Dream Hoarders

I’m hopeful that unclosed tags help fight the class war too

How is making public college free regressive?
There used to be more free public college than there is now. Regressive means ‘walking back’. In that sense, more free public college is regressive. We don’t know what ‘progressive’ means until we know which way one is progressing.

“ Another is by not complaining when, for example, a Mayor plans to build high density housing in upper-middle class cities and neighborhoods – and chiding our friends and neighbors when they do so.”

Yes. The most progressive thing most people are likely to be able to do in their current lives is support high density housing in areas near them. If you claim to be progressive but always find a reason to oppose nearby large housing construction you are deceiving yourself. That even goes for people who claim to oppose the projects because they (never) have (enough) ‘affordable’ housing. (I’m looking at you Seattle, Berkley, and San Francisco).

The tax-advantaged status of 529 Plans, like the tax-advantaged status of 401K’s make them much more valuable savings vehicles for the affluent.

It does not necessarily follow that we should (in the interest of equity) abolish them.

It is broadly agreed that (collectively) we should save more for retirement and invest more in the higher education of our youth. We can do that through higher payroll taxes (to pay for more generous Social Security benefits), through more generous funding of public Universities and through more generous student-aid programs (Pell Grants, etc.).

But we can (and, I would argue, should) encourage individual savings towards those goals. The lost tax revenue, due to the tax-advantaged status of 401Ks, is still small compared to what it would have cost to support those retirees through a national pension scheme (were that even politically possible).

Similarly, while greater public investment in higher education is highly desirable, it’s hard to see how net investment in higher education could possibly come out ahead if you tried to fund it by abolishing 529s.

By contrast, eliminating the Mortgage Interest Deduction, which advantages the top 20%, while achieving no worthwhile social policy goals, is a slam-dunk. And it will net the treasury more money, too. Go for it!

But somewhere between 5% and 20% have their wagons hitched to highly inegalitarian features of the tax/benefit system. The thesis is just this: that it is not (only) the 1% but the behavior of, and the policies that entrench the advantages of, the non-super-wealthy upper middle class that block social mobility in America.

Yes, yes, yes! Now, instead of endlessly rehashing this, I will be able to quote this post (or preferably the book). The “hitched wagons” metaphor is particularly important, because it is important to understand why part of John Quiggin’s does not in fact apply: those in the top 20% might very well not have made any gain, it is nevertheless true that their social status and especially their relative social status compared to the deciles below them depends highly on the 1% (or even the 0,1%): think a qualified accountant or junior analyst at a financial institution, or an assistant professor at an American private university whose costs is covered disproportionately by full-tuition students coming from very wealthy families.

John Quiggin @5 The points being raised by Reeves can be (and are) replicated to apply to people well below the top 20 per cent […] but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s the 1 per cent who have been the only consistent winners.

Wait a minute, here. There is a narrow comparison one can make – for instance income and wealth a certain percentile actually has compared to the amount it would have if the distribution of wealth had kept the shape it had in the 70s – on the basis of which we may conclude that the 1% have been the only consistent winners. That is an important insight, but that is far from the whole story.

To begin with, even from a strictly economical point of view and even comparing the real society with an hypothetical one, there has been a geographical polarization, so that the top 5%/10% at large might have stagnated, but that might be because the top 5%/10% in the Appalachian region and the Rust Belt has disappeared while the top 5%/10% in Seattle and the Bay Area has thrived.

Secondly, people do not typically compare themselves with their hypothetical selves in an alternate history (maybe they should, but they typically don’t), they compare themselves with their contemporary. So even if the top 2%/20% in Seattle have economically stagnated just as much as the top 2%/20% in the suburbs of Cleveland or the middle 50% in Georgia or even the lowest 20% in the suburbs of Seattle, they might feel (and for good reasons) that they are doing much better and should do everything they can to maintain a hierarchical advantage.

Finally, and in my mind most significantly causally, economical inequalities are just part of the story, educative inequalities are at least as important. My household is just about in the top 30% in terms of income and wealth nationally, yet I consider myself significantly higher in the social hierarchy (and in particular well within the category targeted by Reeves) because our qualifications allow both my wife and I to easily increase our income if we ever need or want to and, more importantly, the educational advantages we can bring to our children give them a considerable advantage in the pursuit of the certifications they will require to enter the highly qualified workforce. That’s why the 529 sort is so perfect by the way.

The group targeted by Reeves is best characterized by being on top with respect to all three dimensions: affluent, highly-qualified professionals with higher education degrees in dynamic metro areas. These people (precisely me) currently benefit from the highly inegalitarian society we live in and will lose in relative if not absolute terms if it ever becomes more egalitarian. I say we do it anyway, but we should not kid ourselves.

(continued) The end of Bruenig’s text gets to the core: “What this means is that the primary focus of those interested in a fair economy should not be chasing some social mobility pipe dream. Rather, it should be on cramming down the income and wealth differences between the classes.”

Most Americans below the top 20% could not accurately tell you what they paid in Federal income taxes. They know whether they got a refund or had to write a check last year, and it’s possible they know roughly how much the refund or check was. Thus any argument for regressive tax policies always finds an audience; they simply have no basis on which to determine if the policy treats them fairly with respect to the wealthy, or not. People who can save virtually nothing in a 401k – certainly never enough to retire on – will fight to keep them.

Thanks for the refs ccc. Here’s another one: https://newrepublic.com/article/144182/wrong-way-fight-inequality

These reviews have convinced me that the book is apolitical and moralizing and its focus on the privilege of well-off professionals all too easily distracts from the class warfare waged by the plutocracy (*). Now that the US has a government by the plutocracy and for the plutocracy, moral appeals to the upper middle class are a bizarre substitute for political change.

(*) This clearly played a role in the election campaign, when Clinton, who wasn’t born into privilege at all, became the poster child of the “elite” while the billionaire candidate who was born a plutocrat, who literally uses gilded toilet appliances, and who is now close to his goal of looting the US treasury of trillions of dollars, could get away with posing as a populist.

“she got unfair advising advantage instead from having a parent who is in, and studies, the business”

Do you really think this was unfair? I don’t get what notion of fairness is at work in this judgment, unless it’s ‘any enjoyment of a good not available to everyone is unfair.’ But that seems a wildly implausible conception of fairness to me.

The rule of thumb is that under capitalist domination, like almost always, both the right and left factions of the salaried class will attempt to use the ever growing numbers of the impoverished class as a weapon against the wage class, the only other autonomous and self-organizing class besides capital, shrinking and disorganizing that wage class and driving them down into the dependency class. The common weapons of both factions will be cross-class identity rhetoric, including technocracy and meritocracy.

“But Reeves details the phenomenon impressively, and makes a convincing argument that ordinary Americans, who would not self-identify as lefties, should be outraged by many of the features that sustain unequal opportunity, given the ideals they do hold.”

Or maybe it could lower the barrier to actually self-identify as lefties. I came from a conservative family, too, and at least in the story I tell (about) myself it’s this type of argument that pulled me over to the left.

I’m hearing similar overtones to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s points about desegregation of (K-12, US) schools that’s not going to happen as long as white (and in nearly all her examples, middle class to upper middle class) parents keep voting and advocating strictly tied to a maximization of their own advantage, even in the face of policies blatantly constructed to prevent mixing of children between neighborhoods. (She, of course, is a journalist, not an academic researcher.) And I agree. Doing what’s right over pursuing one’s self-interest (individually or as a perceived class) should be an ethical norm on the left.

This is a fantastic book for figuring out more equitable policies for 1963. For 2017, though? This is a bunch of pointless analysis.

Let’s just look at college opportunities. Right now, UCLA, Virginia and Berkeley let in as many Freshman as basically every other “Elite” university combined. Go ahead, quibble with the math if you want. Maybe it’s a thousand less? Maybe two? But we’re in the ballpark.

Those three public universities ALREADY do basically what this book prescribes. The UCs in particular focus largely on grades and test scores. You can quibble about how “scores oriented” they are, but again you know we’re in the ballpark. Unless you want to talk about letting in 5 fencers in a class of 9,000, or the small percentage let in on “other qualities” (and largely are focused on letting lower SES kids in?) Maybe you do, but I’m going to bet no.

And that’s had zero affect on inequality, largely because the college education itself has almost zero effect on inequality. Hoarding the gate to $100,000/year jobs just doesn’t matter. That’s a rounding error in the great flood of money to the top .1 percent. It’s like giving a guy some bactine after both his legs are cut off. Better than nothing, I guess, but not really getting at the problem.

I also don’t see the point of trying to get the top 20% to see themselves as allied to the top .1%…

re: M Caswell #18 and Chris #23:
Yes unfair, since the undeservedly advantaged individual is more likely to get a higher position in the social hierarchy. It may be impossible and undesirable to *directly* remove all such unfair advantage, since too family invasive. But the unfairness can be *indirectly* compensated by policy (tax and transfer, public health care, curb high CEO payments, …) that counter the unequal *outcomes* in money, health, longevity and more that currently flow from the hierarchy of social positions.

Re: why making college education free might be regressive: why shouldn’t the wealthy pay more for college? Wouldn’t it be more progressive to have the cost burden to shifted to the wealthy? It should be free for the poor, of course – that’s progressive.

I happen to find this sort of argumnetation, often heard from the left as moralizing and demeaning. I could do my usual thing, and just skulk off into a corner and keep quiet, but I think that does a dis-service to the left. Its not that there isn’t ant merit in the argument, its how its attitude will in many cases create a counterproductive reaction in the target audience. In short it’s moderately successful people (1:20) percenters, being told they don’t deserve what they got, because they had some class-advantages. This particularly grates on white males. So we end up with the phenomena that many people have developed a huge amount of disdain for liberals, and of the liberal project.

I think it also comes close to making an argument that the world particularly the socio-economic world is a zero-sum game, so that providing any help to someone with better than average prospects already does more harm than good, as it disadvantages those who didn’t get that advantage. At least when/where I grew up, the development of deep expertise among some
fraction of the public was considered to strongly contribute towards the improvement of mankind. Now, I guess that viewpoint has become unfashionable. In any case having parents who were college educated, and strongly pro-education, as well as having just enough knowhow to for instance get their kids reading before the age when the public schools started that task. And they new enough math so the kids could get a big legup there too. And of course I did the same thing for my kids. So in our families, everyone ended up somewhere in the STEM or medical fields, and easily within the top 20 percent. But, the primary message we get from portions of the left, is that this was profoundly unfair/immoral, because we unfairly took places in the hierarchy that displaced others of mostly lower SES. But, in our way of seeing things, the extra help we recieved -or gave our kids, increased the net societal expertise in these areas.

In any case, my plea, is that we have to be very careful in how we are percieved. Far too many in America have come to a strongly anti-liberal attitude. So strong in fact that they would vote for a known child-molester over a liberal. We have a lot or perceptual ground to make up.

Wouldn’t it be more progressive to have the cost burden to shifted to the wealthy?

If you mean ‘it’s available to everyone and the wealthy pay’ then yes, and the way to do that is taxation. If you mean ‘it’s available to the wealthy, who pay for it’ then no, that’s regressive, if you believe HE confers some net average benefit.

But omega Centauri, this world is zero sum. If the best jobs go to kids who did internships then those kids who can’t afford to live alone and work unpaid don’t get the job. There are only so many places in top state schools, and if rich kids get them because their parents can buy into the area then poor kids miss out. Sure the real solution would be an infinite number of places but with the plutocracy behaving as it is that’s impossible. Also if the top 20% learn they’re being unfair, and realise the only way to be fairer is to change the system, then we may see real change – at least electorally.

I made this point in a previous thread but got sneered at for suggesting the bottom 20% might see professors – in the top 20% – as their class enemy. Insert the same discomfort manifesting again here.

in short it’s moderately successful people (1:20) percenters, being told they don’t deserve what they got

They are moderately successful but they are, by global standards, exceptionally well-paid (making more than $90K / yr if this is accurate) so no, they don’t

People vote in their self interest

Population of earth: 7.6 billion
20%*population of US: 66 million

You’re outvoted.

Sure in the short term admissions to a given school are capped, so at least in terms of credentials its a zero sum game. But ultimately the value of those credentials is determined by what those students actually can accomplish in the real world (to the extent that employers are trying to maximize the value of their enterprises). What I’m saying, is that getting the best training, which starts in infancy btw, increases the capability of the global human enterprise. If everything was a zero-sum game, and the development of knowledge didn’t matter, how did world GDP per person increase by a couple orders of magnitude over the last few centuries?
So the goal for making things more fair, should be to spread these advantages down the SES ladder. Not to blame those who took advantage of the opportunities provided to them.

Yes, let’s go to the American middle class and tell them we won’t be satisfied until their wages are equalized with a typical worker in China or India, because inequality is bad. Talk about a moralistic, hair shirt politics! They’d be absolutely right to reject you.

The truth is that reform of the economic systems that benefits the top one-tenth of one percent, or one percent, can produce gains for both average people in China and India and average people here. (And the top 20% are average people or close to it — over 60% of the U.S. population will have a household income over $100K at some period during their peak earnings years). People who try to sell you on screwing the American middle class as a necessity for being morally virtuous are not selling good politics in any way, shape, or form.

I find myself wondering how many here commenters belong to the 20%. The linked article (and apparently the whole book) was certainly written as if that was the only audience. I may get to the top quintile someday (my parents are right around the lower edge), but the only 20%ers my age (late twenties) are the extraordinarily privileged, talented, or lucky.

It’s strange that no one has mentioned how age plays into these class rankings. I’m obviously not “lower class” just because I’m a broke Millennial — people understand that it takes time start a career and build up assets and I think people do tend to overstate how static the class boundaries really are. How many of the 1% and 20% are nearing the end of their working lives or already retired? How many of them are young people just thinking about starting families?

Part of the reason it seems like everyone thinks they’re “middle class” is because, even if you make half a million a year, there was likely a time when you were a renter counting the days til payday and hoping your car didn’t break down first. Those experiences are not all equal though. Many struggling young people (myself included) have more prosperous relatives they can lean on for support when times get tough or the runs out. Others… just keep struggling. I was privileged enough to spend the better part of a decade as a full-time student and do unpaid and “paid” internships that will likely pay dividends down the line because I could count on my family for support. I was able to climb a couple rungs of the social ladder that I would never have made it up if I didn’t have people who could catch me when I lost my grip. I called that support. Another word is patronage.

I think this also helps explain the relationship between the 1% and the 20%. If you’re in the lower four fifths of the socioeconomic spectrum, you don’t meet a lot of rich people, unless maybe you watch their kids or clean their pool, but the plutocrats and aristocrats obviously have to have families, friends, and colleagues. Those fellow travelers can’t all be other old financiers and “society” people and the children of the 1% can’t all grow up to be uber-rich either. There’s not enough money to go around. So that’s where the 20% comes in (or especially the 5%). They’re the teachers at the elite schools, the junior partners at the elite firms, the small donors at the fundraisers, the money men, middle men, and middle managers. Many of them come from money, others expect to get their some day. Most are comfortable enough not to complain too loudly and well-trained enough not to ask how much the truly rich make or envy them when they learn the answer.

Chris Stephens: “Re: why making college education free might be regressive: why shouldn’t the wealthy pay more for college? Wouldn’t it be more progressive to have the cost burden to shifted to the wealthy? It should be free for the poor, of course – that’s progressive.”

If college education is free, the wealthy _do_ pay. They pay for everyone. I’ve seen estimates that free college for everyone would cost something on the order of $80 billion. Tweak the top marginal tax rate and the capital gains rate enough to fund college for everyone. How would that be regressive?

Omega Centauri #40: “So the goal for making things more fair, should be to spread these advantages down the SES ladder. Not to blame those who took advantage of the opportunities provided to them.”

You make the same mistake as M Caswell above. The fact that something is unfair doesn’t entail that blame must be expressed in response. The fitting response in this case is instead to, as you write, strive to spread the advantages down the ladder and, as you don’t write, at counter the flow of unequal outcomes that currently flow from the hierarchy of social positions, at least until the advantages are evenly spread.

Shorter: the persistent fact of unequal opportunities is a reason to enact policy for more equal outcomes.

There is a productive way to make this argument and a deeply unproductive way.
Asking people to advocate for more school funding – so that the band has uniforms – is positive. Asking people not to participate, en masse, simply ensures that there are no local extracurricular activities. Or their local kids (as a group) don’t get to go on a field trip. More simply, asking people to provide more for other groups is far more likely to succeed than telling them not to try and do what they think is right for their own kids.

You can get a lot of support for progressive taxation coupled with solid social benefits.
If you set them up in ways that are perceived as “unfair”, on the other hand, you get absolutely nowhere.

This is why I disagree in the strongest possible terms with Harry on free college tuition – of course it benefits students who are richer than average. But it also provides an avenue for social mobility for some poor students – and you can pay for it with progressive taxation that is *taken* from families who are richer than average. The “we know better” system of charging high tuition and then giving scholarships to the poor ends up making college impossibly expensive for the middle, and saddling upper-middle class kids with a ton of debt when they’re young. It’s wretched social policy, and it has a very similar logic to what we’re seeing in the book.

Lovely to see a supposedly left leaning blog devolve into what are equivalents of Republican trickle down economics apply to global inequality.

I suppose that the disproportionate amount of outrage over what seems a relatively modest (if practically trivial) claim–the 20% have an unfair advantage in social mobility and might do well to consider trying to moderate reduce those advantages–is a pretty good sign that the offended 20%ers are right: this is, in some ways, strategically bad politics–it will anger rather than persuade.

Or rather, it’s bad politics *if* the future of politics consists in convincing and politically mobilizing 20%ers. If, on the other hand, the future of politics consists in convincing and mobilizing both the 1st world’s 80% and the global 80%–well, that’s another story, indeed, pissing off self-righteous, virtuous, hardworking 20%ers might be good strategy then. Perhaps recent political events could give us some clues about who the hairshirts are here?

I also think engels is right wrt provision of HE. I’m surprised that so much of the discussion seems premised on leaving a market structure unchanged–people can get the education they can afford in a “free” market– with a little help for the worst off.

It is interesting that the “worst off” has expanded to include what seems to be the middle two quartiles, along with an apparent assumption that while college and maybe graduate degrees are necessary, mobility is not expected or desired. The purpose is not to make people able to educate their own children on their own dime, but something else.

The idea that the poor in the US are a member of a global elite seems cruel. Visit the corridor of shame in South Carolina, or the rural and border regions of Texas. Go to the South Bronx. Or maybe some of the more remote rural towns in the US. Or how about West Virginia.

Even without adjusting for purchasing parity their incomes are often very low indeed. Third world low. They often don’t have access to healthcare. Their schools are sub-standard and if not at third world levels, not far from it. In some communities they don’t have access to running water. Access to housing can be intermittent.

The ignorance among the bourgeois in the US on how bad and pervasive poverty is in the US really pisses me off. Particularly when it’s combined with moral tales about things they could do differently, or the David Brooks bullshit about character.

Omega Centari and a few others have touched on it – maybe it should be said more bluntly. What’s the point of helping kids get good educations if the response of the “liberals” is to then crap on them for utilizing tax breaks so they can help their own kids get good educations.

Somewhat like others above, myself and my siblings are the first generation of our family to achieve college degrees. In my own case my parents worked and saved – I worked and saved – so I could go to the best possible college my grades and test scores would allow. Those collective efforts resulted in a degree and earnings that are high enough to fund 529s for my own childrens education.

Why is it liberally “wrong” that a parent wants their children to have the same opportunity? Should I not use 529s? How would that change anything. Should I make them wash dishes, bus tables and dig holes on a hot day to pay their own way (as
I did)?

Maybe I’ve missed the point – why is education “good” when its poor kids getting it for free and suddenly “class priveledge” when its a wealthier kid probably paying full price using a tax advantaged account ….seems like the education is just the kick toy – what’s actually not liked is when the wealthier kid gets the Goldman Sachs job and the poor kid gets Starbux despite the same degree and there’s no way getting rid of 529s solves that.

I’ve found the “Dream Hoarders” arguments fairly convincing, but I think one of the most critical ways in which dream hoarding happens is ignored.

What’s the key metric on which the 50th percentile has fallen relative to the 80th in the last 50 years? As far as I can tell, it’s in stability–especially family stability. And a key way that the top 20% have contributed to that is by saying you can buy your way out of instability, but you can’t discriminate your way out. If it takes an income of $150,000 to live in your neighborhood and go to your schools, there won’t be many single custodial parents in your neighborhood, or many children with unstable family structures in your schools. But if you have a household income of $50,000, you used to be able to get that kind of neighborhood and school by requiring something in addition to money: now you can’t.

That 25% of families in the top 25% have 529s doesn’t mean only families in the top 20% make real use of 529s.

1) Most families in the US struggle to save because they do not have enough money. Putting significant sums into a 529 is simply not realistic.
2) The more tax you pay, the greater the benefit from a 529. Therefore by definition 529s are a larger subsidy for the wealthy.

Cian 56: If that is a response to my 43, let me clarify. Yes, there is misery in the US, not just relative but absolute poverty. But women and people of color are far disproportionately affected. (Even rural schools in white areas tend to be far better than minority schools.) That white male citizens of affluent countries are generally privileged in terms of living standards and opportunity compared to most of humanity is a fact. I know because although I come from a poor rural family (accent and all), by sheer luck of the birth lottery I had access to first world health care and excellent education, not to mention clean water and electricity, advantages and opportunities that most humans still lack. If we are not capable of that level of self-reflection, we are not worth much as leftists.

Cian 55: I would guess that most commenters here are not that affluent; most are academics and there are few well-paid jobs for academics. But anybody curious, do consult the percentile calculator https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator-2016/.

Layman 45: As I pointed out, *any* tax benefit is by definition regressive. It doesn’t follow that all tax benefits are equally unjust and unjustifiable. More to the point, if tax rates were high enough generally and tax breaks the exception not the rule, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. It isn’t perverse that tax payers who save for education are favored compared to other tax-payers. What *is* perverse is that the wealthier a tax-payer is, the more opportunities they are given to avoid paying taxes.

Great post, Harry. We should talk. Slightly related… https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/01/rich-parents-school-inequality/431640/

“All of us lucky enough to have been born into affluent countries, a forteriori with the right skin color and gender, are globally part of a tiny privileged elite.” (TM 12.05.17 at 10:37 am)

“Yes, there is misery in the US, not just relative but absolute poverty. But women and people of color are far disproportionately affected.” (TM 12.05.17 at 7:24 pm)

What a difference a day makes

bianca steele: “Telling people the 80th percentile is very important, and should it turn out that people at the 68th percentile also use 529s, telling the that (1) their contribution is a rounding error as far as the important people are concerned, and (2) the implications are the same no matter whether the line is at 65 or at 95, may not be, as Yan put it, good politics.”

Whether it is good politics or not depends on what else you tell them. The 68th percentile is a household income of $90,000, and carries a federal income tax obligation of something like $15,600 per year. As long as whatever you do offsets the value they’re currently getting from 529s – if any at all! – why would they object?

I haven’t responded to anything because today is the first day that I’ve been able to access the site (CT was blocked from the wifi connection I’ve had the last 2 days).

On free college – -I occasionally promise to write a post on this, and maybe I should actually do it. I feel that I have argued it out with engels in numerous threads… One point though is this: however you raise the money to pay for free college there are other things you could do with that money — eg, spending it on early childhood education and k-8 education which is universally used and the quality of which is much worse for lower income than for more affluent children (which is, in turn, one of the reasons that making college free is regressive, it being a benefit that is only genuinely accessible for those for whom schooling has worked out reasonably well).

TM — the 10-15-20% isn’t just academics. It includes all sorts of professionals — physicians, accountants, some nurses and teachers, engineers — some farmers, business owners (large, medium, and small). I thought I made it clear that the book is not a call to the barricades! It exposes the way that people who are already relatively well off protect advantage for their kids, thereby harming others.

Those who feel moralized. Well, Reeves isn’t standing for office, is he? Its true — nobody wants their dodgy behavior pointed out to them, which is why politicians don’t do it.
“In any case, my plea, is that we have to be very careful in how we are percieved. Far too many in America have come to a strongly anti-liberal attitude. So strong in fact that they would vote for a known child-molester over a liberal. We have a lot or perceptual ground to make up.”

Maybe being a bit less fierce about protecting tax advantages that target us and opposing high density housing that might lower our property values and allow lower income kids entry to our schools, making sure that when we raise money for schools much or at least some of it goes to a general fund that is redistributed to schools with children who are more needy than ours, would help a little bit?

On 529s. I don’t have the book to hand, but nearly all the benefit of the 529s is within the 20%. And this almost certainly raises the price of going to selective institutions, thus harming access to poorer children. Very few colleges provide substantial grant aid to lower income kids, in fact, and over the past 25 years need-based aid has been reduced and merit-based aid (‘meritorious’ essentially means ‘unneedy’) has increased (because of collective action problems that colleges are, by law, not allowed to solve). At somewhere like Madison or UCLA more affluent out-of-state students are, indeed, paying for (on average) less affluent in-state students. But don’t overestimate the extent to which your kids are paying for others (if they are going to a private college, or one of your own state’s public colleges, they are probably not subsidizing other kids much). You are probably not paying the ‘full cost of college”. And the premium attached to a college degree has actually increased.

Yes, 529s are better than the MID. Not all tax benefits are equally bad and unjust: some tax benefits are all things considered good! But, all things considered, 529s are bad.

But 529s are shitty policy: better to tax the money away and give it back in “free” college allocated by talent rather than wealth. That way the education will go to those who can use it best.

however you raise the money to pay for free college there are other things you could do with that money — eg, spending it on early childhood education and k-8 education

…or bombing more of the Middle East back into the Stone Age
http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/21/news/economy/war-costs-afghanistan/index.html

You started the global comparison game and I pointed out where it leads if you are consistent.

It doesn’t lead where you said it does—viewing propertlyless poor in the West as part of an ‘elite’.

Your plutocratic fascist regime (you in the US), supported by much of your romanticized white working class, thrives on anti-intellectual, anti-academic resentment.

It’s almost as if they resent the existence of a quasi-caste which despises them, ignores their suffering abs tells them they’re privileged if they complain

Layman and harry: “Why would it be bad politics to eliminate 529s”

I’m not opposed to abolishing them (and harry I’m not in the business of “protecting tax advantages” in any shape), but I think they have in this debate gotten far more attention than they deserve and that in itself is bad politics. It’s bad politics to scandalize a relatively small education tax benefit while the carried interest tax loophole is hardly talked about any more, while the plutocrats have almost reached their goal of extracting trillions more in obscene tax breaks, while millions Americans are poised to lose their access to health care and Medicare is on the chopping block, while the looting of federal lands by ranchers and miners is intensified, while the CFPB is being dismantled, the EPA, financial regulations, labor regulation, anything that protects the majority of Americans from the depredations of the 0.1% is under assault. Sorry folks, this is not an academic debate, this is the kind of distraction that gives the ruling class cover to loot the country so efficiently. And harry, if you believe that your heartfelt “mea culpa I’m a selfish academic unfairly supporting my children’s college education” will change anybody’s anti-liberal attitude, I don’t know what to say honestly.

If I thought making college free would improve American foreign policy, I’d change my mind about it.

If I thought it precluded funding primary schools better so would I

Bianca: If you can only put a little money into a 529 then the fees will eat up any tax benefit you might get (and probably more than that). Like 401Ks they are a terrible program for people in lower tax brackets who don’t have a lot of savings. Wallstreet make out like bandits though, so there’s that.

As someone else said – it would be far better to put that money into lowering the cost of public education, with a focus on non-flagship colleges.

Universal benefits are good politics. Anyone who hasn’t realized that by this point should maybe rethink their priors.

Fees and debt are a huge problem for working and lower middle class students. It increases drop out rates, and gives them a huge disadvantage after graduation (or worse if they fail to graduate). Fear of debt also makes working class students less likely to go to college. And that’s ignoring the predatory nature of college debt in this country.

On top of that in the last 20 years there has been an explosion in the number of jobs for which at least a 2 year degree is a requisite. Want to be data entry clerk in a hospital – that needs a degree. Without a college degree your adult life is severely curtailed, but the gatekeeper for most people are unimaginable levels of debt at a time in their lives where most people are very bad at handling debt.

I don’t object to moralizing. I haven’t seen anyone object to moralizing. What kind of person would?

I think there is a severe problem of audience with a book like Reeve’s. There’s nothing wrong with telling people who have more than they need that they should help people who don’t have enough! There’s maybe a tiny bit wrong with being a little fuzzy with the facts in order to make a persuasive point clearly, but for some audiences and some purposes, OK. But that is quite different from claiming that the one book *everybody* needs to seriously grapple with is this one.

Cian @ 89

Have you read Reeves? Are you seriously arguing that a family with three teenage kids, where both parents grew up in blue-collar households, and the wife just went back to work five years ago (because her own mother works fulltime and can’t provide free childcare), and each parent earns $60,000/year, is one of the “upper class” families Reeves describes in such detail?

Or is the book so good that you don’t even need to read it in order to make the same arguments Reeves is “really” making?

TM: If you have a household income of 120K in the US you have an income greater than 80% of the US population. You are well off. By definition you are part of the upper middle class. Your ability to save significant sums of money is a luxury most people in the US do not have. You are defending privileges that only the elite can really use. The politics of this are terrible.

But if anybody really thinks that the class enemy are moderately successful academics who after years of racking up college debt and scraping by on precarious TA-ships, adjunct positions, post docs and so on land their first permanent job at a provincial college in their 30s and some time in their 40s perhaps reach a household income of 120k: the plutocrats are laughing about your guillotine rhetoric.

Class enemy was a bemused response to the rather lame defenses of privilege. If you’re in the bottom end of the 20% you’re not necessarily the problem, but arguably you’re benefitting. What you do with that information is up to you. Denial is certainly an option.

Yes academics are more precarious than most, though that life of precarious TA-ships and adjunct positions was still no different to that faced by many many Americans.

Your plutocratic fascist regime (you in the US), supported by much of your romanticized white working class, thrives on anti-intellectual, anti-academic resentment. That is exactly the cover that allows them to loot the country so efficiently.

It’s hard to get good figures on who exactly belongs to the white working class (education is typically used, which is a terrible proxy). If you go by income then most white working class people didn’t vote. So it seems safe to assume that most white working class people didn’t support either candidate. Two thirds of Trump’s supporters were in the top 50% of the income distribution.

And you’re the one that brought up race. I was talking about poverty. But since you brought it up. 17.5 million white people in the US live below the official (and way too low) poverty rate of $20K. Contrast that with 8.7 million black people and 11.2 million hispanics. Yes poverty is distributed unfairly, but A LOT of white people live in terrible poverty (household income of $20,000). Their anger seems perfectly legitimate to me.

I also endorse Z @ 95, with only this exception: That if you want that affluent family to realize all those things, you’re going to have to do something to make them realize them; and it strikes me that almost anything along those lines that might have the effect you want is indistinguishable from guilt tripping. Well, there are some other things you could do that are not guilt tripping them – take away all money, or force their kids to go to the shitty school, etc – but they make guilt tripping seem like the nice way to go.

From H @98 ” In the US, the more affluent your background, the more the government subsidizes college for you (roughly). ”

Harry can you unpack what you mean by this because it runs highly contrary to the experience I’ve seen…..let me explain my version:

My child attends an in-state university which, in round numbers is $30,000 per year. We are fortunate to have a good income and I’ve saved using 529 plans….we get no grant, no aid, nothing ever (I waste an hour of my life every year filling in a FAFSA as its a pre-requisite for getting merit scholarships should one be earned). I have no expectation of getting any aid nor do I feel I deserve it…so this isn’t a complaint, I’d rather someone else get it….but I can’t pay more than 100% of the full published cost.

As I illustrated in my own comment @27….maybe I will get $24,000 of tax break over the course of 4 years and that’s only if I had actually saved every dollar of the $120k in a 529 (which I didn’t)….that would still only be a 20% savings against the total cost and I can’t really see how it would have been any greater if my income had been say double what it is….only lower if I hadn’t saved as much. Had I not saved using that vehicle, I’d have still paid 100% of the published rate and gotten zero benefit of any kind.

Conversely, many of my child’s friends at the same university, receive a range of aid packages including variously loans, grants, work/study etc. Again, I’m glad they all get this, it would be great if it could be more, but they are getting this because their families have lower incomes (speculating most are in the $75-100k range) and if the sample is at all representative, the net cost of their tuitions will be far lower than $96,000 net I expect to ultimately pay.

Inevitably they will pay some interest on the loan portion, and maybe that’s what you mean, but then your argument is a financing argument, not a cost of tuition argument.

I definitely respect Cian or Raven’s point that there is a difference in carrying debt vs. not and various other qualitative experiences (uncertainty, housing etc.) – but that isn’t what you seem to be saying at 98, which is why I’m trying to understand what you mean.

Can you help with what you mean? I’m truly puzzled by this line of thinking as it doesn’t match experience….thanks.

I also don’t think morality is the most helpful prism through which to view politics but if you adopt it it’s clear anyone who enjoys the kinds incomes we are discussing is morally bad as an individual for the simple reason that they could very easily relieve much immediate human suffering and death by giving it away, but choose not to.

(Btw I should probably say I’ve never Reeves but from what I’ve heard I’m not really a fan, just agree that the rot at the top of American society goes a long way beyond big capital.)

middle v upper-middle?
Also it would be wrong to base it on income alone. I have two kids starting computer careers in silicon valley and SF. Their salaries would make the upper-class by any national statistic. But, the housing realities being what they are, short of moving into a trailer-park where trailers are three feet apart*, they won’t be able to afford a house/condo. So they will be living with high rents for crappy and insecure housing. Clearly the same income in a semi-rural area they would be able to live like kings, but it the highly gentrified areas its a different story.

*I was looking on Zillow, and such places can be found in silicon valley, a block or two away from multi-million dollar houses.

Is that so easy?

If you just gave £10K/yr to Oxfam it would definitely save lives; if you thought about it you could doubtless do better.

I honestly don’t know ANYONE in the “middle class” who is “hoarding wealth.” I grew up in an affluent suburb and now raise my children in a high-poverty county in the South. I think most pundits and writer are completely out of touch with the realities of today’s economy.

Upper middle class is indeed a different story re: career coaches for 8th graders, etc. And the accent does indeed matter.

What’s really needed to get the poor on track to middle class… jobs that pay living wages. And mentors that show young people such jobs exist.

Do they exist?

Amusingly enough: “my money won’t help” and “bootstraps!” explicitly contradict each other on the reality of systemic problems and barriets: if it’s straightforward for people to get themselves out of poverty then ipso-facto it must be easy to help them.

All right-wing activists etc etc.

1. How is free college regressive? Matt Bruenig lays out the effect on wealth inequality with typical concision: http://mattbruenig.com/2015/05/19/wealth-inequality-and-student-debt/

2. Why not just raise top marginal tax rates? In case people haven’t noticed, upper-middle class people hate paying for stuff and will go mental if you raise taxes AND close the loopholes open to them, including tax deductions for virtuous things like education. Usage fees are a thing and have their place, even in market socialism. One thing they can do is push back on the positional arms race of rich people piling up multiple degrees. Higher ed is a *quasi*-public good. It has positive externalities, but totally unlike, e.g., healthcare, individuals reap huge, differentiated benefits from consuming it.

3. What poor person complains about free college? Among poor students, perhaps ones who hear other students talk about their relaxing summer travel (which would come from money freed up by not paying tuition) while poor students are often left to scrape by since they return to be just regular undeserving poor people. I’m not talking about envy, I’m talking about the palpable feeling that you are second-class and maybe don’t deserve to be where you are.

4. On top of all that, as Bruenig points out, why is subsidizing students such a priority that there is no call for a truly universal active labor market / income floor that includes non-students? https://medium.com/@MattBruenig/the-college-debate-is-as-incoherent-as-ever-d8a0db0e8bd8

As someone who was poor, went to university, and has seen lots of people I know who didn’t be immiserated, the woolly thinking around this issue makes smoke shoot out my ears. IMO you can never have enough clearly argued pieces posted about this, and I hope Harry will write one. In particular, it might be good to start thinking about how we on the left can move beyond the sad vision of society where our go-to solution to everything is to mine the very richest few via income tax (which, perversely, assumes we will always have them as a class). We need a society based on cooperation, and that includes contributing.

Unorganized thoughts:

But Z @ 95 is guilt tripping: “Look, no offense, but you can either choose social democracy and sacrifice 2 of your 3 vacations a year and new kitchen and attend the same ugly schools, hospitals, and common spaces as your poorer relatives or you can go get yours and spend your life cosplaying Lord & Manor in the Age of Mass Production and let em all rot”. How’s that not guilt tripping?

Here in the States (probably the same elsewhere), the irony that I used to perceive is that it was the upper middle class reactionaries who had the…conscientiousness…to be defensive about their class privilege (“if it wasn’t for the liberal politicians, the teacher unions, the enviromental-wacko’s and the loony left” said with bitterness or dead-heart aloofness) whereas the upper middle class liberals were only vaguely, apassionately, paternalistically political and didn’t even have the self-awareness to be defensive.

…There’s rot at all layers of class, from all directions: let’s not pretend like the social fabric isn’t being pulled apart from multiple directions. It’s simply the wealthy who are naturally in a position to be financially opportunistic about the rendering. But it’s also finding a political majority to confront the wealthy that gives us the best hope for repairing the damage, and getting back on track to building sustainable, egalitarian communities.

…In the states, fighting absolute poverty is a misdirection (as a focal point of politics). The focus should be on disempowering the rich and the Lord and Manor middle class cosplayers while building social democracy. But egalitarianism isn’t about material well-being; that’s just a means. Equality is about dignity and power. Schools hospitals courts and parks matter more than income. Communities matter even more.

…Technocratic progressivism can’t do the politics. We must have an inspired vision for the Levelling. That means ritual and unseriousness as a public spectacle. A new spiritual expression. Absent calamity, society can’t change without a lower- and middle class vanguard changing their identity: same thing a surviving alcoholic or born-again goes through.

…Environmental calamity, nuclear war, tyranny, pandemic. Each of these could happen and almost any one or more seems likely to arise before too long. But taking ourselves seriously on the way down would be an almost equivalent tragedy. What if we were arguing about 529’s the whole time?

individuals reap huge, differentiated benefits from consuming it

That is itself a contingent feature if American (and to lesser extent British) society, and one that has got a lot worse in Britain since the charging model Harry and others used it to advocate for was implemented

Amusingly enough: “my money won’t help” and “bootstraps!” explicitly contradict each other on the reality of systemic problems and barriets

Right

Layman and b9n10t anything [doing what] you want is indistinguishable from guilt tripping and How’s that not guilt tripping?

The way I see it, there is a difference between “X is wrong and makes you a bad person” (e.g X=tax evasion) and “X is individually perfectly fine and desirable but in the current social context participates in the snowballing inequalities.” Omega Centauri may have bought a computer to his kids when they were young. Maybe he talked with them about algorithms from time to time, maybe suggested a book on programming. They went to a good school, worked hard, wen to a good college, worked even harder, got excellent marks in computer science. They naturally look for a job and naturally end up in one of the most dynamic place in the world for talented computer science graduates. They make a ton of money but still barely can afford a place and thus would probably not look so favorably at a huge tax increase on their income aimed at improving schools, especially since they and literally everyone they know went to good schools (well the computers at the school down the street are a bit old, but nothing some fundraising among parents won’t fixed). Did they do anything wrong? Do I want them to feel guilty? No. I don’t think so. They aren’t actively deciding to tear apart the society. It’s just that in the current system, they participate in the tearing apart.

So I’m not overtly concerned about how they feel about their personal decisions (indeed, that would be hypocritical on my part). I do want them to realize the tearing apart and how the fantastic inequalities of our society are propping them and pushing other people down, think hard about they could remedy this problem at a systemic level and organize politically accordingly. Or think hard about it, decide they like it that way (it’s a free world) and be prepared to be opposed. But I admit that my patience with slogans like “equality of opportunities”, “excellence in training” or even “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” has diminished quite dramatically these last 15 years.

And by the way, I subscribe to b9n10t’s paragraph “let’s not pretend like the social fabric isn’t being pulled apart from multiple directions… But it’s also finding a political majority to confront the wealthy that gives us the best hope for repairing the damage, and getting back on track to building sustainable, egalitarian communities.”

122 — sure, but it has nothing to do with the introduction of fees — just that inequality has gotten worse, and education has become more salient to one’s prospects. If you know analyses that suggest otherwise I’d love to see them.

engels: “The top 20 percent of households actually own a whopping 90 percent of the stuff in America … Their average net worth? $3 million.”

Average net worth is high on the list of most misleading statistics ever. Even within the top 20%, most of the wealth is concentrated at the top. If you don’t understand that, you won’t even remotely grasp the extent of American inequality.

The net worth at the 80th percentile is a half million. A $3 million net worth corresponds to the 96th percentile!
https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-states/

Putting the 80th in the same basket as the 95th or 99th percentile doesn’t make sense. They are not just quantitatively but qualitatively different. Far more than 20% of Americans make $120k household income at some time in their lives. These are not members of a permanent “upper class”; as I pointed out, many of them have experienced precarious life stages. I don’t say that to “complain” on behalf of high income Americans, dear cian. I do think you have to get the facts straight. You have to pay attention to life stage effects. When you compare all households, you include student and other young single households who normally have low incomes (and low or negative net worth) and retireee households. A late career two earner academic or professional household supporting dependants, often in a place where cost of living is high, making $120k and with $500k in the bank, is not upper class in any meaningful sense. They still should in my view pay higher tax rates than they do now. But if you try making them the poster family of American class privilege, you are seriously astray.

“Environmental calamity, nuclear war, tyranny, pandemic. Each of these could happen and almost any one or more seems likely to arise before too long. But taking ourselves seriously on the way down would be an almost equivalent tragedy. What if we were arguing about 529’s the whole time?”

This, I think, is the real issue with modern intellectuals (see pretty much all comments above). Adjusting, or arguing about adjusting, a few small social programs is not anywhere close to being remotely useful. Each of these potential threats require significant and sweeping social, political and economic changes or we all die (albeit at different rates). Climate change is coming faster and more assuredly than winter in GoT. Imagine currently systems of social support a few years out under the strain of automation-fuelled unemployment, mass-scale migration and food shortages.

Either we choose some form of full-scale socialism or it’s a long, dreamless sleep for our species.

When I advocate for free college there are some things that go with this. First of all I only care about access to public colleges. I don’t think a dime of public money (including subsidized loans) should go to private colleges (I’m ignoring research which is it’s own thing). Given that the 1% send their kids to fancy private colleges, I think that takes care of that particular problem.

Secondly, I think the US education system is quite broken and this has an affect on college. Kids from poorer backgrounds are not properly prepared for college and so waste time and money doing remedial education when they get there. The solution to this is obviously to deal with the inequities of schools, in particular funding and educational standards. That’s a very tough problem obviously.

Thirdly the US college system seems pretty inefficent (for example the way in which courses are chosen, graduation requirements, etc). All of my younger colleagues seem to have spent longer at college than they should have because they missed a course because it wasn’t on offer, or didn’t have enough credits, or they weren’t the wrong credits. None of them are very happy about it either. And all of them ended up doing courses they had little interest in, or with little relevance to them, just because it was the only way they could graduate. And my god the stadiums, the sports, the facilities, the campus cops, the goddam climbing walls? Are these really necessary in a public university?

Z @ 126:

I think the members of the upper middle class that can hear what you’re saying without miscomprehension or defensiveness are…by now on the left. But it’s a message that needs to be heard nonetheless.

I myself would appeal more to self-interest than social conscience. Talk about hedonic treadmills, talk about spirituality (the 4 noble truths; eye of the needle; The Perennial Philosophy).

Better yet to organize the 80%, though.

engels @117–I was just about to post that article here–thanks.

Everyone should have a look at that piece. Wow.

I observe with some disappointment that nobody has addressed my main objection: that Reeves’ line of argument lends itself to anti-intellectual resentment. Sure, academics and intellectuals are no better people, they can be just as selfish as anybody else. And sure they contribute toward the perpetuation of an unjust system, just like everybody else. We don’t need to discuss that. But the behaviors that Reeves complains about – basically, education-affine people wishing to secure good educations for their own children – are not in themselves blame-worthy and more importantly they are a consequence, not a cause of the systemic injustice that should be addressed. (*) If I’m right about that, then it’s hard to see what positive effect could come from disparaging people for valuing education.

(*) Responding to Harry’s question at 80: moral appeals can sometimes be useful as part of a broader political strategy but never substitute for it; individual virtue won’t save the world, only a high enough price on carbon can. Boycotts are usually more about PR than about the economic effect. What could be the point of boycotting one’s own children?

1. Slogans along the general lines of ‘Stop injustice!’ and ‘Make things fairer!’ have significant potential political appeal.

2. They even have potential appeal to some of the people who (wittingly or unwittingly) are beneficiaries (directly or indirectly) of injustice/unfairness.

3. If you are using political slogans along those lines, it is neither advantageous nor necessary to put effort into getting beneficiaries of injustice and unfairness to understand how they are beneficiaries. If they come to that realisation by themselves and decide to keep supporting justice/fairness, well and good; if they come to that realisation by themselves and decide not to support justice/fairness as a result, that’s unfortunate; but why press the point?

Don’t moralise, organise.

(PS. I don’t write the Washington Post, if their journalism upsets you take it up with them.)

I haven’t followed the discussion closely, but reading the original post, it’s striking that Reeves’ discussion of post-school education seems to be focused entirely on access to elite (private and public flagship) universities, with the alternative being vocational education and apprenticeships. This seems to miss the huge issue of inadequate funding for second-tier state universities and community colleges.

Relatedly, while there’s lots of discussion of regressive tax concessions, he doesn’t seem to say anything about actually increasing taxes on upper income earners (however you define them)

Maybe these things are in his book, but missing from Harry’s summary and from other references to Reeves that I’ve read. In their absence, it does seem like an exercise in guilt-tripping.

148@ Thank you, I agree. The low-return on some 4-year college degrees raises real question on how much debt students can fairly be expected to accept. The case of the dishwasher at Yale fighting to save his union job revealed that he had a degree in communications and the debt that goes with it. It is possible, of course, that he might not have got the job washing dishes at Yale without his degree in communications.

However, having worked as dishwasher myself, at sixteen, I can’t see any particular need to pay banks the interest on 120k, or a ‘university/community college’ just so I can get a union dishwasher job. People do go into work directly from high school and lead happy, contented lives. The only people I know from high school who became millionaires did so without college degrees. Preaching that ‘we’re all better off if we all go to university’ is fine, as long as somebody else is paying for it. Asking graduate students, for example, to take on huge amounts of debt so that they can become wage slaves for their more fortunate tenured betters, seems pretty close to a scam. The other discussion has people describing a three, or four, course teaching load per semester. The adjuncts I know teach between 14-20 courses per term to live a more, or less normal life. Suffice to say there’s little time left to do good research.

Improving k-12 and two-year vocational colleges makes far more sense to me.

TM @ 151, ‘seems to be’ does a lot of work for you in that analysis, and your recapitulation of what you think ‘this debate’ is about in 149 is equally suspect. I’ve already addressed your (our similar) comments about ‘shaming’, so I’ll wait for you to suggest some mechanism of communicating the issue that can’t be dismissed as ‘shaming’ the plutocrats or their supporters. I can’t think of one. Further, I can’t grasp the fine distinction between others saying we should ‘take money’ from the 20% to fund things and you saying we should raise taxes on the top 30%, unless the latter is just an endorsement of the former strangely couched as an objection. I also can’t grasp the point of working to show that you can’t lump the second decile or even nine tenths of the top decile with the one percent if you’re proposing to redistribute more from the top three deciles anyway.

So, taking your prescription, we’ll raise taxes on the top 30%, and seek to drive a wedge between those who make a fortune from capital and those who merely make a fortune from being a professional – never mind that nearly every business executive plutocrat is a ‘professional’, or that most of them make their fortunes by looting the public companies they manage rather than from owning any ‘capital’ – and from those who don’t make any fortune at all but foolishly support the policies of those who do, and we’ll somehow do that without doing anything that could be described as ‘shaming’ anyone. I look forward to it!

Odd that you’ve proven so many people wrong here, but that your policy prescription – stripped of the pejorative you apply when others propose it – amounts to the same thing: Let’s take more from the haves and use it for the benefit of the have-nots.

engels 146: It is misleading to report averages when explaining a highly unequal distribution. That is a truism every introductory statistics lesson tries to convey

From the article:

These figures, staggering as they are, mask a lot of the variation in the top 20 percent. Let’s run those numbers again, breaking out some of the richest households separately. There’s the top 1 percent, gobbling up an astonishing 40 slices of American pie. The next 4 percent split 27 slices between them, while the next 5 percent take another 12 slices (a little over two slices per person). The bottom 10 percent of the top 20 percent get, on average, one slice of pie each. But don’t feel too bad for them: Their net worth is, on average, about $740,800.

It’s almost as if… you just assume people are stupid and waste everyone’s time telling them stuff they already know!

John Q.:

In his talk with the AEI, Reeves advocates higher taxes on the top 20%, calling “we are the 99%” a reprehensible exercise in blaming the rich.

J-D:

I can get behind “fairness is good!” without spending $20 and 40+ hours on reading, much less advertising, a book that promotes “truthiness” and asks working parents making $60K/yr to get on board with “many if not most of us will be in the 1% at some time in our lives.”

Layman @131 what you’re after is to engage their empathy so as to create in them a sense of obligation, and that’s guilt tripping.

When I see my toddler cry because he hurt himself, I feel an urge to help him, but I don’t fell guilt that I did not hurt myself, so I do believe that what empathy and compassion are different emotions than guilt. But let’s forget emotions.

but how will you accomplish that without something that looks like guilt tripping?

By appealing to their enlightened self-interest. If they don’t stop pulling, the fabric of our society will tear apart, and with it will go democracy. Many people like democracy, understand that it is valuable, and recognize if only dimly that it is the only way we have to solve some of our most pressing collective problems. Americans and British already had a taste of what happens in a post-democratic advanced countries. Others might not want to follow in their steps.

TM @140 the behaviors that Reeves complains about– basically, education-affine people wishing to secure good educations for their own children –

By now, you must realize that this is not the basic line. The basic line is that a segment of the society promotes inegalitarian social arrangements or prevents more egalitarian ones because they know the considerable advantages provided by their education and the education they can bestow on their children ensure that they will end up on the right side of the inegalitarian divide. I don’t know how to make it clearer: I have a personal and direct advantage at a rotten public system of education, because I know fully well that in such a system, if anybody comes on top, it will be my kids. Now maybe you think that the fact that everybody in the top 20% has been at least unconsciously (and usually very consciously) aware of that fact and the fact that the system of public education has been increasingly rotten (in many countries) are unrelated, but I find it a remarkable coincidence.

If I’m right about that, then it’s hard to see what positive effect could come from disparaging people for valuing education.

Once again, the language of blame, ” we unfairly took places in the hierarchy”, “disparaging” “crapping on” that you and a couple of other commenters have used is unhelpful. Notice by the way that, in this thread at least, there has been much more instances of people saying “stop blaming [insert whomever] and telling them they are bad people” than cases of people saying “I blame [insert whomever] and they are bad people.” This already should tell you something.

Now to address what you call your main objection

I observe with some disappointment that nobody has addressed my main objection: that Reeves’ line of argument lends itself to anti-intellectual resentment.

Nobody suggests devaluing education. Nobody suggest disparaging education. The problem is not education, and only someone who willfully wants to ignore the inequality problem would think it is. I hope you can understand that.

Consider the following two systems. In system 1, there is a hierarchy in education and those on top earn on average twice the income of those at the bottom and both enjoy comparable opportunities of employment with comparable stability. In system 2, there is a hierarchy in education and those on top earn on average ten times the income of those at the bottom, enjoy great opportunity to change employment and have near absolute security of employment whereas those at the bottom are at the mercy of sudden unemployment, in which case their social existence is more or less destroyed. Nobody is asking the top achievers in system 2 to stop valuing education.

What some of us are asking of them is 1) to stop going about as if educative hierarchies in such a system were meaningful or carried some intrinsic value of fairness while it is painfully obvious that anyone who has grown up in a family at the top has a statistically unsurpassable advantage other one who has grown un in family at the bottom (so no more meritocratic fairy tales, no more talks of equality of opportunities) and 2) to start supporting policies that would move the society closer to system 1 instead of opposing them (and if you don’t think they by and large oppose them, if only by letting the inertia of social forces push others slightly down and them slightly up, I suggest you pay closer attention).

Harry, apologies for the triple posts, but if I may ask ” Corbyn’s — well, Shelley’s — formulation, is much more analytically accurate and politically well-oriented”

What is Shelley’s formulation?

To say something (a little) more positive:

I think Reeves makes clearer why a book like “Paying for the Party,” which I thought was very good, nevertheless made me feel the authors didn’t always have a solid handle on where their subjects stood in the relative distribution of incomes, within the university they studied or in the country at large. They often suggested that the overwhelming majority of students at a public flagship university come from backgrounds that would put them in the top 5% of the population. This really can’t be. But if they believe those backgrounds are available to the top 20%, it makes more sense. (Now, it’s possible that in the state they studied, the top 20% really is able to provide the kinds of connections they say those kids had. I don’t think this is the case in the parts of the country Reeves is talking about.)

And if we can really, in the United States, provide the educations Reeves describes to a whole fifth of the population, that is really pretty good! But we can’t. Harry’s observation in the OP that a family in the top 20% can easily provide a top-notch education to their kids by moving to what’s called a “superzip” requires that there be enough of those zip codes to house 20% of the population. And there aren’t. (It’s interesting that the assumption that there are, which Reeves again can be seen to make clear, might suggest to some that a parent who seems reasonably comfortable who doesn’t move to a better school district doesn’t care about education.)

Also, I’d be interested in seeing a post looking at “Get Out” in terms of the violinist problem!

What is Shelley’s formulation?

‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.’

http://www.historyhome.co.uk/c-eight/distress/masque.htm

Bianca – generally if you’re in the top 20% you have access to pretty decent schools. They may not be the best schools, but they’re more than adequate. There are a range of mechanisms by which different states and cities do this. In a lot of places it’s solely by lottery. Schools are funded locally, so wealthier areas have more resources from property taxes. On top of that wealthier areas have better access to donations. And as the icing on the cake – wealthier kids are cheaper to educate.

In cities this can be harder. So the way that cities have organized this is that the better schools require more from the parents. At a minimum you have to apply, which usually means navigating a reasonably complicated system that takes time and cultural resources. Some schools have further barriers – maybe they make kids submit essays. In other regions those schools don’t have buses, making them unavailable to poorer kids. The system is brilliant as it seems fair, invokes ideas of ‘choice’ and ‘meritocracy’, while actually enforcing the status quo.

Also to be clear, when we’re talking about bad schools. We’re not talking about schools that only offer one language, or fail to score high on (meaningless) tests. We’re talking about schools that are (literally) falling apart, where core parts of the curriculum are barely taught and where kids are essentially warehoused. Where only the test is taught.

Cian,

I assume when we’re talking about failing schools, we’re talking at least about schools that are Level 3 in NCLB assessments. My town (actually we just voted to change to a city charter*) has more than one of these. The schools are not falling apart physically, special ed and ESOL students get more or less what they need, and a reasonable proportion go to college, even top-ranked colleges. Some of the kids get free lunch and some never turn in any homework, but they aren’t visibly destitute. Some are homeless, and I’m not sure you could tell by looking at them.

*which is interesting in the context of concern about focusing on our kids, because we also changed to a school board elected by district–previously all members were at-large and came from the sections of town known for being most affluent
–similarly with the legislative body, poorer sections were underrepresented–and some of the existing members argued that the system was better than the new one because it rewarded their unselfish desire to do good for the whole town, where the representative system would reward selfishness and conflict.

bianca steele

J-D:

I can get behind “fairness is good!” without spending $20 and 40+ hours on reading, much less advertising, a book that promotes “truthiness” and asks working parents making $60K/yr to get on board with “many if not most of us will be in the 1% at some time in our lives.”

Sure, me too. I have not bought or read the book (I am a Foreignanian, so the specifics discussed in the book and in many of the comments here are not directly relevant to me), nor did I make any reference to it. I’m not sure whether you think you were disagreeing with me about something. Maybe I didn’t make my position sufficiently clear.

Addendum: we don’t have neighborhood schools. The only way we could get all kids sorted into the closest school would be if they all needed/preferred the services and programs available at that school, and since few schools are located in the most densely populated areas, that wouldn’t really work either.

(As someone who got a good degree in a STEM subject from a respected university I can testify it was a hell of a lot easier and more fun than working minimum wage jobs for four years—I know because I did that during the holidays…)

engels:

I think many people work harder and under more stressful conditions and do more socially-useful work than others: emergency room doctors vs. real estate agents, first-responder cops vs. retail managers, emergency response social workers vs. physical therapists. These are professions in which workers are regularly traumatized (“secondary” or “vicarious” trauma) and yet must/should be doing high-level cognitive work all the while. Along another axis of difficulty (namely, risk): entrepreneurs and scientists risk investments of time, effort, and money. Their business could fail or their research could become irrelevant or flawed. Others pursue careers in stable beaurocracies or less-demanding task or do work that is inherently rewarding (artists, artisans, performers) regardless of outcome. Society should definitely have differential rewards (nicer house, fancier clothes, food, etc…) commensurate with these sacrifices that are made for socially-critical work.

Again, such inequalities in status-goods would only be just in a society in which two other “baskets” of goods and services* were shared equally by all (e.g. education, healthcare, law, voting/lobbying, parks/nature) or provided at a baseline (e.g. housing, nutrition, leisure time, income).

*Cian at 165: please note I am emphasizing this distinction! Wealthy individuals should be sanctioned for seeking better healthcare, or legal representation, or political influence than the poorest in society.

B9 I think you’ll find that hypothetical problem is a long way from the real world. I think I’ve read that the job categories who are under the chronic stress on average are low-paid workers and the unemployed.

Layman
The extent of any psychological pressure and possible emotional stress required to get people to support systemic change is significantly less then than the extent of the psychological pressure and possible emotional stress required to get people to change their individual behaviour patterns. If you want to get me to change the way I treat my child, you are going to have to give me reason to think that there are flaws in the way I treat her now, and it makes sense for you to expect that I won’t like it; if you want to get me to support change to the way the system treats children, you am going to have to give me reason to think that there are flaws in the way the system treats children now, but I am much less likely to take that personally in the same way.

Ultimately that pretty much explains all our shitty social structures: why does X happen, because it provides opportunity for some people to abuse others. And… that’s basically the heart of the conservative project right there, innit, I need to trap people so they can’t run away if I abuse them, I need to disable all bar one power structure, the one I controll.

UN poverty official touring Alabama’s Black Belt: ‘I haven’t seen this’ in the First World

“Seems like there’s an interesting dovetail between Harry’s bafflement as to how tuition fees could lead to greater wage premiums for credentials and b9n10nt‘s rationalisations of income inequality on the basis of the ‘sacrifices’ professionals make to qualify”

I’m baffled why you think I’m baffled. Of course I see how they could. I just see no evidence that they have (in the uk over the past 19 years or, actually, in the US for that matter)

On the recommendation of the OP, I read through the Reeves book, and found it… underwhelming. If the purpose of the book is to catalogue some policies that the upper quintile (of which, full disclosure, I’m a member) uses to “hoard opportunity,” in his inelegant phrasing, then I guess the book has some utility. But if the purpose is to actually explain why and how the structural conditions of this hoarding come about and can be corrected, then there’s nothing of use in there whatsoever. Of course we’ve known for a long time that many “good liberals” will eagerly support such things as racially discriminatory schooling so long as it goes by another name and stands to affect them personally; same with exclusionary zoning and so on.

There are certainly abuses outlined in this book that should be corrected, but pretty much everything Reeves recommends is ludicrously unambitious and won’t do anything but affect the problem of inequality at the margins (except maybe eliminating the HMID). Take his suggestion that we should eliminate 529 plans; ok, sure, let’s do that, but who benefits the most from those plans? It’s not “the top quintile,” so much as “the top quintile of the top quintile,” and even then, these are already people who have the means to pay for college in other ways. Eliminating 529s on their own won’t do anything for the vast majority of Americans who don’t have college savings plans, nor will it in any way reduce the determination of the top quintile to send their kids to college. It’s a marginal policy at the very best.

Likewise, eliminating legacy admissions, while obviously correct, is not a solution to anything at all. It would affect the relative odds of perhaps 1% of all college applicants, most of whom are choosing between schools of relatively equal and high prestige anyway. It should still be done as a matter of fairness, but we’re fooling ourselves if we imagine that this is going to make any difference in college accessibility.

Basically the problems that Reeves outlines are real but his solutions are so modest that they’re barely solutions at all; they’re just going to aggravate the people that they’re targetting, which would be fine if they would also achieve something, but they won’t. By focusing on “the top quintile” instead of the people who have the most meaningful influence on how policy is made in this country (the 1%, or more accurately, the 0.1%), Reeves is lumping professionals who have to live in the world that the billionaires make with the billionaires themselves.

Most of the ills that Reeves identifies would not exist in a country with a strong welfare state, and yet bizarrely, he calls free college (a thing that literally used to exist in the United States until right-wingers dismantled it) a “boondoggle” and Harry is apparently only too ready to join him there. The benefit of universal programs is that they build their own constituency, but apparently Harry and Reeves both think that we should soak the 20% at the point of entry and build a Byzantine system to then somehow redistribute the opportunity downwards. The last 40 years, at least, have demonstrated that this doesn’t really work, as it then turns subsidized college into a benefit “for the poor” rather than for everyone, and reduces the incentives to defend these programs when attacked. It also ignores the fact that even if I can afford college for my child, it’s surely better for me to amortize this cost over my lifetime as a taxpayer rather than incur it all at once. For example, I have to send my son to day care, which is expensive; I’d much rather pay out that amount in smaller chunks over several decades and provide free-at-point-of-service day care not just for my son but for everyone else too, rather than eat the fiscal shock all at once.

Cian up above in comment 133 is entirely correct and I want to echo everything they say. It baffles me that we’re still discussing this small-bore stuff as a serious solution to national problems. Even if some of it should be done out of simple fairness, many of these policies are barely relevant to the lives most people lead. If we want a more egalitarian society, we’re not going to get there because we tweaked some provision of the tax code; we’re going to get there because we’ll have engineered a massive wealth transfer from the top to the bottom.

Harry Thing is… if we’re looking at the past 40 years post-secondary has become LESS inflected by parental resources, because it has expanded and become much more widely available

To me, that is a crucial empirical question, perhaps the crucial one. If indeed post-secondary expands and become universal, as did primary and secondary education before, then the insulating effect of an essentially different level of education and the specific formative experiences its acquiring entailed (which perhaps coincidentally is synchronized with the period in life where close social circles are stabilized) will eventually be overcome by the universalization of the experience. If however a threshold of 20% to 30% of a generation achieving complete post-secondary education becomes an enduring feature of advanced western democracies, or if a higher proportion gets a post-secondary degree but a strict hierarchy of such degrees sharply divides them, and if consequently for the first time in the history of mass politics educative forces tend to separate citizens rather than to unite them, then a deep rethinking of democracy and of political thinking is in order as our standard mode of thinking about these was shaped in an age with completely different dynamics.

BTW, Harry and engels, thanks for the explanation about Shelley. I knew the poem but could not imagine that it was this Shelley that was referred to when talking about Corbyn’s formulation.

Layman Some people are pulling because they believe – perhaps rightly – that they’re insulated from any consequences of our society tearing apart.

Some people surely do. Still I think that people actually don’t know much about how other people live and devise their political preferences according to what they know, so according to their own experience mostly. When I’m feeling optimistic, I think that if they knew, they would understand, and that political organization can make them know.

engels I blame the American petty bourgeoisie and declare they are bad people.

Oh, sure, I didn’t forget about you. That’s why I did not write that nobody made such accusations.

Harry, from the point of view of relative positions that more people are going to university is irrelevant. The important question is the neatness of fit between the percentage that do go and their place in the academic hierarchy and and their parents’ positions. My impression is that is becoming more not less deterministic. (Since fees only came in recently we’re taking about the last decade, not the last four decades.)

I didn’t forget about you. That’s why I did not write that nobody made such accusations

Thanks—I guess.

Layman 152: Can you point me to where I objected to “saying we should ‘take money’ from the 20%”? There is an awful lot of strawmanning going on. You now act surprised that I ask for higher taxes on high income Americans when I have made that very point from the beginning and repeatedly. What I objected to specifically is what the reviewers criticized as Reeves’ apolitical and moralizing approach. Here’s Konczal:

JK 188, Thanks for the comment, agreed.

Layman: “You’ve argued at length with those who want to take money from the 20%, saying that it’s wrong to equate the 1% with the next 19%”

(1) “I would say at least the top 30% in the US should pay higher taxes. Of course the increase should be sharply progressive. But that hasn’t even been the issue in this debate. This has been about the wisdom of shaming the top 20%” (49)
(2) “Putting the 80th in the same basket as the 95th or 99th percentile doesn’t make sense. They are not just quantitatively but qualitatively different.” (130)

Now please explain why you think these statements are contradictory.

To be clear. I’m opposed to college being free for all (in the US, right now; I’m basically against eliminating fees in the UK too, but less confident about my understanding of the institutional situation). But not to need-based subsidies. Lower income students should get reduced fees, and grants.

Why? None of the proffered rationales make any sense. You’re just helping to prop up a system which hoses people at the point of service and then engineers a spectacularly complicated set of knobs and levers to try and make that experience less painful for those with fewer resources. Free college would be a fantastic boon to the lower 80%, and by including everyone in the system, you ensure that it has lasting support because the upper 20% benefit too. That’s the whole point of universal services; instead of that, we have a stupid neoliberal hellworld of atomized individuals. And you’re surprised that the parents in the top quintile will do everything possible to position their kids ahead of their “competitors?” You’re the one telling them that this is the only way to get anywhere!

I suppose it’s not technically inconsistent to write a book in which one calls for privileged parents to do less for their own children and yet doesn’t envision a radical systemic overhaul, but it certainly doesn’t incline me to take such a position seriously.

@TM, that’s rather skirting my point, as I never said those two statements were contradictory.

engels Thanks—I guess.

It was indeed meant as a nice comment. We disagree on that precise point, but still…

@205 I meant to compliment you on your observation that some UK students fear they are little more than cash cows. My brief association with two UK universities as a graduate student left me in no doubt that the acknowledged quality of my research was ‘value-added’ to what was, in reality, an economic exchange very likely to leave the student poorer.

I’m not sure things are any better in the US. How many jobs exist for a BA in English from Vassar that will pay down the six-figure debt incurred by a young person skilled in little else?

Layman 202, I have no idea what you object to. My apology.

JK 200: In Germany, when rather moderate (by anglo standards) university fees were introduced, they were politically defeated and repealed after a few years. This is certainly due to the buy-in of the whole middle class. There is also no concept of elite education and private universities are almost non-existent. In my experience, it makes a huge difference on attitudes towards education: no concept of education as a commoditiy with a price tag, no concept of the comparative “value” of a degree, no admissions “game” and anxiety, no test prep for pointless tests (in 19 years of public education, I never took a single multiple choice test), and a lot less bureaucracy. Nevertheless it has to be said that the problem of unequal access persists. By the latest numbers, only 18% of students received financial aid (for cost of living) (https://www.gmx.ch/magazine/politik/studentenwerk-bafoeg-reform-32685208). I can’t tell what percentile the cutoff corresponds to but the portion of low income students seems to be decreasing.

It’s easier for society to buy in to free university if the percentage attaining a four-year degree is 28 percent. When that number exceeds 50 percent, society may buck. Streaming at schools in Germany occurs age 12, denying a sizeable percentage of students the secondary skills required to succeed at a ‘free’ university. The notion that ‘free’ means ‘no cost’ applies only to those fortunate enough to make the cut. To the rest ‘free’ means no choice, but not no chance. Between ‘edgy’ comments about guillotines and demands for free university for all, I don’t see how any parent is going find this discussion worth taking seriously. The upper 20 percent is just that, and will remain that irrespective of the identity of individuals who make up that demographic.

The problem as I see it is to do a better job educating young people while they are young, providing them with marketable skills, opportunities to be creative and use their imaginations, get plenty of exercise, and keep them safe from drugs.

Physical fitness and social factors play no small part in successful outcomes. Normalizing THC use and obesity are two excellent ways of ensuring more young people fail to reach their potential. Re-stigmatizing drug use and obesity will do more for young people than fantasizing about universal university for all.

Go to the gym and go to the library. Works for me, and will work for most.

We disagree on that precise point, but still…

Might have been interesting to have inkling as to why but I guess it’s nice to be politely ignored rather than yelled at for a change

Jerry — if you read the various comments I’ve made about this in this thread you should be able to discern the reasons that I think what I do.

No, I understand the reasons for which you oppose tuition-free college. What I’m saying is that, on their own merits, those reasons don’t make any sense. Again: you are proposing to maintain a baroque system of means-tested education and you want to make that up to the poor students on the back end, so to speak. But that system has no constituency except those poor students; consequently, it will be undermined by that very same 20% at every opportunity. To the upper quintile you are saying, simultaneously, “we will not create universal programs that will also benefit you,” but also, “you should do less for your children because that would be more ‘fair'”. So, rather than asking them to make a collective sacrifice (of money) in exchange for which they, like everyone else, will benefit from a universal program of higher education that doesn’t risk bankrupting them, you are telling them that they should make individual sacrifices in the form of not doing everything they can to ensure their children’s success. If you can’t see why this is an absolutely hopeless politics that functionally zero people will actually materially support, I don’t know what else I could tell you.

Universal programs benefit the poor because the rich can already buy their way into something better. Under the present system, all that will continue happening is that the 20%, of whom approximately none will read your or Reeves’ books (and wouldn’t do anything if they did read them), will just keep doing what they’re already doing, further narrowing the opportunities for everyone else. That’s because they understand that as the gap between the top quintile (and, again, really the top 1% of that quintile) and everyone else increases, not doing everything for your kids means that they could be leapfrogged from below, and landing in the middle-middle class, which is being increasingly being hollowed out, is a potential recipe for poverty. If your proposed politics don’t include putting a firm floor for how low one can fall, then you should logically expect anyone with means to do everything they can to avoid falling, because the fall is potentially bottomless. And that’s exactly what happens.

If you want to imagine a radically different schooling system and radically different society then, sure, free college might be a boon to the 80% but it would be a boon that they wouldn’t care about.

Fascinating number. I wonder where you got that? Is there some survey that you have access to where a majority of the people in the bottom 4 income quintiles say they wouldn’t care about free college? Because frankly I don’t believe this for a second.

As things stand, 40% don’t go to college (and wouldn’t if it were free)

Again, how do you know this?

and another 20% or so don’t graduate (and for sure wouldn’t if it were free — don’t imagine for a minute that society would spend close to as much as it currently does on higher education if it were free;

I don’t understand how the first part of this sentence connects to the parenthetical, but “spending money” on something is of course not equivalent to getting results. A great deal of money that universities spend has nothing to do with any sort of educational mission but rather goes to feed armies of administrators and constructing fancy buildings. My alma mater recently committed to rebuilding a football stadium situated on a literal earthquake fault for the paltry sum of ~$500 million, which I’m sure is definitely going to improve its educational mission.

and, if public, but not private, college were free, we’d get even more socio-economic segregation between institutions than we do).

Citation required. All the rich people who want to send their kids to private colleges already do that anyway; what makes you think that free public education would somehow exacerbate this?

And Reeves is NOT A RADICAL LEFTY!!! Nothing I have said suggests he is. Some people here seem unable to appreciate anyone’s thinking or proposals unless they align almost exactly with their own.

Yes, thanks, I am sufficiently well-versed in all internet traditions to be able to divine that a fellow at Brookings is not a radical lefty. That, of course, is exactly the problem. And the reason I don’t appreciate his proposals or thinking (which, actually, isn’t true, as I explicitly called some of his proposed initiatives worthwhile) is simply because they won’t work. They don’t constitute any meaningful changes to the status quo, and they depend on individual sacrifices without any sense of social solidarity. Reeves’ proposals presume the existing neoliberal frame and propose to modify some tiny aspect of it at the margins (legacy admissions!) No one asked for them, and no one will follow through on them; at best they’ll be ignored, and at worst they’re a great example of the centrist tactic of pitting various classes of workers against each other rather than against capital.

I neglected to mention above, but will do so now, that a situation in which the kids from the top quintile are saddled with large debt burdens for their college educations is one that reinforces current forces of stratification because it almost necessarily demands that they move into well-compensated “high-status” professions. If you graduate with $100k in debt, you’re much more likely to end up taking a Wall St. job or a job in biglaw or similar industries, rather than something that you might be more interested in, because you have a huge amount of money that you need to pay back. That in itself creates a positive feedback loop that drives all the people with advantages into the most privileged ranks of the economy; a free college education would be a great equalizer in that regard.

Harry,

Reeves’ proposals seem to leave intact all the nonmonetary advantages the rich enjoy, and tax away the monetary advantages the upper middle class (especially new money and nonwhites), and let’s say 1/3 of the middle class, enjoy. At the same time, it seems to suggest focusing most political activity on encouraging charity among the well off, and giving some money to the poor for remediating services. It’s not surprising he admires Charles Murray.

I’ve read some other things you’ve written, and I find it difficult to make your position hang together.

Re-stigmatizing drug use and obesity will do more for young people than fantasizing about universal university for all.

Don’t forget avocados
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=millennials+avocados

I think most people are simply mindless of other people

So you don’t make moral judgments of anybody with respect to their conduct towards others?

So the way to make the 20% understand is to build a political movement that expresses the political conditions of the lower 80% strong enough so that the 20% will have to listen

I think they listen, and also that they know. I also think they would even do something about it, as long as it doesn’t mean self destruction for them. Asking them to dissolve into the lower 80% is not going to work (and that’s what a lot of policy sounds like, like removing those 529s). Telling them that the lower 80% is going to live like they do now sounds a lot better. As Jerry Vinokurov pointed out above, the middle class is mostly fighting against falling. It will be really hard to convince even the very nice ones among them to stop.

A compounding issue is that, for a voter, what options are there currently really on the table? Not policy, that’s actually easy, but people you can vote for that are (a) willing to implement those policies while (b) are not, at the same time, keen to implement additional, very unpopular policies (I’m thinking about things like immigration policy. Incidentally, at both ends of the spectrum – see below). As far as I can tell, in the US (a) already mostly gives the empty set.

(incidentally, this is why I am so worried about permanent neo-liberal rule in the sense of John Quiggin three party system and why I’m so vehemently opposed to someone like Macron; it’s not that the policies of his government are so bad – they occasionally are, but occasionally fall well within the traditional spectrum of ordinary politics – it’s that they are carving the political space in a way that prevents the political expression of anybody except the top 20%).

Macron, and that particular election, is a nice example of how this works out. He was put in power by the left (who tends to be middle class), because they actively voted against the poor.

(And I have a hunch that JQ’s three party system is a lot more unstable than he makes it to be.)

One thing is that he doesn’t talk about the 1% at all really

But he does. He talks about people who send their kids to the best private schools in the country. John Quiggin has shown that’s about the top 2%. He talks about people who send their kids to the best public schools in the country. That seems to be about the top 5%. He talks about the social and cultural capital that the upper middle class pass on to their kids because they were upper middle class themselves and so were their parents. That cuts it down further.

And then he goes on and on about how much easier it is for parents who grew up upper middle class, with upper middle class parents, to give their kids intangibles–from learning to read to learning about high culture–without spending money or relying on (public or private) institutions. For anyone else to see that their kids have those intangibles, they have to either spend money or rely on institutions.

We have a much bigger middle class now than we did in 1920, and a much bigger professional class. We’ve accomplished this by assuming that a big public outlay at the beginning would create a class that could pay for their kids’ education themselves–we can’t afford that education, for the number of people now in that class, anymore, maybe not even if we raise taxes. We’ve also degraded our schools–arguably–and/or segregated them–to the point where mobility isn’t going to be as high without a much higher outlay of money (and I think knowledge about how to educate all kids that we do not have). For nearly twenty years I’ve been reading people who write about education shrug and say “well only upper middle class kids will be able to become lawyers from now on” and continue shrugging as the amount of money required to pay for college becomes less and less accessible to people who used to be able to afford it. And there are people in this thread suggesting, apparently in all seriousness, that saving for your own future is a vice, and if we lessen almost-rich kids’ ability to attend college, the slack will be taken up by the disadvantaged. The almost-rich kids, I guess, will just eek out a meager living selling artisanal pickles and living in their parents’ manses until they can deed the property to the county.

I’m joining this thread late but re: free education vs. fees and its impact on poor families, I really don’t think that high student loans are a big disincentive to poor kids going to university. It certainly wasn’t for me (I was dirt poor), and I don’t think it is in general for other people from the same class. In fact poor people have shown themselves willing to go into debt to buy dubious housing when there is a chance of a short term profit from the market, even if the potential payout is lower and the risks higher – and the loan scheme much more punitive – than for higher education. Compared to NINJA loans, pay day loans, and hire purchase schemes (all used extensively by the poor), university loans are a very kind and low risk form of financing.

No, the problem for poor kids is the living expenses, which are often not covered by a loan program and can constitute a much larger expense than student fees (outside the US). E.g. here in Japan a year in a degree might cost you 1-2 million yen, but you’ll need another 2 million yen to live, and that may not be covered by a loan system. I faced this uncertainty when I was about to go to university, when there was no loan system in place for expenses, and the mere threat of that uncertainty nearly killed my aspirations. Fortunately I got access to Austudy, and so had a basic income for the entire four years of my undergraduate degree. Without it I would have been in a difficult position, lacking even the money to move to the city from the country to start my studies.

In my opinion if you’re looking for gradual political changes to make it easier for poor kids to go to university, you need to introduce a debt free system of living expenses like Austudy, and if you have to choose between funding free education or funding a basic income for students, choose the latter.

After living expenses the next biggest deterrent is poor education opportunities at high school in poor areas. Better investment in K-12, and a basic income for students, are vastly more important than free education. [If you have to choose, obviously – I think we should fund all 3!]

What’s with ph and this incessant credentialism shit he’s on?

Singapore ranks 1st in education. The list of nations with relatively high-income economies and relatively strict anti-drug laws maps fairly well onto the list of nations with relatively good bang for the buck in terms of educational outcomes, with some notable exceptions.

THC use in Maastricht reduced academic performance.

In 2011, the city sought to pull back some of the marijuana tourism going to its coffee shops, where marijuana sales are legally tolerated. So through the local association of cannabis shop owners, it banned some foreigners of certain nationalities from buying pot at these venues. This let researchers Olivier Marie and Ulf Zölitz, in the cleverly titled “‘High’ Achievers? Cannabis Access and Academic Performance,” compare the academic outcomes of Maastricht University students with varying levels of access to legal pot. What they found: The students who weren’t allowed to legally access marijuana saw their grades significantly improve, especially in classes that require numerical and mathematical skills.

K 12 educators already know the challenges of teaching students under the influence of drugs, and of teaching students exposed to systematic drug abuse – a fact white people love to ignore. Which is why David Simon dedicated an entire season of the Wire (4) to draw attention to the problem. Valuing children as people involves difficult discussions about behavior, not just of the children, but of the community.

@232 Panic attack? No need to worry, I’m not interested.

But when they vote for disgusting candidates who also promise to make them economically worse off?

Anti-racism smashes the glass floor. People rise as far as they can, and fall as far as they can: if there’s a socioeconomic barrier, then the people just below it will be pretty damned talented… and the people just above it… won’t be.

“Economically insecure” -> “no longer reliably able to draw rent from being a white guy and lacking other qualifications”.

Better exit polls from Alabama (education, race, gender, but no income)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/alabama-exit-polls/

ph

The list of nations with relatively high-income economies and relatively strict anti-drug laws maps fairly well onto the list of nations with relatively good bang for the buck in terms of educational outcomes, with some notable exceptions.

The parts of the curate’s egg were good, with some notable exceptions.

TM @ 237 great post; total agreement.

In response to Bianca Steele above, I want to again argue the importance of “equal services” compared to “decent services,” and do so “in all seriousness”.

Consider…

In absolute material terms, the lower middle classes and working poor have significantly higher living standards than there forebears a century prior. Even among those who are “nickled and dimed”, (working long hours at several low-wage insecure jobs), many indicators would favor their welfare over the average western citizen just 150 years ago: housing conditions, lifespan, medical care and nutrition, child’s access to education, personal safety, even disposable income and leisure tim. This is in NO WAY meant to suggest that we not should concern ourselves with our/their plight. But what we should therefor appreciate is that what concerns us is inequality and injustice , not absolute material and psychological hardship per se.

Certainly, when we talk about higher ed. in an age of unparalleled breadth (% of population) and depth (class penetration) what grates is not the absolute hardship visited upon the 80%, but the inequality and injustice that they should have to work harder and under more stressful conditions than the top 20% to secure access to these institutions and credentials. Relative indicators matter…a lot.

I think this truth needs to be acknowledged, reflected upon, and taken more seriously. Aversion to injustice isn’t some sentiment afforded only to those who are materially secure; rather, it is one fundamental aspect of our experience as social beings -oftentimes, a more prevalent determinant of well being than absolute material welfare. That is, we might very well be happier as a 15th C noble than a 21st C wage slave, even though the latter experiences greater welfare in absolute terms.

& if this is so, then we should consider that calls for greater “social mobility”, “equal opportunity” (narrowly conceived), and a more robust “safety net” are still off-the mark. They are not sufficient for liberty, equality, and community to be widely expanded.

& so when Bianca Steele writes, “And there are people in this thread suggesting, apparently in all seriousness, that saving for your own future is a vice”, I think we need to consider taking the bait and affirming: Yes! A world in which individuals are taking non-trivial steps to help their own get ahead is a lost world. It’s a world that has accepted injustice, although in our hearts & minds we can not accept it. We see that inequality and injustice is the cause of much suffering simply because it exists, regardless of its direct, “absolute” impact on human welfare.

Even those who currently “get ahead” should take seriously the possibility that their upbringing, their home and work life, and their hobbies and talents, and those of their children would be significantly enriched by an egalitarian and just social order.

Secondly, “in all seriousness” is an argument from incredulity:

in all seriousness, fathers should let their daughter’s choose whom they wish to marry?”

in all seriousness, the town beggar should have the same right to vote as a landed noble?

in all seriousness, blacks and whites should be aloud to intermarry?

In all seriousness, we can’t possibly imagine a world in which individuals and parents don’t behave selfishly much of the time. But we shouldn’t accept a world in which this private instinct overwhelms either communal instincts or deliberative public choices.

Very interesting thread, to which I have nothing to add, except to say that JV and b9n10t speak very eloquently for me.

Money aimed at minorities, religions, ethnicity etc. just about any identifiable trait – but it takes a mountain of paperwork and a good guide to find it and the people who deserve the resources the most are the ones least likely to have such a guide.

This is true. But it is worse: Guides are of absolutely crucial importance, and it persists throughout academic life. If your dad or your mom can explain to you what is really expected from you at university, how to navigate the absurdist, non-visible hierarchies and political complications, you will have a solid net advantage. When it gets really competitive, that’s the edge that will save you, to the detriment of those that don’t have such parents.

And it’s full of that. Suppose you are a working class PhD student, submit your first paper and get the inevitable rude teardown by the referee. It’s a family disaster! One parent is a prof? Laughter at the initiation ritual and encouragement to continue. Etc.

It seems to me that the barriers to entry into the academic middle class are in no small part the unintentional result of emergent behavior. I suppose it is the same up and down the knowledge economy.

Providing better guidance can help, but those who really would be good at providing it are too busy being successful themselves to afford the time to help – except when it’s their children’s turn, of course…

@246 Good points Mario

It begins even before the college acceptance to the application process – much of which is geared towards an upper-middle class, probably white, kid.

My step-mother spent many years as a volunteer in a middle/lower-middle income high school helping kids with college apps. These are perfectly smart kids but there’s an art to answering a question like “What is your greatest strength and weakness” or “What historical figure would you want to have dinner with and why?” that isn’t necessarily obvious to even a talented high schooler.

Just making sure the grammar is neat, all the questions are answered and that the kid doesn’t inadvertently say something ill-advised is not something most kids have ready access to – particularly in large magnet high schools where student to teacher ratios are lousy and the focus is often more on kids that are problems than those that have potential.

Its better now than it used to be in many public schools, but still not enough. Contrast that to private high schools which routinely employ one ore more full time college advisors that not only help target the essays and organize all the recommendations and other details within an application – they probably have relationships with the admissions staff at the nearby schools and knows what exact stuff they like to see.

It remains the case that grades & scores carry more weight than the applications –
but if a kid’s app winds up in the wrong pile since it doesn’t come across as polished or its incomplete, all the demographics and aid programs in the world can’t help them. Parents can pitch in where they are able – but even an educated parent doesn’t know the ins and outs that can provide a real edge.

I’ve talked about debt, which is systematically either misunderstood or misrepresented by journalists, before, here:

https://crookedtimber.org/2016/06/06/lesson-plan/

“61% of all Bachelor’s degree’s recipients graduate with some debt, and the average level of debt per borrower was $26,900; more like the loan for a new car than the loan for a new house, and dwarfed by the increased earning-expectations that most degrees bring in their wake even now. In fact, as they point out, some students take out too little in loans – if your progress to degree is impeded by working long hours in a minimum wage job, you would be better off borrowing, graduating and starting to earn better wages earlier (and your post-graduation earning power doesn’t have to be much better for this to be true). Most people with large amounts of debt pursued graduate study, including post-bac Medicine and Business degrees.”

One difference between student loans and new car loans is that new cars depreciate in value fast, and don’t increase your earning power.

Debt is not a large problem for most of the people with the highest debts — doctors and lawyers. It is a HUGE problem for people who go to college, accumulate debt, and don’t graduate. Free college would likely exacerbate this problem, because colleges would have less money (you can believe otherwise if you want, but I think that’s a reasonable assumption) and would thus provide less effective support for students who struggle. And for most students living expenses (which free college does not address) dwarf tuition costs, as others have explained above (looking at the private elites and flagship publics, which enroll a small fraction of students, distorts your view views of what tuition costs really are for most students).

Getting rid of for-profits — many of which are, ironically, close-to-free, because the only students they enroll use Pell grants, but which provide very low quality advising, and have appalling graduation rates — would probably help somewhat with the real debt problem. Just restricting Pell grants so they could not be used for for-profits would probably do the trick. That would have been a cost free and progressive proposal for a progressive Democratic candidate to adopt, but would not be sexy, and would not win many votes (I knew lots of young people who were drawn to Sanders by the free college promise; I doubt they’d have been excited about restrictions on Pell Grants….)

Before this excellent thread is closed, let me mention that the first World Inequality Report which recently came out contains pertinent international data (of probably currently unsurpassable quality and scope). The most directly relevant section in terms of our conversation is probably 5.4 (see especially graph 5.4.1 page 270).

http://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-full-report-english.pdf

Hey, student loans are great because you’ll get a good job and be able to pay it off.

Except for:
– Student loan debt averages about $30,000, with 25% of students owing over $28,000
– Total student loan debt is on the rise (at about $3000/second, although this isn’t a very helpful stat)
– Students who attend for-profits/two-year community colleges generally have a much harder time actually finding a job or finding a job that pays well enough to allow them to pay off their debts
– Students who graduated around 2008-2010 are the lost cohort because there were no jobs available for them and on average earn $16,000 p.a. less than those who graduated in 2012
– Since 2005, 95% of all jobs created have been precarious in nature (in 2014, of the roughly 140,000 jobs created, only 3,500 were middle class. The rest were low-wage)
– The difference between the earnings of high-school educated and college educated workers is increasing, but only because the plight of high-school educated workers is worsening (while college-educated workers remain steadily underemployed)

The idea that you should accumulate educational debt because it will give you better opportunities in the job market is falling apart at a slightly slower pace than the idea that the rich will use tax cuts to create jobs, but it is getting there. It is true that as the number of middle-class jobs contract, credentialism is going to become stronger and stronger (artificially inflating the value of a college degree), but this will not actually reflect a higher standard of living (just the bare necessity of employment).

Many first-world nations are able to provide free education (at least for the poor) and it is still relatively high-quality in nature (see Canada, Germany, etc). Much like free health care, most of the arguments against this idea fall in the category of “if the poors aren’t literally dying, what’s going to motivate them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?”

In a world of precarious labor, having an extra $30K+ in debt (particularly in those states where you cannot work if you have not paid down your debts) is going to be crushing.

Pavel a lot of the problems you describe have no connection to free college and are a uniquely American issue. If 95% of new jobs are precarious free college is not the solution.

I’m by no means going to pretend I have any real answers. And I want to say that anyone helping working class students compensate for their lack of contact to the hidden curriculum is in my view a good person. The more, the better. Period.

And yet…

It’s not like academia is an utopia. And if I may say so in a crass way: stupid poor people are deserving of dignity, too. Taking away the smart among the poor, and making them middle class (does adjuncting count as middle class, btw?) surely looks like an improvement, but somehow I’m not convinced that it scales.

The whole thing also distracts from the fact that the academic middle class is built on eroding ground.

(Unrelated fact: the local plumber here (no college nor similar) seems to have no problem making enough money to put him well into the 20%.)

Pavel @258
in 2014, of the roughly 140,000 jobs created

I’d think 140,000 is more like the average number of new jobs (or new hires) every month in 2014 (in the U.S., that is). It can’t be the yearly figure.

Thanks so much Harry–and thanks so much to you for your vigorous advocacy for undergrad teaching excellence. I may be retired–but like you, I’m not retiring from that advocacy! Far from it. I have more time now to be in your corner.

And if I may say so in a crass way: stupid poor people are deserving of dignity, too.

It’s not just crass, it’s contradictory (by calling them ‘stupid’ you’re undermining the dignity you claim they’re owed).

@ 269 If I’d wanted to say that, I could.

What I mean is, if you’re so smart, why do you seem so unhappy? Surely one can be both happy without being wealthy. No doubt you’ll find something to object in that, too.

As for the unhappy clever, what if happiness turns out to be a choice?

Is that a question worth asking?

There’s no necessary connection between intelligence and happiness or wealth.

Oh that’s some b9bait right there :)

I’d say, individually if you are expecting wealth to make u happy (& it’s probably not conscious) you are less likely to be happy.

But on the ecological level: yes, because of our physiopsychoendocrinology. Having wealth is having status, having status promotes a certain hormone dynamic, which promotes a diminution of anxiety depression and neurosis ( as well as reducing
incidents of cardiovascular and metabolic disease).

D.C. among first in nation to require child-care workers to get college degrees
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/district-among-the-first-in-nation-to-require-child-care-workers-to-get-college-degrees/2017/03/30/

Sorry—ambiguous grammar on my part. I was rejecting the presumptive connection between intelligence and happiness (PH) and between intelligence and wealth (American folk ‘wisdom’). I agree wealth and happiness are connected, at least in the modern sense rather than, say, Solon’s.

On the subject of intelligence and happiness, I find Voltaire thought-provoking:
http://www.online-literature.com/voltaire/4411/

Hi engels.

Happiness is a choice worth exercising.

See on the tubes!

Like something out of a Don DeLillo novel (should confess I originally heard about him from one of Chris Bertram’s comments here)

I enjoyed the link for Z (apart from the howler about Nozick). But the story that he links to about David Geffen has to be a hoax, surely.

Harry, your last comment puzzled me.

(apart from the howler about Nozick)

Can you spell it out? When I read that part it seemed vaguely similar to something I read in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (but I read this book almost 20 years ago so I may be misremembering). Wiki seems ro believe there is indeed something like that in the book.

But the story that he links to about David Geffen has to be a hoax, surely.

And now I’m doubly confused. I have colleagues whose children go to that school.