The Privatization of Risk

Thomas Edsall's NY Times opinion piece, Why Don't the Poor Rise Up?, is a great thinkpiece on the way "individuation," the way we have all been atomized, step by step, into being "individuals," discouraged from recognizing our collective destiny or responsibility, has led to the psychopaths taking charge. But it has other thoughs as well, including this quote from Jacob Hacker's book

The Great Risk Shift: "Up until the 1950s, American society and government combined a faith in economic opportunity with a commitment to economic security. Today that message is starkly different: You are on your own."

Hacker and Ulrich Beck together make the claim that the successes of the modern welfare state, by assigning individual claims to its benefits as well as individual contributions to its well-being, has sown its own destruction. Pointing to individual egregious abuses, the anti-collectivist crowd has successfully clawed their way into a transnational economic structure that allows them to assign risk away.

"Risk" has always been something that the capitalists talk about. The economic opportunity of 1950s capitalism (which most people agree was pretty damned good capitalism, at least for the dominant socioeconomic group, namely white dudes) came with a safety net. But that net no longer exists. Instead, profits are socialized and risks are privatized. This creates risk asymmetry, where some groups take risks and other groups suffer the "unforseen side effects." The most trenchant example is of course the bailout of the banks, where millions of retirees suffered the "unforseen side effects" of the quasi-legal corruption of Wall Street (now completely legalized by our failure to prosecute anyone), but the most commonplace examples of corporations going bankrupt to leave behind toxic waste dumps has been ongoing for decades.

Edsall doesn't mention it, but his article stands in opposition to David Frum's infamous Dead Right (1995) in which Frum's opening sentence reads "Since it’s formation in the early 1950’s, the intellectual movement known as American conservatism has stood for two overarching principles: anticommunism abroad and radical reduction in the size, cost, and bossiness of the federal government at home." Note that Frum's agenda is pure individualization. But Frum goes on to ice the cake:

The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top. Social security, student loans, and other government programs make it far less catastrophic than it used to be for middle-class people to dissolve their families. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do not.

So not only is that whole, vicious "You're on your own" not unwanted, it's actually a desired feature. Capitalism isn't a glorious promise of economic opportunity, it's a mechanism for keeping the hoi polloi in their place, cowed and compliant.

Here we are, twenty years after Frum's book, and the general trend is exactly as Frum (and David Brooks, and Ross Douthat, and the New York Times) wanted it.

The Unbearable Whiteness of the New York Times

That Edsall article is the gift that keeps on giving. Here's another observation:

The differing consequences for those at the top and those at the bottom are visible in the class-based responses to a key element of individualization: changing sexual mores. After a period of turbulence and high divorce rates in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the well educated are coming to terms with the sexual revolution by postponing marriage and delaying fertility as divorce rates for this class have stabilized or declined. The children of the affluent are, in turn, prospering. Conversely, the less well off – from all backgrounds — have struggled with high levels of family dissolution, father absence and worklessness, leaving their own prospects, and those of their children, bleak.

Edsall curiously keeps referring to "class" when the paper off of which his thoughts pivot very deliberately says that class is outmoded in an "individualized" society.

I could go into another rant about how this is the classic Red Sex/Blue Sex dichotomy, but there's something else in that paragraph that makes me take notice.

The unbearable whiteness of the New York Times.

Go take a look at the hand-wringing throughout the 1970s and all the way through the present about "inner city" familial turbulence, and all the finger pointing by white editorialists when accusing the black communities they supposedly served of failing their moral and familial duties. Suddenly, issues of family instability and dissolution due to economic pressures is something the NY Times wants urgently to talk about, and they do because it's happening to white people.

The risk that Frum gleefully talked about (see previous post) has now revealed its ugly downside: the demoralization and de-legitimization of the very cultural values the conservatives love to talk about. David Brooks loves to finger point this way; it's one of his signature topics. And every time he does it, the counterpunditocracy points out that Brooks is still one of the five stupidest men alive for claiming that moral training will overcome and organize any socioeconomic hardship. Brooks, Frum, Edsall-- ineed the entire NY Times opinion pool-- regards with alarm the rising chaos within white families, because suddenly the problem is on their doorstep, may affect their children. Brooks' latest is literally a "if only poor people had rich people's values, then they could be rich too." Not really, though; they'd just be less troubling to Brooks and his peers.

It's not genetic. It's not cultural. It's purely economic. And it's been caused by people who accepted aid and comfort from Frum, and Brooks, and Douthat. The poor didn't have to be victimized; they didn't have to become rabble. But the New York Times never really spoke truth to power, never really cared that much about the rabble. And now they have to live in fear of the rabble. Their rabble. Pitchforks and all.