I've been playing a huge amount of solitaire and Sudoku as of late. Some of that is simply malaise about our current situation with the pandemic. But a good part is an indication of writer's block. I've had a topic for a post to write for quite a while, but I was struggling both with what I wanted to say and how to frame it in a way that makes sense. And this opinion piece from yesterday, didn't help any. It made me wonder whether I've got anything worth saying that hasn't been said already. I hope it is not arrogant to conclude that I do have something to contribute, by overlaying economic issues onto the race issues, and then including undergraduate education into the mix, plus a variety of additional issues. That's my aim here.
The title of my post borrows from a featured piece in last week's New York Times Magazine, America's Enduring Caste System. And this post is meant as a sequel to a recent post of mine, Did a Change Ever Come? Will a Change Be Coming Soon? In that piece I wrote that we tend to provide solutions before we have a full airing of the problem and then having worked through an analysis of what needs to be done to remedy it. So I welcome pieces such as that essay in the New York Times Magazine. (The week before there was a piece on reparations, What Is Owed.) These pieces capture grievances that should be well understood and need to be addressed. Can we bring systemic racism to an end? If we could, what does the path to getting there look like?
I like to use quotes or bad jokes as a way to introduce goals or big picture ideas.
Q: What do you know when you see three elephants walking down the street wearing pink sweatshirts?A: They're all on the same team.
With this let's consider income inequality, in the 1960s and now. These graphs from the Pew Research Center are very informative. They compare household income distribution for a base year, 1970, to a much more recent year, 2016. This is done by each race separately and then with a comparison across races. The income numbers are inflation adjusted (1970 dollars are converted to 2016 dollars) so these are "real income" comparisons that are meaningful. Household income is given on a per capita basis, to control for size of household. So if in my household there is my wife and me, and if her income is $100,000 while my income is $50,000, then this will be reported as each of us having $75,000 of income. (These numbers are just for illustration and don't reflect our true income.) There is an unmistakable message from the data presented here. Household income was much more concentrated in 1970. Then, it would be fair to refer to America as a middle class society. That is no longer true.
Further, it appears that increasing dispersion in income is an ongoing thing. Consider the following table, which I created from Census data on household income for the period 2010 to 2015, during a time of normal economic growth. (I made this table in the process of writing a post called, Socialism Reconsidered - Part 4 - Thoughts on Income Redistribution, where I considered a hypothetical policy to flatten the income distribution, along with some rationale for doing so.)
My value add with this information is from computing the various rows in blue labeled Differences, showing that those difference grew over time, more so for the upper quintiles in the distribution. The upshot is the higher income households grew further away from median households in the income distribution.
If we are on the same team with those who have similar incomes to ours, and if the change didn't come in the 1960s, in spite of us being a middle class society then, how can the change happen now when our experiences are not common because the income dispersion is so great? We should pause over this question as it doesn't have an immediately obvious response. The best I have come up with are these questions. Can we still all be on the same team, but play fundamentally different roles based on our differences in income? Is there a caste system now that is more income based than raced based? If so, how might we undo that caste system as well? Later in this piece I will give some examples of this that are specific to education.
There is a way in which those Pew graphs are misleading. The data are right censored at $200,000/year. It is not that long ago (fall 2011) when Occupy Wall Street had our attention. It gave us the language of the 1% versus the 99% - the rich versus everyone else. Based on data here, the Pew graphs do a good job of describing the income distribution among the 99% but don't tell us anything at all about the income distribution among the 1%. (Recall the Pew graphs present per capita household income. That would need to be multiplie by number of household members to get household income. I believe mean number of household members is around 2.6, but I'm reporting that here without checking it for veracity. I've done that checking in the past.)
Indeed the 0.1%, the uber rich, have such high incomes that they couldn't even approximately be represented on the Pew graphs as currently done. And many of them seem quite resistant to income redistribution that would take income from themselves to raise the incomes of those in the lower quintiles, ergo their intense opposition to Obamacare, which entailed just such income redistribution. For this reason, when democratic socialists advocate for policy, which surely features elements of income redistribution, they typically focus on the beneficiaries and then consider the implied income redistribution as a taking from the very rich. Ultimately, this may come to pass, but it is definitely not an all-on-the-same-team approach.
It may be that an all-on-the same team approach is impossible. What may be possible, however, and what I argued in that earlier post on income redistribution, is that many in the top quintile who are not uber rich can be convinced that they should favor some income redistribution out of a sense of social responsibility. It is this notion of social responsibility which I think is necessary to push for strongly if a a change will come. Tying that to my earlier post about race, the change didn't come in the 1960s because too many opted out. We need an approach now where people who are well off feel compelled to opt in. Even as the country has opened its eyes about race, the connection to necessary income redistribution is not being made, as far as I can tell. Both the NY Times pieces, the one on the caste system and the one on reparations treat the burden as if it should fall on Whites equally. I don't think that's correct. Poor Whites should not bear this burden at all. The well to do of all races should bear it. We need leadership that establishes this connection forcefully.
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Let me turn to other economic issues, which show that our economy is not working well for many people, which in turn provides a good bit of the fuel for contemporary racism. The growth rate of per capita GDP has been slowing for some time. It is worthwhile to contemplate the possible reasons for this. One that's been on the table for quite a while is the aging of American society. Birth rates have been down for a while. Recently immigration has been down too. Life expectancy, until recently, has been up. In an era where robots and AI provide a threat to anyone who has a job that can be automated, I'm not sure whether those explanations hold water, but perhaps they are part of it. A different explanation is that there are no big ideas left to dramatically raise productivity, nothing like indoor plumbing, the steam engine, and the advent of electric power. Surely the personal computer and then the rise of the Internet were both big ideas, but they've been around for quite a while now, mobile computing too. A related explanation is that much R&D now is going into protecting already achieved profitability - to keep the economic rents coming. This makes those earning the rents happy, perhaps, but it does nothing for the economy overall (and maybe it hurts the economy, depending on how those rents are maintained, more about that below). In any event, if the economy isn't growing very quickly and those at the top are claiming an increasing share of income for themselves, that leaves everyone else with not much at all.
There are other ways the economy is evidently failing that become apparent either when you look at specific sectors of the economy or if you consider big negative externalities that the economy produces. On the latter, our over reliance on fossil fuels and its impact on global warming has to be the biggest one, along with our inability to self-regulate in a big and consistent way in anticipation that weather-wise, things will be getting still worse. (As I'm writing this piece, I had to stop yesterday afternoon and turn off the computer because of a horrific thunderstorm that came through the area, which produced incredibly large balls of ice in a terrible hailstorm.) And we don't yet have a good answer for this.
Here are some sector specific ways the economy doesn't work well. Finance as a sector is way too large, attracting far too many of the graduates from our elite universities. The benefits that the sector produces may be largely illusory, as anyone who has been tracking the stock market as of late will know. The real economy is in a horrible recession now, the stock market not so much. Further, those benefits are not broadly shared, so they contribute to the rising inequality in society. I would argue that much of the so-called financial gains are really nothing more than income transfers from labor to capital. Oliver Stone's movie, Wall Street, dates back to 1987. It's a dark picture of compassionless management run amuck, yet perhaps a spot on depiction of the plutocrats who rule the roost over the Republican Party as if it is their puppets.
There is also something fundamentally wrong with how we do our news, mainly on TV, but also on the Internet, and in the various publications. News should be boring, for the most part. It should be about the details of potential policy debates or if not that then about major events in our economy, described in an expansive way. To understand these at some depth requires a detailed analysis. In other words, it should be a slug to get through. Mostly, however, we're not getting that. News competes with other entertainment for the viewer's attention. News if done in a boring way would lose that competition, expect perhaps for a sliver of the population that consider themselves eggheads. What alternative for news wins the competition more broadly? We've known the answer to this for well over a century. We called it "yellow journalism" back then, when the news was done exclusively by print media. Now, on TV, there is an added aspect - stoking the audience into a frenzy. Anger, it turns out, can be addicting. The audience comes back for more of the same, perfect for generating lots of revenue from the commercials, even while it is terrible for the audience in getting a nuanced picture of what's going on and in maintaining good mental health at the same time.
Something similar is happening with our social media too, where the design seems to promote addiction of the users. But there is an added aspect with social media that is even more insidious. The user's online history is tracked in detail and curated by the social media provider, which is interested in making a buck, nothing more. Our privacy is compromised as a result. And the approach doesn't auto-correct, as the ad supported model has trumped the subscription model. This is frightening.
However, regarding racism, the biggest failure happened in manufacturing, which has been in decline for upwards of 30 years, has hollowed out the industrial Midwest and converted it into the rust belt, and wrecked havoc on non-college males who couldn't make the adjustment by finding other work (less well paying) in the service sector. Much of this decline, I believe, was inevitable, both the off shoring of the jobs, as elsewhere workers with the same productivity would accept much lower wages, and the automation of work, an issue that has been with us at least since Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece, Modern Times. Where I find major fault is with policy makers who could have anticipated this decline. For non-college males, construction jobs have to be a reasonable substitute for manufacturing jobs. And our decaying infrastructure needs massive reinvestment, which we're reminded of every time we drive down a road full of potholes. Yet this infrastructure reinvestment has not been forthcoming.
Among the White working class who used to have manufacturing or construction jobs, the Vietnam War drove them into the arms of the Republicans, as they were strongly pro war (and anti those who were against the war, notably the hippies). Nixon became their guy. Even as Nixon pursued his Southern strategy, I believe it was his hawkishness on the war that brought these voters into the fold. But the Republicans kept playing the race card in subsequent elections, well after the Vietnam War was a thing of the past. The Republicans found a winning strategy in combining a low-tax small-government approach, which economically was against the interest of working class Whites, by continuing to play the race card, and rounding it out by appealing to Fundamentalist Christians, particularly in regard to repealing Roe.
But this picture is incomplete. There was an interesting interview in the New Yorker recently, How to Confront a Racist National History, which uses the experience of how Germany, post WW II, dealt with the Nazi period and the horrors created then, as a partial model for how the U.S. should confront the legacy of Slavery. The comparison is imperfect, no doubt. It is, nonetheless, useful. Prior to becoming Nazis, many of those German males must have felt a huge sense of emasculation. Having lost WW I and having to bear very harsh reparations for that was part of it. Then the world fell into the Great Depression and all became its victim except for the very rich. Among a certain fraction of the population, as described here in a piece about contemporary politics, their values are focused on Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. These people are prone toward racist attitudes, which economic dislocation surely exacerbates. An obvious message for us now, if we want to reduce the racism from such people, materially improve their economic situation so that it is not quite so desperate and, maybe, becomes even comfortable.
The following is an absurd suggestion from me, I know. But the social scientist in me wants to know about the family history of those White cops who do horribly violent things to Blacks. Is there a history of overt racism in their families? Is there a history of economic dislocation, where the parents once had good jobs in manufacturing but then lost those? It's not the story now. The story is about ending systemic racism. Yet I think we need to have a better handle on the overt racist personality. To defeat it, we need to know its cause. The NY Times Magazine pieces I cited above seem content to ascribing the cause to the system. Yet there are Whites who try hard to treat others with decency, regardless of their race. These other Whites live in the same system. Why then the different responses? That needs to be understood.
* * * * *
Hugo Long. This is a bad joke about when we played street football, and what we said to the kid who was out of the play but nonetheless ran a pass route. It's a commentary on this post, which I'm still writing this Monday morning, though I had intended to finish it yesterday.
I want to turn now to higher education as a microcosm of the caste system. I do this in part because I have more direct experience to bring to the discussion when considering higher ed. But it is also because I believe that the overt racism of some members of the police and White nationalists is quite different from what tends to happen on campus, which I would argue is mainly a consequence of provincialism rather than overt racism, though there is surely some of the latter and perhaps a continuum between the two rather than just one or the other. I wrote about this a few years ago in a post called Provincialism and Freedom of Speech in the Classroom. It gives some examples where cultural differences rather than racial differences caused tension. Further, the first example is about student antagonism to the instructor on account of that cultural difference (and possibly because the instructor was a woman). This can't be readily explained by a historical power structure. It is something else going on. Here is the most relevant bit from that post.
In her (the instructor's) mind provincialism didn't just reflect a limit on experience. Many people have limited experiences through no fault of their own. Provincialism requires a closed mind that is not willing to challenge preconceptions nor have experiences that might contradict those beliefs.
One reason for the provincialism is the geographic proximity of the students enrolled at Illinois when they were in high school. Back in 2017, I actually made a Google Map of the hometowns of the domestic students in my Economics of Organization class. (There were a few international students, who aren't include here.) If you zoom out you can see the few students who were from out of state. By zooming in, you see the vast majority of students were from the northwest suburbs of Chicago. This, perhaps, explains a common cultural view by such students. It doesn't explain a closed mindset, however. That might be better explained by family values, religion, or some other factor such as a lack of curiosity. This being closed to new ideas is antithetical to the values of the university, but it perhaps helps the students get through college. We know that loneliness is a significant issue for undergraduate students. Finding students like themselves, perhaps students who went to the same high school as they did, might be considered as a coping strategy. Fraternities and sororities might be considered in this light, though they might also reflect a determined effort to solidify provincialism, especially in that they exclude certain students who want to become members.
Sometimes this provincialism manifests as being clueless about how one's behavior might impact others. I wrote about this in a post called Theism - "Pan", "Mono", and "A", where I described my first experience where religion entered into my classroom. It was inadvertent and in retrospect I invited it, but that's only because I couldn't imagine it happening ahead of time. One student was responsible for several microaggressions against classmates, without being aware that he was doing it. This was in a class for campus honors students, among the better students on campus academically. My conclusion is that provincialism can pertain in certain dimensions of human interaction, while the same person is quite open to possibility in other areas, such as the discipline of study the student is pursuing. Indeed, I felt I was reading about provincialism in this recent piece from the the New Yorker, about Silicon Valley versus the New York Times. I wonder if other readers of that piece had a similar reaction.
Therefore, one wants to ask whether it is possible to educate a person out of his/her provincialism and, if so, what it would take to do that. I don't think we know the answer to that one, but I'm guessing it would require an ongoing mentoring relationship to peel the various layers of the onion, rather than one simple lesson which gives clear evidence to counter prior held belief. We don't let go of our beliefs very easily. Instead, we tend to reject the evidence, at least initially. Continuing to confront additional evidence of the same sort may create a kind of tension in the person that requires abandonment of the old belief. But this is just a guess and it might very well be that the person opts out of the mentoring well before reaching that point.
In any event, the prevalence of provincialism makes one want to question that the beliefs derive only from the system and the history of oppression that the system embodies, as argued in the NY Times Magazine piece on America's caste system. The following piece from five years ago, The University of China at Illinois, makes for a good read as it gives a good deal of background and detail about how Chinese students and White students at Illinois remained apart rather than intermixed with regularity in friendly interactions, in spite of the large numbers of both types of students on campus and although a priori the Chinese students would have preferred such interaction. This can't be explained by the system, because there was no earlier experience with large numbers of Chinese undergraduate students. But whatever does explain it should be kept in mind when considering White-Black interactions on campus, as some of the same factors are likely in play.
Let me switch to a different aspect of college life that may be less apparent to outsiders, but that is evident to those who work on campus. In a fractal way, the income inequality in our society overall gets replicated by divisions between haves and have nots on campus. The STEM disciplines and Business are the haves. The humanities and some of the softer social sciences are the have nots. I wrote about the issue some years ago in a post called Our Increasingly Bifurcated Higher Education System, where the focus was on faculty salaries. It is one of the main drivers behind why campuses like mine have gone so heavily into teaching faculty who are not on the tenure track. And it is sustained by the expected starting salaries from graduates in the respective disciplines, along with the hyperinflation in tuition.
Students have always been somewhat mercenary about why they go to college and in certain majors it seems more concentrated. When I was a college student pre-meds had that reputation. But the extent of it now is beyond belief and it is a major contributor to the mental health crisis among students we are currently seeing. What is especially sobering, in contrast to the non-college Whites who have lost out with the decline of manufacturing jobs, is that many of these students who are experiencing depression seem to be on the path to being winners in the the lottery that our economy presents to them. Yet that is insufficient to keep them content, well motivated, and to avoid feeling anxiety and depression. To me, this is a clear signal that the system is broken and we in higher education need to understand that. My sense of the solution was expressed in a post, Reconsidering Elitism in Public Education, and my preference is that the solution would be applied to private education as well. (But how to achieve that is beyond me.) We need for the education to be decent but not elite. Now if students fail at school it is perceived as a disaster. Failure should not be so frightening. Indeed, students need to learn to fail and then after a fashion begin again with renewed determination or instead try something else that is fundamentally different. The dread of failure is surely feeding the mental health crisis. The system needs to see itself as largely responsible for producing that dread. At present, we're dealing with this as if the system is fine and it's just the lack of mental health professionals that is the problem. The system is not fine. The mental health crisis is evidence of that.
Let's move onto considering admissions and how undergraduate admissions sustains the caste system. Perhaps 20 years ago or so I was a member of the CIC Learning Technology Group (the CIC is now called the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and my counterpart from our sister campus in Chicago told me that my campus was not admitting enough Black students from Chicago. I was probably vaguely aware of this beforehand, but I had no direct role in admissions, so I didn't make a big deal of it then. Sometime later I became aware that many students who would qualify for admission didn't take the effort to apply, either because they didn't think they could afford it or because they didn't want to attend college where they were one of only a few Black students in their classes. Our sister campus, UIC, was easier for them that way, and it was preferred by many Black students even while a degree from UIUC would be more prestigious as a credential in the labor market.
More recently, the NY Times ran a series to show how elite colleges reinforce the current income distribution more than they create opportunity for those less well off to rise and shine. Here is the data for my campus and here is the article that describes the general issue. To be fair, my campus has had programs to counter this apparent bias. The one I'm most familiar with is called Illinois Promise, as I've mentored students who were part of that program. More recently, the campus has raised the maximum income level for eligibility with something called Illinois Commitment. Note that these programs are explicitly based on family income, not on race. Moreover, it is my understanding that the admission decision itself may take county of residence into consideration as one of the many variables that determine admission. But family income is not included in that, yet standardized test scores, which surely do count though not this year, are strongly correlated with family income. So, how the various variables get aggregated into a decision to admit the applicant remains something of a mystery.
There is more to it than that for considering in-state applicants. In Illinois, the main way public education for K-12 gets funded is through property taxes. Those taxes clearly vary by housing value. Rich neighborhoods have much greater funding per student than poor neighborhoods, whether those poor neighborhoods are rural, and primarily White, or urban, and then primarily Black and Latinx. It's been quite a while since I read Kozol's The Shame of the Nation, where he describes with horror apartheid schools that are incredibly under funded. I can't remember whether any Chicago schools were included but I'm quite sure East St. Louis schools were. Surely any approach to education that claimed it was being done by all who are on the same team would equalize funding per student regardless of race or location of the school. Getting to that, however, will be a very heavy lift. Based on where we are now, I wonder if it is possible.
* * * * *
I refuse to join a club that would have me as a member.
In this last section I want to take on the question of whether talking about White Privilege and White Guilt is a good way to arrive at an all-on-the-same-team approach. In particular, people my age who are not Black were raised on the story that we're a nation of immigrants. Most of those immigrants experienced a good deal of discrimination when they arrived, for which that line from Groucho serves as an emblem. Further, most of these immigrants arrived in America well after the Civil War, so they can't be directly connected with the evils of slavery nor with Jim Crow. What then is the benefit about repeated talk of White Privilege?
I'm probably going to disappoint readers on this one by taking both sides of the argument. I do think it matters, on a case by case basis, where the person currently is on social responsibility and how far that extends. A test of that is if many shared the same views would that be sufficient to end systemic racism? But that may be too simple in how to consider these things. We normally do things in increments, not all at once. Ending systemic racism will be a process, a difficult one to follow through on. Will we back away from the process before it has a chance to play through because some who said they would opt in got cold feet and then opted out?
Here I think it helpful to consider something called the availability heuristic, which means that people make their decisions about issues based on examples that come readily to mind. What has become quite evident recently, is that the vast majority of White people are ignorant about the various issues and concerns that Black people live with that White people simply don't confront. The events that have followed since the George Floyd execution have alerted everyone to the dangers of excessive police violence (even if we should have been alerted to this from prior experiences but apparently were not). That particular threat is now available to White people. But there are many other aspects to systemic racism that remain hidden to Whites because they don't live in segregated Black communities and don't experience all that happens there. Those are not available and I wonder if they can be made available in the absence of dramatic and viral videos that illustrate the issues. For example, it has been reported extensively that the death rates from COVID-19 are much higher in minority communities. But I doubt that most Whites can explain why that is nor could they explain what would need to change so that was no longer true. In the absence of full availability, the expressions White Privilege and White Guilt serve as placeholders that there is a story there that needs to be told.
Now, taking the other side of the argument, I do think that much of what needs to be done is to reduce income inequality so that we return to being a middle class society, with all races included in that vision. But this will require within-race income redistribution, something that is not getting attention now, yet I believe is absolutely necessary. How can you argue for that except by arguing that it is the socially responsible thing to do?
I will close by mentioning this post, Ask What You Can Do For Your Country, which has a table in it of the amount households would pay in federal income tax at a few focal income levels and that is rendered every 5 years, starting in 1980 when Jimmy Carter was still President (though the last year is 2013 since I didn't have 2015 data available when I wrote the post). It is worth spending some time poring over this table just to ask, what is the right amount of taxes that a household should pay in this situation? We've changed our answer to that question repeatedly over time. My own preference for the ideal would be to accept the first tax cut under Reagan, and hence use the 1985 numbers. They are substantially lower than the 1980 numbers, yet much higher than in the other years given, all of which are more recent. Would it be possible, by using a social responsibility argument, to return to that level of taxation. Of course, it would need to be coupled with how the increased taxes would be spent. The beneficiaries must be disproportionately at the lower income levels. This in itself wouldn't end systemic racism. But it would be a remarkably good first step to test the all-on-the-same-team approach.
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