Opportunity and Outcome
Last week, David Brooks introduced the following conceit into his column:
There are two major political parties in America, but there are at least three major political tendencies. The first is orthodox liberalism, a belief in using government to maximize equality. The second is free-market conservatism, the belief in limiting government to maximize freedom.
But there is a third tendency, which floats between. It is for using limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. This tendency began with Alexander Hamilton, who created a vibrant national economy so more people could rise and succeed. It matured with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War Republicans, who created the Land Grant College Act and the Homestead Act to give people the tools to pursue their ambitions. It continued with Theodore Roosevelt, who busted the trusts to give more Americans a square deal.
Now I think we understand that no conceit of this sort is going to be literally accurate. But I really doubt you could find any kind if substantial American political movement that’s ever been dedicated to the idea that we need to maximize equality as opposed to mobility. This is something that conservatives say about liberals who they don’t like (Brooks likes Obama and says “Democrats now control the middle” citing the Hamilton Project — an initiative of Bob Rubin, Jason Furman, and others) but I don’t think you find a lot of people there.
But either way, this is truly a false choice. Look what I found reading the UK section The Economist on the plane the other day:
Inequality is strongly associated with immobility. And of course it is. In a society with a lot of equality (Denmark) you naturally get a lot of mobility. But in a country like the United States where you have such giant gaps between the first and second decile, the second and third decile, and the ninth and tenth decile, it would require genuinely heroic public policy interventions to create anything resembling real social mobility. Meanwhile, most of the mobility-enhancing things you could think of (taxing rich people and spending the money on high-quality universal children’s health and early childhood education) are also egalitarian measures.
33 Responses to “Opportunity and Outcome”
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October 29th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
If one were to ask Alexander Hamilton what his policy goals were, I doubt Hamilton would’ve answered “to create a vibrant national economy so more people could rise and succeed” (or 18th-Century words to that effect) and I also doubt that Roosevelt would’ve suggested that “social mobility” was a goal of his anti-trust legislation.
Brooks is grabbing not-really-relevant facts from American history and claiming them to support his invented thesis. It would’ve been no sillier (and more fun to read) if, for example, he’d contended the Spanish-American War was fought for the cause of social mobility.
October 29th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Is Brooks really the best possible hire the Times could have made for fact-free bloviation on American political history?
I’m a huge Hamilton fan, but he was pretty clearly the leader of a faction aimed at securing a dominant position for commercial interests in the new government, not providing “opportunity for all” or something like that. And it’s ridiculous to suggest that the Homestead Act and land grant colleges were the main political ambitions of Lincoln-era Republicans. Brooks goes rifling through American history to find examples he can deploy in support of whatever he thinks this week.
October 29th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Doesn’t your own family’s experience — and that of millions of Asian-Americans — dispute your comment on the lack of “mobility” in America?
You are however right about Brooks’s ahistoric argument and silly strawman.
October 29th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
The three major planks of the Republican party in 1860 were that slavery shall not spread, tariffs shall be high and a homestead law would grant free land to western settlers.
Land grant colleges were not a big deal, but the homestead act was.
October 29th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
“This tendency began with Alexander Hamilton, who created a vibrant national economy so more people could rise and succeed.”
That’s probably a substantive misrepresentation of Alexander Hamilton. Put as simply as possible, there were numerous conflicting opinions about what a “vibrant national economy” could mean during his time. Hamilton advocated (and, indeed, more than occasionally used his offices and relationship with George Washington to either secretly or at minimum semi-covertly conspire to engineer behind the scenes) one particular vision of what that economy would look like which certainly wasn’t universally accepted at the time. Further, you could argue (and his contemporary political opponents certainly did argue) that Hamilton’s plans were just as much or more about ensuring that the New York and Boston financier-class (which everyone at the time universally understood that Hamilton was both himself a representative of and also a lobbyist for) got a central, at least partially protected, role in the economy rather than some idealistic starry-eyed vision of egalitarianism.
October 29th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Could Brooks cite any passages from Hamilton extolling the need for more “social mobility”. Just because Hamilton was a self-made man himself, doesn’t mean his economic program was designed to enhance social mobility. That is not to say he was opposed to social mobility, either. My reading is that Hamilton a confident elitist who was a believer in strong states and natural meritocratic hierarchy built around dominant and successful individuals like himself. He seems, above all, to have been a practical thinker interested in building the power and prosperity of the United States. To the extent he cared about social mobility, it would have been for the purpose of allowing the cream to rise to the top in a centralized system, where the elect few of capable commercial titans would be free from the lilliputian bands of the demos to build the nation’s power through commerce. The government was to be capable of energetic and decisive action on behalf of American commerce, assisting and protecting those industries that were building the country’s strength, and driving investment and growth with a strong government-run central bank.
October 29th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
The graph from The Economist is worthless. The graph only makes sense if you use Denmark and the US as points on the line. France, Germany, and Norway have nearly equivalent income disparities but totally different degrees of mobility. The same for Canada, Spain, and Britain. If any thing, the graph shows no correlation between mobility and equality.
October 29th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
My reading of Hamilton [to join the pile-on] is that his primary concern was with building a strong nation–a goal that he identified in large part with identifying the interests of the nation with that of the elite [After all, at the beginning there was no American elite--only a Massachusetts elite, a Pennsylvania elite, a Virginia elite, etc.]. Many of his policies were in fact distinctly unfriendly to small entrepreneurs. His Bank of the United States kept a tight hand on credit, and Federalists were generally cool toward opening up the transappalachian West. Contrary to popular belief, he wasn’t a fan of protective tariffs, which, if truly protective, would have cut into the revenues he needed to service his funded debt [and the elite bondholders]; he preferred encouraging industry through subsidies, chiefly to his cronies. For these reasons, the Joe the Plumbers of his day went for Jefferson.
October 29th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Doesn’t this completely fail to take into account the radical right wing, the Christianists, etc.?
October 29th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Re “Just because Hamilton was a self-made man himself, doesn’t mean his economic program was designed to enhance social mobility.”
——————
Like John McCain, Alexander Hamilton made his money the hard way — he married for it.
October 29th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Plus, any one who studies the Founding in depth will conclude that the modern day USA would be a hell of a lot better off if Aedanus Burke had blown Hamilton’s brains out in the 1790s.
I do concur that there was some benefit to leaving the job to Aaron Burr in 1804. Burr had the good judgment to shoot Hamilton in the gut –so that Hamilton would be in pain for days before dying. Although rumor has it that Burr had to shoot Hamilton ..er.. on the wing.
October 29th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Anyone ever notice how New York City’s William Kristol is the spitting image of Alexander Hamilton?
October 29th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Re: Just because Hamilton was a self-made man himself, doesn’t mean his economic program was designed to enhance social mobility. That is not to say he was opposed to social mobility, either. My reading is that Hamilton a confident elitist who was a believer in strong states and natural meritocratic hierarchy built around dominant and successful individuals like himself.
Which in an 18th century context did imply a high degree of social mobility since under the ancien regime of European civilization it was not a meritocracy that occupied the highest ranks, but an inbred and often quite stupid and incompetent aristocracy.
October 29th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
“Which in an 18th century context did imply a high degree of social mobility since under the ancien regime of European civilization it was not a meritocracy that occupied the highest ranks, but an inbred and often quite stupid and incompetent aristocracy.”
That’s a bit of an overstatement: Bourbon France’s actual administration (not the courtier positions at court which were essentially powerless, but rather the finance ministry and the regional intendants) were quite rarely staffed with any members of the nobility (and almost never with high-ranking members of the nobility). Though the Prussian army (which effectively was the Prussian state) was generally led by titled aristocrats, the Prussian army welcomed aristocrats of numerous nations into its armies. There was a lot of social mobility within the nobility, too – and the nobility constituted as much as 5% or more of the population in some places (which certainly was as much of the population as the Virginian high planter class that entirely controlled Virginia’s politics constituted of Virginia’s population).
October 29th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Doesn’t your own family’s experience — and that of millions of Asian-Americans — dispute your comment on the lack of “mobility” in America?
Anecdote != data.
October 29th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Just Asking
“Doesn’t your own family’s experience — and that of millions of Asian-Americans — dispute your comment on the lack of “mobility” in America?”
No, not really, his family story would only dispute a claim that there is no social mobility in America.
What he is saying is that social mobility is rarer on an aggregate basis in America than in many other rich countries.
October 29th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
It has long amazed me that conservatives, who claim to believe in family values, can’t grasp the simple point that you can’t have equality of opportunity without equality of outcomes, because the outcome for on generation determine the opportunities of their children.*
Now I think that sometimes (say from the lying mouth of Lyndon Johnson) there is a conscious effort to use “eqaulity of opportunity” as a euphemism for “equality” (no need to talk about “liberty of opportunity” or “fraternity of opportunity”) exploiting the fact that, in human society, there isn’t much difference between policies which promote equality of opportunity and policies which promote equality.
* to be honest, I have a guess as to what is going on. The unit to some is not the individual but the dynasty (that’s what economists call it). So people should have the opportunity to work hard and give their children the best education etc. The lineages had equality of opportunity in the mythical past (certainly not in the actual past) and something earned by your parents or grandparents belongs by right to your family.
Of course what is really really going on is race. The units are Whites and Blacks. Attitudes towards “equality of outcome” and “equality of opportunity” have a lot to do with attitudes towards affirmative action.
October 29th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Please be nicer to David Brooks. This is a major advance for him. Normally, every idea, book or column of David Brooks can be reduced to “There are two kinds of X” with X = people, states, economic systems, Starbucks v. Walmart, and so on. In this column, Brooks admits the existence of three kinds of a thing!
October 30th, 2008 at 4:07 am
“Contrary to its stated goals and repeated claims, the U.S. higher education system fails to equalize opportunities among students from high- and low-income families. Rather, the current process of admission to, enrollment in, and graduation from colleges and universities contributes to economic inequality as measured by income and wealth. The system thus seems to intensify and reinforce differences in economic status
The Role of Higher Education in Social Mobility.”
Opportunity in America Volume 16 Number 2 Fall 2006
October 30th, 2008 at 10:29 am
In France, you can be just as poor as your father was !
October 31st, 2008 at 8:18 am
Civil War Republicans were true believers in classic liberalism…their whole plan for Reconstruction was that once the slaves were freed, the magic of the market would lift them up into the middle class.
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