I spend time inside three schools–a Washington prep school that our older daughter attends, our younger daughter’s D.C. public school (which draws from families of very diverse race and income), and a Hyattsville high school where I do some civic work. These are three worlds. People in each building have different expectations, they talk differently, they evaluate one another according to different criteria, they have different experiences. And everything in each school is of a piece. The clothes, the architecture, the explicit rules, the curriculum, the vocabulary, even the food–all match. Although life will bring a few surprises, it’s powerfully obvious that the kids at the prep school are getting ready to run America, the ones in Hyattsville will mostly stock shelves and answer phones, and the students in the diverse school will have diverse paths–largely forecast by their parents’ current situations.

Today’s New York Times launches a series on social class. There are some zippy graphics on this page. You can see, for example, that inequality is growing and that 75% of families that were in the bottom income quintile in 1988 are still in that quintile today. Of those currently in the top fifth, more than half were already there in 1988. These statistics don’t surprise me; in fact, I would have guessed that fewer families had ascended economically in the last 17 years.

What replicates social inequality in America: families’ financial assets, their culture, their social networks? Students at a fancy downtown Washington prep school have more knowledge and better cognitive skills than those at a standard comprehensive public school. Cognitive skills may result from nature or nurture, but in either case they are economically valuable. Since a prep school is selective, it can pick applicants who have the skills to prosper later in life. However, cognitive skills are not everything. We see a great deal of inherited inequality in the US despite differences in measured skills. Christopher Jencks notes (pdf, p. 52): “If one compares American workers with the same test scores and the same amount of schooling, the Americans’ wages vary more than the wages of all Swedish, Dutch, and German workers.”

Many Americans believe that there is less equality in the United States than in other developed countries because there is more competition here; and competition generates wealth. However, within the wealthy countries, there is no correlation between efficiency (wealth produced per hour or per person) and inequality (Jenck’s pdf, p. 53). There is more inequality in the United States than in most Western European countries because our top tax rates are lower and the basket of services for poor people is smaller. The poorest Americans have much less real, after-tax purchasing power than their counterparts in Western Europe.

Why should we care? I don’t believe that it’s any of my business if other people are richer than I–not even if they are much richer. That’s because at my income level, I already enjoy the security and the range of choices that our society is capable of providing. But there are many millions of Americans who can’t afford education or travel, nor can they choose what work to do or where to live. They receive lousy health care. There are also billions of human beings whose poverty sharply shortens their lives and limits their freedom. It is not because equality is good in itself, but because poverty limits freedom and welfare, that we should care about inequality.

Because both of Maine’s Senators are swing votes on the question of filibustering judicial appointments, that state is now the focus of intense lobbying and advertising. However, the Times‘ David Kirkpatrick finds that “most citizens have only a hazy idea of what the fuss is about. In interviews with about two dozen Mainers in Portland, Augusta and their suburbs during this week’s Senate recess, none had a clear understanding of the Senate procedure at the heart of the debate: the filibuster, a tactic that allows a minority of senators to stymie the chamber by standing against the 60 votes needed to close a debate.”

All else being equal, it is a Bad Thing that people don’t understand the issue that is likely to consume their Senate for a month or more. It means, among other things, that strongly ideological interest groups enjoy more power than they would if everyone were following the issue.

People are certainly capable of understanding a filibuster. I’m always amazed at how many people can write software, play an instrument and understand music theory, or organize complex financial transactions–all problems that I find somewhat intimidating but that are harder to grasp than a filibuster.

I’m professionally committed to the idea that we should teach children and adolescents more about politics and government. However, I don’t believe that 40-year-olds will remember the definition of a filibuster because they learned it in ninth grade. Civic education is important because it provides a baseline of understanding so that people can begin to follow the news. The news media could do a better job of explanatory journalism, but if people don’t want to learn about Senate procedures, no amount of explanation will help.

Ultimately, I believe we need several layers of politics. The top layer is national and international affairs, and it must be a spectator sport for most citizens. We want people to be interested and informed about national and global issues so that they can vote well, but extensive participation is unrealistic. There must be other layers in which direct participation is possible and potentially rewarding. As my colleage Steve Elkin argues, municipal politics is an excellent source of civic education, because the scale is large enough to matter (and to encompass diversity), yet small enough for people to grasp and to affect. Also, municipalities must grapple daily with perhaps the core issue of any market democracy, which is how much to benefit investors in the interest of economic growth.

If people worked in local politics (and at least twice as many held local office 50 years ago as today), then they would understand legislative processes first-hand. They would also have identities as active citizens that would motivate them to follow national news. My friend and co-editor John Gastil has found that members of juries–with the exception of juries that deadlock–are considerably more likely than comparable people to vote in elections. At first, this finding doesn’t seem to make much sense: jury service is profoundly different from voting. The only reasonable explanation is that “citizenship” is one thing in people’s minds. If they become active citizens in one domain, they behave that way in others, too.

Thus, instead of trying to make Maine residents (of any age) understand the filibuster, I would put my energy into involving them in town and county affairs, co-op and condo boards, student associations, union locals, and other political bodies of human scale.

On Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies explains why “Gorgeous” George Galloway was able to knock off a Labour incumbent and win a Parliamentary seat last week. For a long time, “Gorgeous” was an outrageous leftist Labour MP from Glasgow, famous for his successful libel lawsuits, his constant deep tan, his fancy clothes, his reputation for corruption, and his personal relationships with several dictators, including Saddam (to whom his last words before the invasion were: “Sir, I salute your courage, strength and indefatigability”). Galloway was expelled from Labour, which cost him his Glasgow seat; but last Thursday, he won a triumphant return to Westminster. He will represent Bethnal Green & Bow, once the very heart of Cockney England, a poor East-End district that now has a large Bangladeshi population.

America has had several Gorgeous Georges of its own: most recently, former Representative Jim Traficant (D-OH), who was renowned for his corruption trials, his blatant toupee and outrageous 70s clothes (worn well into the 1990s), his infamatory rhetoric (especially the one-minute House speeches punctuated with the phrase “beam me up”), and his unsavory friends–local mobsters, in this case, rather than Arab dictators. Just as “Gorgeous” was kicked out of Labour, Traficant was expelled from the Democratic caucus and then the U.S. House. Gallaway is a Marxist, and Traficant is an anti-tax populist, but they share almost eveything else (including precisely the same views on most social issues).

I happened to be in Youngstown, Ohio, Traficant’s home town and electoral base, when he faced his final trial. Youngstown is a very hard-hit former steel city. My host had deep Youngstown roots as the son of a former Steelworkers Local president; he introduced me to many acquaintances of diverse classes and backgrounds. I recall a guy who had done federal time for drug-smuggling, a straight-arrow assistant football coach, and others. Quite a few of these people were Traficant fans. They knew that Youngstown was an economic disaster and that Traficant was unlikely to make it any better. But they admired him for “sticking it” to the IRS and the Justice Department. This was a man who, when charged with taking bribes as sheriff, persuaded a local jury that he had been conducting an undocumented, independent sting operation. Many Youngstown people were rooting him to pull it off again.

Continue reading →

I’m quoted in a wire service article entitled “A Rite For Generations. School trips again are a capital idea. With terror fears abating, students are returning to meet the nation’s symbols.” As I told the reporter, Gil Klein, I don’t think there’s any specific research in favor of taking kids on fieldtrips to Washington. But I like the idea. I thought of my Mom, who took her class of elementary students from Syracuse to DC in 2000 or 2001. They raised all the money for their trip, travelled on a shoestring, did lots of preparation during the preceding year, and had an unforgettable experience. I also remembered my own first visit to Washington when I was a teenager, and what an impression of nobility I took from the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol.

Today, among other tasks, I’ll be helping to choose the projects that CIRCLE will fund under our “youth-led research” grant competition. We have hundreds of applications to choose from, many excellent. All across the country, groups of adolescents are conducting research on issues that range from gentrification and disparities in local school funding to teen pregnancy and crime. Many have applied to us for small grants to pursue this work.

After the meeting, I’m on my way to California for a conference on civic education convened by the state’s Judicial Conference. My family and I will then spend Friday and the weekend on vacation along the California coast, so I don’t really expect to post again until Monday.