Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 20, 2008: The growing class gap
By LARA E. PUTNAM and ROBERT D. PUTNAM
Ten days of pundit parsing of Barack Obama’s vocabulary have served only to obscure the uncomfortable reality of unequal opportunity in America.
Among white Americans, there is a growing class divide, which begins with the gap in wages and economic security. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the share of national income going to the top 1 percent of households more than doubled from 1979 (7.5 percent) to 2005 (15.6 percent). Since the late 1990s, the bottom 20 percent of families actually lost 2.5 percent in average income, while the top 20 percent enjoyed a 9 percent rise.
But this economic divergence also shows up in social attitudes and behavior, including church attendance and social trust. A growing disparity in outlook between haves and have-nots is hardly irrational, because people lower in the social hierarchy (white and nonwhite alike) have been badly treated by the last few decades. Are these folks “bitter”? Judge for yourself.
About a quarter of the white adult population — some 39 million people — consists of men and women whose education stopped at high school and whose income falls below the national median. (We focus here on whites only because the disadvantages nonwhites face are better known, not because those disadvantages are less important. Working-class whites also are considered key swing voters in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary.)
As the life chances of white have-nots have deteriorated over the past generation, their perspective has become steadily grimmer. To be sure, it’s long been true that folks with more income and more opportunity report greater happiness and optimism about the future. They also are more likely to believe that they can trust others to treat them fairly.
But before the mid-1980s the size of this “class gap” looked pretty steady: Year by year, happiness and trust and optimism among the most and the least privileged white Americans tended to go up and down together. Over the past 20 years, however, college-educated white people with above-average income have become happier, more optimistic and more trusting, even as their fellow citizens in the lower quarter of the social economic pyramid have grown less happy, less optimistic and less trusting.
Worse yet, the malaise of inequality is spilling over into the next generation. Recent research suggests that intergenerational economic mobility rose from 1950 to 1980 and then entered a significant decline. Unfortunately, there’s reason to think the decline in equality of opportunity may accelerate in the years ahead.
Our own research, as yet unpublished, depicts a widening class gap among American young people over the last 30 years in many precursors to life success: family stability, social and civic and religious connectedness, self-esteem, parental involvement, trust and academic aspirations.
White youth from have-not backgrounds used to attend church only 10 percent less than white youth from upper-middle-class homes; now have-not kids are 25 percent less likely to attend church. In terms of community involvement, time spent with parents and even self-confidence, the picture is much the same.
This growing disparity in formative experiences portends a more caste-like America, in which children’s life chances are increasingly dictated by their parents’ social class. The playing field is tilted more and more against the have-nots.
As for the extent of bitterness and disaffection in “small town America,” the crucial trends have little to do with city size. Indeed, as class has come to matter more and more over the past two decades, community size has mattered less and less. The trend is clearest in church attendance, and has created a reality far different from what pundits’ pronouncements would have you believe.
In the 1970s, poor folks and rich folks in cities were equally likely to attend church; the same was true in the suburbs. Small-towners, both rich or poor, attended church far more often than either urbanites or suburbanites. But churchgoing by advantaged white Americans has declined only slightly since then (and stopped falling a decade ago), while church attendance among less well-off Americans has fallen steadily for the last two decades. Last year, for the first time, church-going among privileged city-dwellers topped that among disadvantaged small-towners.
Political alienation, too, is strongly determined by class and unaffected by community size. Whether they live in big cities or small towns, white folks with no college and below-median incomes are equally likely to believe “government officials do not care about people like me.” Surveying the contemporary landscape, their cynicism looks anything but irrational.
Hillary Clinton has argued that small-town Pennsylvanians draw strength from their traditions, churches and leisure activities. Surely that’s true. And yet it would be condescending not to recognize that sustaining family and community in the face of joblessness, foreclosure and dislocation is an uphill road.
Folks in small towns who have managed to climb the ladder of success through education and well-paid employment are just as happy and socially engaged as their advantaged peers elsewhere. But the large numbers of small-town people who have not managed to get on that ladder are as unhappy, fearful about the future and unlikely to think government will listen to them as their peers in cities and suburbs.
The empty meeting halls and weed-filled parks of the Mon Valley bear witness to the grinding social toll of wholesale economic disenfranchisement. Elite commentators who romanticize the “tight-knit communities” and “enduring religious values” of hard-hit towns like those of North and Central Pennsylvania — where often a third of children under 5 live below the poverty line and only one adult in 10 has a college degree — are, tragically, out of touch. The opportunity divide in America today is real and getting worse, and the injuries of economic exclusion go far beyond the pocketbook.
What does this mean as Pennsylvania voters head to the polls?
The real question is not ginned-up outrage over Barack Obama’s choice of words to describe the very real hardships facing many Americans in towns and cities of all sizes. The real question is whether his optimistic insistence that “Yes We Can” will resonate in those still-struggling Pennsylvania cities and towns that suffered a body blow with the loss of steel mills and factories a generation ago. Mr. Obama’s work as a community organizer on the streets of Chicago was predicated on the belief that even in communities beset by disinvestment, job loss and chronic frustration, self-confidence can be restored, collective bonds can be rebuilt and political efficacy regained.
Are hard-pressed white voters in Erie and Allentown and McKeesport willing to take that same leap of faith?
We’ll know soon enough.