Dream Hoarders

I said I would read it, and I finally did. This slim little book by Brit-turned-US-citizen and Brookings scholar Richard Reeves puts a fine focal lens on our complicity in the class system we all claim to despise. It is a reminder that when we blame the 1 percent for everything, we are just hiding from the fact that it's really the top 20 percent who reap the benefits of our current system.

Reeves opens with a benefit we've taken advantage of in this household: 529 plans. When Obama tried to remove the tax benefits from those plans and use that money to fund a fairer system of tax credits, he found that the very people who put him in office were the ones who hated that idea most. So he pulled the plug before the new, rather progressive idea got off the ground.

Reeves repeatedly reminds the reader that class is fluid. The top 20 percent (roughly households above $115K in income) varies from year to year. But for every person coming up, someone has to go down, and that's the problem. We all want to conserve what we have, often using the excuse of protecting our children. A local example from NYS might be the fact that we cannot come up with a formula for funding our schools, because in order to make things fair, we would have to take something off the top of the districts that offer Mandarin and Prelaw classes to fund districts that can barely afford special ed—and no one, even in the most liberal enclaves of Westchester, is willing to do that!

The upper middle class, or top 20 percent, is rapidly pulling away from the bottom 80 percent. Their children are advantaged from birth, and their status is passed down, thus belying our belief that America is a meritocracy. Rather than focusing on money itself, Reeves names a handful of current trends that serve to keep us separate and unequal. He refers to these trends as "opportunity hoarding." They include exclusionary zoning, legacy college admissions, and unpaid internships, all of which this upper middle class family has taken advantage of over the years. He finds, and I believe him, that the thought of getting rid of any or all of these three advantages makes upper middle class people crazy, no matter what their political leanings might be. Yet all three are designed to ensure that families don't fall out of their comfortable 20 percentdom by allowing other families to move up and displace them.

Because he's a Brookings guy, Reeves doesn't just drop guilt on us without offering policy solutions. His goals are both to reduce opportunity hoarding and also to increase equality. The latter could be achieved, he believes, through the reduction of unintended pregnancies through better contraception (US contraception is antiquated compared to the rest of the developed world's); increasing home visiting to improve parenting (it's a universal event in Britain and unheard of here for the most part, but it has effects as good or better than pre-K education); revising the way we pay teachers so that good teachers are assigned to poorer districts; and funding college fairly (he thinks free college is a terrible idea but champions income-contingent loans, vocational programs, apprenticeships, and cutting tax subsidies to wealthy universities). Interestingly, several of his ideas showed up in HRC's campaign proposals. It would have been fascinating, had she won, to see whether she could battle through the backlash from the people who supported her to get some of these reforms rammed through.

When it comes to exclusionary zoning, Reeves doesn't want to plop high-rises in semirural communities but favors the "missing middle" of townhouses and duplexes that blend into surrounding two-story homes and create mixed neighborhoods and school districts. (We have a couple of examples of duplexes toward this end of Ellis Hollow, but I have no idea if they're affordable. I know that every townhouse that goes up in the county is fought against tooth and nail by someone.) He points out that if Oxford and Cambridge can end legacy admissions, so can Harvard and Yale. And he wants to regulate the oversight of internships so that minimum wage and fair labor laws are enforced and students who are not easily subsidized by their parents may take advantage of those jobs.

There's lots more related to inequitable tax treatment, etc., and there are lots of lovely Brookings graphs showing income and inequality, but the brunt of his argument is as described here. Most of the people complaining loudest about income inequality in America are people who contribute to it. Until we face our privilege and vow to give something up, absolutely nothing will change. Sobering and worth remembering.