FEATURE
 |
A Jewish Mother in Every Home | |
| David Brooks' awful answer to the social mobility crisis | ||
 by Daniel Brook, March 27, 2007
|
||
TAGS:
As much an annual Passover fixture as horseradish or bad wine, every Jewish family has an Uncle Ron. He is, in fact, at most every holiday gathering, but with Pesach’s prescribed overindulgence, he’s in rare form. After tipping back the fourth cup of wine, his mix of arrogance and outrage boils over. Uncle Ron’s been ruining American seders for a century, but over the decades—depending on the context—his diatribe has changed.
In generations past, Uncle Ron was the seder socialist, crying for world revolution and railing against the piecemeal reforms pushed by FDR and his labor union boss. But with today’s Uncle Rons inhabiting the upper socioeconomic echelons of American society, the seder rant is more likely to critique welfare queens than corporate fatcats. “Look, I didn’t get to Scarsdale by hanging out on street corners,” today’s version might go. “The Asians study, work, and get ahead. But don’t hold your breath for the Puerto Ricans. And the blacks? Don’t get me started. They don’t need scholarships and affirmative action. What they really need is a Jewish mother.”
Uncle Ron should not be dismissed lightly; he is our impolite cultural bellwether, expressing the collective’s underbelly of anxieties, hopes, and prejudices. The ideas that underlie today’s Uncle Ron rant—that Jews moved up through hard work and if others don’t it’s their own fault—are a key part of contemporary conservative rhetoric. Ironically, much of the Jewish punditocracy is on the wrong side of today’s social mobility debate, actually working to dismantle the institutions that afforded them, their parents, and their grandparents a chance to move up.
*****
Pushy mothers: One possible reason the Jews moved up.Uncle Ron—and his conservative pundit friends—couldn’t have chosen a worse time to be wrong. Social mobility is in decline. The children of those on top now stay on top; the children of those on the bottom stay on the bottom. Reversing the post-WWII trends, the proportion of students at top colleges coming from poor families is dropping. Only 3% of students at selective colleges come from families in the bottom quarter of income earners; 74% come from the top quarter.
The question is whether this developing crisis is due to economic barriers or cultural barriers. Did Jews move up because of unions that made working-class jobs pay middle-class wages, free public universities, and the GI Bill, or because of their tradition of literacy and learning? Was it City College or pushy mothers?
*****
Jews have always been central to the national debate about social mobility. For most of the twentieth century, Jews were at the forefront of the push to eliminate explicit racial and religious barriers to educational and employment opportunities, and they believed that once these barriers were lifted, the top of the new meritocracy would be as diverse as society at large.
Inbred imbecile: George IIIThe social scientist Richard Herrnstein disagreed. The child of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, he had worked his way up through New York’s then-tuition-free City College to become a professor of psychology at Harvard. A perfect meritocracy, he proposed in a seminal 1971 Atlantic article, would allow the naturally brightest to end up on top. Those bright people would pair up and produce bright children and the American meritocracy would wind up looking less democratic than aristocratic. But unlike aristocratic Europe, where inbred imbeciles like George III ended up ruling empires, modern aristocracies would be fair. Even more alarming, this new, fair aristocracy would look like a racial caste system, Herrnstein theorized, citing a study showing a 15-point gap in the average IQs of whites and blacks.
In his important 1992 book, The End of Equality, Jewish pundit Mickey Kaus cautiously came to Herrnstein’s defense. Social mobility was beginning to decline, he theorized, because a perfect meritocracy had been nearly achieved. Those groups that had what it took to move up had already moved up. Meritocracy was like a centrifuge that spun the best to the top and left the dregs on the bottom. “At some point,” Kaus wrote, “we may run out of new groups to run through the centrifuge.”
Just as Herrnstein predicted, American society has become more aristocratic. (We even have George II, a dim-witted heir, running our country.) It is tempting, then, for Jews to take up the position Herrnstein outlined in 1971, essentially defending and legitimating hierarchy. After all, anti-meritocratic policies like legacy preferences at Ivy League colleges that used to hurt Jews now help them.
Another dimwitted heir: George IIAnd now that new research has shown that IQ is largely shaped by early child development, conservative pundits have been able to have their cake and eat it too—to embrace Herrnstein’s theories without embracing his openly race-based explanations. Though Herrnstein was Jewish, many Jews were wary of embracing a view that sounded so much like eugenics, the pseudo-science that worked to legitimate the social order back when Jews were towards the bottom. Explaining away inequality as the result of black/white IQ differences sounded like something out of 1930s Germany—not the kind of argument most Jews want to defend. But once the racial element was removed, the argument became more appealing, even flattering. Perhaps there really was something superior about us. But rather than claiming to be some kind of black-haired, brown-eyed master race, why not just say it’s behavioral? It’s not our genes, it’s our moms.
*****
Jews and Asians do well because they are good parents, the thinking goes. They push their kids in school and make them do punishingly un-fun but mentally rewarding activities, like taking music lessons. This develops their children’s brains in ways that parents who spend their time shooting hoops and shooting drugs (whatever color they may be) never will. Thus the way to reinvigorate social mobility must be to not let economically poor parents be parentally poor parents. In short, we need to create more Jewish mothers.
So when Jewish Republican pundit David Brooks writes, “the rich are getting better at passing their advantages on to their kids,” as he did in The New York Times in January, he’s not talking about how George W. Bush eliminated the inheritance tax allowing the rich to literally pass all their wealth on to the next generation. Instead, he’s talking about cultural advantages, arguing that rich parents imbue their children with good social skills and study habits.
Undoubtedly, these things matter. It’s good for a kid to have a pushy mother who makes him do his homework. And it’s good to have grandparents who read bedtime stories. But there have always been pushy mothers and storytelling grandparents. Does it make any sense to blame declining social mobility on these things?
Muddy logic: Harvard's Memorial Hall, reflected in a puddleIn Brooks’ scheme, America is turning into a “hereditary meritocracy [because] highly educated people…move into highly educated neighborhoods and raise their kids in good schools. [These kids] get into good colleges (the median family income of a Harvard student is now $150,000), then go out and have their own children, who develop the same sorts of wonderful skills and who repeat the cycle all over again.” What Brooks doesn’t mention is how much more expensive top schools have become over the past generation—the very period in which social mobility has declined.
Two generations ago, when my grandparents went to the City University of New York, it was free. That came to an end during the 1970s New York City budget crisis. Despite the city’s fiscal turnaround, the Republican mayors of recent decades have never restored the funding. (I nearly went into my own Uncle Ron tirade when I heard conservative pundit Irving Kristol explain in an interview in the documentary film Arguing the World why he went to CCNY: “I didn’t know anything about City College. All I knew was it was free.”)
In the more middle-class America of a generation ago, there was also a lid on what private colleges could get away with charging. When my mother went to the University of Pennsylvania it cost just $1,630 a year ($11,000 in today’s dollars), within the financial reach of her schoolteacher parents. Now, with the lid off, today’s tuition is over $34,000 a year. Granted, most private colleges offer financing options to rival Bob’s Discount Furniture, but gee, Mr. Brooks, maybe the reason Harvard students come from such well-to-do families is because Harvard’s tuition has gotten so high.
Which is not to say that culture doesn’t matter. Consider Asians, who can see and raise the Chosen People in pushy mothers per capita. They are still moving up more than most ethnic groups, but their route is through the few public escalator institutions that conservatives have not managed to fully dismantle—free urban magnet schools like Manhattan’s Stuyvesant high school and low-cost public universities like UC Berkeley, which is now majority Asian. (It should be noted that before the conservative backlash landed Ronald Reagan in the California governor’s mansion, Berkeley was tuition-free.)
Stuyvesant High: Elitist and full of smarties.That’s why Brooks’ policy prescriptions miss the point. He thinks the government should encourage marriage and get kids from “disorganized” homes into preschools that teach “bourgeois values.” (To which you might respond, what’s he doing in the party that cuts Head Start to fund tax cuts for the rich?) But let’s be honest: Governments are much better at tasks like making sure institutions like City College and UC Berkeley are tuition-free than at making sure parents are pushy.
When Montrealer-turned-Angelino Leonard Cohen sang, “Everybody knows the fight was fixed, the poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes,” he must have been talking about L.A. because in Montreal, that’s not how it goes—Canada now has higher levels of social mobility than we do. Why? Canadians certainly aren’t known for being pushy. The reason is because Canada hasn’t experienced the same conservative backlash we have down here. They haven’t eliminated inheritance taxes, made it impossible to organize labor unions, and ratcheted up college tuitions. Government mandates require even top private universities like McGill to charge only USD $4,200 a year ($1,400 for in-province students). That’s why they’re eating our lunch when it comes to social mobility.
For better or worse, pushy mothers will always be with us, but unless we start rebuilding the institutions of social mobility, all the pushing in the world won’t get their kids up the ladder. You have to wonder: if Richard Herrnstein or Uncle Ron were born in today’s America, could they still make it to Harvard or Scarsdale?
 |
Daniel Brook is a journalist whose work has appeared in Harper's and Dissent, among other publications. His first book, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America (Times Books) will be published in Jun More... |
Our guide to doing the New Year right
News and views about the newest nation on the block
Our suggested Rosh Hashanah menu, interactive and mouth-wateringly...
Black Jewish author Julius Lester says that in 21st century America,...
Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s religion
| Dev Blog | Privacy | Submissions | Contact | |  | | Comment Policy | About Us | FAQ | Masthead |
| Hosting provided by Tilted Planet | ||
abnobel
IQ and "awful" answers
First, a quibble. You write that "new research has shown that IQ is largely shaped by early childhood development." I'm afraid that the latest peer-reviewed research (as opposed to popular books cleverly marketed to neurotic parents) has conclusively demonstrated the opposite - that IQ is largely (approximately 60%) heritable.
A recent colloquy between Frank Sulloway and and Jack Kaplan in the New York Review of Books provides some of the relevant data. But I should add that this research should hardly undermine the egalitarian project. As Frank Sulloway notes:
This general conclusion [i.e., that IQ is largely heritable] does not mean that environmental influences on IQ are unimportant. On the contrary, abundant evidence has shown that family environments make a substantial contribution to intelligence, especially before children reach adulthood and especially in impoverished environments that do not allow for the full development of genetic predispositions.The increasingly evident portrait of human development that has emerged from these twin studies is one of nature via nurture, as people growing up are drawn to environments that provide the best outlets for their inborn dispositions and abilities.
One other thing. In asking "if Richard Herrnstein or Uncle Ron were born in today’s America, could they still make it to Harvard or Scarsdale?", do you honestly mean to imply that in the post-civil rights era, there are more barriers to social mobility than in the 1930s or 40s? Recent generations of immigrants, from the Asian influx of the 60s and 70s to the emigration of Soviet Jewry in the 80s and 90s (and every group in between), who came to this country penniless, might beg to differ. Free public education is an absolute good, but the success or failure of any group depends on more than their economic circumstances.
rugalach
an interesting point
You make a valid point here. I am not sure that I believe that there is something cultural involved in valuing education for the opportunities it presents. There are many educated Latinos who have moved up the socio-economic ladder through higher education. However, I teach ESL to a predominantly Latino population (usually from Mexico) in a charter high school in Denver, and I don't always see a large percentage of this population truly understanding the importance of education the way I did when I was their age. Many are struggling teen mothers, and many work outrageous hours for peanuts. They all have problems I did not have at their age. I had the luxury of going to state colleges (grad and undergrad) and was able to make education a priority in my life. It's more than simply having an overbearing pushy Jewish mother who made sure we did our homework every night. What about having role models? What about good sex education? What about immigrants' rights? What about language/culture barriers?
Daniel_Brook
Fact-checking memo for abnobel
To abnobel:
Thanks for reading--and for keeping me honest. I should be more clear about the current research on IQ. It seems to show that one's total potential IQ is fixed through heredity, but whether you ever reach that potential is determined by your early childhood development. The main point is that it calls into question the research Herrnstein was writing about. He was using a then-recent study by a Harvard collegue named Jensen who published on black-white IQ disparities. Jensen's premise was that if in 1969, 15 years after Brown v. Board ended school segregation, blacks still had lower average IQs, it was surely because of their limited capacities. You've got to be pretty far to the right (and pretty blind to the facts) to consider America one year after MLK's assassination to be some kind of racial egalitarian wonderland. In fact, Great Society programs like HeadStart were created to address the very clear remaining disparities in the childhoods of black and white children.
As for the high-watermark of social mobility in America, it was the 1960s and 70s. My ficticious "Uncle Ron" fits that generation but you're right in pointing out Mr. Herrnstein, a youth of the 1930s and 40s, surely faced barriers to mobility on account of his Jewishness. City College, however, was an exception. It was eager to accept bright Jews and was truly "need blind" in a way today's schools never really are. It had no tuition at all.
Anonymous
Uncle Ron
You sink a thoughtful argument by taking as fact two demonstrably false premises, that "IQ is shaped by early development" (nonsense, as any honest psychometrician will admit--this is merely the latest dodge of the less and less avoidable fact that heredity counts more than anything else in IQ, and thus in life); and that regarding trends in social mobility, "The question is whether this developing crisis is due to economic barriers or cultural barriers."
The question includes a third possibility, as implied by my first point.
The twentieth century was a period of radical change in Ivy League schools, changing from a clubbish environment full of dim George the II types, to the brutal meritocracy that it is now; this process began well before the liberalization and continues now after this so-called conservative "backlash." What we are seeing is the limits of those "escalators" of social mobility (which I nonetheless agree we need to do everything we can to preserve).
Listen to your Uncle Ron. He's been there.
Anonymous
Uncle Ronowitz
"Oy vey, Daniel, zoo are a vee bit zlow vor a Jew! Zoo muzst spend zome more time ztudying zhee psychometrics!"
"Jensen's premise was that if in 1969, 15 years after Brown v. Board ended school segregation, blacks still had lower average IQs, it was surely because of their limited capacities. You've got to be pretty far to the right (and pretty blind to the facts) to consider America one year after MLK's assassination to be some kind of racial egalitarian wonderland."
A nice thought, Daniel, but Jensen's research has continued to the present day, and the 15-point (minimum) IQ-gap between blacks and whites has persisted with more tenacity than the vice-like grip of a wizened Jew-hand on an ill-got gold ingot! Despite an unending stream of liberal programs, liberal wealth-transfers, liberal campaigns, and liberal spells and incantations, Negro inferiority continues to stare us in the face unblinkingly: with pupils dilated and eyes red-rimmed with the tincture of crack-cocaine!
And Jensen is not alone in his field. The foremost researchers into the nature of IQ-heritability and variation across populations, names like J. Philippe Rushton, Michael Levin ("Oy, he's von of us!"), and Richard Lynn, not to mention Murray and Herrnstein ("Oy, another von!" Plotz!).
"Perhaps there really was something superior about us. But rather than claiming to be some kind of black-haired, brown-eyed master race, why not just say it’s behavioral?"
"Black-haired, brown-eyed master race"—Oy, Daniel, zoo crack me up! Jewish brains are master-race material; but Jewish bodies and Jewish neuroses?—eh, no so much!
It’s not our genes, it’s our moms.
"Squawk! Shmuely’s goin’ ta Haaahvahd! Squawk!"
Ha-ha-ha! Anywhoo, it wasn’t a bad article, Danny. Keep making your poor, tired, long-suffering mother proud!—"Squawk! Don’t date a shiksa! Squawk!"
-Gentilus Gentillicus, Rex Judeorum
Anonymous
David the Dullard
My God, what a turd of an argument. Yes, David Brooks is a schlub. But Brook (Brooks singular?) is as dense as he is arrogant. You could not write a stronger argument for young writers restraining themselves until they get a little life experience behind them. Research helps as well.
Arguing the question of the heritability of IQ and referencing someone "named Jensen" is like arguing economics and referring to "some guy named Hayek." What a putz.
You make as if Jensen's landmark controversial study just popped up and foundered like some anomalous blip, when the one standard deviation difference in IQ between blacks and whites (which Jensen and countless others have been ostracized for refusing to ignore or conjure fanciful arguments to obscure) remains, stubbornly.
So much so that the tack had to become, a la the quack Stephen Jay Gould, that IQ in fact doesn't exist, and that evolution doesn't affect cognition and had somehow stopped, for humans at least, about the time it would have inconveniently shaped us into distinct races. Think about it: body types, hair, complexion, size, resistances to disease; all of these things having managed to shape us into the remarkable diversity of races that is humanity, yet somehow none of this affects behavior. As if your brain was just grey goo. Well, the next step, arguing against the existence of race, becomes perversely logical in this frantic, faith-based order.
Few within the relevant disciplines ever took Gould seriously, yet still he is quoted approvingly, usually along with Richard Lewonton's fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin's_Fallacy; the more we learn about genetics, the more absurd these people become. And well deserved. They've grown wealthy telling people what they want to hear and contributing not only to destroying careers and livelihoods, but in effect thwarting scientific endevour and, yes, promoting psuedo-science.
We are coming up hard against the limits of social mobility precisely because we are becoming more meritocratic. Nature is the most un-egalitarian thing imaginable.
It's no longer enough to simply say that an idea or an observation has "racist" implications. This is a logical fallacy, arguing from consequences: young David doesn't like what's implied by an idea or a finding therefore it must be false. This point and sputter routine is wearing thin.
Anonymous
Of course it's not possible
Of course it's not possible that despite all the "liberal spells and incantations" different groups lack the equal educational opportunity to realize their genetic potential intelligence.
If you believe that...I literally am incapable of having a coherent conversation with you.
Daniel_Brook
Conservatives Should Put Their Money Where Their Mouthes Are
If conservatives are so sure that poor, minority children are intellectually inferior, why are they always coming up with excuses to keep them from funding their schools as those of rich, white children? (For example, former NYS governor Pataki dragging his feet with a court order to better fund New York City's schools.) If you ever spend any time with inner-city elementary school children (and I have, for example, during a summer in the education department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), you'll realize they have similar distributions of intellectual talent to kids from suburban schools. Most kids are pretty middling. A few are extremely bright and a few are extremely dull.
BT
Brilliant. You are hovering
Brilliant. You are hovering around the real reason why nobody marries and has kids. Our young men can't support three people: hubby, missus, and the kid. And no, she isn't going from the birthing room straight back to the work force, dragging her IV pole and a few bloody towels. And no, the kiddie won't be sleeping through the night anytime soon. Children don't raise themselves. You can't subcontract the job out. Not on your salary. And it doesn't work well that way.
Hurray for the Jewish Mother! Down with Margaret Mead's smear of her, and Woddy Allen's too, and Phillip Roth's.
Mommy bear, Daddy bear, and Baby bear. You got a better idea? Now, how are we going to pay for it? Now that the urban middle class ain't no mo'. Can we learn to be happy and poor again? Can we learn to do without Manolo Blahniks? Can we get assertive about this? Our forebears didn't take any nonsense. They had values. We have been Calvin Kleined.
Post new comment