The Social Animal (50 page)

Elite universities become bastions of privilege. Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose surveyed the top 146 U.S. colleges and found that only 3 percent of the students there came from families in the bottom economic quartile. Seventy-four percent of students came from families in the top quartile.

A healthy society is a mobile society, one in which everybody has a shot at the good life, in which everybody has reason to strive, in which people rise and fall according to their deserts. But societies in the cognitive age produce their own form of inequality, lodged deep in the brains of the citizenry, which is more subtle than ancient class distinctions under feudalism, but nearly as stark and unfair.

Harold pointed out that most nations have tried to battle this problem, spending a lot of money in the process. The United States has spent over a trillion dollars to try to reduce the achievement gap between white and black students. Public-education spending per pupil increased by 240 percent in real terms between 1960 and 2000. Major universities offer lavish aid packages and some of the richest, like Harvard, waive tuition entirely for those from families making less than $60,000 a year. The United States spends enough money on antipoverty programs to hand every person in poverty a check for $15,000 a year. A mother with two kids would get a $45,000 check every year if the programs were converted into a simple transfer.

But money can’t solve the problem of inequality because money is not the crucial source of the problem. The problem is in the realm of conscious and unconscious development. Harold needed only to compare his upbringing to Erica’s to see this. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that encourages human-capital development—books, discussion, reading, questions, conversations about what they want to do in the future—and some children are bathed in a disrupted atmosphere. If you read part of a story to kindergarten children in an affluent neighborhood, about half of them will be able to predict what will happen next in the story. If you read the same fragment to children in poor neighborhoods, only about 10 percent will be able to anticipate the flow of events. The ability to construct templates about the future is vitally important to future success.

In 1964, before the cognitive age had truly kicked in, rich families and poor families were demographically similar, which meant that children up and down the income scale began adulthood with similar outlooks and capacities. But as more and more demands were put on mental processing, gaps opened up and more-educated children grow up in different landscapes than less-educated children. More-educated children live amidst virtuous feedback loops. High skills and stable families lead to economic success, which makes stable family life easier, which makes skill acquisition and future economic success easier. Less-educated children live amidst vicious feedback loops. Low skills and family breakdown leads to economic stress, which makes family breakdown even more likely, which makes skill acquisition and economic security even harder to achieve.

Today college-educated and non-college-educated people inhabit different landscapes. Over two-thirds of middle-class children are raised in intact two-parent families, while less than a third of poor children are raised in them. About half the students in community colleges have either been pregnant or gotten somebody pregnant. Isabel Sawhill has calculated that if family structures were the same today as they were in 1970, then the poverty rate would be roughly one-quarter lower than it is today.

Vast attitudinal gaps have opened up as well. As Robert Putnam has shown, college-educated people are much more likely to trust the people around them. They are much more likely to believe they can control their own destinies and to take actions in order to achieve their goals.

People on both sides of the divide tend to want the same things. The highly educated and the less-educated tend to want to live in stable two-parent homes. They tend to want to earn college degrees and have their children surpass them. It’s just that the more-educated have more emotional resources to actually execute these visions. If you get married before having children, graduate from high school, and work full-time, there is a 98 percent chance that you will not live in poverty. But many people are unable to achieve these things.

As Harold conducted his research on poverty, family disruption, and other issues related to social mobility, he sometimes wanted to just shake people and tell them to get their act together. Show up for the job interview. Take the
SAT
test you registered for. Study for the final so you can graduate from college. Don’t quit your job just because it’s boring or because you’ve got a minor crisis at home. He knew that at some level there is no substitute for individual responsibility and no prospect for success unless people are held accountable for their decisions and work relentlessly to achieve their goals.

On the other hand, he knew it was no good to just give bootstrap sermons. Flourishing depends on unconscious skills that serve as a prerequisite for conscious accomplishments. People who haven’t acquired those unconscious skills find it much harder to fall into a workday routine and trudge off to a job each morning even if they don’t really feel like it. It will be harder for them to be polite toward a boss who drives them crazy, to smile openly when they meet a new person, to present a consistent face to the world, even as they go through different moods and personal crises. They’ll find it hard to develop a fundamental faith in self-efficacy—a belief that they can shape the course of their life. They’ll be less likely to have confidence in the proposition that cause leads to effect, that if they sacrifice now, something good will result.

Then there are the psychic effects of inequality itself. In their book
The Spirit Level
, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that the mere fact of being low on the status totem pole brings its own deep stress and imposes its own psychic costs. Inequality and a feeling of exclusion causes social pain, which leads to more obesity, worse health outcomes, fewer social connections, more depression and anxiety. Wilkinson and Pickett point, for example, to a study of British civil servants. Some of the civil servants had high-status, high-pressure jobs. Others had low-status, low-pressure jobs. You’d think the people in the high-pressure jobs would have higher rates of heart disease, gastrointestinal disease, and general sickness. In fact, it was the people in the low-pressure jobs. Low status imposes its own costs.

With his soft-side approach, Harold put his faith in programs that reshaped the internal models in people’s minds. If you felt, as Harold did, that in some low-income communities achievement values were not being transmitted from one generation to another, then you had no choice but to try to instill them. That meant you had to be somewhat paternalistic. If parents were not instilling these achievement values, then churches and charity groups should try. If those institutions were overwhelmed, then government should try to step in to help people achieve the three things they need to enter the middle class: marriage, a high-school degree, and a job.

“All of us need to be prodded to do things that will improve our long-term well-being, whether it is eating the right foods or setting aside funds for retirement,” Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill write in their book
Creating an Opportunity Society
. “Low-income families are no different.” There was no single policy that could build these unconscious skills. Human-capital policies are like nutrition. You have to instill them constantly. But Harold did see a sequence of policies that could help those who are cut off from the social-mobility ladder.

The biggest impact comes from focusing on the young. As James Heckman argues, learners learn and skill begets skill, so investments in children have much bigger payoffs than investments in people who are older. Parenting classes teach teenage moms how to care for their children. Nurse home visits help provide structure for disorganized families and provide on-the-job pointers for young mothers. Quality early-education programs have lasting effects on childhood development. Sometimes the IQ gains fade away as children from quality preschools enter the regular school population. But social and emotional skills do not seem to fade away, and those produce lasting gains—higher graduation rates and better career outcomes.

Integrated neighborhood approaches like the Harlem Children’s Zone produce the most impressive results. These programs offer a deluge of different programs, all designed to put young people into a high-achieving counterculture.
KIPP
academies and other “no-nonsense” schools significantly improve their students’ prospects. These schools, like the one Erica attended, give students a whole new way of living, much more disciplined and rigorous than they are used to.

The most important thing about any classroom is the relationship between a teacher and a student. Small classes may be better, but it’s better to have a good teacher in a big class than a bad teacher in a small class. Merit pay for teachers should help keep talented teachers in the classroom. Students learn best from someone they love. Mentoring programs also create relationships. Students are much less likely to drop out of high school or college if they have an important person in their life, guiding them and encouraging them day by day. The City University of New York has a program called
ASAP
, which has an intensive mentoring component and seems to increase graduation rates.

The first generation of human-capital policies gave people access to schools, colleges, and training facilities. Second-generation policies would have to help them develop the habits, knowledge, and mental traits they needed to succeed there. It’s not enough to give a student the chance to go to a community college if, once she gets there, she finds the requirements confusing, the guidance counselors rude and unavailable, the registration process baffling, the important courses already full, and the graduation requirements mysterious. These obstacles defeat students lacking social capital. Second-generation human-capital policies have to pay attention to the hidden curriculum of life as much as to the overt one.

The more time Harold spent thinking about politics and trying to form a governing philosophy, the more he realized that personal development and social mobility were at the heart of his vision of a great society. Social mobility opens up horizons because people can see wider opportunities and transformed lives. Social mobility reduces class conflict because no one is sentenced to spend their days in the caste into which they were born. Social mobility unleashes creative energies. It mitigates inequality, because no station need be permanent.

Harold found himself in a nation with two dominant political movements. There was a liberal movement that believed in using government to enhance equality. There was a conservative movement that believed in limited government to enhance freedom. But historically, there once had been another movement that believed in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. This movement had its start on a small Caribbean island a few hundred years ago.

In the eighteenth century, there was a little boy who lived on the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean. His father abandoned him when he was ten. His mother died in the bed next to him when he was twelve. He was adopted by a cousin, who promptly committed suicide. His remaining family consisted of an aunt, an uncle, and a grandmother. They all died within a few years. A probate court came in and confiscated the small bit of property he had inherited from his mother. He and his brother were left destitute, orphaned, and alone.

By seventeen, Alexander Hamilton was managing a trading firm. By twenty-four, he was George Washington’s chief of staff and a war hero. By thirty-four, he had written fifty-one essays of
The Federalist Papers
and was New York’s most successful lawyer. By forty, he was stepping down as the most successful treasury secretary in American history.

Hamilton created a political tradition designed to help young strivers like himself. He hoped to create a nation where young ambitious people could make full use of their talents, and where their labor would build a great nation. “Every new scene, which is opened to the busy nature of man to rouse and exert itself, is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort.”

“Rouse” ... ”exert” ... ”energy.” These are Hamiltonian words. He promoted policies designed to nurture this dynamism. At a time when many people were suspicious of manufacturing and believed that only agriculture produced virtue and wealth, Hamilton championed industry and technological change. At a time when traders and financial markets were disdained by the plantation oligarchy, Hamilton promoted vibrant capital markets to stir the nation. At a time when the economy was broken into local fiefdoms, run by big landowners, Hamilton sought to smash local monopolies and open opportunity. He nationalized the Revolutionary War debt, creating capital markets, and binding the nation’s economy into one more competitive exchange. He believed in using government to enhance market dynamism by fostering competition.

The Hamiltonian tradition was carried on in the early nineteenth century by Henry Clay and the Whig Party, which championed canals and railroads and other internal improvements to open up opportunity and bind the nation. That cause was taken up by a young Whig, Abraham Lincoln. Like Hamilton, Lincoln had grown up in a poor family and was fired by an ambition that knew no rest. But Lincoln gave more speeches about labor and economics than he did about slavery, and sought to create a nation that would welcome self-transformation and embrace the gospel of work.

“I hold the value of life is to improve one’s condition,” he told an audience of immigrants in 1861. Under his leadership, the Civil War-era government unified the currency, passed the Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act, and railroad legislation. These policies were designed to give Americans an open field and a fair chance to spread the spirit of enterprise, enhance social mobility, and so build the nation.