No Slack

Forget about Haves and Have-Nots; think Do's and Do-Nots

Jonathan Rauch | September 22, 2003

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That would not be quite so disturbing if people readily moved up from the bottom over the course of their lives. Alas, there is reason to fear that impoverishing behavior is harder to escape than economic disadvantage. Kids who don't know their fathers, and whose teenage mothers dropped out of school, and who grow up in neighborhoods where married parents are curiosities, are much more likely to become unmarried parents and dropouts themselves. Kids who are doted on by two college-educated parents never even think about failure.

"We know we have growing income inequality," Sawhill says, "but there's a lot less focus on another gap that's opening between rich and poor, and that's in the behavioral domain, and it involves both work and marriage." This new gap, she adds, "doesn't bode well for the future of social relations in America." Unchecked, it might lead to permanent class barriers, something America has, until now, been mercifully spared.

Forget about the haves and the have-nots. America now faces a divide between do's and do-nots. Coping requires conservatives to see that inequality threatens mainstream values, and liberals to see that mainstream values are the key to reducing inequality. Conservatives, Sawhill argues, will need to spend more generously on child care subsidies and wage supplements and last-resort jobs to get the poor working (jobs bring mainstream values as well as money). Liberals will need to accept that money without behavioral change is useless or worse.

The good news is that Congress is moving in the right direction: toward more emphasis on work, more child care support, and new efforts to promote marriage and deferred childbearing. What remains to be seen is whether the policy can outpace the problem.