Monday, January 16, 2012 by The New York Times
“I have a dream,” declared Martin Luther King, in a speech that
has lost none of its power to inspire. And some of that dream has come
true. When King spoke in the summer of 1963, America was a nation that
denied basic rights to millions of its citizens, simply because their
skin was the wrong color. Today racism is no longer embedded in law. And
while it has by no means been banished from the hearts of men, its grip
is far weaker than once it was.
To say the obvious: to look at a photo
of President Obama with his cabinet is to see a degree of racial
openness — and openness to women, too — that would have seemed almost
inconceivable in 1963. When we observe Martin Luther King’s Birthday, we
have something very real to celebrate: the civil rights movement was
one of America’s finest hours, and it made us a nation truer to its own
ideals.
Yet if King could see America now, I believe that he would be
disappointed, and feel that his work was nowhere near done. He dreamed
of a nation in which his children “will not be judged by the color of
their skin but by the content of their character.” But what we actually
became is a nation that judges people not by the color of their skin —
or at least not as much as in the past — but by the size of their
paychecks. And in America, more than in most other wealthy nations, the
size of your paycheck is strongly correlated with the size of your
father’s paycheck.
Goodbye Jim Crow, hello class system.
Economic inequality isn’t inherently a racial issue, and rising
inequality would be disturbing even if there weren’t a racial dimension.
But American society being what it is, there are racial implications to
the way our incomes have been pulling apart. And in any case, King —
who was campaigning for higher wages when he was assassinated — would
surely have considered soaring inequality an evil to be opposed.
So, about that racial dimension: In the 1960s it was widely assumed
that ending overt discrimination would improve the economic as well as
legal status of minority groups. And at first this seemed to be
happening. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s substantial numbers of
black families moved into the middle class, and even into the upper
middle class; the percentage of black households in the top 20 percent
of the income distribution nearly doubled.
But around 1980 the relative economic position of blacks in America
stopped improving. Why? An important part of the answer, surely, is that
circa 1980 income disparities in the United States began to widen
dramatically, turning us into a society more unequal than at any time
since the 1920s.
Think of the income distribution as a ladder, with different people
on different rungs. Starting around 1980, the rungs began moving ever
farther apart, adversely affecting black economic progress in two ways.
First, because many blacks were still on the lower rungs, they were left
behind as income at the top of the ladder soared while income near the
bottom stagnated. Second, as the rungs moved farther apart, the ladder
became harder to climb.
The Times recently reported
on a well-established finding that still surprises many Americans when
they hear about it: although we still see ourselves as the land of
opportunity, we actually have less intergenerational economic mobility
than other advanced nations. That is, the chances that someone born into
a low-income family will end up with high income, or vice versa, are
significantly lower here than in Canada or Europe.
And there’s every reason to believe that our low economic mobility has a lot to do with our high level of income inequality.
Last week Alan Krueger, chairman of the president’s Council of
Economic Advisers, gave an important speech about income inequality,
presenting a relationship he dubbed the “Great Gatsby Curve.” Highly
unequal countries, he showed, have low mobility: the more unequal a
society is, the greater the extent to which an individual’s economic
status is determined by his or her parents’ status. And as Mr. Krueger
pointed out, this relationship suggests that America in the year 2035
will have even less mobility than it has now, that it will be a place in
which the economic prospects of children largely reflect the class into
which they were born.
That is not a development we should meekly accept.
Mitt Romney says that we should discuss income inequality, if at all,
only in “quiet rooms.” There was a time when people said the same thing
about racial inequality. Luckily, however, there were people like
Martin Luther King who refused to stay quiet. And we should follow their
example today. For the fact is that rising inequality threatens to make
America a different and worse place — and we need to reverse that trend
to preserve both our values and our dreams.
© 2012 New York Times
No comments:
Post a Comment