In America, financial inequality has soared over the past few decades. But the issue has had surprisingly little political traction.
The most striking change in American society in the past generation—roughly since Ronald Reagan was elected President—has been the increase in the inequality of income and wealth. Timothy Noah’s “The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It” (Bloomsbury), a good general guide to the subject, tells us that in 1979 members of the much discussed “one per cent” got nine per cent of all personal income. Now they get a quarter of it. The gains have increased the farther up you go. The top tenth of one per cent get about ten per cent of income, and the top hundredth of one per cent about five per cent. While the Great Recession was felt most severely by those at the bottom, the recovery has hardly benefitted them. In 2010, ninety-three per cent of the year’s gains went to the top one per cent.
Since rich people are poorer in votes than they are in dollars, you’d think that, in an election year, the ninety-nine per cent would look to politics to get back some of what they’ve lost, and that inequality would be a big issue. So far, it hasn’t been. Occupy Wall Street and its companion movements briefly spurred President Obama to become more populist in his rhetoric, but there’s no sign that Occupy is going to turn into the kind of political force that the Tea Party movement has been. There was a period during the Republican primary campaign when Romney rivals like Newt Gingrich tried to take votes from the front-runner by bashing Wall Street and private equity, but that didn’t last long, either. Politics does feel sour and contentious in ways that seem to flow from the country’s economic distress. Yet much of the ambient discontent is directed toward government—the government that kept the recession from turning into a depression. Why isn’t politics about what you’d expect it to be about?
Traditionally, class figured less in politics in America than in most other Western countries, supposedly because the United States, though more economically unequal, and rougher in tone, was more socially equal, more diverse, more democratic, and better at giving ordinary people the opportunity to rise. That’s what Alexis de Tocqueville found in the eighteen-thirties, and the argument has had staying power. It has also been wearing thin. During the five decades from 1930 to 1980, economic inequality decreased significantly, without imperilling “American exceptionalism.” So it’s especially hard to put a good face on the way inequality has soared in the decades since. Even if you think that all a good society requires is—according to the debatable conservative mantra—equal opportunity for every citizen, you ought to be a little shaken right now. Opportunity is increasingly tied to education, and educational performance is tied to income and wealth. When it comes to social mobility between generations, the United States ranks near the bottom of developed nations.
Like the competitors on cooking-contest TV shows, writers who are presented with these socioeconomic ingredients do quite different things with them analytically, but nobody approves of the situation and almost everybody blames the élite. Charles Murray points out, in his new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” (Crown Forum), that indices of social disorganization at the bottom of the income distribution—imprisonment, joblessness, divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing—have been rising substantially. “Coming Apart” reprises elements from all Murray’s previous books, most notably “Losing Ground,” from 1984, which counterpoised a liberal élite and a socially dysfunctional underclass, but the differences are telling. In “Losing Ground,” the underclass being examined was mainly black, and the argument was that the élite had helped to create that underclass by enacting social-welfare programs. Poor people reacted to their perverse incentives by losing an ethic of work and family, and the social fabric of their communities disintegrated. But the social program that was the main villain of “Losing Ground,” Aid to Families with Dependent Children, doesn’t exist anymore, and Murray no longer blames misguided policies for the behavioral problems of the poor.
Instead, the malign influence of the élite is purely a matter of ethos, or moral tone-setting. The élite—who, in Murray’s account, live in unprecedented geographic and social isolation from poor and working people—are themselves hardworking, unlikely to divorce, dedicated to their children, and even comparatively religious, but, unlike the élite of Victorian England, they don’t “preach what they practice.” Somehow this manifests itself in the breakdown of social mores at the opposite end of society.
“Coming Apart” is, in effect, an analysis of inequality that rules out a program of redistribution. In Murray’s view, trying to shift resources away from the élite wouldn’t do much good, because (as Murray and Richard Herrnstein argued, in far more detail, in “The Bell Curve”) the élite are genetically endowed with higher intelligence: as long as the United States is a meritocratic society, and as long as these people keep meeting at selective colleges, marrying, and improving their breeding stock, they’ll keep doing better than everybody else. Anyway, what the non-élite need isn’t money, Murray thinks; it’s better values. Very little of “Coming Apart” is devoted to government policy.
Murray’s élite live in an archipelago of “SuperZips,” mainly blue-state inner-ring suburbs, like Chevy Chase, Maryland. They are a type that sounds awfully familiar: Obama-supporting, kitchen-renovating professionals with graduate degrees, who, unable to rest comfortably in the knowledge that they have passed economically dispositive high I.Q.s on to their children at conception, obsess relentlessly over education. In David Rothkopf’s “Power, Inc.” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), we encounter an even more exalted “Superclass”—a group Rothkopf introduced in a previous book by that title—whose members are the sort of people one might encounter at the World Economic Forum, in Davos. They are rich, rooted primarily in global banking and business rather than in any particular communities or set of social values, and ideologically committed to unimpeded markets above all else. Unlike Murray’s élite, they are not merely the product of inexorable natural processes. They flourish in a world they deliberately built for themselves, by expertly altering the rules. Rothkopf, who was a Deputy Under-Secretary of Commerce during the Clinton Administration and is now a globe-trotting consultant, writes as a quasi-penitent member of this group.
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