By MEGHAN CLYNE Dec. 17, 2014 7:05 p.m. ET It’s a familiar refrain: Inequality is on the rise in America. Since the 1970s, the wealthiest have grown wealthier, the poorest have gotten poorer and the middle class has disappeared. Globalization, corporate greed, the shredding of Franklin Roosevelt ’s social contract and the dismantling of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society have produced a safety-net-less, go-it-alone America. To these well-worn talking points, Berkeley-trained sociologist Marianne Cooper adds a new dimension. “Inequality,” she explains in “Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times,” “must be measured not just by the amount of money in our wallets, but also by the thoughts in our heads and the feelings in our hearts.” Thomas Piketty, meet Oprah Winfrey . Ms. Cooper examined inequality’s emotional consequences by interviewing 50 Silicon Valley families. From those conversations, she concludes that Americans cope with inequality by “doing security”—emotionally constructing a sense of economic well-being as one constructs other personal attributes like gender. For the poor, this involves “downscaling,” or requiring less to be happy. The better-off, meanwhile, worry incessantly that their ample resources are still not quite enough—in sociologist-speak, “upscaling.” “Cut Adrift” presents in-depth profiles of five families. Laura Delgado is in her early 50s, unemployed, divorced and deep in debt. She enjoyed a happy middle-class upbringing and earned a college degree. But a series of unfortunate events—long stretches without work, large medical expenses incurred without health insurance, a pattern of overspending and a refusal to leave the high-priced Bay Area—have made Laura a case study in downward mobility. Still, she knows she is better off than most of the world, and she accepts the consequences of her decisions. Ms. Cooper, however, sees Laura’s positive attitude as a wrongheaded acceptance of personal responsibility for macroeconomic failures. In Laura’s defense, she doesn’t have a Berkeley Ph.D. At the opposite end of the economic scale are the Mahs. Brooke and Paul met in an elite M.B.A. program; he makes $250,000 a year, allowing her to be a full-time helicopter mom. Though they would seem to be firmly among America’s haves, they still fret about the future. Will their hyper-educated kids measure up to Chinese math whizzes? Can they manage in retirement with less than $10 million saved? Will the world survive climate change? The Mahs are skeptical, and Ms. Cooper sees their “upscaling” as evidence that today’s insecurity causes distress even at the highest reaches of the income distribution. Most of “Cut Adrift” consists of such sweeping extrapolations from the 50 interviews. Ms. Cooper’s evidence is overwhelmingly anecdotal, yet it still fails the credibility test: The extended family profiles are composites, presented under made-up names with fictionalized details added at the author’s whim. Thus Ms. Cooper is free to confuse cause and effect with abandon, which she does most egregiously when tying the middle-class approach to security—“holding on”—to the burdens of modern womanhood. Her archetypes are Sam and Gina Calafato : He is an ATM repairman; she is a software account manager who out-earns her husband. The Calafatos share upper-income families’ aspirations, but face heart-wrenching disappointments. Gina, for instance, has to tell their daughter they can’t afford her dream of attending NYU. It’s no surprise that Gina bears the bad news: According to Ms. Cooper, “holding on” is women’s work. Citing research from the Center for American Progress, Ms. Cooper contends that mothers like Gina have become primary or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families and that they resent their “infantilized” husbands. As Debbie Clifford, another middle-income mother, tells Ms. Cooper: “I don’t like the fact that I have to give birth to the babies and earn all the money and pay all the bills.” Gender theory is religion for Ms. Cooper, who was the lead researcher for Sheryl Sandberg ’s best-selling book “Lean In.” For more organized faiths, however, the author seems to have mostly scorn. She profiles Kapo and Laeta Faleau, poor Samoan immigrants who provide for their family with the help of their Mormon congregation. This approach to insecurity, which Ms. Cooper labels “turning to God,” represents American civil society at its best and undermines her contention that life’s risks must be borne wholly by either the individual or government. Yet she sees something sinister in this aid from friends and neighbors. As the policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama shift social-welfare provision from government to faith-based organizations, Ms. Cooper asserts, the poor are increasingly driven into churches, where they are subjected to “religious coercion.” As proof of this commodities-for-conversions scheme, she notes that none of her upper-income interviewees “turn to God” to handle economic anxieties. One could quibble that religious charity to the distressed is in fact history’s norm, not its exception. Or that, in limiting her survey to Silicon Valley—not exactly known for Bible-thumping—Ms. Cooper overlooks the many well-heeled churchgoers “turning to God” in places like Nashville and Dallas. Or that there may be genuine attraction to, and truth in, the message of a man who said, “You cannot serve God and Mammon” and “Blessed are the poor.” But that guy didn’t earn a Ph.D., either. It seems to take an advanced degree—combined with stale data and worse ideas—to arrive at Ms. Cooper’s naive diagnoses, drawn from one of America’s most unrepresentative areas and extended to the whole country. Not even her Valley-dwelling subjects share her theory that macroeconomic forces are behind all their woes: “Tellingly,” she writes, “the only people I spoke with who wondered why those with less were not more politically active or angry about these issues were the well off.” There is certainly a need for a serious study of inequality—of how big-government policies and a broken civic culture have consigned millions of American children to lives vastly less hopeful than their peers’. Unfortunately, “Cut Adrift” isn’t it. Ms. Clyne is an M.B.A. candidate at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 23:58:37 +0000
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