Another reason that many people don’t vote is that the U.S. political system has come to be organized around just two political parties. The Republicans and Democrats differ on some issues, such as abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and gun control, but they share an overall support for capitalism, wealth, property, and the use of military force to defend and advance national interests. They share a dependence on campaign contributions from corporations and other wealthy donors who expect politicians to serve their interests in return. They also share a reluctance to help people living in poverty who depend on welfare; a tendency to use immigrants, people in the lower class, teenage mothers, and people of color as scapegoats for social problems; and a resistance to doing anything serious about such problems as racism, sexism, and other forms of privilege and oppression.
If you belong to one of the groups whose interests the major parties do not support, then it’s easy to see the political system as loaded toward interests that are not your own. From this perspective, it doesn’t matter which party is in power. It also doesn’t matter whether you vote, for the outcome for you will be the same either way. In 1996, for example, the federal government drastically cut welfare benefits and turned away from its longstanding commitment to care for its neediest citizens, including children living in poverty. The law was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by a Democratic president.
Since the 1990s, Republicans and Democrats have joined in what Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith describes as a “revolt of the contented against the unfortunate.”4 The United States has a political system controlled by a majority of the voting population, who are content with the way things are:
It operates under the compelling cover of democracy, albeit a democracy not of all citizens but of those who, in defense of their social and economic advantage, actually go to the polls and vote. The result is a government accommodated not to reality or common need, but to the beliefs of the contented who are a majority of the actual voters.5
It should come as no surprise, then, that you are more likely to vote if you are in the middle or upper classes, have a good job, or are white.
An ecological factor in low voter turnout is a practice known as ‘gerrymandering,’ which is especially powerful in the election of congressional representatives. States are divided into congressional districts, and every ten years state legislatures redraw district lines based on population counts from the latest census. The goal of whichever party is in power is to draw district lines in such a way that voters favoring the opposing party are concentrated in as few districts as possible, minimizing the number of representatives they are able to elect. At the same time, lines are drawn so as to maximize the number of districts where substantial majorities of voters favor the incumbent party.6
One result of this practice is that voters find themselves in districts where the party they favor has such a large majority of supporters that their candidate is bound to win regardless of whether they vote. This means that each individual vote loses its importance, discouraging voters from bothering to show up at the polls since the outcome is perceived as all but certain.
It has become a common practice to explain low voter turnout in terms of psychological conditions, such as apathy. Sociologically, however, this misses the underlying fact that even if this were true for large numbers of potential voters, how people feel arises from their participation in social systems. When a political system is organized in ways that make staying away from the polls a rational choice for millions of people, it rings somewhat hollow to argue that citizens do not vote simply because they do not care, as if ‘not caring’ is a psychological condition that has no relation to the social systems in which people live their lives. It is striking to note that in the presidential campaign of 2008 that elected Barack Obama, voter turnout among people of color reached record levels, based on the perception that for the first time in generations, there was the possibility of electing a president who might actually make a positive difference in their lives, and their votes might play a role in making that happen.
Why Is There Poverty? Putting the ‘Social’ Back into Social Problems
Following the course of major social problems, such as poverty, drug abuse, violence, privilege, and oppression, it often seems that attempts to solve them never work. Government programs come and go as political parties swing back and forth between stock answers whose only effect seems to be influencing who gets elected. If anything, the problems get worse, and people feel increasingly helpless and frustrated or, if the problems do not affect them personally, may feel nothing much at all.
As a society, then, we are stuck, and we have been for a long time. One reason is that these social problems are huge and complex. But on a deeper level, we tend to think about them in ways that keep us from getting at their complexity in the first place. It is a basic tenet of sociological practice that to solve a social problem, we have to begin by seeing it as social,7 without which we ask the wrong questions and look in the wrong direction for visions of change.
Consider poverty, for example, which is arguably the most far-reaching and long-standing cause of chronic suffering. The magnitude of poverty is especially ironic in the United States, whose enormous wealth dwarfs that of entire continents. Almost one out of every five people in the United States lives in poverty or near-poverty. For children, the rate is even higher.8 Even people in the middle class have reason to feel anxious about the possibility of falling into poverty or something close to it—through divorce, for example, or being laid off as companies try to improve their competitive advantage, profit margins, and stock prices by replacing workers with machines or transferring jobs overseas.
How can there be so much misery and insecurity in the midst of such abundance? If we look at the question sociologically, one of the first things we notice is that poverty does not exist all by itself. It is one end of an overall distribution of income and wealth in society as a whole. As such, poverty is both a structural aspect of the system and an ongoing consequence of how the system is organized and the paths of least resistance that shape how people participate.
The economic system we have for producing and distributing wealth is industrial capitalism. It is organized in ways that allow a small elite to control most of the capital—factories, machinery, tools—used to produce wealth. This encourages the accumulation of wealth and income by the elite and regularly makes heroes of those who are most successful at it. It also leaves a relatively small portion of the total income and wealth to be divided among the rest of the population. With a majority of the people competing over what is left to them by the elite, it is inevitable that a substantial number of people will wind up on the short end and live in poverty or with the fear of it. It is like the game of musical chairs: since the game is set up with fewer chairs than there are people, someone has to wind up without a place to sit when the music stops.
In part, then, poverty exists because the economic system is organized in ways that encourage the accumulation of wealth at one end and create conditions of scarcity that make poverty inevitable at the other. But the capitalist system generates poverty in other ways as well.
In the drive for profit, for example, capitalism places a high value on competition and efficiency. This motivates companies and their managers to control costs by keeping wages as low as possible and replacing people with machines or replacing full-time workers with part-time workers. It makes it a path of least resistance to move jobs to regions or countries where labor is cheaper and workers are less likely to complain about poor working conditions or where laws protecting the natural environment from industrial pollution or workers from injuries on the job are weak or unenforced. Capitalism also encourages owners to shut down factories and invest money elsewhere in enterprises that offer higher rates of return.
These kinds of decisions are a normal consequence of how capitalism operates as a system, paths of least resistance that managers and investors are rew
arded for following. But the decisions also have terrible effects on tens of millions of people and their families and, with them, entire communities. Even having a full-time job is no guarantee of a decent living, which is why so many families depend on the earnings of two or more adults just to make ends meet. This reality is made possible by the structural feature of capitalism by which most people neither own nor control any means of producing a living without working for someone else in exchange for wages.
To these social factors, we can add others. A high divorce rate, for example, results in large numbers of single-parent families who have a hard time depending on one adult for both child care and a living income. The centuries-old legacy of racism and white privilege in the United States continues to hobble millions of people through poor education, isolation in urban ghettos, prejudice, discrimination, and the disappearance of industrial jobs that, while requiring relatively little formal education, nonetheless once paid a decent wage. These were the jobs that enabled many generations of white European immigrants to climb out of poverty but which are now unavailable to the masses of urban poor.9
Clearly, patterns of widespread poverty are inevitable in an economic system that sets the terms for how wealth is produced and distributed. If we are interested in doing something about poverty itself—if we want a society largely free of impoverished citizens—then we have to do something about both the system people participate in and how they participate in it. But public debate about poverty and policies to deal with it focus almost entirely on how people participate, with almost nothing to say about the system they participate in. What generally pass for ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ approaches to poverty are, in fact, two variations on the same narrow theme of individualism.
A classic example of the conservative approach is Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground.10 Murray sees the world as a merry-go-round. The goal is to make sure that “everyone has a reasonably equal chance at the brass ring— or at least a reasonably equal chance to get on the merry-go-round.”11 He reviews thirty years of federal antipoverty programs and notes that they have generally failed. He concludes from this that since government programs have not worked, poverty must not be caused by social factors.
Instead, Murray argues, poverty is caused by failures of individual initiative and effort. People are poor because there is something lacking in them, and changing them is therefore the only effective remedy. From this he suggests doing away with public solutions, such as affirmative action, welfare, and income support systems, including “AFDC [aid to families with dependent children], Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and the rest. Eliminating these programs would leave the working aged person with no recourse whatsoever except the job market, family members, friends, and public or private locally funded services.”12 The result, he believes, would “make it possible to get as far as one can go on one’s merit.”13 With the 1996 welfare reform act, the United States took a giant step in Murray’s direction by reaffirming its long-standing cultural commitment to individualistic thinking and the mass of confusion around alternatives to it.
That confusion lies in how we think about individuals and society and about poverty as an individual condition and as a social problem. On the one hand, we can ask how individuals are sorted into different social class categories and which characteristics best predict who will get the best jobs and earn the most. If you want to get ahead, what’s your best strategy? Based on many people’s experience, the answer seems clear: work hard, get an education, and never give up.
There is certainly a lot of truth in this advice, and it gets to the issue of how people choose to participate in the system as it is. Sociologically, however, it focuses on only one part of the equation by leaving out the system itself. In other words, it ignores the fact that social life is shaped by the nature of systems and how people participate, by the forest and the trees. Changing how individuals participate may affect outcomes for some. As odd as this may seem, however, it has relatively little to do with the larger question of why widespread poverty exists at all as a social phenomenon.
Imagine for a moment that income is distributed according to the results of a footrace: all the income in the United States for each year is put into a giant pool, and we hold a race to determine who gets what. The fastest fifth of the population gets 50 percent of the income to divide up, the next fastest fifth splits 23 percent, the next fastest fifth gets 15 percent, the next fifth 9 percent, and the slowest fifth divides 3 percent. The result would be an unequal distribution of income, with each person in the fastest fifth getting 16.7 times as much money as each person in the slowest fifth, which is what the actual distribution of income in the United States looks like.14
If we look at the slowest fifth of the population and ask why they are poor, an obvious answer is that they didn’t run as fast as everyone else, and if they could just run faster, they would do better. This prompts us to ask why some people run faster than others and to consider all kinds of answers from genetics to nutrition to motivation to having time to work out to being able to afford a personal trainer.
But to see why some fifth of the population must be poor no matter how fast people run, all we have to do is look at the system itself. It uses unbridled competition to determine not only who gets fancy cars and nice houses but also who gets to eat or has a place to live or access to health care. It distributes income and wealth in ways that promote increasing concentrations among those who already have the most. Given this, some of the people in this year’s bottom fifth might run faster next year and leave others to take their place in the bottom fifth. But there has to be a bottom fifth, so long as the system is organized in this way.
Some argue that a different solution is to increase the amount of income available, to create a ‘bigger pie’ as a way to raise people out of poverty. As the history of capitalism makes painfully clear, however, the same system that enables the upper classes to take most of the national income every year also enables them to absorb any increases in the income pool. Between 2009 and 2012, for example, as the economy was recovering from the disaster of 2008, the top 1 percent of the population received 95 percent of the total growth in national income.15
Learning to run faster may keep you or me out of poverty, but it will not get rid of poverty itself. To do that, we have to change the system along with how people participate in it. Using the footrace metaphor, instead of splitting the ‘winnings’ into shares of 50 percent, 23 percent, 15 percent, 9 percent, and 3 percent, for example, we might divide them into shares of 24 percent, 22 percent, 20 percent, 18 percent, and 16 percent. There would still be inequality, but the fastest fifth would get only 1.5 times as much as the bottom instead of 16.7 times as much, and 1.2 times as much as the middle fifth rather than 3.3 times as much.
People can argue about whether chronic widespread poverty is morally acceptable or what an acceptable level of inequality might look like. But if we want to understand where poverty comes from and what makes it such a stubborn feature of social life, we have to begin with the sociological fact that patterns of inequality result as much from how social systems are organized as they do from how individuals participate. Focusing on one without the other simply will not produce a solution.
The focus on individuals is so entrenched in our culture, however, that even those who believe they are taking social factors into account usually are not. This is as true of Murray’s critics as it is of Murray himself. Perhaps Murray’s greatest single mistake is to misinterpret the failure of federal antipoverty programs. He assumes that federal programs actually target the social causes of poverty, which means that if the programs do not work, social causes must not be the issue.
But Murray has it wrong. Welfare and other antipoverty programs are ‘social’ only in the sense of being organized around the idea that social systems, such as government, have a responsibility to do something about poverty. But the antipoverty programs themselves are not organized around a soc
iological understanding of how systems produce poverty in the first place. As a result, they focus almost entirely on changing individuals and not systems and use the resources of government and other systems to make it happen.
If antipoverty programs have failed, it is not because the idea that poverty is socially caused is wrong. They have failed because policy makers who design them do not understand what makes the cause of something ‘social’ in the first place. Or they understand it but are so trapped in individualistic thinking that they do not act on it by targeting the appropriate systems, such as the economy, for serious change.
The easiest way to see this is to look at the antipoverty programs themselves, which come in two main varieties. The first holds individuals responsible by assuming that financial success is solely a matter of individual qualifications and behavior. In other words, if you just run faster, you’ll finish the race ahead of people who are currently beating you, and then they will be poor instead of you. We get people to run faster by providing training and motivation. What we do not do, however, is look at the rules of the race or question whether the basic necessities of life should be distributed through competition.
The result is that some people rise out of poverty by improving their competitive advantage, while others sink into it when their advantages no longer work and they get laid off or their company relocates to another country or gets swallowed up in a merger that boosts the stock price for shareholders and earns the CEO a salary that in 2012 averaged more than 273 times the average worker’s pay.16 But rarely is anything said—much less done—about an economic system that allows a small elite to own and control most of the wealth and that sets up the rest of the population to compete over what is left.
This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement created such a stir when it burst on the scene in 2011 with its critique of not only capitalism but also the power and influence of corporations and the wealthy over federal and state governments. In spite of its beginning, it has failed thus far to grow into a larger movement, in part because it has not been guided by a comprehensive sociological analysis of the problem.
The Forest and the Trees Page 18
