I never met Sargent Shriver, who died on Tuesday, but I have been knocking around the movement for national and community service since the 1980s and know several people for whom his death is a personal loss. My condolences to them and my respects to Mr. Shriver, who exemplified a political moment that we badly miss today.

Sargent Shriver stories are numerous and inspiring. For example, he traveled so much as Peace Corps Director that he became accustomed to sleeping under the rows of airplane seats during almost daily long flights (something that today’s cabin attendants would quickly forbid). But I would like to honor his core principles more than his particular actions:

He was committed to “service.” His own service record included a bronze star at Guadalcanal, stints as president of the Catholic Interracial Council (a civil rights group), chairman of the Chicago Board of Education, founding director of the Peace Corps, director of the Office of Economic Opportunity during the War on Poverty, and ambassador to France, plus holding the Democratic nomination for Vice President in 1972. Several of the organizations he directed were also devoted to “service.” The Peace Corps provides opportunities to serve one’s country and the host country; and many of the anti-poverty programs that Shriver directed at OEO were also driven by service (Job Corps, ViSTA, Legal Services). The kind of service he exemplified was not charitable, nor amateurish, nor necessarily unpaid. The Peace Corps, for example, is the “toughest job you’ll ever love.” It’s serious, responsible, more-than-full-time work, and you earn a paycheck for it.

He stood for fairness and equality of opportunity. It was at his suggestion that Senator John F. Kennedy interceded on behalf of Martin Luther King in 1960, and Shriver had a lifetime commitment to inclusion, as reflected also by his anti-poverty work and the Special Olympics. His idea of fairness was never patronizing or disempowering. He saw excluded people as assets and potential leaders.

He exemplified a government that was popular, ambitious, and accessible. In 1960, nearly 80 percent of Americans said they trusted the government in Washington to do what is right. The government in which they placed their trust was busy doing things. In 1963-4, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act (launching the War on Poverty and creating Head Start, Job Corps, and many other programs that Shriver was soon to run), the Food Stamp Act (institutionalizing food stamps as a permanent federal welfare program), the Federal Transit Act (providing federal aid for mass transportation), the Library Services and Construction Act (offering federal aid for libraries), the Community Mental Health Centers Act (de-institutionalizing many mental health patients), the Clean Air Act (the first federal environmental law allowing citizens to sue polluters), the Wilderness Act (protecting nine million acres of federal land), the Equal Pay Act (addressing wage discrimination by sex), the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (ending de jure racial segregation in the United States), and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (rapidly escalating the Vietnam War).

Many of these programs were criticized as imperial impositions of federal power. Some were serious failures. But several were designed to expand political opportunities for ordinary citizens. Announcing the War on Poverty, President Johnson said, “This program asks men and women throughout the country to prepare long-range plans for the attack on poverty in their own communities. These are not plans prepared in Washington and imposed upon hundreds of different situations. They are based on the fact that local citizens best understand their own problems and know best how to deal with those problems.” Johnson was honoring a particular social contract: people were expected to trust and pay for an aggressive government, but in turn it would honor their political ideas, energies, and values. For various complex reasons, that contract soon broke down, but Sargent Shriver personally exemplified it.

While he presided over the OEO, the Federal Government paid the salaries of thousands of people who worked at the grassroots level, organizing communities and running programs. The Great Society included elements of bureaucracy and centralization, but it also required the “Maximum Feasible Participation” of citizens. As a result, there was a lot of civic experimentation. Some people who were heavily involved in those experiments later switched over to electoral politics. Some burned out or lost the opportunity to serve when their budgets were cut. But a considerable number continued to experiment and learn, often moving from federal programs to nonprofits such as Community Development Corporations. When they lost their government grants, they developed local financial sources. When they got tired of fighting city hall, they developed collaborative relationships with local governments. This human trajectory is a major theme in Carmen Sirianni and Lew Friedland’s book Civic Innovation in America.

That brings me to a final principle of Shriver’s: the permeable boundary between state and civil society. In his own career, Shriver worked consistently on certain public problems but moved between the government and the private sector. He also established programs that allowed other people to work for the federal government for a little while, and then take their skills and knowledge into civil society–or vice-versa. The War on Poverty launched many such careers. I think one reason–although surely not the only reason–for the broken contract between the government and the people is the loss of opportunities to innovate within government and to address public issues in the private sector.

More articles that you could read in your lifetime demonstrate that socioeconomic status correlates with important outcomes, from voting to longevity. But what is SES? The American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Socioeconomic Status says (PDF):

social status is commonly conceptualized in terms of socioeconomic standing derived from formulas, taking into account various combinations of income, education, and occupation … Although social scientists continue to disagree about how best to operationalize SES, which indicators are the most valid (e.g., occupation vs. education vs. neighborhood), and the translation of different combinations of these indicators into class groupings (e.g., college degree plus corporate position equals “middle class”), the fundamental conceptualization

involves access to resources.

The Task Force proceeds to complicate the picture by introducing conceptions that are less focused on absolute resources and instead emphasize relative standing or the ability to reproduce advantage from one generation to another. But all the conceptions seem to presume that the SES of an individual can be captured by a single composite measure which is not equivalent to wealth, income, or occupation and which does not incorporate race, gender, or age. (Those are treated as correlates of SES, not components of it.) To know whether the formula is valid, we must decide what one thing we want to measure.

Perhaps SES is a measure of the comparative advantage that A has in getting what A wants in life, once we account for personal aptitudes and character traits, demonstrable skills, and race, gender, and age (which we measure separately).

We know, for example, that US Senators have median assets of $1.7 million and that 51 members of the last Congress had family members who had also served in Congress. So it seems likely that SES affects (but does not completely determine) your odds of getting into Congress–which is something that some people want.

But what we want is affected by SES, not just whether we can get what we want. Perhaps, for example, being related to a Member of Congress not only makes it easier to be elected; it also makes it more likely that you want to be a politician. (Certainly, many Americans would rather be almost anything else.) To take another example: you need wealth and family connections to be admitted to certain snobby clubs. But having wealth and family connections might hurt your chances of hanging out with the cool kids behind the gym or going ice-fishing with the guys. In short, SES (as we typically measure it) confers advantages on those who want to get into high-SES social circles and makes them more likely to want such entree. But that doesn’t mean that SES increases the odds of any person, A, to get whatever A wants.

Now it is starting to seem as if SES is not a continuous variable at all. “High SES” is just the name we give to certain subcultures, although other subcultures are equally exclusive and desirable. But that can’t be right, because it’s obvious that getting into the US Senate or the World Economic Forum at Davos is more valuable than being included with the cool kids behind the gym (even if most people would rather be with the cool kids).

Another possibility: SES is the most refined measure of economic power. The idea is that some people can influence their own and others’ economic circumstances more than other people can. (They can also use their economic power for political leverage.) Wealth is one measure of how much economic power individuals have. If you have a billion dollars, you can buy a company and fire everyone: that is power. But wealth is not the best measure of economic power, as a couple of examples will demonstrate:

• It is 1974 and George W. Bush is a graduate student at the Harvard Business School. He is an alumnus of Yale and a member of Skull & Bones. His father is chairman of the Republican National Committee and is on the road to becoming president of the United States; his grandfather had been a United States Senator and a board member of Yale, CBS, the Union Banking Corporation, and other companies. George W. Bush has high SES, if anyone does. But his income may be quite low because he is a graduate student, and even his wealth may be negligible if the Bush family’s assets are structured in such a way that he has to wait for his share. An auto mechanic of the same age may have more wealth.
• A 95-year-old widow lives in a house worth $2 million, but she can only use that $2 million asset as a place to reside. She has less power than George W. Bush had in 1974, but more wealth.

Yet another possible definition emerges: SES is an estimate of how much money the individual will be able to invest and spend according to choice during the rest of his or her lifetime. That definition appropriately gives a current Harvard MBA student higher SES than an auto mechanic or an elderly lady in a big house. But it won’t quite work, because not all “socioeconomic” advantages are monetary. For instance, having a grandfather in the US Senate is an advantage that money cannot buy.

If we want to measure economic power rather than wealth as SES, then such factors as age, educational status, parental occupation, family reputation, and family income should also count as aspects of SES.

Those factors could be included. But geographical location, language, race, gender, physical appearance, and religious belief–not to mention personal traits and accomplishments–also confer economic power. I understand the value of measuring these factors separately from SES so that we can investigate the changing relationships between race or age and SES. But if SES is defined as economic power, and if being white confers economic power in the US, then on what conceptual basis can we exclude race from our measure of SES?

I am on a very brief trip to California–heading back to Boston later today, with no time to blog. But I recommend perusing the suggestions for how to improve civility that Jim Fallows’ readers have sent him. I disagree with many, but it’s a thought-provoking list.