Higher education and social mobility

There is an appalling level of inequality in American society; and even more troubling, the multiple dimensions of inequality seem to reinforce each other, with the result that disadvantaged groups remain disadvantaged across multiple generations. We can ask two different kinds of sociological questions about these facts: What factors cause the reproduction of disadvantage over multiple generations? And what policy interventions have some effect on enhancing upward social mobility within disadvantaged groups? How can we change this cycle of disadvantage?

Several earlier postings have addressed some aspects of the causal question (post, post). Here I’d like to consider the policy question — and the question of how we can use empirical evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of large policy initiatives on social outcomes such as mobility.

One social policy in particular seems to have a lot of antecedent plausibility: a policy aimed at increasing the accessibility of higher education to the disadvantaged group. The theory is that individuals within the group will benefit from higher education by enhancing their skills and knowledge; this will give them new economic opportunities and access to higher-wage jobs; the individuals will do better economically, and their children will begin life with more economic support and a set of values that encourage education. So access to higher education ought to prove to be a virtuous circle or a positive feedback loop, leading to substantial social mobility in currently disadvantaged groups.

It is a plausible theory; but are there empirical methods through which we can evaluate whether it actually works this way?

Paul Attewell and David Lavin undertake to do exactly that in Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?, published in 2007. Their research consists of a survey study of a cohort of poor women who were admitted to the City University of New York between 1970 and 1972 under an open-admissions policy. Thirty years later Attewell and Lavin surveyed a sample of the women in this group (about 2,000 women), gathering data about their eventual educational attainment, their income, and the educational successes of their children. Analysis of their data permitted them to demonstrate that attenders were likely to enjoy higher income than non-attenders and to have children who valued education at levels that were higher than the children of non-attenders.

The benefits of higher education in increasing personal income were significant; they find that in the population surveyed in 2000, the high school graduate earned $30,000, women with some college earned $35,000, women with the associate’s degree earned $40,783, women with the bachelor’s degree earned $42,063, and women with a postgraduate degree earned $54,545. In other words, there was a fairly regular progression in income associated with each further step in the higher education credential achieved. And they found — contrary to conservative critics of open-access programs in higher education — that these women demonstrated eventual completion rates that were substantially higher than 4-6 year graduation rates would indicate — over 70% earned some kind of degree (table 2.2). “Our long-range perspective shows that disadvantaged women ultimately complete college degrees in far greater numbers than scholars realize” (4).

So access to higher education works, according to the evidence uncovered in this study: increasing access to post-secondary education is the causal factor, and improved economic and educational outcomes are the effect.

This is an important empirical study that sets out some of the facts that pertain to poverty and higher education. The study provides empirical confirmation for the idea that affordable and accessible mass education works: when programs are available that permit poor people to gain access to higher education, their future earnings and the future educational success of their children are both enhanced. It’s a logical conclusion — but one that has been challenged by conservative critics such as Bill Bennett. And given the increasing financial stress that public universities are currently experiencing due to declining state support for higher education, it is very important for policy makers to have a clear understanding of the return that is likely on the investment in affordable access to higher education.

Retreat of the Elephants

Mark Elvin’s title, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, is brilliantly chosen to epitomize his subject: the human causes of longterm environmental change in China over a four-thousand year period of history. How many of us would have guessed that elephants once ranged across almost all of China, as far to the northeast as what is now Beijing? And what was the cause of this great retreat? It was the relentless spread of agriculture and human settlement.

In other words, human activity changed the physical environment of China in such a profound way as to refigure the range and habitat of the elephant. “Chinese farmers and elephants do not mix.” This story provides an expressive metaphor for the larger interpretation of environmental history that Elvin offers: that environmental history is as much a subject of social history as it is a chronology of physical and natural changes. Human beings transform their environments — often profoundly and at great cost.

This is now a familiar story, when we consider the anthropogenic influences on global warming in the past fifty years. What Elvin’s book demonstrates is that human activity is an integral part of the story in the long sweep of history as well. Nowhere is this fact more evident than in Elvin’s treatment of the perennial problem of water management in China. Seawalls, canals, dikes, drainage, irrigation, desalinization, and reservoirs were all a part of China’s centuries-long efforts at water control. And each of these measures had effects that refigured the next period in the water system — the course of a river, the degree of silting of a harbor, the diminishment of a lake as a result of encroachment. (Peter Perdue’sExhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan tells a similar story about the fortunes of Hunan’s Dongting Lake.) The waterscape of late Imperial China was very much a moving picture as human activity, deliberate policy interventions, technology innovations, and hydrology and climate interacted. There is a particular drama in seeing a centuries-long history of magistrates attempting to control the hydrology of the great rivers and deltas of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, to counteract silting and flooding and the massive problems that these processes entailed. Here the local officials made their best efforts to absorb the history of past interventions and their effects in order to design new systems that would obviate silting and flooding. This required planning and scientific-technical reasoning (137); it required large financial resources; and, most importantly, it required the mobilization of vast amounts of human labor to build dikes and polders. But always, in the end, the water prevailed.

Elvin’s history is fascinating in a number of ways. He is an innovative writer of history, bringing new materials and new topics into Chinese historical research. His interweaving of agriculture, population growth, technology, and environmental change is masterful. He combines economic history, cultural history, and natural history in ways that bring continual new flashes of insight. He makes innovative use of literature and poetry to try to get some inklings into the attitudes and values that Chinese people brought to the environment. And he returns frequently to the dialectic of population growth and resource use — a rising tempo of change that imposes more and more pressure on the natural environment.

(See The High-Level Equilibrium Trap for a discussion of one of Elvin’s earlier and highly influential ideas — the idea that Chinese agriculture had reached a stage of development by the late imperial period in which technique had been refined to the maximum possible within traditional technologies, and population had increased to the point where the agricultural system was only marginally able to feed the population. This is what he refers to as a “high-level equilibrium trap.” He returns to something rather similar to this idea in Retreat of the Elephants by offering a theory of environmental exhaustion (“Concluding Remarks”): a measure of the degree to which population increase and economic growth have placed greater and greater pressure on non-renewable resources.)

Consumption and environmental collapse

Today the Dalai Lama presented a lecture on global environmental sustainability at the University of Michigan. One of his central points had to do with personal consumption and personal happiness: the fact that the planet simply cannot sustain the level of material consumption characteristic of affluent countries, in support of the world’s population of over 6.5 billion people. He expressed his hope that we will come to think differently about happiness, fulfillment, and material consumption.

This message made me think of the very powerful analysis that is conveyed in an important recent book by James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Speth has been an environmental scientist and policy expert for decades — he is currently the dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies — and he has an understanding of the crisis that our global society faces that is just as powerful and fact-based as any I have read.

Speth opens his argument with a set of sixteen graphs over a time scale of 1750-2000. And they all have roughly the same shape: beginning at moderate levels in 1750, each of the variables show exponential growth that begins to accelerate in roughly 1900-1950. The variables? Population, total real GDP, foreign direct investment, damming of rivers, water use, fertilizer consumption, paper consumption, motor vehicles, CO2 consumption, ozone depletion, average surface temperature, great floods, ocean ecosystems, coastal biogeochemistry, loss of rain forest, global biodiversity. These graphs tell a powerful story in the aggregate: these are trends that cannot be sustained.

Or consider the second paragraph of the book:

Half of the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second. About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity. Twenty percent of the corals are gone, and another 20 percent severely threatened. Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal. The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in sixty-five million years, since the dinosaurs disappeared. Over half the agricultural land in drier regions suffers from some degree of deterioration and desertification. Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us. (1-2)

This is the “edge of the world” to which the title refers.

Speth correctly notes that these environmental crisis lines all derive from the economic realities of accelerating economic growth since 1900. Economic activity consumes resources, produces waste products, and clears land for development. Moreover, he observes that the economies that we have created in the modern world place growth at the value center: the central goal of economic activity is to accumulate and grow. And yet he notes as well that often this growth is counter-productive; for example, he quotes the UNDP Human Development Report 1996 and its findings of jobless growth, ruthless growth, voiceless growth, rootless growth, and futureless growth. And he reviews some of the survey data about “personal happiness” that seems to support the point as well: past a certain threshold point, greater income doesn’t bring greater happiness.

So if there is a bridge at the edge of the world — what is it made of? What kind of transformation of the world’s activity can slow and eventually reverse these catastrophic environmental trends?

Speth provides a hard but achievable prescription, and it is very much like that expressed by the Dalai Lama today in Ann Arbor: we must re-evaluate the meaning of life, we must change the way we think about material consumption, we must find happiness in activities that are not resource intensive, and we must tame our growth engines in the economic structures in which we live. Nothing less than a fundamental change in our personal philosophies and our economic structures will save the planet’s welfare — from rain forest to Great Lakes to fisheries to the air we breath and the water we drink.

Can we do it? It seems most unlikely. But it’s probably the only way out.

Knowing poverty

Poverty is an important social fact in virtually every society. What is involved in knowing about poverty — for the citizen, for the poor person, for the social scientist, the historian, and the novelist?

To start, there is a set of descriptive and analytical features of poverty. How do we define the concept of being poor: is it a specific income level in a specific country or region; is it a specific level of deprivation in terms of access to a defined set of basic goods; is it a threshold level of resources necessary to actualize one’s capabilities?

And then we want to know the facts about the disribution of poor people, geographically and demographically. What is the percentage of poor people in urban locations? How much rural poverty is there? How do poverty rates compare across major social groups (race, age, marital status)? And how have these statistics changed over time? We could imagine presenting this body of knowledge as a compact set of dynamic maps and graphs, representing the large body of data in terms of a series of displays over time and space — for example, CensusScope. (Edward Tufte’s work comes to mind here — visit his website and an early, direction-setting book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition.)

Parallel to this factual and statistical knowledge about the distribution of poverty over a population is the sociological question, what are the social mechanisms that give rise to these patterns and trends? What kinds of factors cause some populations to have a persistent and high rate of poverty, while other populations experience much lower rates?

Another and distinct aspect of “knowing poverty” has to do with getting to the experience of being poor. This is partly a question for ethnography — how do poor people struggle and cope?How do they experience their daily lives? And how do they express their experiences? But it is also an attempt to gain a clearer grasp of the situation of being poor — what it means for everyday nutrition, how it affects options when illness or accident arises. Sociologists with an ear for qualitative investigation and conversation have bee able to capture a lot of this (Sennett and Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class; Richard Sennett, The Craftsman.) So making an effort to gain an understanding of the situation and experience of being poor is an important aspect of knowing poverty.

And how are non-poor people able to gain some knowledge of the situation and experience of being poor? This is where the knowledge of literature comes in; through the ability of the poet or fiction writer to vividly and accurately capture something of the lives and thoughts of people in very different circumstances than one’s own. This is an important aspect of a multicultural pedagogy: finding materials that permit students to immerse themselves in the texture of other people’s experiences of the world.

Now, finally, citizens. Poverty, it seems, is largely invisible to middle class people in the United States. Their knowledge of the basic facts and insights mentioned above is extremely limited. Here the problem isn’t research or pedagogy. It is clear enough how the Detroit Free Press or the Atlanta Constitution could present the basic facts about national or regional poverty on a clear and understandable form. Instead, the problem seems to be a cognitive version of myopia. The social circumstances that confront us up close, and that are likely to influence our basic interests, get our focused attention. But all too often, more distant social problems don’t get a second look. And this seems all too often to be the case for poverty.

The world food system

Here is one very concrete way in which we live in a global world: the most basic need that we have — food — is satisfied on the basis of a system with global reach and global price and production interconnections. The planet’s 6+ billion people need a daily diet of grains, oils, and protein, and the most important of these foods are produced within the context of a global trading system. Current estimates of malnutrition indicate that a significant percentage of the world’s population live in hunger (Facts about Hunger, PRB). And, after a decade or so of relative stability in this system, changes in the world market are threatening major disruptions of food supplies. (See an earlier posting on the recent sharp rise in rice and wheat prices.)

Consider grain production and consumption. Here are a few websites with useful information about the world grain trade in the past decade: USDA, providing a lot of data on grain production and consumption; UC-Davis, a simple introduction to the global and US rice markets; UNCTAD, a thumbnail of the basics of the global rice trade over the past two decades; FAO, a compendium of data on food production; and IRRI, a compendium of data about rice production. One thing that becomes clear in reviewing some of this data is that the current crisis in grain prices should not have been a surprise. The forecast provided in the USDA report is based on 2006-07 data — and it gives a clear indication of the supply and price crisis that the world is facing today.

This system is interesting for UnderstandingSociety because it provides a nice example of a complex and causally interlinked social system that invites careful analysis. And it is a system that has the potential for stimulating explosive social upheaval — given the political volatility that food prices and hunger have had historically.

We ought to ask a whole series of questions about how the food system works:

Technology — how extensive and widespread are the forms of technology innovation that are changing the food system? Is there a Green Revolution 2.0 underway?
Productivity — what are the trends in productivity in agriculture? Output per hectare, output per unit of input, output per labor-day
International trading institutions — corporations, commodity and futures markets, flow of incomes to stakeholders. What effect have free-trade agreements had on grain production and prices — WTO, NAFTA?
Social institutions of farming. What are the various institutions through which grain is produced — peasant farming, family farming, large-scale corporate farming
Social effects of agrarian change — how do rural conditions and quality of life change as a result of technology change in agriculture?
Macro-stability — does growth in food supply match growth in population?

If we want to know how the global world works as a system, then we need to understand agriculture and agricultural trade better than we currently realize.

China’s cultural revolution

What is involved in understanding China’s Cultural Revolution?

The question comes to mind for several reasons — but most vividly because of a recent interview in France in the le nouvel Observateur with Song Yongyi. Song’s personal itinerary is historic — he was a “rebel Red Guard” in 1967, a political prisoner in China from 1970 to 1976, a librarian at Dickinson College in 1998, and a prisoner in China again in 1999 for six months for the “crime” of collecting documents about the Cultural Revolution. (See his website at California State University at Los Angeles.) Song is in the middle of creating a large database on the events of the Cultural Revolution, including especially an effort to document the killings and massacres that occurred during this period. Song estimates, for example, that more than 50,000 people were killed during the purge of the Mongolian Communist Party alone, and he attributes to an internal party document a figure of 1.72 million deaths during the period of the Cultural Revolution.

The question is interesting for UnderstandingSociety because it has to do with historical knowledge and understanding. A vast amount has been written about the Cultural Revolution — by western scholars and by Chinese people who participated in the CR or were victims of its violence. We have both first-hand stories and careful academic scholarship that document many aspects of this period of China’s recent history. So in one sense, we are in a position to know a lot about this period of China’s history. And China scholars have asked the “why” question as well — why did it take place? For example, Roderick MacFarquhar’s multivolume history of the period, culminating in Mao’s Last Revolution, goes into great detail about the politics that surrounded the CR. Also of great interest is Joseph Esherick, Paul Pickowicz, and Andrew Walder’s recent edited volume, China’s Cultural Revolution As History.

We might want to say, then, that the history of the Cultural Revolution has been written.

But as Song Yongyi demonstrates, this would be incorrect, in two ways. First, the scope of the violence and the ways in which it was perpetrated — the military and political institutions that were involved deeply in the transmission of the violence across China — these factual aspects of the period of 1966-76 are still only partially known. And there is reason to believe that the remaining areas of ignorance are likely to substantially change our interpretation of the events. In brief, it seems likely that the scope of violence and killings is substantially greater than what historians currently believe, and the degree of deliberate political control of the instruments of disorder is greater as well. So the simple factual question, what happened?, is still to be answered in many important areas. More would be known if the authorities were to make the official archives available to scholars; but this has been a highly sensitive and secretive subject since 1989.

Even more important than the factual story, though, is the explanatory story. We don’t yet have a good understanding of why this period of upheaval took place; what the social and political causes were, what the institutions were that facilitated or hindered the spread of disorder, and how these events aided or impeded the political agendas of powerful figures and factions in China. (When you visit the summer palace and Buddhist temples in Chengdu, for example, the guides tell you that these structures survived the destruction of the Red Guards because Deng Xiaopeng maintained control of the military in this region and gave orders to protect these historical structures.)

So the history of the Cultural Revolution still remains to be written. And this fact presents us with a very real question of historical epistemology: how much can we ultimately know about a vast and important event, for which there are voluminous archival sources and surviving witnesses? Can we hope to come to a “final” and approximately true interpretation of these events? And can we learn something important about social movements and political institutions from this history?

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today is a sad day of remembrance in America and the world. Forty years ago today Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis. And, followed by the murder of Robert Kennedy only a few months later, America’s heart and history were jolted.

Dr. King’s life devotion to the cause of racial justice in America is one of the most important legacies we have in this country. His moral clarity and his personal courage provided our generations with signposts we still haven’t fully absorbed. And the work to which he devoted his life is unfinished. It is crucial for our future as a country that we make intelligent and compassionate progress based on this legacy.

It is so remarkably striking to me to see the different life experiences that white and black Americans have lived, especially the generation who are in their fifties and sixties today. These men and women were in their teens and twenties in 1968. They have clear, personal memories of that day in April forty years ago, and of the months that followed. For most African-American people in this group there are very specific, vivid, and personal memories of segregation and racism in their years of childhood and adolescence. Whether their experiences were of growing up in Arkansas or Chicago in the 1950s, most African-American people of this age cohort have deep and personal experiences of racism. And their memories of the murder of Dr. King have an urgency and personal sorrow that feels very different from the experience of white Americans of the same age.

My discipline is philosophy and I have taught social and political philosophy intermittently throughout my teaching career. At this stage of my career it is very striking to recall how mute this field of philosophy has been to the experience and structure of American racism. The ideas of equality, liberty, and justice are defining values in the field of social philosophy. And yet the topic of racial justice has not been a central focus; only rarely has it been even talked about as we consider the theories of Kant, Rousseau, Mill, or Rawls. And yet my whole education and career are framed by the murder of Martin and the candidacy of Barak. How could race not have been the central problem of social philosophy in America during these decades? It is a failure of collective social cognition, an instance of willful social blindness.

I think there is a connection between these two points. A part of teaching about principles of social justice should be a serious learning of the lived experience of injustice.

The majority in America is inching its way towards a commitment to racial justice. We can make further progress along this road if we will only listen in humility and silence to the experiences of racism that shaped the lives of so many millions of our fellow citizens.

The price of rice

The price of internationally traded rice has roughly doubled in the past several months. There are several independent factors that seem to be contributing causes for this sudden spike in prices (New York Times story, Toronto Globe and Mail story), but the bottom line is that this is very bad news for many developing countries in Asia and Africa. Poor people everywhere spend a high percentage of their income on food. If the price of the chief staple food rises abruptly, this will predictably cause suffering and hunger among the poor. Amartya Sen’s penetrating ideas on issues of hunger and famine are as relevant today as they were two decades ago (The Political Economy of Hunger, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation). And, as Sen discovered, prices and incomes are critical determinants of malnutrition and famine. And recall that current estimates of the number of malnourished people in the world approach one billion!

Another important symptom of food distress for the world’s poor — the UN food program announced a few days ago that high prices have exhausted its budget (emergency appeal). It has called upon donor nations to provide immediate supplemental funds to permit it to continue its crucial programs.

This shift in international market conditions will also have the potential for creating civil unrest in several countries. There are already signs of urban unrest in the Philippines, where rice riots and disturbances have already occurred. The Times story cited above mentions food riots in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. Governments that fail to assure the availability of affordable food supplies will be reminded of the volatility of the issue of food — from medieval Europe to revolutionary France to Poland in the 1970s.

There seems to be a similar issue percolating in North America — a sustained rise in the prices for wheat and maize over the past year. In this case the cause seems to be the increased demand for grain created by ethanol production on a large scale. Americans spend a smaller percent of income on food, so the immediate consequences are less damaging to population welfare. But this trend suggests a similar caution that we need to heed — we need to pay attention to the stability and sustainability of the world’s food system.

Food security is an important dimension of a developing country’s long-term welfare and stability. These issues haven’t gotten much attention in the international press in the past decade or so. Neo-liberal doctrines, market restructuring, and the Washington Consensus have pushed these more material aspects of economic development to a lower priority and visibility. But maybe current conditions will bring the issue back to center stage.

Anonymity and civility

The topic of civility on the internet has gotten a lot of ink recently (posting, posting, posting). People flame each other online in ways they would never do in a public meeting. And this tendency is most extreme in anonymous postings on blogs and web sites.

What is it about anonymity that sometimes brings out the worst in people? Fundamentally it is the separation between speech and accountability that sometimes poisons anonymous speech. Plato speculated about the Ring of Gyges in the Republic: how would people behave if their actions were entirely untraceable? And English moralists had similar fears about the Masquerade in the eighteenth century: social functions in which men and women attended in masked costumes were bound to create moral disorder (web page). Anonymous speech on the internet seems to provide a real-world test of the proposition. And, by the evidence, there are a fair number of people who will take the cloak of anonymity as permission to express outrageous, harmful, and fundamentally disrespectful things to and about others.

And it is interesting to realize that this is not a twenty-first century development. One of E. P. Thompson’s final books was a careful study of the social conflicts in rural eighteenth-century England (Whigs and Hunters), where he focuses on the “Black Act” — a package of laws designed to squelch poachers, timber thieves, and other rural misbehavior. Two behaviors in particular were prohibited with severe penalties — going about in a mask and conveying anonymous, often threatening, letters. Anonymity was a tool that was used by individuals and groups to threaten and coerce landlords, wardens, and gamekeepers. Thompson describes a raft of anonymous letters and their social function in “The Crime of Anonymity” (included in Albion’s Fatal Tree).

Here are some examples of anonymous letters that Thompson quotes in the appendix to “The Crime of Anonymity”:

Ms orpen i am informd that you and your family whent before last year and glent up what the pore should have had but if you do this year it is our desire as soon as your corn is in the barn we will have a fire for it is a shame you should rob the pore …

…

this will all com true
this is to give notis that you millers and shop keeper all
kill the over Seeer
had best to take keare of youer selves and mind that you
arnt kild and if you dont sink with your folower [flour] we will make
tom Nottage is a dam Rouge
you sink for we have rob your Mill seavel [several] Times and we
kill him for one there is 4 more we will kill

…

To The Damd Eternal Fire Brands of Hell Belonging to Odiham and its Vicinity. In other Words to the Damd Villans of Farmers that with hold the Corn that please God to send for the Poeple of the Earth away from them.

…

And a response from the forces of order —

ONE HUNDRED
Guineas Reward

Whereas some wicked and evil disposed Person or
Persons, did write a Letter, addressed to Joseph Bulmer,
threatening to take his Life, and to burn his Premises, unless
he would advance the Shipwright’s Wages–and did put the
same Letter under the Door of the Compting-House of
Messrs. R. Bulmer and Co. in South Shields, where the same
was found on the Morning of the 14th Inst.

Whoever will give Information so that he, she, or they,
may be convicted thereof, will be paid a Reward of ONE
HUNDRED GUINEAS by the said Messrs. Bulmer, on
the Conviction of such Offenders or any of them …

…

So what are we to make of this curious behavior from two centuries ago and from the present? One piece of the story of anonymity is the situation of “speaking truth to power”. Anonymous threats and accusations are “weapons of the weak” in James Scott’s terms (Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance). They are a way for powerless people and groups to express and advocate their claims without repression. And they can be a potent social instrument of power as well, constraining the power and behavior of the high and mighty. It is why the complaint box doesn’t require a sign-in process. Thompson puts it this way: “The anonymous threatening letter is a characteristic form of social protest in any society which has crossed a certain threshold of literacy, in which forms of collective organized defence are weak, and in which individuals who can be identified as the organizers of protest are liable to immediate victimization” (Albion’s Fatal Tree, 255).

But anonymity can also be a tool of oppression and intimidation. Anonymous messages and actions can be intimidating and harmful on a range of levels, from irritating and insulting to slanderous and reputation-destroying. The anonymity of the klansman’s sheet and hood was deliberate: it made it all the more impossible for the people oppressed and threatened by the KKK to retaliate against the pharmacist or gas station owner who cowered within. And it permitted the threat of Klan violence to be all but irresistible.

The discussions that are occurring online about civility often invoke Jurgen Habermas and his ideas about the public sphere as a place for open and civil debate (e.g., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society). The idea here is that publicity is an essential component of a democratic polity: people engage with each other in a public space, and they embody an ethic of mutual respect that permits profound disagreements to occur without the collapse of civility. And, through these public interactions the citizens develop the possibility of a deeper consensus about what is to be done.

So it seems that the categories of privacy, anonymity, civility, and public democracy are all tied together somehow. And the internet gives this mix of sometimes conflicting values a particular urgency.

Race and American inequalities

Douglas Massey is a leading US social scientist who has worked on issues of inequality in America throughout his career. He is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. His most recent book (Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System) is a huge contribution to our understanding of the mechanisms producing inequalities in American society, and it amounts to a stunning indictment of racism and anti-poor public policies over a seventy-five year period. And, unlike other interpretations that attribute current racial inequalities to past patterns of overt discrimination, Massey argues that these inequalities can be traced to current discrimination by individuals and institutions alike. (An earlier book, American Apartheid, co-authored with Nancy Denton, is also very important.)

Massey leads off his analysis with a theory of the social psychology of racism and discrimination against poor people. He argues that the stereotyping that is inevitably associated with social cognition leads to a pattern of discrimination against African-Americans, immigrants, women, and poor people that deepens and entrenches their unequal shares in American society. The twin mechanisms of discrimination and opportunity-hoarding both flow on the basis of the categories of discrimination created by these mental constructs – hence “categorical inequality”. (Visit a recent posting for a related argument about the social psychology of prejudice.)

Massey hypothesizes two dimensions of mental categorization, leading to four gross categories of people in one’s social category scheme: warm-cold (appealing-unappealing) and competent-incompetent. People who are like us are considered “warm” and “competent”. The other three quadrants are categorized as “other”: warm but incompetent (pitied), competent but cold (admired), and incompetent and cold (despised). And he asserts that American racism places African-Americans in the final category. This in turn is used to explain the harshly negative tilt that US legislation has shown across lines of race and poverty.

Massey argues that these cognitive mechanisms work at a pre-conscious level, and are operative even in the behavior and choices of people who consciously experience their values as democratic and egalitarian. These patterns of ongoing discrimination reinforce and reproduce social institutions that assign very different outcomes to African-Americans, poor people, and other dis-valued people. This works itself out in employment, advancement in a career, access to healthcare, and public policy and legislation.

A particularly valuable part of the book is the mass of elegant graphs that Massey has assembled. These represent in composite an astounding narrative of discriminatory public policy over almost a century of legislation.

Read the book — it will change your understanding of taxes, policies, safety nets, civil rights, and racism.