How can US social mobility stay vibrant past the 1970's?

[TxCoatl1970]

I wanted to salvage the debate re: social mobility slowing down to a crawl in the United States since the 1970's.

A talking point re: social mobility has been US middle-class net income declining since 1973.

There's the usual statistical challenges re this talking point- who'd you ask, how educated were they, and so forth, as well as who's responsible for helping people reach their potential?

Tremendous social changes occurred over that period- affirmative action for minorities and women entering traditionally white male-dominated fields have vastly expanded the workforce that can be middle-class on their own. Anyone with a bachelor's degree can play.

I'd argue that OSHA and environmental regulations changed the nature of work considerably where Americans preferred to spend capital rather than draft more expendable labor doing things expediently as had been the case since the Industrial Revolution.

Automation and better computer/communications technology have enabled a 24/7 work culture that allows a few workers to do the work of hundreds, but made the system dependent on the tech working right for productivity to continue increasing.

Still, looking at the last forty years, I'd say the United States had seemed to ossify socially into the haves and have-nots.

The haves are largely independent contractors or business-owners, have an income stream not as heavily taxed as earned income, and generally wonder what the have-nots are whining about.
Haves can be of any race, ethnicity or both sexes, but white males and immigrants tend to be the most common examples.
Entrepreneurialism seems to be the defining theme- finding and exploiting opportunities to the best personal profit by decreasing overhead and working yourself to death to establish and keep clientele.

Have-nots have had several things hinder their ability to move up versus other generations. What used to be more defined barriers to self-improvement (racism and sexism) are now more subtle but still difficult to deal with. This is warmed-over Barbara Ehrenreich but I think she's right.

Consider single women of any race, making less than 30K a year.
Poverty programs force them to make choices between qualifying for Medicaid, subsidized housing, child-care, etc. and pursuing jobs that play 8-10.00 an hour.
Paying out of pocket for health insurance, child-care, rent, etc and nobody can do just one job and get by. So they have to work a second or third gig just to have enough money.
Can they spend the time to simultaneously empower themselves with more education/qualifications AND enrich their kids' learning curve and give them the feedback to be successful in school?

 

[Plumber]

Avoid Nixon. And Reagan.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

I think going forward in this we're going to have to have a single definition of what is meant by "mobility" -- do we mean "relative mobility", people being able to move up in their class status as defined by how it compares with others; or do we mean a kind of "absolute mobility", which is defined as the statistical likelihood that somebody being able to make, say, 20 times the wealth (defined in terms of purchasing power) what the household he grew up in made?

If our going definition is the former, it's really just a question of "How do we stop inequality from taking off?" If it's the latter... well, growth is important here, but there's also the issue of how you stop an "incumbency of wealth" from cropping up, or at least getting more entrenched.

 

[TxCoatl1970]

Reply to JFP

@ JFP Good reply- relative mobility (jumping a tax bracket or two) and absolute mobility (how likely can s/b be Micheal Jordan or Steve Jobs?) are important distinctions.

@Plumber- Nixon was an economic liberal who wanted everyone to get a dole called the Negative Income Tax people could save, invest, and or spend to keep consumption up and keep more people working, wanted universal health care, and a few other goodies near and dear to modern Dems.
Nixon knew the lower-middle-class were his staunchest supporters and tried to hook them up as inflation went nuts during the 1973 oil crisis.
IMO he was a slimy SOB but he wanted the most good for the most people, got us out of Vietnam, and recognized PRC.

Reagan OTOH AFAIC was the one who got everything sliding down the scupper the last thirty years for the American middle-class.
First, he got the US federal government on the low-tax, high-spending borrowing spree we've been on that's put us in such a perilous fiscal position.
We haven't spent enough in infrastructure b/c we feel (at local and state govt) we can always borrow what we need, instead of admit to the electorate that the basic stuff we have needs maintenance and
is an ongoing overhead expense.

Second, Reagan and TBH, Tip O'Neill's House, dismantled a good chunk of the social safety net and also gutted grants and federally-subsidized student loans so his buddies could push private student loans.

Third, on Reagan's watch-- America's Industrial heartland suffered several major dislocations. You can argue US Steel and the Big Three automakers were behind the times and needed restructuring to the benefit of Wall Street.
A huge chunk of folks lost good jobs and were marooned in economic dead zones to scrape by on service jobs making a lot less or move away.
You can talk knowledge economy and service society all you want, but not everyone can be software engineers and there's nowhere the need for bodies in the biotech and IT industries that became hot to absorb the unemployed and underemployed.

From a political standpoint, I think here lately, it's political poison to admit the US has slipped so badly in relation to other 1W economies in quality of life and social mobility (people in poverty to jump a couple of brackets to be comfortable) that we keep hoping trickle-down economics works- it doesn't.

So beyond showing hindsight, how do we move forward?

 

[Deleted member 40957]

So beyond showing hindsight, how do we move forward?

The most obvious PoD is the classic one that's used to get rid of the Reagan Revolution - have Ford avoid the "Soviet domination" gaffe, win in 1976, suffer the same problems as Carter, then have the Republicans lose 1980.

Of course, this disregards the fact that since 1976 the Democrats began moving away from the New Deal consensus and drinking the neoliberal kool-aid too. It'd be important to get a genuine New Deal type as the Democratic nominee in 1980 - maybe Walter Mondale; he was one of the last members of his political era on the national stage.

 

[TRH]

Scoop Jackson, maybe? He was a New Deal diehard as well, I think.

 

[BlondieBC]

You need a lot of little things. Eliminating the alumni advantage in getting into top schools helps. So would funding schools more equally. A kid in a poor region with old textbooks is at a huge disadvantage compared to a kid in a NY private prep school. Probably might as well eliminate private secondary schools. More funding for head start. Less decline in Unions. Better corporate governance so connect CEO can't loot companies as easy. Lower caps on the amount of house Freddie and Fannie back. Better enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. Often in life we want a single simple answer to fixing complex problems when in reality we have to focus on making a 100 little things a bit better each year.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

Of course, this disregards the fact that since 1976 the Democrats began moving away from the New Deal consensus and drinking the neoliberal kool-aid too. It'd be important to get a genuine New Deal type as the Democratic nominee in 1980 - maybe Walter Mondale; he was one of the last members of his political era on the national stage.

Not necessarily -- even if you get a New Democrat into power in 1980, that's still a much smoother transition that you're likely to see than under Reagan.

 

[BigWillyG]

Avoid LBJ and Great Society for starters. Along with that find a way to avoid the crack epidemic and the decline of stable families in the US underclass. Germany and Japan never recovering from WWII while the USSR and Maoist China survive also keeps the US as the only major industrial economy on Earth so lots of low level jobs available which pay well without needing lots of education since the US has a de facto monopoly on industry as well.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

Avoid LBJ and Great Society for starters.

How would averting the War on Poverty decrease inequality?

 

[Plumber]

@Plumber- Nixon was an economic liberal who wanted everyone to get a dole called the Negative Income Tax people could save, invest, and or spend to keep consumption up and keep more people working, wanted universal health care, and a few other goodies near and dear to modern Dems. Nixon knew the lower-middle-class were his staunchest supporters and tried to hook them up as inflation went nuts during the 1973 oil crisis.

That's true. However, wanting a Negative Income Tax and some degree of UHC is a lot different than getting it. In addition, Nixon fucked up the economy significantly during the '70s, most notably through the poor policies of Arthur F. Burns to make the economy as good as possible in 1972. His agricultural policies were also trash. Add that onto Nixon creating the modern political system that emphasizes "social issues" over economic ones, Humphrey '68 is certainly preferable to another term of Ford.

 

[BigWillyG]

How would averting the War on Poverty decrease inequality?

Prevents the creation of the current dependent underclass and might help avoid the family decline depending on how the Sexual Revolution goes without LBJ and Vietnam. Without the War on Poverty you probably don't have woman "marrying the government" as the way to handle unplanned pregnancy.

 

[Plumber]

How would averting the War on Poverty decrease inequality?

Take out the in.

 

[TxCoatl1970]

Replying to many and adding a jot I hope

@BlondieBC
I think you're 100% correct about needing LOTS of little changes instead of a few monster POD's to solve the stagnation in economic mobility.
I think the unions missed several boats in the 1960's and 70's to staying relevant.
#1 there were union outreach efforts to blacks and other ethnicities, but a lot of them were too little too late. By the time the US economy went swirly inthe mid-1970's, nobody trusted union leadership.
TheMann's Detroit TL addresses this.

#2 Unions missing the boat on women entering the workforce as they did was another boner, not to mention NOT protecting women from sexual harassment and so forth. The lawsuits filed to challenge that were private lawsuits, not unions filing them.

#3 Unions should have been trying to vertically organizing in their companies so that it's not just blue-collar shop floor employees, but also front-line and middle managers.
Get union organizing so it's NOT about class, it's about doing right by the greatest number of people and KEEPING the company's bottom-line healthy, too.

As to the Great Society- it was a mighty effort made with the best of intentions and failed miserably in some places.
I may be conflating things, but I watched a documentary about the Pruitt-Igo projects in St. Louis, and it predated the Great Society by fifteen years, but it exemplified the attempts of progressive city governments to clear out slum housing, warehouse the working poor in high-rise subsidized housing projects, and give poor folks a leg up in cleaner, more comfortable housing.
The Feds and local housing authorities forgot to subsidize maintenance and rents charged were nowhere near enough income to maintain them properly.
There were a ton of other issues NOT addressed- such as the good jobs in St. Louis moving out to the suburbs, but no mass transit going out there so folks living in projects could commute to good jobs.

Who failed in this scanario?

Was it the Feds' fault, the Missouri or Illinois state governments, St. Louis city council, the local Chamber of Commerce, NAACP, or any of a number of other groups to why the Pruitt-Igo projects became cesspools of poverty, crime, and despair?

The Great Society tried to identify and tackle the effects of poverty and some of the causes with a great wad of federal money and manpower that IMO got pissed away on a multitude of brushfires. The economy tanked in the 1970's between Vietnam wind-down and OPEC embargo and folks were frustrated at the results, so money and political capital pushing the GS dried up in the Nixon era.

Where the Great Society failed was that it responded based on "expert" assumptions about what poor people needed without a lot of input from poor people about what they really needed and didn't get a lot of private-sector involvement in finding jobs and qualifying people to fill them.

Politicians from the Reagan era on made a lot of political capital trying to prevent welfare fraud and trapping folks with bureaucratic red tape preventing folks from making any reasonable economic progress.
I've dealt with unemployment insurance, welfare, and Medicaid, etc in Texas and it's a full-time job with rather patlry rewards.

Bill Clinton did try public-private partnerships approach in welfare-to-work programs to decidedly mixed results thirty years later.

Pundits talk about "the underclass" as if they're some alien tribe most decent working folks have no connection to, much less nice affluent professionals.
IMO the War on Drugs has been the War on the Poor.
Add in the race-to-the-bottom employment philosophies employed by businesses and folks are expected to walk in the door with everything they need to do the job in hand.

 

[Sam R.]

I wanted to salvage the debate re: social mobility slowing down to a crawl in the United States since the 1970's.

What social mobility prior to 1970? The number of working class entrants to Bab's "Professional-Managerial Class" was minimal at best, and peaked in the 1960s, and has subsequently seen a massive proletarianisation of many so-called PMC professions.

The number of working class entrants to the petits and small bourgeoisie is relatively static.

The bourgeoisie is relatively static.

Those remaining PMC functionaries, the classical professional CEO and Board-member have either reverted to being true bourgeois with the advent of the generalisation of stock-options, or have maintained their social status.

What social mobility prior to 1970. What social mobility after 1970.

All I see from your dataset is a systematic emiseration of the working class through deskilling and proletarianisation.

Yes this may be a hard Fordist-Taylorist account, but I don't see how a collapse in income return as wages to a SES quintile amounts to substantive change in terms of social mobility when the class structure and class composition is as resilient to movement between classes as it ever was.

yours,
Sam R.

 

[RousseauX]

Prevents the creation of the current dependent underclass and might help avoid the family decline depending on how the Sexual Revolution goes without LBJ and Vietnam. Without the War on Poverty you probably don't have woman "marrying the government" as the way to handle unplanned pregnancy.

Whoosh and here comes the welfare queen argument as perpetuated by the Regan presidential campaign, with about as much evidence to back it up as one would expect.

 

[RousseauX]

Automation and better computer/communications technology have enabled a 24/7 work culture that allows a few workers to do the work of hundreds, but made the system dependent on the tech working right for productivity to continue increasing.

This is huge and something that's not really preventable. So I'm just gonna pee-empt the inevitable "tariff against china" argument.

For all free trade has being demonized as the number one reason as to the decline of American unionized labor which allowed anyone with a high school education to attain middle class status, there is surprisingly little evidence to support it and lots of evidence against it being the prominent reason. One of the major reasons is that if foreign trade was the reason for decline of wage for unskilled labor then there should have being an -increase- in the demand of unskilled labor in the US (which after all, still has more labor productivity and much less transportation cost than China or Bangladesh no matter how cheap their labor is). However, we know for a fact that demand for unskilled labor has dropped.

Skill based technological change however leads to the exact scenario that we have seen so far, which is to say that there has being a marked decline in demand for unskilled labor despite a drop in wage for them. So basically you have a case where there has being an increase in demand/wage for skilled labor and a corresponding drop in the same for unskilled workers which is the exact thing perpetuating a lot of inequalities in America today.

What this means is that a shift from the post-war manufacturing societies might be inevitable for the United States unless the US tries to emulate the German system, which I think is highly unlikely.

 

[StevenAttewell]

@Plumber- Nixon was an economic liberal who wanted everyone to get a dole called the Negative Income Tax people could save, invest, and or spend to keep consumption up and keep more people working, wanted universal health care, and a few other goodies near and dear to modern Dems.
Nixon knew the lower-middle-class were his staunchest supporters and tried to hook them up as inflation went nuts during the 1973 oil crisis.
IMO he was a slimy SOB but he wanted the most good for the most people, got us out of Vietnam, and recognized PRC. =

I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. To begin with, plans for some kind of income guarantee had been developing since the War on Poverty had begun. Nixon's FAP was a limited program: it applied to families with children only, it established a rather low minimum income of $1,600 (below the poverty line), and it capped out at $3,920 (2011 equivalent of $22k a year, or only 133% of the poverty rate for the average household).

Significantly, Nixon dumped all of this the moment it was politically useful for him to do so. He dropped FAP like a red-hot potato, and then slammed McGovern repeatedly for proposing something very similar. Then after '72, he turned on a dime and began to cut spending and jam up interest rates to fight inflation instead of unemployment.

 

[RousseauX]

IMO the War on Drugs has been the War on the Poor.
Add in the race-to-the-bottom employment philosophies employed by businesses and folks are expected to walk in the door with everything they need to do the job in hand.

That's actually pretty good POD, the war on drugs have a massive effect on perpetuating the cycle of poverty for poor of the wrong skin color at the same time when their labor is needed less and less and society can therefore marginalize/ignore easier.

 

[Mad Missouri]

@BlondieBC
I think you're 100% correct about needing LOTS of little changes instead of a few monster POD's to solve the stagnation in economic mobility.
I think the unions missed several boats in the 1960's and 70's to staying relevant.
#1 there were union outreach efforts to blacks and other ethnicities, but a lot of them were too little too late. By the time the US economy went swirly inthe mid-1970's, nobody trusted union leadership.
TheMann's Detroit TL addresses this.

#2 Unions missing the boat on women entering the workforce as they did was another boner, not to mention NOT protecting women from sexual harassment and so forth. The lawsuits filed to challenge that were private lawsuits, not unions filing them.

#3 Unions should have been trying to vertically organizing in their companies so that it's not just blue-collar shop floor employees, but also front-line and middle managers.
Get union organizing so it's NOT about class, it's about doing right by the greatest number of people and KEEPING the company's bottom-line healthy, too.

As to the Great Society- it was a mighty effort made with the best of intentions and failed miserably in some places.
I may be conflating things, but I watched a documentary about the Pruitt-Igo projects in St. Louis, and it predated the Great Society by fifteen years, but it exemplified the attempts of progressive city governments to clear out slum housing, warehouse the working poor in high-rise subsidized housing projects, and give poor folks a leg up in cleaner, more comfortable housing.
The Feds and local housing authorities forgot to subsidize maintenance and rents charged were nowhere near enough income to maintain them properly.
There were a ton of other issues NOT addressed- such as the good jobs in St. Louis moving out to the suburbs, but no mass transit going out there so folks living in projects could commute to good jobs.

Who failed in this scanario?

Was it the Feds' fault, the Missouri or Illinois state governments, St. Louis city council, the local Chamber of Commerce, NAACP, or any of a number of other groups to why the Pruitt-Igo projects became cesspools of poverty, crime, and despair?

The Great Society tried to identify and tackle the effects of poverty and some of the causes with a great wad of federal money and manpower that IMO got pissed away on a multitude of brushfires. The economy tanked in the 1970's between Vietnam wind-down and OPEC embargo and folks were frustrated at the results, so money and political capital pushing the GS dried up in the Nixon era.

Where the Great Society failed was that it responded based on "expert" assumptions about what poor people needed without a lot of input from poor people about what they really needed and didn't get a lot of private-sector involvement in finding jobs and qualifying people to fill them.

Politicians from the Reagan era on made a lot of political capital trying to prevent welfare fraud and trapping folks with bureaucratic red tape preventing folks from making any reasonable economic progress.
I've dealt with unemployment insurance, welfare, and Medicaid, etc in Texas and it's a full-time job with rather patlry rewards.

Bill Clinton did try public-private partnerships approach in welfare-to-work programs to decidedly mixed results thirty years later.

Pundits talk about "the underclass" as if they're some alien tribe most decent working folks have no connection to, much less nice affluent professionals.
IMO the War on Drugs has been the War on the Poor.
Add in the race-to-the-bottom employment philosophies employed by businesses and folks are expected to walk in the door with everything they need to do the job in hand.

The problems with Pruitt-Igo are a lot more complex than what you've wrote. Saint Louis has been horribly mismanage since the 1870's when the city father's decide the city had grown as large as it ever needed to be and convinced the state governemnt to set the city's borders. It's a third maybe fourth class city with the sad delusions it's still a top ten city.

Take a look at the city now. It's public schools produce little more that champion basketball and football players. The schools are so bad that St. Louis City Police and Fire fighters (who have to live with in the city to work there.) would rent apartments in the city and move out to a suburb when their children became school age or paid for private education. It's people understood this was a problem, they complained about it, and yet they routinely elected the same people to their school board. It got so bad the state had to decredit the City school district.

And then you have the high crime, the silly city taxes (12% income tax if you work in the city.), and on and on.

If it wasn't for the 30,000 Bosians that moved into St. Louis in the 1990's it would be worse than Detroit.