. And great wealth neither causes poverty nor can readily alleviate it. Only by properly targeting poverty, and by understanding its social, cultural, and moral dimensions, can well-intentioned policymakers hope to make a dent in American poverty — and thereby advance mobility and sustain the American Dream.
I think one of the problems with contemporary liberalism has been its unwillingness to seriously acknowledge the destructive cultural factors that hinder economic mobility in some low-income communities. Many progressives behave as if "institutional inequality" is the only thing limiting the available opportunities for low-income families. But conservatives rightly point to the importance of personal responsibility and family stability.
Indeed, it often seems as though the liberal "model" of society has failed to account for the vast array of government-sponsored social welfare and social justice programs introduced over the past several decades -- most of which have failed to remedy the problems that they were designed to address.
Unfortunately, we now have a conservative movement that is more interested in browbeating the president over a simple "stay in school" speech than challenging him to more seriously address issues like parental involvement.
Update: Here is a good article explaining why conservatives should've been supporting Obama's speech to school children.
4 comments:
I think one of the problems with contemporary liberalism has been its unwillingness to seriously acknowledge the destructive cultural factors that hinder economic mobility in some low-income communities. Many progressives behave as if "institutional inequality" is the only thing limiting the available opportunities for low-income families. But conservatives rightly point to the importance of personal responsibility and family stability.
Here's my issue with the idea of "personal responsibility". It is easy to be personally responsible when you have a system already set up and in place that reinforces such behavior. It is easy to slide back into being "personal responsibility" after a lapse when you have a place of good-standing in an upwardly mobile community, and when you fit into the storybook image of a "good" person.
It is hard to make progress when you're learning in overcrowded classrooms, and when your family can't afford to put food on the table. It is hard to make progress when the failings of your community - due in part to structural trends that remove resources and opportunities such as white flight - is turned into the personal failures of those within the community.
It is hard to fight for personal progress when doing the personally responsible thing - like, as mentioned on NPR's Thursday Fresh AIr, not fighting your dog in a dog fighting ring - leads to you getting dead. If you're going to be getting dead or in a dead-end job or harassed by the police anyway,, why not do the personally irresponsible thing?
I also think it is hard to tie oneself to the idea of personal responsibility if only a small fraction of those who 'do right' make it. I don't know how to fix that problem. It seems to me that capitalism, by its very nature, creates something of an underclass. But tying personal responsibility to 'making it' when few without adequate resources do make it, is difficult to swallow.
There does need to be personal responsibility, but we also need to recognize how being personally responsible is made exponentially easier by being higher up the scale of who we consider 'good people' already. And by tying personal responsibility to success and affluence, a much larger, complex part of the picture is missed.
Correction:
It is easy to slide back into being "personal responsibility" after a lapse when you have a place of good-standing in an upwardly mobile community, and when you fit into the storybook image of a "good" person.
There should be no "being" in the above sentence.
Sure. Institutional factors can cultivate desperation and reinforce destructive behaviors. Historically, conservatives have underplayed the importance of these systemic forces.
But progressives have been equally hesitant to acknowledge the cultural forces that discourage progress in some poor minority communities.
The president has touched on this a bit -- calling on "AWOL" black fathers to take more responsibility for their children -- and he was strongly rebuked for "condescending to black people."
You may argue that institutional factors discourage black fathers from taking more responsibility for their children, but cultural forces are equally important.
The same goes for education. The stigma of "acting white" -- which discourages so many black students in the innercity from taking school seriously -- has little to do with institutional inequality.
The same goes for education. The stigma of "acting white" -- which discourages so many black students in the innercity from taking school seriously -- has little to do with institutional inequality.
A couple of things - I'm pretty sure the inadequacy of inner city schools keeps a lot of students from taking school seriously. I'm also sure that racial inequality and the history of racial tensions plays into what is considered appropriate behavior.
I'm not saying personal responsibility isn't a thing to be striving for. But what I am saying is that economic institutional inequality isn't the only type of long-term inequality that keeps minority and poor communities from achieving great things, and that other factors - including prison sentences for nonviolent crimes - play into it. And that it is easy to coach someone on personal responsibility if your community is already schooled in it and expects it, and if you can screw up and still be seen as a good person.
In other words, it is easy to tell a kid to ignore the community that's telling him or her that s/he's acting "white" to ignore it, embrace personal responsibility, and achieve. It is damn hard for that kid to do that, especially without structures in place to support that end goal. Long-term and broad based projects like Harlem Children's Zone work because they don't depend merely on 'personal responsibility' but understand how the very structure from how to discipline children to how to school children needs to be changed.
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