Inequality

David Brooks has an interesting op-ed in the New York Times today about the work of Annette Lareau, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland who writes about American families in books like Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education.  The book David Brooks discusses is her 2003 study of the impact of social class on childrearing, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life.  According to the publisher's blurb, she compares the "frenzied middle-class obsession with their offspring's extracurricular activities" to the "paths on which poor and working class kids are put by their circumstances."  Id. The different childrearing approaches, dictated at least in part for the poor by lack of resources, "reflect and contribute to the transmission of inequality."  Id.

Brooks acknowledges that neither working parents nor upper-middle-class parents are bad parents.  The more well off provide their children a wealth of learning experiences and opportunities to make choices and express their views.  The children of the working poor are more likely to be left alone and less likely to engage in conversations with their parents and other adults.  The result seems to be that they are less prepared for a world where organizations, and one's ability to take a leadership role in decision-making, are critical components of success. 

Brooks concludes that we need to raise the earned income tax credit to ease the economic stress of the poor.  Now that I can agree with wholeheartedly:  we need to use the tax system more fully to offset the growing income inequality.   

But Brooks goes one step further and says that "today's rich don't exploit the poor; they just outcompete them."  Maybe.  But I suspect the non-exploitation statement is a significant exaggeration: there are numerous ways in which the rich exploit the poor, including providing inadequate benefits to employees in order to pull out more profits for owners/managers.  Wal-Mart's reported reliance on federal benefits for its low-paid employees is just one example. See this post from Third World Traveler and this New York Times Story and WakeUpWal-Mart. 

The problem is that you can't divorce the kid's opportunities from the parent's social class.  It isn't just learning to look an adult in the eye and to voice your own views strongly.  It's also the critical support of the parents' friends and peers at work who form a network of contacts that will smooth the children's paths as they follow in their parents' footsteps into successful professional lives.  if that's competition, it's on an uneven playing field.  That earned income tax credit needs to be significantly higher to make the game a fairer one.