Class Matters
by correspondents of The New York Times with an introduction by Bill Keller. Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2005.
Reviewed by Julie SomersA team of New York Times (Times) reporters spent about a year investigating the extent to which social class—defined as a combination of income, education, wealth, and occupation—is a governing force in American life. They wrote an interesting and thought-provoking series of eleven articles called Class Matters based largely on stories of people from all over the U.S. and on a Times poll conducted to discover how Americans regard class and where they place themselves. The articles present statistics describing incomes and the effect of recent tax cuts on various income groups, but probably not enough to satisfy the economist-reader. The Times published the articles over three weeks, with the first article appearing May 15, 2005, and the last appearing June 12, 2005.
Americans like to believe that they live in a land of opportunity, in which any child can grow up and become President if she chooses to apply herself. But Class Matters argues that this vision is largely false and that class has tremendous influence over the quality of one’s life and that of one’s children. Class Matters describes at least two reasons why it appears that class no longer matters in the U.S. even though income inequality has been rising since the mid-1970s. The first is that the U.S. is more affluent than ever. Globalization and technological advances have made picture-taking cell phones and other luxuries affordable to almost everyone. Americans living today are much better off than previous generations in terms of material comfort. So Americans appear to accept the trade-off of having a smaller share of society’s pie than their parents once did, since their piece is bigger than the one their parents had. Second, even though income inequality is on the rise, Americans believe that there is equality of opportunity so that differences between rich and poor do not add up to class barriers. Americans believe that hard work and a good education are more important to getting ahead than connections or a wealthy background. Cheap imports and technological advances have provided Americans with more things. But reporter Janny Scott found large class differences for things that matter most, such as health care and good health. “The more education and income people have, the less likely they are to have and die of heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and many types of cancer,” writes Scott. Scott reported on three New Yorkers who suffered heart attacks: an upper-class architect, a middle-class utility worker, and a lower-class maid. The upper-class architect was taken to a stat-of- the-art hospital in Manhattan and received angioplasty— a procedure that many cardiologists say is the gold standard for heart attack treatment. The middle-class utility worker was taken to a hospital in Brooklyn that did not have state permission to do angioplasty. He was given a drug to break up the clot blocking an artery to his heart. It worked at first, but the clot re-formed. The lower-class maid was taken to a city-run hospital that serves three of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods. She had to wait two hours before being examined by a doctor in the overcrowded emergency room. She was given drugs to stop her blood from clotting and to control her blood pressure.
Scott found that class also played a large role in the ability of the three New Yorkers to change their life style and adopt healthy habits. The architect reformed his diet with fresh healthy food purchased from nearby farmer’s markets and increased his exercise, taking walks in nearby parks. The utility worker and the maid did not have ready access to fresh healthy food and green space for exercise. Scott writes, “Upper-middle-class Americans live longer and in better health than middle-class Americans, who live longer and better than those at the bottom.”
Class Matters also suggests that there is not equality of opportunity in America and that it is very difficult for those at the bottom to climb their way out of poverty through pluck and luck. According to Class Matters, economist Gary S. Becker in a 1987 speech summed up the research on mobility—the movement of families up and down the economic ladder— by saying that mobility in the United States was so high that very little advantage was passed down from one generation to the next. However, studies of mobility are difficult since they require tracking people’s earnings over decades or matching earnings records of parents with those of their children. Class Matters reports that new studies of mobility have found that the movement of Americans to different income groups has leveled off and may have actually slowed. However, some economists say that whether or not mobility has decreased during the last generation is still an unanswered question and that the data will not be conclusive for years. Class Matters finds that not only has mobility stagnated for an individual, but children are also unlikely to move into a class different from their parents. Class Matters portrays America as a kind of inherited meritocracy. Grades and test scores, rather than privilege, determine success, but parents with money, education, and connections provide their children with the resources needed to achieve top grades and high test scores. As quoted by Class Matters, Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, argued, “The same score reflects more ability when you come from a less fortunate background. You haven’t had a chance to take the test-prep course. You went to a school that didn’t do as good a job coaching you for the test. You came from a home without the same opportunities for learning.” Yet, as described in Class Matters, “When William G. Bowen, a former president of Princeton, looked at admission records recently, he found that if test scores were equal a low-income student had no better chance than a high-income one of getting into a group of nineteen colleges, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams, and Virginia.” Scott and another New York Times reporter David Leonhardt write that, “At 250 of the most selective colleges in the country, the proportion of students from upper-income families has grown, not shrunk.”
Class Matters does include stories of people who have pulled themselves up from poverty into the middle class. Reporter Tamar Lewin tells the story of Della Mae Justice who became a high-powered attorney despite growing up in poverty in rural Appalachia. But according to Justice, “The norm is, people that are born with money have money, and people who weren’t don’t. I know that just to climb the three inches I have, which I’ve not gone very far, took all of my effort. I have worked hard since I was a kid and I’ve done nothing but work to try and pull myself out.”
Reporter Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Angela Whitiker and her 12-year slog to pull herself and her children into the middle class by studying to become a nurse and then by working back-to-back shifts. Whitiker was successful, in part, because she married an emotionally supportive man who held down a steady job. Sociologists explain that upward mobility requires both human capital and social capital. Human capital is a person’s education, job, credentials, and employability. Social capital usually means emotional support and encouragement from a reliable stakeholder in one’s life. William Julius Wilson, professor of sociology and social policy at Harvard, argues that because there are so few marriage-eligible black men due to high rates of joblessness and incarceration, society needs to find ways to duplicate the kinds of support that come from an encouraging partner.
In the most data-intensive article, “Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind,” reporter David Cay Johnston writes that income inequality is on the rise and some believe that it does not bode well for America’s future. In 2000, the wealthiest 0.1 percent of taxpayers earned over 10 percent of the nation’s income, a level not seen since the roaring twenties. Johnston quotes then Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who testified on the increasing concentration of incomes, “For the democratic society, that is not a very desirable thing to allow it to happen.” Johnston also writes that “…Some of the wealthiest Americans, including Warren E. Buffet, George Soros, and Ted Turner, have warned that such concentration of wealth can turn a meritocracy into an aristocracy and ultimately stifle economic growth by putting too much of the nation’s capital in the hands of inheritors rather than strivers and innovators.” A few of the articles deal with less weighty topics. For example, in “The Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life” we are prodded to feel sorry for the family that must constantly relocate so the breadwinner can climb the corporate ladder. In “Old Nantucket Warily Meets the New” we learn about the strain on the old money families caused by the intrusion of new money families into elite vacation spots. But overall, Class Matters delivered a thought-provoking thesis portraying America as a sort of inherited meritocracy where wealthy parents provide their children with the resources needed to achieve economic success, leaving the less affluent and their children with little opportunity to climb out of poverty.
Julie Somers is an economist at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The views expressed in this review are those of the author and should not be interpreted as those of the CBO.