Our social fabric is fraying, and people are losing a sense of purpose, dignity, and connection to one another. This too has implications for economic health. It is the strength of families and communities, not the broader economy, that is at the root of economic opportunity.
This goes along with the theme that I see emerging, which is that sociology is becoming more important than economics. To me, the widening of cultural gaps is very important. Those of us who live in affluent areas are really out of touch with much of the country in a way that was not as true fifty years ago. As I have said, back in 1965 at a Cardinals game, one would find people of all social classes sitting in the same section of the ballpark. That is not true any more.
McCloskey’s suggestions include
a voluntary national-service program. The activities would not be limited to military service but would include service in every venue, from childcare to eldercare to addiction recovery to environmental cleanup. While voluntary service is traditionally thought of as something for 18- or 19-year-olds, it could presumably be offered as a one-year program that anyone could participate in once in their lifetime for a set stipend of $30,000 or $15 an hour. The federal government would pay the stipend, or perhaps provide some other type of benefit, such as a credit for college costs, at that level. Instead of creating a large new federal agency to provide these service opportunities, citizens could partner with existing nonprofits or city-based projects. Indeed, such a program need not be a national one, but one that cities and communities could spearhead themselves.
She suggests starting with a trial pilot, rather than a full national program.
Even though service would be voluntary rather than obligatory, I am not on board with this suggestion. I don’t like to define “service” as working for a non-profit. Instead, if the goal is to help people feel useful and connected, I would look for ways to increase employment in general, including in the for-profit sector. Instead of a full stipend, the Federal government could offer a subsidy–perhaps a one-year exemption from the payroll tax.
Also, as one puts together a package of policies, it is important to keep in mind some fundamental trade-offs. For example, deep means-testing imposes high marginal tax rates, which impede upward mobility. See my essay on the UBI.
But in any case, this involves throwing economic solutions at sociological problems. My guess is that even if the economic ideas are well considered, the problems will confound economic policy. Of course, policies that are based on normative sociology (the study of what the causes of problems ought to be) will do even worse.
This sounds like AmeriCorps. You basically volunteer for a year at a non-profit organization under a “living stipend” from the federal government. The program is pretty awful.
I don’t know if I would call Americorps ‘pretty awful.’ I did City Year, an Americorps program, and while the school I worked at was certainly pretty dysfunctional, it was a formative learning experience for me. Whether I helped the children I worked with in any meaningful way is much harder to know.
Which of ‘we’ is she speaking?
Are we sure there is a problem? I walk my dog in an off leash dog park. People from all sorts of backgrounds, jobs and levels of income. In general people get along, and the biggest factor in sorting people (and biggest cause of problems) is how the dogs get along. I like people who have dogs my dog likes, and I don’t like people whose dogs my dog does not like.
I have the sneaking suspicion that the program would just be a failure on its own terms. Some blue state city would have its volunteers helping put on drag queen story hour at the local public library or handing out cosmetics at some homeless shelter for the transgendered, so people on the right would get all bent out of shape about the program being politicized, people on the left would get bent out of shape about them being bent out of shape, and there’d be a lot of finger-pointing and the whole thing would add to polarization rather than subtract from it.
I’m not sure how expanding for-profit employment would overcome cultural gaps.
In the workplace, the affluent are never going to be working next to the extremely poor – people work with people at or near their level in the employment hierarchy – doctors work with doctors and nurses, janitors work with janitors, and that’s not going to change.
If you want to bridge cultural gaps, you need social activities that appeal to both the affluent and the poor. One place I have seen the affluent mix freely with the poor is at Burning Man and in that community – which includes everyone from freakishly rich tech moguls to homeless hippies. The reason for that is probably because, well, both rich people and poor people enjoy doing drugs, and Burning Man has an enforced policy of “radical inclusion” that compels people to welcome people they otherwise would snub. I think there’s also something to the enforced non-commercial nature of the event as well. It sets the tone that the event is a place where you are expected to socially interact – impersonal transactions are forbidden.
This is probably similar to churches. There are no rich people churches and poor people churches – everyone goes to the same church. The decline in religious participation and increasing neighborhood segregation by income, probably relates to the decline in cross-class social connections.
Another example I can think of is “maker” spaces – that’s another group that is sort of a social activity where everyone is welcome to participate, organized around not just one hobby, but hobbyists in general who need to share tools like a woodshop or metal shop that are too expensive to own individually. That might be a good candidate to increase social connection – promote make spaces and “maker” culture. I realize that DIY is a market failure, but not when people are doing it for fun.
There are no rich people churches and poor people churches – everyone goes to the same church.
Is that really true? The churches I have went to tend not have a good mix of different classes.
I remember reading on Rod Dreher’s blog where he said that in the deep south, where he’s from, church attendance is a very middle class activity. The wealthy have more fun things to do, the lower classes look at church as being like school: something that has to be endured for a time when you’re young, and they typically call it quits as soon as they’re able. Not sure how generalizable that is, though, not being a church-goer myself.
Again I am dubious as a middle class person may think middle class people only attend because they only see middle class people at their church. (He may be correct in Louisiana though.)
In our area, I see most churches are fairly segregated by class and secondly by race.
“But in any case, this involves throwing economic solutions at sociological problems.”
I believe that the suggested fixes are throwing sociological solutions at economic problems – problems caused by government interference in the marketplace. Before creating any new programs, try getting rid of minimum wage laws, job licensing regulations, regressive sin taxes, and marriage penalties in welfare programs. Stop all programs that encourage poor people to buy houses, which reduces their mobility when economic trends change. Eliminate rent controls, zoning restrictions and urban renewal projects. Allow school choice. Take two aspirin and call me in five years. If the sociological trends that McCloskey cites haven’t reversed by then, I’ll consider some sociological fixes.
Those of us who live in affluent areas are really out of touch with much of the country in a way that was not as true fifty years ago.
I am dubious of this reality as:
1) Can we start with the Post War boom years (1948 – 1974) were the outlier not the long term reality? In fact most of US history, there hardly any interaction of much of the country and somebody living in California in 1909 would hardly have a clue what happened in West Virginia. (In 1919 we did have WW1 and WW2 was the above experiment so we had an outlier generation.)
2) There was a lot of segregation before the 1960s that defined who you interacted with. Even outside the South, most local communities were segregated.
3) At the bottom end of the Bobo reality, I get tired of claims about coastal elites living in gated communities. My kids do go to a Hispanic-American school.
4) I still say the big difference of today versus the past is the interaction of local community and churches. But given the economy is global, people don’t feel as important to develop roots.
Point #1 is discussed at length in Yuval Levin’s _The fractured republic_, which Prof. Arnold has spoken highly of in the past. Levin agrees that the 30 or so years during / after WWII pushed many people of different strata together–more so than during the Gilded Age, and also more so than now. So it was the mid-20th century that was unusual.
We probably need more data, too. and agreement over what we are focusing on.
Has anyone here read June Carbone’s “Marriage Markets?” I feel like the easiest solution to the US’ “sociological” problems is just to address them head on, which would mean changes to laws regarding marriage and child support, among other things. Basically you have to build an ecosytem where non-college educated men and women can trust each other as long term partners, in an environment in which many men are not able to contribute much financially and in an environment in which women have the ability to very greatly restrict access to a man’s children (especially if he cannot afford a lawyer).
I don’t even know how much leftists (and conservatives) would respond to providing pro bono lawyers for child custody disputes, divorces, child care support disputes, etc. I don’t know how people would respond to changes in laws that no longer criminalized men for not making childcare payments, and moreover in laws that guaranteed access to non-custodial parents who didn’t make those payments (because a lot of poor men can give their time to their children, which is valuable, but just don’t have enough money). I don’t know how people would respond to a system that incentivized (and maybe even encouraged) men and women not to be married by giving government benefits to women living with the father of their children but not married, and those folks sharing expenses.
” I don’t know how people would respond to a system that incentivized (and maybe even encouraged) men and women not to be married by giving government benefits to women living with the father of their children but not married, and those folks sharing expenses.”
I understood your other examples, but not this one. Do you mean to give unmarried people living together benefits that you don’t give to married people? I don’t see the logic behind that. What about women who have children with different fathers, or living with a man who is not the father?
My understanding is that means tested programs require women not to live with a man (as a means to prevent people from getting government benefits for a mother who isn’t working while the father is working to support the family, with the total family income being above the phaseout or cutoff line). Essentially this would make a lot of government programs universal for women who don’t earn a whole lot of money and might also encourage a lot more upper middle class women to be SAHMs, at least for a while.
Our social fabric is fraying…
Seriously? We want the government to address this?
Yes, tighter and tighter labor markets may help a lot.
For two generations the US Federal Reserve has practiced wage repression, while elites have cheered immigration, whether legal or otherwise, for its resulting cheap labor.
Oh? You think the voters may pick Bernie Sanders under such circumstances?
The relevant Bryan Caplan quote:
and:
In other words, fraying social fabric is a feature, not a bug. The point is to undermine solidarity, treat fellow citizens more like strangers, and enable free market reforms, and move away from nation states to a more ancap model. With all respect to Caplan, he’s smarter than me, I agree with most of the logic here, I’m impressed with it, yet I disagree overall.
The relevant CATO quote is:
The implication being that a country is immoral as it distinguishes between us and them, while a pure market economy is the moral goal as it is purely accessible to everyone. But again, while “fraying the social fabric” is a pessimistic doom-and-gloom phrasing, that is the deliberate direction advocated by Caplan and CATO.
Helen Smith’s article “The nation is not your extended family” is worth looking on this, at PJ Media, and she tends to write short and often simple “preachy” columns but in that one she does go back to Hayek.
These discussions of “the social fabric” need to specify situations and how we are to respond, given a choice between various alternatives.
Here’s a petty example from my own life. I stopped giving blood (and even more so, platelets!) to the Red Cross and instead became a research subject for clinical trials, which actually knocked me out of the Red Cross donor pool, so they no longer call me with robo-calls. Donating platelets could be done 26x a year and took two to three hours, and a sense of diffuse duty wasn’t enough to keep me going more than 6 months, especially when the saline replacement resulted in discomfort from having to urinate severely while having to wait fifteen more minutes for the procedure to end.
I felt bad about quitting, but I felt like clinical trials paid me money while the Red Cross wanted me to give them stuff for free. For the rest of my life. I know they have a business model that works for them, and it’s a good cause–it didn’t work for me. They didn’t come to my place of employment, I went to them, sometimes going out of my way, and the more often I gave the more they wanted me to give more.
The abstract need of my platelets didn’t give me *nothing* when I met that need. I never felt adequately thanked for my time and inconvenience, it wasn’t a social event, the abstract intangible rewards wilted quickly over time.
end petty example.
One aspect of the “fraying of the social fabric” is a result of people withdrawing to save themselves from other people’s opportunistic gambits.
The arms-length transactions of the market seem to be less likely, over-all, to leave me feeling like a sucker, than activities that are “for a good cause.”
I’d like to volunteer more and do things to make the world a better place generally. Sometimes I look around and see rackets masquerading as charitable organizations.
Sorry for this phenomenological observation that is petty and self-centered.
Yes, maintaining the social fabric is a good thing. At the same time, there is that maxim: “If you don’t have a strategy, you become part of someone else’s strategy.” Let the idealists beware!
In regards to “The nation is not your extended family”. In many ways a nation is exactly an extended family. Or maybe it’s an extended tribe which is an extended family. I believe that CATO and Caplan and many on the left agree and want to undermine that. The CATO quote I gave says that we are a market economy with country (nation) attached not the other way around. The intent is to undermine the nation, and make it more of a pure open market. They have persuaded me on many issues, and I agree with most of their logic. I also can imagine a nation free future that works much better than today’s political world of nations. And maybe that will happen. But even CATO and Caplan, really have no idea how things will go, they seem rather reckless in that regard. And while some of their ideas and arguments are insightful and intelligent, others arguments seem flippant and unconvincing. I know they’ve heard all the counter arguments that I could ever make, and they’re extremely sure that they are right. I believe there’s a large chance they’re wrong and in hindsight their mistakes will eventually become obvious.
Regarding your personal anecdotes, most of the sentiments you express seem reasonable and agreeable. All charity ultimately has to compensate the giver by giving stoking their ego, making him/her feel good. Financial compensation works too, but then it’s often not considered charity.
When we look at places with little social solidarity and social trust, especially at scale, what we rarely find are ancap libertarian utopias that we would like to live in.
There are many scenarios where low social trust and low solidarity led to disaster and other scenarios where it worked out really well. I’m not convinced either side of that argument is absolutely right.
Which are these examples where low solidarity and social trust worked out well?
I’m honestly coming up with a blank.
Free markets themselves. A customer trusts the baker to bake a good loaf of bread and the baker will trust the customer’s money even if they don’t trust each other as people. Most things we buy, there is a similar trust relationship.
One can look at big cities, like New York City, and sure the politics are majority progressive, but it’s absolutely a low trust city that is highly desirable to live in. People pay a huge premium to live and work there. NYC votes for these outrageously left politicians that are quite the opposite of libertarian AnCap, yet it is still a city with very low trust, that uses markets, and works pretty well.
NYC is a reasonably high trust environment as far as I can tell, at least in the parts of NYC that are desirable. I don’t have to worry that the tap water will poison me. When I deposit money in the bank I don’t think it will get stolen. When I pay taxes I expect I will get at least some vital services in some capacity in return. And when I walk on the street I don’t think I’m about to get mugged.
If I were to move to a third world country I could not count on any of those things. Those countries have “markets” and have tried their best to mimic the west in every way possible, but it just doesn’t stick.
Maybe we have a different definition of “high trust”.
I believe the AnCap idea is very high trust in contractual relations. Think of how Amazon puts in great care that if you buy something, you get what you bought, the shipper ships on time, they aggressively weed many types of fraud and bad apple sellers. But you don’t necessarily trust Amazon sellers as people, you don’t consider them family, they are strangers that you trust to sell a product.
If Google or Amazon ran a city, I’d imagine you could trust it to do a good job in keeping a lid on casual street violence and drinking water would be clean. I find that plausible. I’d like to try living in a Google run city or something similar.
It can be true that a nation is like a great big extended family (and that is literally true in places like Iceland or Israel). However, that isn’t true in nations like the US, China, or Russia. Those nations are, within their own borders, the size of empires, and they all have enough diversity (even among the supposedly unitary Han) that they aren’t really nations of only one people, but many.
What that means for how politics should be conducted and what policies those nations should pursue isn’t really clear to me. It seems to me that Russia and China have chosen to go down the path of emphasizing the commonalities among the major ethnic group (Russian speakers, anti-Nazism, Orthodox Christianity; among the Han, I guess some sort of idea of the Han as one nation humiliated and now rising to their rightful place as the center of the earth, i.e. some sort of Han supremacism). What the US should do I really don’t know; that is, I don’t know how what kind of a narrative about the country and its people could be believed in by a large majority. Ocasio-Cortez and Jerry Falwell just don’t seem to me to be from the same nation, and I don’t know what kind of a narrative could convince people that those two are anything other than strangers as opposed to folks that are truly part of the same collective. Hell, you could say the same thing about Mitt Romney and Donald Trump, or Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi.
Depending on which taxonomy or measure of homogeneity or solidarity that you choose, you will come to different conclusions on which nations are “one people” or “many people”.
Many siblings from the same nuclear family have bitter rivalries and seem similarly distant.
My personal preferences on what the US should do: I find the open border AnCap utopia very appealing, I agree with most of the arguments behind it, but ultimately it’s too risky, and I vote to sharply tap the brakes for the short term. I believe that people like Caplan and CATO, are smarter than me, I’m not a qualified researcher or debater and they are, but many of their arguments are particularly flippant or on shaky logical ground and sometimes rather obviously flat out wrong.
But tying this back to Kling’s original post: fraying the social fabric is quite a deliberate choice being made, and I see some valid arguments for it.
Ocasio-Cortez and Jerry Falwell aren’t from the same nation. Nations and countries are two different things.
Search for “fate of empires glubb”
I found it recently and found it both educational and disturbing. It shifted the causality of the relationship you describe. It’s not that the goal is to fray social bonds. It’s that the consequences of upstream dynamics is manifesting today as frayed social bonds (among other cultural ills that have come up in comments on this blog over the last couple years).
Do baby boomers feel any solidarity with millennials? No.
The boomer philosophy is: We don’t owe anybody anything. Everybody owes us.
Baby boomers stand in the way of free-market reforms in pensions, education, health care, taxation.
It’s not like boomers are uniquely selfish. But they got in first. Millennials are just never going to be in a position to do to the boomers what the boomers have done to them. It was a one-time deal. The boomers robbed their children. It isn’t going to happen in reverse.
So how’s it working out? Is this a good and productive fraying of the social fabric? The worse, the better?
Society is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. So how is this partnership going? Going well?
No. We have a real-life example of the social fabric getting ripped up, and it hasn’t worked out well. One generation ripped off the next and it hasn’t yet led to a libertarian utopia.
The most telling thing about Ms McCloskey’s proposal is that she sees the alienation you speak of as a “problem” whose solution may require “incentives” along the lines of government programs and compensation. I don’t dismiss her rationale, nor do I question her sincerity, but I am dispirited that this re-connection between the Americas would need to be so “manufactured.” I find life choices – such as those Charles Murray’s, which have not been that different from mine – more appealing and sustainable, providing less “windows” through which we can peek at specimens of Red/Fishtown America, but more as “doors” through which we can escape our gilded cages.
Maybe I am misunderstanding your comment, but I guess there is some responsibility to examine if the rules of the game are setting up people to fail, and if they are, then doing something to change them. Maybe government incentives aren’t the best way to change things, but when tens of millions of people all make what appear to be the same bad choices, that indicates to me that something has gone wrong in the environment.
The government should always be looking to do better, but it is entirely possible that positive changes can result in a new set of cultural stresses. Those that adapt to these new freedoms well can achieve significant improvements to prosperity, while those that cannot may suffer.
This could be something as straightforward as widespread adoption of mobile phones and cellular communications. It may take 50-100 years for the human race to socially adapt to this because it messes with the fundamentals of human socialization.
We are going to have to simply choose what we will and won’t do with these new technologies, and social science and economics won’t be helpful. Depending on the term being evaluated, social sciences might show that mobile phones are a net harm to human well being. Should we make them illegal? That would probably be very stupid in the longer term, but we don’t know for sure. Only with the benefit of hindsight will we know whether we made the right decision.
Sociology and Economics provide very little predictive insight for larger strategic decisions.
That presupposes we can agree on “bad choices” and what the consequences of “bad choices” will be.
Both Parties, and most educated folk, believe in and support “responsible promiscuity”.
Have sex with others you are attracted to before marriage (often others even after marriage), but be careful to avoid unwanted pregnancy and STDs. I used to believe this would be good, too (Heinlein, even Rand); now I’m sure it’s bad for society.
Society needs more stable marriages and better families.
The gov’t should certainly be shifting incentives to support man-woman + their bio children families, and making it easier on families.
It’s highly unlikely that the small, or very small, increased gov’t incentives will really result in a lot more stable marriages. While I can imagine quite significant incentives having 10 or 20% increases, I don’t believe they would be politically feasible.
On jobs, I prefer a job guarantee, but one where the gov’t pays some, or most, of your pay, but you work for a profit-making company. These are the ones who are creating wealth in a sustainable way. For the job seekers who qualify, the gov’t should pay their SS taxes & other payroll deductions, as well as employer taxes (so they get more take home pay) for the first year. Expanded EITC should be used, too.
The tax system on businesses should start to include how many employees, and the median salary of employees, and the top 0.1% or top 10 sum salaries of listed companies — we need more facts about how much the top and median folk are making at companies.
Tucker Carlson has many similar themes; he notes that capital income is taxed much less than labor income; for example 28% on income, 14% on capital. This was probably great for accumulating wealth, along with inequality. But now it would be better to lower income taxes to same level as capital (tho raising capital taxes is more likely, politically).
The explicit gov’t goal should be helping those willing to work and be sexually responsible to help themselves into relative middle class (which I define as the income range about $30k to $120k with a $60k median, starting from one half the median to twice the median).
“Responsible promiscuity” is what I was taught growing up too (not by my parents, but certainly by “the system”). Like you I think it was a disaster, in part from living it, seeing it lived in others, and statistics. In the lower orders it led to total chaos. In the upper orders it led to a lack of relationships (less marriage, less childbearing) which blunted to negatives but at the costs of important positives.
I think this view on “responsible promiscuity” is a pretty big dividing line between worldview. If you believe in it, it seems to become the #1 priority. I would actually consider it the center of progressivism (and similar offshoots like libertarianism). Perhaps as a central manifestation of a kind of “the purpose of life is you own enjoyment, then you die and it’s a black void, and BTW we don’t really know what makes people happy so more or less follow your feelings” ethos. Sure you throw a few “responsible” limitations on top, but its kind of thin and breaks pretty easily. And sure the different groups espousing this ethos all have their own ideas about how the fallout should be corrected (#MeToo), but the idea that “responsible promiscuity” is just not a great starting point to begin with is defended to the death. I think it would be defended even more than all other “hot button” issues for these groups.
Do we have something better than “responsible promiscuity” as a social technology? I know that at first, in the 60’s, people celebrated “free love”, but nowadays, the continuation of “responsible promiscuity” seems as much a reaction to the implications of birth control, female earning power, and reduced earning power among men without a college degree as opposed to a positive good in itself. That is at least my perspective as a college educated older millennial. It wasn’t that sex was the be all end all, it was rather that sex was totally fine so long as it didn’t threaten a bourgeois life plan, which I think makes clear what is really valued.
As a follow up, I think why “responsible promiscuity” seems so important to a blue state world view is that people in blue states tend to view it as a lynch pin for personal prosperity. Take it away, and you are back to the era of tons of teen pregnancies, teenagers entering into sh1tty marriages (or not entering into those marriages and having kids with multiple partners) and working low paying jobs to try to support themselves and their offspring. Basically what a lot of people view as the social reality of Red State America (and African American and Hispanic ghettos, but they won’t say that), whether accurate or not. It really is about the money and social status, not about the sex.
I guess there are two questions:
1) Without “responsible promiscuity”, would we end up in a rash of teenage pregnancies? Or would people simply exercise more restraint? You don’t get pregnant or catch and STD if you aren’t having sex. It seems to me that you could move the needle on this if you tried.
2) Is “responsible promiscuity” harmless? At the individual or society level. The impression I get is that it is harmful, though that manifests in different ways (in the upper classes, not through acute disaster, but in the form of low marriage and fertility rates).
Having sex effects you even if you don’t get knocked up or catch an STD. Acknowledgement of this reality would go a long way towards promoting better behavior across the spectrum. It also wouldn’t hurt to have a concept of sexual relations and life purpose that carrot and sticked people towards good life paths (even, yes, if it was “judgmental”).
P.S. I think we ought to be clear about “red state” versus “blue state” America. GOP voting peaks among the middle class, specifically people 0-1 SD that live in the suburbs and mostly live the bourgeois family life. DEM life is either elite or underclass. At any given level of socio-economic class (say, comparing people of equal socio-economic class), people who vote GOP have better social outcomes than those vote DEM.
A driver of the “fraying of the social fabric” is our government’s sale of special privileges to companies, groups, and individuals. As long as privileges are for sale, people will find ways to buy them – whether with votes, money, or threats of violence. The result is a downward spiral as resources are increasingly channeled into lobbying and away from productive activities. The only way to stop the increasingly vicious tribal battle to live at others’ expense is to shut down the government privilege store.
Right. McCloskey, Cass, and many of the newest wave of ‘reform conservatives’ are trying to treat matters of culture and social psychology with mild material subsidies. Forget for a moment whether this is what Republican voters really want from their politicians or if implementing such policies would yield victory at the polls, there is no good reason to think that the certain modest manipulations of the tax code can really move the needle on these stubborn social phenomena which derive from matters other than a slight insufficiently of real purchasing power.
As for the participation rate, she seems to exaggerate the problem. The employment population ratio for 25-54 year-olds is now close to 80%, nearly what it was at the peak of the 2002-2008 expansion. The participation rate for the same group has rebounded from the low plateau from 2014-2016, and has risen 2 percentage points since, and it is now approaching the modern era normal range over the last 30 years.
LKY said the same thing about fertility. That the material incentive it would take to get people to have kids would have to be so enormous that it would be difficult to implement. There is no way you could implement subsidies that large without having already won the culture wars over the desired status of children and families.
If your big idea to change the GOP is a modest increase in the EITC, you aren’t reforming much.