Inequality: Why the poor are getting poorer

Why is America a nation of growing inequality? asked David Brooks in The New York Times. The yawning economic and cultural gap between the well-to-do and the working class—now wider than at almost any point in our history—has academics and pundits searching for explanations. Now, a new Harvard study provides an illuminating—and “horrifying”—insight into what’s going on. The affluent and the working classes, the study found, are raising their children in “starkly different ways”—virtually dooming the poorer kids to a life at the bottom. In recent years, college-educated parents have massively ramped up the amount of time and money they spend on activities that enrich their kids’ education, brainpower, and social skills, from reading to them at night to spending thousands on after-school activities and private tutors. Working-class parents aren’t keeping up. As a result, their kids’ grades and test scores are lagging, and their chances to move up the ladder are dwindling.

So are their chances of growing up in a traditional family, said Jason DeParle, also in the Times. A stunning 60 percent of births among non-college-educated women now occur outside of marriage; among college-educated women, it’s just 10 percent. Single moms are often overwhelmed by work and family responsibilities, and kids suffer as a result. A mountain of research shows that single-parent kids are “more likely than similar children with married parents to experience childhood poverty, act up in class, become teenage parents, and drop out of school.” So it’s time liberals stopped promoting the lie that all families are equal, said Jonathan Last in WeeklyStandard.com. If the Left really cares about inequality, it needs to accept that “married parents are more likely to have prosperous, healthy, stable families than single parents.”

Most liberals long ago conceded that point, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. But family structure is only half the picture. Today, social mobility is greater—and inequality less stark—in countries such as Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Canada. “What do these countries have in common?” They guarantee health care to all, provide more-affordable college educations, and levy higher taxes on the wealthy. Their government policies deliberately seek to level the playing field, and to give everyone equal opportunity. Unless we follow these successful societies’ example—and adopt policies “to offset the radical redistribution toward the very rich”—the American dream will be doomed.

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