is the title of this column by Paul Krugman in today's New York Times. It starts with the notion that we still have a problem with race, as exemplified by what happened with Freddie Gray and the resulting disturbances in Baltimore.
But Krugman is, after all, an economist, and in his second paragraph he tells us
And the riots in Baltimore, destructive as they are, have served at least one useful purpose: drawing attention to the grotesque inequalities that poison the lives of too many Americans.
He follows that by pointing out that "debilitating poverty" and the concomitant "alienation from society" are from from being unique to Black communities:
In fact, much though by no means all of the horror one sees in Baltimore and many other places is really about class, about the devastating effects of extreme and rising inequality.
Referring to the data (about which I have postged) showing the relationship of life expectancy in Black Baltimore neighborhoods to Third World Countries, he notes that a similar disparity can be seen in rising death rates among lower class Whites:
Most notably, mortality among white women has increased sharply since the 1990s, with the rise surely concentrated among the poor and poorly educated; life expectancy among less educated whites has been falling at rates reminiscent of the collapse of life expectancy in post-Communist Russia.
Please keep reading.
He acknowledges that there is a difference in obesity, smoking and other self-destructive behaviors that accounts for the increase in such disparity, but connects it to "an economy that leaves tens of millions behind." He has little patience with commentators who blame the poor for their own condition and advocate middle class values as a solution:
Maybe, just maybe, that was a sustainable argument four decades ago, but at this point it should be obvious that middle-class values only flourish in an economy that offers middle-class jobs.
And that - the non-availability of middle-class jobs - is a key for Krugman, who after all is writing as an economist.
He quotes a sociologist, William Julius Williams, who warned that the disappearance of well-paying jobs in the inner city contributed to the break-up of Black families, arguing that Wilson's work contained an implicit warning that other groups would have similar results should they see the loss of economic opportunities, and then Krugman writes
And so it has proved. Lagging wages — actually declining in real terms for half of working men — and work instability have been followed by sharp declines in marriage, rising births out of wedlock, and more.
He quotes Isabel Sawhill of Brookings as making the case explicitly, and those who pay attention note a similar rise among poorer whites who lack meaningful job opportunities.
He criticizes commentators who think our attempts to address the problem through social welfare spending has exploded and failed:
In reality, federal spending on means-tested programs other than Medicaid has fluctuated between 1 and 2 percent of G.D.P. for decades, going up in recessions and down in recoveries. That’s not a lot of money — it’s far less than other advanced countries spend — and not all of it goes to families below the poverty line.
Look at those last two phrases
it’s far less than other advanced countries spend
and not all of it goes to families below the poverty line.
We know that Social Security, which some of the Right still want to dismantle, has done more than anything else to prevent extreme poverty among the elderly, and that Medicare despite the until recent need for the ongoing "Doctor Fix" has done much to alleviate the stress for the elderly of receiving medical care. Yet the political cost of both programs has meant that both programs have large chunks of expenditures on behalf of those who don't really NEED them to avoid poverty.
But these are NOT the programs in the 1-2% of GDP to which Krugman refers. We have SNAP (for which some states now require the use of what are effectively debit cards carrying fees that benefit banks at the expense of the people for whom the benefits were intended), we have some housing programs (for which it is possible for landlords to profit, as I discovered when I did the computer work for Section 8 for Arlington County VA several decades back), and so on.
Krugman argues that despite flaws in the data, we know the programs do make a difference, and could make far more of a difference were we as generous as we like to think we are.
There is one final paragraph, with which I will shortly conclude.
Again, we know we have the resources to address our problems. Think for a moment about minimum wages. Raising them does NOT have to raise either prices or cost jobs, since the cost can often be easily absorbed by employers taking slightly less extreme profits on their own behalf. Funding Social Security, to look at what is our most successful anti-poverty program, could easily be guaranteed by simply raising the cap on which the tax is applied. Heck, a number of years ago I had a group of 11-12 graders analyze the data that was available and with one exception all agree such a fix was hardly distorting and would easily address the problem of future funding, even allowing for a possible expansion of the program.
We as a society are often far less generous than we think we are.
But fixing the problem that leads to situations like the despair one sees in Baltimore is well within our capability.
That is NOT to deny the horrible behavior of Police towards people of color. Remember, it is not necessarily the color of the policeman, but far more the color of the person against whom the police apply their power - think Henry Louis Gates, for example, or the NBA player who just got his leg broken. That is a reflection of a society in which an educated Black man can often still not get a cab, where my African-American students experience being followed in stores regardless of the economic status of their families while almost none of white my white teenagers have never had such an indignity perpetrated against them.
Krugman is not ignoring racism, rather he is countering the rationale used to blame the victim, to blame those who finally riot because they have lost hope, and pointing out that those without hope is an expanding population that is increasingly multihued in its skin color. I have seen this in the poverty in Appalachia, and also in some working-class neighborhoods in cities like Cleveland and Baltimore.
But I will let Krugman have the last words, noting I will NOT end with my final salutation, given how inappropriate it would be.
The point is that there is no excuse for fatalism as we contemplate the evils of poverty in America. Shrugging your shoulders as you attribute it all to values is an act of malign neglect. The poor don’t need lectures on morality, they need more resources — which we can afford to provide — and better economic opportunities, which we can also afford to provide through everything from training and subsidies to higher minimum wages. Baltimore, and America, don’t have to be as unjust as they are.