Week 6. Lecture outline
What is the American Dream? The belief that individuals, through hard work, can improve their life chances, and that each generation will attain a higher standard of living than the previous one.
Recent research suggests that the American Dream may be unattainable for many Americans and that it may be increasingly unattainable. The chances that someone born in the bottom quintile of the income distribution (the bottom 20 percent) will reach the top quintile are small: between 4 and 7 percent. The rate of upward mobility in the United States is smaller than it is in a number of other countries. And the likelihood that children will end up with higher incomes than their parents had decreased over the last thirty years.
Inequality: The uneven distribution of resources in society. Experts agree that the United States today is characterized by sharp and increasing inequality. The richest 1% of Americans hold 38% of all privately held wealth. The richest 1% of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90%.
The puzzle is that, in the ideal social problems process, when the public is made aware of a social problem by the media, they should call on their policymakers to solve the social problem. And there has been media attention paid to inequality. Sociologist Leslie McCall’s (2013) study of media coverage showed that beginning in the mid-1990s, there was increasing attention to income inequality. In 2013, President Obama called inequality the “defining challenge of our time.” So why haven’t we seen policy to combat inequality? Why haven’t we seen people demanding more taxes on the wealthiest Americans, higher minimum wages, universal pre-K education, free college tuition?
More broadly,
Why do people not demand government action on problems that affect them?
How hard is it to change public opinion about social problems?
But first: Why have we had growing inequality in the United States?
Karl Marx: Because of capitalism. The haves are those who own the means of production (factories, farms, Apple, etc.). They are capitalists (they have capital). The have-nots are people who work for a wage. They are wage-workers. According to Marx, capitalists also have power over government, the law, the mass media, education, and public opinion.
But the problems with Marx’s argument are that: a) In Marx’s terms, CEO’s are wage-workers. And the man who owns a hot dog stand is a capitalist. But that doesn’t seem right. We need a better understanding of class (of economic divisions that shape our life chances) than Marx provides. b) Public education in the United States is public. It is freely available to everyone. We need a better understanding of class reproduction (how it is that working class kids become working class adults).
Rather than serving as “the great equalizer” it was intended to be, education reproduces rather than combating inequality. Somehow, by the time they apply to college, upper middle class kids have a significant advantage over working class and poor kids. Sociologists ask: how does that happen? What is the source of upper middle class kids’ educational advantage?
Sources of upper middle-class advantage: One, the advantage of money:
Residential segregation means that poorer people have less access to good public schools.
Even when governments try to equalize resources for public schools, private foundations allow wealthier parents to funnel contributions directly to schools in their communities.
Middle class people can afford educational services outside public school such as quality pre-k schooling, tutoring, test-taking training, guidance on selecting schools, and enriching internships and educational experiences.
Two, the advantage of favorable expectations.
The “Pygmalion Effect” (Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968)
But, teachers tend to have lower expectations of boys, minority students, and lower income students.
“Stereotype threat”: when students believe that teachers have lower expectations of them, they perform worse (Steele and Aronson 1995).
Three, the advantage, not of money, but of social connections and know-how. Not economic capital but what sociologists call cultural capital.
Middle class kids learn strategies of entitlement. They learn to see authorities as equals, and to negotiate for what they need (Lareau 2002).
Middle-class people’s advantages in educating their children is just one factor contributing to inequality, and rising inequality. Other factors include:
The growth of the financial sector.
The decline of unions.
The cost of college and the increasing number of jobs that require a college education.
The automation of many jobs.
Again, rising inequality is affecting, not just poor people, but middle class people. Yet, by and large, Americans are not demanding government policy that would combat inequality, policies like higher taxes on the wealthy, a higher minimum wage, universal pre-K, or Free college tuition. Why are Americans not demanding policies that would help them?
One answer is that Americans are fiscally conservative. They do not believe in redistributing wealth.
Another answer is that Americans believe that they are getting ahead even when they are not. They have “mobility optimism” and tend to “system justification.”
Lessons of inequality for understanding social problems
Marx was right about the deep and sharpening division between the haves and the have-nots. But he was wrong about who the haves and have-nots are and why their children also tend to become haves or have-nots.
The haves–the upper middle class and the wealthy–have advantages of money, favorable expectations, and cultural capital.
Why do people oppose the government redistribution of wealth? For reasons of principle and because they believe, contrary to evidence, that they are getting ahead (“mobility optimism”) and that the system works (“system justification”).