My mother used to tell what she thought was a hysterically funny joke, that when she was a child, she never knew she was poor because nobody told her. She was no Samantha Bee. But her point was that she lived pretty much like her peers in Newark, New Jersey. She didn’t have much, but she didn’t miss what she didn’t know. Sure, rich people lived like rich people, but what did that have to do with her?
But what she could, and did, manage to accomplish was to send her two kids to college to become something. Like most Jewish parents, education was the one gift she had to give her children. It was the one thing the Nazis couldn’t take away. They could take your homes, your possessions, even your life, but they couldn’t take your education. As it turned out, that was enough.
Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, finds this to be unfair.
The big difference is that most of the people on the highest rung in America are in denial about their privilege. The American myth of meritocracy allows them to attribute their position to their brilliance and diligence, rather than to luck or a rigged system.
There is a point in there, though not the one he tries to make. He’s absolutely right that successful people attribute their success to brilliance and diligence, and, some at least, discount the role of luck. They overstate their virtues, mistakenly assuming success in one endeavor translates to generalized brilliance rather than merely being sufficiently good at one thing to achieve financial rewards. The guy who owns a dry cleaning store might be great at what he does, but that doesn’t make him Einstein, just a good dry cleaner.
And hard work and intelligence alone doesn’t guarantee anything. Circumstances, luck if you will, is usually the distinguishing factor between failure and success. Then again, it’s also true that the harder you work, the luckier you tend to be. Another factor is that people who are smart, who work hard, are more capable of seizing opportunity, making good choices, then people who are waiting for that lottery ticket to fall from the sky into their grubby little hands.
To say we make our own luck may be an overstatement. To say that success is just a matter of luck is to understate reality.
Beneath a veneer of classlessness, the American class reproduction machine operates with ruthless efficiency. In particular, the upper middle class is solidifying. This favored fifth at the top of the income distribution, with an average annual household income of $200,000, has been separating from the 80 percent below. Collectively, this top fifth has seen a $4 trillion-plus increase in pretax income since 1979, compared to just over $3 trillion for everyone else. Some of those gains went to the top 1 percent. But most went to the 19 percent just beneath them.
Reeves speaks of class in the British sense, of being born into aristocracy. No matter how much education you gain, how much money you make, you will never be the Duke of Earl. But that’s not the class here. We have no landed gentry. We are a vulgar lot, our class being our bank account. And upward mobility is not merely possible, but the goal. If achieved, the point is to perpetuate our wealth, prepare our children to take it and keep it. We may not have known what fork to use at a fancy dinner, but our children will.
Politicians and policy wonks worry about the persistence of poverty across generations, but affluence is inherited more strongly. Most disturbing, we now know how firmly class positions are being transmitted across generations. Most of the children born into households in the top 20 percent will stay there or drop only as far as the next quintile. As Gary Solon, one of the leading scholars of social mobility, put it recently, “Rather than a poverty trap, there seems instead to be more stickiness at the other end: a ‘wealth trap,’ if you will.”
Reeves finds this disturbing. Why? This is the point of the American dream. Having gained affluence, why would anybody want to deny it to their children? That nasty upper quintile fights to keep their status because doing anything else would be idiotic. Don’t the impoverished want to leave their poverty behind and join the affluent?
Things turn ugly, however, when the upper middle class starts to rig markets in its own favor, to the detriment of others. Take housing, perhaps the most significant example. Exclusionary zoning practices allow the upper middle class to live in enclaves. Gated communities, in effect, even if the gates are not visible. Since schools typically draw from their surrounding area, the physical separation of upper-middle-class neighborhoods is replicated in the classroom. Good schools make the area more desirable, further inflating the value of our houses. The federal tax system gives us a handout, through the mortgage-interest deduction, to help us purchase these pricey homes. For the upper middle classes, regardless of their professed political preferences, zoning, wealth, tax deductions and educational opportunity reinforce one another in a virtuous cycle.
It’s unclear what Reeves is griping about here. Should the people who have left poverty behind and achieved financial success move to the projects to homogenize housing? Are good schools merely a product of a healthy real estate tax base, or can teachers teach kids in poor schools if only they will try to learn? Your parents didn’t instill in you the need for education, discipline, hard work? Even in “bad” schools, teachers can still teach those who want to learn, provided those who don’t want to learn don’t disrupt learning.
Progressive policies, whether on zoning or school admissions or tax reform, all too often run into the wall of upper-middle-class opposition. Self-interest is natural enough. But the people who make up the American upper middle class don’t just want to keep their advantages; armed with their faith in a classless, meritocratic society, they think they deserve them. The strong whiff of entitlement coming from the top 20 percent has not been lost on everyone else.
And there is it, the privilege argument, the guilt trip laid on the lucky who mistake their fortune for merit and rig the system to protect their entitlement. The argument is that, since they don’t deserve it, they should give it to the downtrodden rather than hoard it all for themselves.
This is where my mother would tell her hilarious joke. Life may not be fair, the top 20 percent may not be brilliant and none of us admits the degree to which luck, rather than merit, allowed us to go from poor to rich. But America is the land of opportunity, and that allows you to seize it or not. There are stories of hard-working people who failed to achieve success and suffered undeserved detriment instead, but that’s not what you’re talking about. A safety net is one thing, but that’s not what you’re asking for. You want an entitlement, a hand-out, rather than the opportunity to be lucky too.
What life does to you is a matter of luck. What you do with yourself is up to you. Perhaps we don’t deserve what we have, but then, neither does anyone else. Much as the top 20 percent emit a “strong whiff of entitlement,” the bottom 80 percent reek of it. Your odor is no better.
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“Land of opportunity”? Sounds like microaggression.
That was my intention.
Sounds like living in the past.
SHG,
I thought the New York Times disliked slut-shaming.
All the best.
RGK
Some sluts are more shameful than others, apparently.
For the record, we originated in the the top 20%, but now find ourselves in the bottom 20%. How did this happen? Go figure. (Of course the IRS, FBI and Homeland Insecurity are not aware of this. If they are, they could care less?) In order to have “upward mobility,” you must have downward mobility. Did not any of the geniuses in academia or the Time Editorial Board ever think of that vexing conundrum: “ONe step up the ladder for you, means one step down for me!” It’s a law of physics and economics, forgodsake. Somebody has to be the fall-guy.
Somebody has to go to prison–since this is a “law blog”,… ha. Not to many judges go to prison, but we’re getting closer and closer to that inevitability, if you catch my drift? Judges and prosecutors must be held accountable for their mistakes and transgressions. The time is rapidly coming when no one will even want those bloody jobs!
Having said the above confessional, we must say: We have ordinary friends, associates, neighbors and regular folks who make life rewarding–for the most part. And we would not have it any other way. There’s more to life than riches on earth and those fancy Trump golf courses. Those who give shall receive; yes, we believe that wholeheartedly. Hobnobbing with the hoi polloi is not a bad way to go. It brings you closer to Heaven than the Church, Mother Teresa-breath. Or did we get it backwards?
If I ever get to be on the highest rung in America (which, today, means “multibillionaire”), I will form an opinion about this at that time.
I received special dispensation to opine from the Christopher Hitchens Foundation.
It seems Mr. Reeves has an objection to people acting in their perceived self-interest. Or at least the “upper-middle class”.
Now if only he could figure out why the deplorables in Kansas won’t in act in theirs. Or at least vote in theirs.
If I can’t grow up to be the Duke of Earl, I want to be the Duke of Paducah. I’ll settle for Duke Snider.
He objects because he believes they rigging the system to keep it from the bottom 80%. Guess he hasn’t been to Yale or Evergreen State lately. The system’s not rigged. They blowing their opportunity.
Mr. Reeves strikes me as the sort that reads Harrison Bergeron and feels that the titular character was appropriately chastened for threatening to stratify the egalitarian utopia everyone had no doubt worked tirelessly to create.
Well, at least it then had a happy ending.
Does this mean:
No nuke bombs, no more Harvard or Yale Supreme nominations?
You are so tricky esteemed one!
Rich or Poor, It’s Good to be Born to Good Parents.
No guarantee – there are never guarantees – but the odds make it much, much better.
You are obviously right, and the variety of failures in child-rearing is a critical, yet sore, subject. To the extent young people are equipped to take advantage of opportunity, the failure of parents to do their job, from proper feeding and hygiene to infusing an appreciation of education, adequately is a far more critical factor than anything else for young people.
So why such a sore subject? It’s not always a parent’s fault (though it often is), and even if it is, should the children pay for the sins of the parent? Then again, if the parents fail to raise the child well, then what?
In my opinion, it is “such a sore subject” these days because while there has always been a broad consensus that “the failure of parents to do their job . . . adequately is a far more critical factor than anything else for young people[,]” that consensus has been muddled by an ever widening variation on what constitutes parents doing their job combined with a breakdown in societal consensus on who gets to decide.
We are nearing the logical extreme of the “it takes a village” approach to raising children where those who care deeply, passionately, about how children in general are raised use their deep passion as justification for asserting competence and authority to dictate to individual parents, frequently over riding the parents’ deep and passionate views which may be the polar opposite. Think Lenore Skenazy and the stories collected on her site. Libertarians, whether libertarian lite or true believers or somewhere in between, may put up with a host of intrusions on their liberty but there probably aren’t many areas on which an intrusion will be resisted more than the raising of one’s child.
And while the end result of child rearing (the hopefully adult 18 year old) is not always the parents’ fault, or the parents’ credit (I readily accept that I likely benefitted from the concept of better lucky than good), the question of whether the children should pay for the sins of the parent is largely irrelevant. It is what it is, much like the child born with some birth defect owing to unique combination of specific genetic material producing a child. Its all well and good to say the child shouldn’t have to bear the burden for that combination, but they do. Its life.
And if parents do fail to raise a child well, then the most we as a society can offer them is the opportunity to, as adults, correct the errors of their parents. But only they will be able to do so, no government can do it for them.
It’s comments like this that make me regret mentioning anything tangential. And it’s very long.
Taking another stab at it, my original point is that, as to the privilege thing, we all have privileges of various kinds (basic intelligence, athleticism, good health, wealth, etc.,), or the lack thereof, but the greatest “privilege” one is born with is one’s parents. Neither zoning or any other measure Reeves mentions are ever going to overcome the luck of the draw of having good or bad parents as a general proposition. Good parents of children in bad schools will seek (not always with success) to have their children learn and grow into adulthood by learned self reliance while children of parents who teach reliance on government (i.e., zoning) are not likely to reach their potential even in the most elite schools. Yes its better to have money than not. But the thrust of Reeves approach is seriously misplaced. It addresses efforts to have government mitigate natural consequences And trying to shame parents for acting in what they perceive to be their child’s best interest is sheer folly.
As to the fairness of this fact of life, or what we should do when a child gets a bad draw, one place to start would be to accept that life isn’t always fair. All we can do is the best we can do and learn to deal with the results of life’s randomness as best as possible. And while the child may be lucky in the draw of his or her parents, chances are the parents put actual work, thought and effort into being good parents, so its not all random. An individual’s effort to be a good parent will always do much more good in the long run than time, money and resources of government trying to alter the basic facts of life.
Actually, no, they don’t want upper middle class folks moving to the projects. They start doing things to make property prices go up and then everyone starts complaining about gentrification because the bodega can’t sell their breakfast sandwich for $4 and still pay the rent…
I’ve never seen “actually” and “bodega” used in the same sentence before.
And you still haven’t. I disliked the run on sentence and added a period before submitting.
That being said, did I really start with ‘Actually…”? Kill me. Just kill me.
Damn. You caught me. Period.