A map of birthrates by neighborhood compiled by the Health Department reveals a telling sociology — a picture of child-rearing as an entitlement of the very affluent and a managed burden of the poor.
..What is most striking is that low birthrates are found in predominantly white and solidly middle-class parts of the city — large swaths of Staten Island and portions of eastern Queens. In 2013, Bayside, in Queens, was the community district that could claim the lowest birthrate. One reason for this could be that the heightened expectations that working- and middle-class families have for raising their children are bumping up against the difficult financial realities of meeting them.
.. The main complaints have come from well-off people themselves, as they worry about overcrowding in affluent school districts and rising numbers of children attending private school, making admission even more impossible.
.. Two years ago the city’s Human Resources Administration issued a series of subway ads meant to drive down teenage pregnancy rates in poor communities. The ads showed babies lecturing prospective mothers that, for instance, their boyfriends would eventually leave them. Liberal critics considered them shaming, but Robert Doar, the former human resources commissioner, told me that in focus groups, the teenagers at whom the ads were aimed responded positively to them.
What’s Wrong With Inequality?
As Anatole France noted, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”
.. On this view, people should suffer the consequences of choices they’ve freely made, but should be protected against losses that they couldn’t have avoided. We eliminate inequalities that are due to sheer bad luck, but we allow those that result from bad decisions. Many people find this an appealing position, but you reject it. Why is that?
E.A.: There are many examples that go counter to luck egalitarianism. How tall people are is largely determined by genetic luck. But this does not make it unjust for professional basketball teams to offer better opportunities to taller players. When we chose people on merit, we’re very often choosing them because they are lucky enough to have certain talents.
.. High inequality, if anything, has negative effects on economic growth, by making the economy more vulnerable to crises and long recessions, and by corrupting the political process.
.. Societies can’t practice racial oppression for hundreds of years, or gender subordination for thousands of years, without perverse ideas and feelings about race and gender becoming deeply entrenched. It takes a lot more than a few anti-discrimination laws and ameliorative policies to undo entrenched identity-based hierarchies.
Has Obamacare Turned Voters Against Sharing the Wealth?
The Kaiser survey found strong opposition, 64-35, to the individual mandate requiring that everyone purchase health coverage. In contrast, a majority of respondents, 60-38, supported the employer mandate that requires companies with 100 or more workers to provide health insurance.
.. The author of the paper, Matthew Luttig, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Minnesota, found that while “numerous political theorists suggest that rising inequality and the shift in the distribution of income to those at the top should lead to increasing support for liberal policies,” in practice, “rising inequality in the United States has largely promoted ideological conservatism.”
.. Hence, emphasizing the severity of a social or economic problem appears to undercut respondents’ willingness to trust the government to fix it — the existence of the problem could act as evidence of the government’s limited capacity to improve outcomes.
It’s Not the Inequality; It’s the Immobility
To be sure, we need to retain the concept of inequality in our thinking, if only to understand public perceptions of the economy or how pay structures are evolving inside corporations. Still, we should be cautious in using “inequality” as an automatically negative term. A lot of inequality is natural and indeed desirable, because individuals have different talents and tastes and opportunities can never be fully equalized.
The concept of mobility helps us distinguish between “good inequality” and “bad inequality.”