Food for thought.

These articles can be applied in many realities besides the specific one that the author thought about. 

On the New Looks of Inequality

Frank Rich, a leading NYT op-ed columnist, observed in a recent issue of the voice of the liberal America: “economic equality seemed within reach in 1956, at least for the vast middle class. The sense that the American promise of social and economic mobility was attainable to anyone who sought it…” That was, he reminds his readers not counting on their memories, the nation’s mood 55 years ago.

As to the American middle class of today, Rich needs only ask a purely rhetorical question: “How many middle-class Americans now believe that the sky is the limit if they work hard enough? How many trust capitalism to give them a fair shake?” – meaning how many Americans managed to preserve and retain the old trust, so much alive still a mere half-century ago: the trust in “social equality of mobility”, or “equality on the move”, “equality coming nearer and nearer”, “equality within reach”… A rhetorical question it is indeed, since in this case Rich can rely on his readers to answer, unhesitatingly: not many… This is, roughly, what has happened to the middle-class dream “that everyone can enter Frontierland if they try hard enough, and that no one will be denied a dream because a private party has rented out Tomorrowland”.

One day earlier another NYT op-Ed columnists, Charles M. Blow, noted the latest statistical evidence: “According to the National Centre for Children in Poverty, 42 percent of American children live in low-income homes and about a fifth live in poverty. It gets worse. The number of children living in poverty has risen 33 percent since 2000. For perspective, the child population of the country over all increased by only about 3 percent over that time. And, according to a 2007 Unicef report on child poverty, the U.S. ranked last among 24 wealthy countries… The reaction to this issue in some quarters is still tangled in class and race: no more welfare to black and brown people who’ve made poor choices and haven’t got the gumption to work their way out of them”.

There is no need to tell the parents of 42% of American children, struggling as they are day in, day out, trying to make the ends meet, that the prospects of equality are nowhere nearer their children, while parents of the 20% of children living in poverty would hardly understand what the “chances”, of the vanishing of which the latest figures inform, were supposed to mean. Both categories of parents, however, would have little if any difficulty in decoding the message flowing loud and clear from the lips of those who set the laws of the land and translate them into the language of right and duties of that land’s citizens. The message is simplicity itself: This is no longer a land of opportunity; this is a land for people with gumption.

The socially manageable “equality of mobility” foundered having hit the hard rock of inequality of individual gumption. Their, the parents’, “gumption” is the only life-boat on offer to those who wish to navigate their children out of poverty. A small boat this is; you’ll be lucky to procure a boat capacious enough to accommodate the whole family. More likely, only a few of the family members, the most daring and tight-fisted among them and so with the largest supply of gumption, will manage to squeeze into the dinghy and keep their place for as long as it takes to reach the coast. And the journey is no longer (if it ever was…) a voyage to equality. It is a chase to leave others behind. The room at the top is pre-booked and only the chosen are admitted. As Frank Rich aptly puts it, “a private party has rented out Tomorrowland”. Land of opportunity promised more equality. Land of people with gumption has only more inequality to offer.

“The Spirit Level”, the eye-opening Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett’s study that demonstrated and explained why “greater equality makes societies stronger”, is at long last beginning to worm its way into the American public opinion (thanks Nicholas D. Kristoff’s comment in the New Year issue of the NYT). The delay all the more thought-provoking, as for the US, the country firmly perched at the very top of the global premier league of inequality (according to the latest statistics, the wealthiest one per cent of Americans masters more wealth than the bottom ninety per cent), and one that supplied the researchers with the most extreme instances of inequality’s collateral damages, Wilkinson-Pickett’s message should have sounded most urgent and closest to the red-alarm level.

Even at this late stage Kristoff prefers to introduce the authors of the study to the American readers as “distinguished British epidemiologists” (rather than connecting them to social studies, redolent as they are in the opinion of American opinion leaders of the condemnable and contemptible leftist-liberal bias and for that reason dismissed before being heard, let alone listened to). Guided probably by the same prudent caution, Kristoff quotes from the reviewed study mostly the data concerning macaques and the relations between low- and high-status macaques and other, unnamed “monkeys”. And having quoted for support John Steinbeck’s sentence on the “sad soul” that is able to “kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ”, he placates the possible alarm of readers spying out a tax-hike menace, and pre-empts their violent protests, by setting the bad news in the less wallet-threatening order: the toll of inequality, he points out, is “not just economic but also a melancholy of the soul”. He admits though, even if is a somewhat round-about and innocuous way, that “economic” it is as well, when pointing out that the choice is between less inequality and more prisons and police – both alternatives known all too well to be costly in rates-of-tax terms.

Inequality is bad not as such, not because of its own injustice, inhumanity, immorality and life-destroying potential, but for making souls bad and melancholic… And for its morbid connection with biology, now finally scientifically confirmed: “humans become stressed when they find themselves at the bottom of a hierarchy. That stress leads to biological changes” like the accumulation of abdominal fat, heart disease, self-destructive behaviour and (sic!) … persistent poverty. Now, finally, we know, as endorsed and certified by distinguished scientists unsuspected of wicked sympathies and illicit connections, why some people are sunk in misery and why, unlike us, they can neither avoid sinking in it nor climb out of it once sunk. This scientific finding comes, at long last, as the much needed sweetener in the bitter reminder of our world-record inequality: the silver lining under that particularly nasty and threateningly murky cloud. It’s all biology, stupid!

All the same, one would say that speaking up is admittedly better than keeping silent, and speaking up late is admittedly better than never… And a truncated, sanitized and blunted message is better than none – so one would be tempted to add. But is it indeed? Shouldn’t we rather, for the sake of the message we carry and the good it was meant to accomplish, beware surrendering to that temptation?

“The better part of valour is discretion” – one of Shakespeare’s less prepossessing characters opined, adding that “in the which better part I have saved my life”… Faced up with the deficit of valour, many would seek that part, known to be better – on the authority… of Falstaff.

On the Shaky Prospects of Meritocracy

The most prestigious academic institutions issuing the most prestigious academic diplomas – institutions most generous in granting social privileges or recompensing social deprivations – are year by year, one step at a time yet consistently and relentlessly, drifting out of the “social” market and distancing themselves ever further from the throngs of youngsters whose hopes for glittering prizes they kindled and inflamed. As William D. Cohan informs in the NYT of 16th March, annual price of tuition and fees at Harvard rose annually by 5 per cent for the last 20 years. This year, it has reached $52.000. “Generally speaking, in order to pay just Harvard’s tuition, someone would have to earn more than $100,000 in annual pre-tax compensation. And there are all the other family expenses – among them, the gasoline, the mortgage, food and medical expenses… Very quickly the numbers get astronomical”.

And yet… Of the 30.000 applicants to Harvard last year, only 7.2 per cent were admitted. Demand for places was – still is – high. There are still thousands of parental couples for whom the tuition fees, however exorbitant, are not an obstacle, and going to Harvard or another elite academic establishment is for their children just a routine matter: the exercise of inherited right and fulfilment of family duty – the last finishing touch before settling in one’s legitimate place inside the country’s elite of wealth. Though there are still thousands or more of parental couples ready for whatever financial sacrifice is required to help their children in joining that elite, and making thereby their grandchildren’s place in the elite a legitimate expectation…

For the latter, whom the universities turning away from their imputed/claimed role of the social mobility promoters wounded most painfully in their parental ambitions and their trust in the American Dream, Cohan has words of consolation: he suggests that perhaps “the best and brightest among us will always find a way to achieve their inevitable level of excellence, with or without the benefit of a traditional education” (italics added). To make that promise sound plausible and believable, he adds an impressive and fast growing list of new billionaires, from Steve Jobs, founder of the Apple, down to the Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey and the founder of Tumblr David Karp – all without exception education dropouts (with Karp beating the record by spending not a single day on the campus since dropping from a high school in its first year). Well, with secure industrial employment no longer on offer, the unemployed may always play lotto, don’t they?

A high-class diploma from a high-class university was for many years the best investment which loving parents could make into their children and children of their children future. Or at least it was believed to be such. That belief, like so many other beliefs combining into the American (and not just American) dream in the gates wide open to all hard working people determined to push them open and persisting in keeping them open, is now being shattered. The labour market for holders of high education credentials is currently shrinking – perhaps faster yet than the market for those lacking university certificates to enhance their market value. Nowadays, it is not just people failing to make the right kind of effort and the right kind of sacrifice who find the gates, expectedly, being shut in their face; those who did everything they believed to be necessary for success, are finding themselves, though in their case unexpectedly, in much the same predicament, having been turned away from the gate empty-handed. This, to be sure, is an entirely new ball game, as the Americans use to say…

Social-promotion-through-education served for many years as a fig leaf for naked/indecent inequality of human conditions and prospects: as long as academic achievements correlated with handsome social rewards, people who failed to climb up the social ladder had only themselves to blame – and only themselves on whom to unload bitterness and wrath. After all (so the educational promise suggested), better places were reserved for people who worked better, and good fortune came to people who forced it to be good by diligent learning and a lot of sweat on the brow; if a bad fortune was your lot, your learning and your work were obviously not as good as they should have been. That apology for persistent and growing inequality is however sounding nowadays all but hollow. Yet more hollow than it otherwise could have sounded, were it not for the loud proclamations of the advent to “knowledge society”, a kind of society in which knowledge becomes the prime source of national and personal wealth and in which, accordingly, the possessors and users of knowledge are entitled to that wealth’s lion’s share…

The shock of the new and rapidly rising phenomenon of the graduate unemployment, or graduate employment much below graduate (proclaimed to be legitimate) expectations, hits painfully not just the minority of zealous climbers – but also the much wider category of people who suffered meekly their unappetizing lot, numbed by the shame of missing the chances waiting in abundance for those less work-shy than themselves. It is difficult to say which of the two category-specific blows can and will cause more social damage, but together, appearing simultaneously, they make quite an explosive mixture… You can almost see quite a few people at the helm shuddering while reading Cohan’s sombre warning/ premonition: “One lesson to be learned from the recent uprising in the Middle East, especially in Egypt, is that a long-suffering group of highly educated but underemployed people can be the catalyst for long overdue societal change”.

You think this is but one more American idiosyncrasy? You well may think so, as one of the most conspicuous features of the “American Dream” is the belief that in the US things can occur that elsewhere, in more mundane lands, are all but unimaginable. To pre-empt such misconception, let’s jump therefore a few thousand miles to the east of Eden: to Poland, a country that in the last two decades experienced an exorbitant rise in the number of the high education establishment, their students and graduates, but also in the costs of education – alongside similarly spectacular rise in income polarization and overall social inequality.

What follows is a handful of samples from an extraordinary amount of similar cases, as reported on 19th March by the Polish leading daily, Gazeta Wyborcza :

Two years ago Agnieszka graduated with a degree in finances and banking. Her countless job applications remained unanswered. After more than a year of invariably vain efforts and deepening despair, a friend fixed her with a receptionist job. Among her not especially exciting duties is to collect day in, day out, the CVs of other graduates bound to remain, like hers, unanswered. Tomek, graduate of another prestigious college, did not have Agnieszka’s luck and had to settle for the job of an estate guardsman for the equivalent of £280 monthly. His colleague from the same graduation ceremony is determined to take any job, if in a few more months nothing remotely related to his acquired and certified skills comes his way. All in all, more and more graduates are putting their university diplomas among the family memorabilia and settle for the not-much-skill-demanding jobs of couriers, shop assistants, taxi drivers, waiters (the latter, promising to fatten thin wages with customers’ tips, gaining most in popularity…)

From Hudson to Vistula, much similar sights and sounds; the same deafening clatter of gates being shut and locked, the same off-putting picture of rapidly rising heaps of frustrated hopes. In our societies of allegedly knowledge-powered and information-driven economy and of education-driven economic success, knowledge seems to be failing to guarantee success and education failing to deliver the success-guaranteeing knowledge…

The vision of the toxins of inequality neutralized, made liveable-with and rendered harmless by the education-driven upward mobility, and yet more disastrously the vision of education able to keep upward social mobility in operation, begin to simultaneously evaporate. Their dissipation spells trouble to education as we know it. But it also spells trouble to the excuse favoured and commonly used is our society in the efforts to justify its injustices.

Read more articles of Zyngunt Bauman here.