Once again, I quote Thomas Sowell, from his recent articles:
Liberals and Class, parts I, II, and III
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.
The latest statistics seized upon to support this class-ridden view of America and other Western societies show that most people in a given part of the income distribution are the children of other people born into that same part of the income distribution.
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.
Racism is supposed to put insuperable barriers in the path of non-whites anyway, so why knock yourself out trying? This is another deadly message, especially for the young.
But if immigrants from Korea or India, Vietnamese refugees, and others can come here and move right on up the ladder, despite not being white, why are black and white Americans at the bottom more likely to stay at the bottom?
The same counterproductive and self-destructive attitudes toward education, work and ordinary civility found in many of America's ghettos can also be found in lower-class British communities. Anyone who doubts it should read British doctor Theodore Dalrymple's book "Life at the Bottom," about the white lower class communities in which he has worked.
These chaotic and violence-prone communities in Britain do not have the excuse of racism or a legacy of slavery. What they do have in common with similar communities in the United States is a similar reliance on the welfare state and a similar set of intellectuals making excuses for their behavior and denouncing anyone who wants them to change their ways.
The latest round of statistics emboldens more intellectuals to blame "society" for the failure of many people at the bottom to rise to the top. Realistically, if nearly a third of people born to families in the bottom quarter of income earners rise into the top half, that is not a bad record.
If more were doing so in the past, that does not necessarily mean that "society" is holding them down more today. It may easily mean that the welfare state and liberal ideology both make it less necessary today for them to change their own behavior.
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.
Despite all the words and numbers thrown around when discussing this situation, the terms used are so sloppy that it is hard even to know what the issues are, much less how to resolve them.
Back in mid-May, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal had front-page stories about class differences and class mobility. The Times' article was the first in a long series that is still going on a month later. Both papers reached similar conclusions, based on a similar sloppy use of the word "mobility."
The Times referred to "the chance of moving up from one class to another" and the Wall Street Journal referred to "the odds that a child born in poverty will climb to wealth." But the odds or probabilities against something happening are no measure of whether opportunity exists.
Anyone who saw me play basketball and saw Michael Jordan play basketball when we were youngsters would have given odds of a zillion to one that he was more likely to make the NBA than I was. Does that mean I was denied opportunity or access, that there were barriers put up against me, that the playing field was not level?
Or did it mean that Michael Jordan -- and virtually everyone else -- played basketball a lot better than I did?
A huge literature on social mobility often pays little or no attention to the fact that different individuals and groups have different skills, desires, attitudes and numerous other factors, including luck. If mobility is defined as being free to move, then we can all have the same mobility, even if some end up moving faster than others and some of the others do not move at all.
A car capable of going 100 miles an hour can sit in a garage all year long without moving. But that does not mean that it has no mobility.
When each individual and each group trails the long shadow of their cultural history, they are unlikely even to want to do the same things, much less be willing to put out the same efforts and make the same sacrifices to achieve the same goals. Many are like the car that is sitting still in the garage, even though it is capable of going 100 mph.
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.
Many comparisons of "classes" are in fact comparisons of people in different income brackets -- but most Americans move up from the lowest 20 percent to the highest 20 percent over time.
Yet those who are obsessed with classes treat people in different brackets as if they were classes permanently stuck in those brackets.
The New York Times series even makes a big deal about disparities in income and lifestyle between the rich and the super-rich. But it is hard to get worked up over the fact that some poor devil has to make do flying his old propeller-driven plane, while someone further up the income scale flies around a mile or two higher in his twin-engine luxury jet.
Only if you have overdosed on disparities are you likely to wax indignant over things like that.
Part III of Thomas Sowell's recent articles, Liberals and Class, Parts I, II, and III to follow in the next post.
