By Patricia H. Kushlis
A March 24, 2008 article in The New York Times features the now not-so-new information that the life expectancy gap continues to widen between rich and poor in the U.S. Seems to me that this is something this country needs to take seriously because, let’s face it at the very least hospital emergency rooms should not be the doctors of first, last - and only resort – for far too many people in this country as happens now. And longevity has much to do with access to good medical care and a healthy life style before illnesses turn into catastrophes.
Life expectancy differences, however, are only one aspect – or symptom - of the expanding inequality gap in this country. A Round Table Discussion last fall among six Harvard faculty members “Is the United States Coming Apart as a Society?” explored this and other dimensions of the far more complex problem affecting American society today. I came upon the discussion belatedly in the Fall/Winter 2007 edition of The Yard, a Harvard alumni magazine. It pulls together a number of issues which all Americans, including and especially those running for public office in November, should be considering, examining and addressing.
Here are some of the major points:
• A rise in social inequality has accompanied the rise in economic inequality; this reflects in the “growing residential separation symbolized by gated communities,” differences in “civic engagement, political participation. . . involvement in the criminal and justice systems, in mental and physical care, in access to education including elite universities” and in problems created by differences in environmental living conditions.
• Although polling data shows deep anxiety and division among Americans along religious (73%), racial (92%) and political lines (97%), when one actually looks at the issues the divisions are not as deep as they are felt. There’s a lot more agreement on what Americans want done on immigration (only a small minority feel strongly that one shouldn’t do anything for undocumented immigrants in the US) than “the sound bites suggest.”
• Too often in public discourse class “is taken as a code for talking about race. “In fact, class isn’t race” and although segregation by social class has increased “in some dimensions” “the numbers on racial segregation are . . . moving in the right direction.” “Upper income African Americans have seen remarkable progress in the reduction of racial segregation over the last 30 years.” “Interracial marriages are increasing, but inter-class marriages are decreasing” and there are much wider spaces, for instance, between white middle class kids and white working class kids. This economic divide seems to be hardening. It reinforces the differences – and differences of opportunity - between these two groups of American youth. Further, it tears apart the “fundamental (social and political) bargain” that Americans “can live with big gaps between rich and poor as long as there is also equality of opportunity.”
• “Economic geography is key. . .. There are three Americas: 1) the prosperous places “mostly on the coasts that are driven primarily by production of new ideas” They are high wage and very expensive. 2) vast areas of the country “where people are lower-middle income. They’re driving everywhere; they’re buying cheap houses and things at Wal-Mart; . . . while “income levels are flat, because so many of their goods are cheap, they’re living in a way that is appreciably better than their grandparents did. The only problem is they’re disconnected from some of the most dynamic elements of the American economy; and 3) the truly disadvantaged, particularly in the inner cities . . . hit by the end of manufacturing and unable to reinvent themselves around new ideas.
• Because the U.S. has never been politically polarized along economic class lines it suggests that there is a “powerful constraint in doing anything about the problem through normal political mechanisms.” Opportunity-based rhetoric, however, is “shown to have resonance.”
• Students need to be taught to think systemically about the nature of poverty – do cities, like New York and Chicago, have so much poverty a symptom that something is wrong with them or are “they doing something right like providing opportunity, public transportation and many other things” that they are “attracting poor people from throughout the world?” Students also need to “recognize the ways in which economic inequality also produces social inequality and affects political inequality.”
Maybe it’s not just Harvard students, however, who need to think about these issues. Seems to me all Americans – whether students at Harvard or not – should be reflecting, and reflecting hard upon the state of American society today and how it can be improved – if it is going to survive - for the good of all.
We should demand that our elected officials do so as well.
Note: The panelists were Harvard University professors Claudine Gay, government; Edward L. Glaeser, economics, Robert D. Putnam, public policy, Mary C. Waters, sociology and William Julius Wilson. The panel was chaired by Professor David M. Cutler, applied economics and dean for the social sciences.