(Third of three parts; click here to read Part 2)

Newcomers in the conversation have also brought fresh insights on three other issues--wage erosion, increasing job insecurity, ballooning CEO salaries--suggesting that current worries are overblown. As to wage erosion, worker cash income may be down, but noncash benefits (pension plans, health insurance, profit sharing) are up. As to job insecurity, in 1991 the average number of years men were remaining in their jobs was five years, compared to four years in 1951. For women, the respective figures are four and two. This evidence does not support the claim that job tenure has shortened. (Obviously, some people do get "downsized." More than half of them, though, end up getting new jobs that pay more.) As for the concern about exploding CEO pay, it certainly is clear that some CEOs make bundles of money. In my extensive review of the literature, though, I noticed that no study of the differences between CEO and "average Joe" compensation examined more than 30 companies. One study prominently featured in U.S. News & World Report was based on a tiny sample of only 10 companies! What this suggests is that, in a very limited number of companies, hyperinequality exists. Whether hyperinequality is a widespread problem has yet to be shown.

Besides offering these various correctives to the conversation, the newcomers also have enriched the discussion with five new topics. First, they've reminded us that envy is just as serious a sin as greed. To date, the inequality discussion has emphasized the latter but neglected the former. Consider economist Paul Krugman's concern that increasing economic disparities mean that more people, as they compare themselves to the "big winners" in the overclass, feel they cannot measure up. "What it takes today to regard yourself as successful is increasingly out of reach," Krugman worries. For him, the problem is that our economy produces some huge winners. But isn't it also a problem that so many are envious of so few?

The public tolerance for envy is related to a second problem spotted by the newcomers; namely, the misleading, and potentially harmful, rhetoric used by the discussants. Robert Reich refers to those Americans in the top 20 percent of the income distribution as "the fortunate fifth," while Richard Gephardt calls them "winners in the lottery of life." Certainly material success often depends to a degree--sometimes a significant degree--on good fortune. But Reich and Gephardt's language obscures the vital relationship between income and work. Many wealthy Americans are rich because they work hard. Many of the poorest families are poor in part because they have no dependable breadwinners. (Indeed, over half of the households in the poorest income fifth have no paid workers, and of the minority who work, only 25 percent do so full-time.) Reich and Gephardt erroneously imply that across the board, high incomes are more a matter of luck than of toil.

Third, the newcomers have spotlighted the unhealthy whining in the debate. Much of the contemporary concern about the "stagnating middle class" stems from the fact that, while most families are doing better than they did a generation ago, the rate of improvement is less than that experienced previously. From 1970 to 1983, spendable income per American rose 45 percent--hardly a figure to sneeze at. But even this good performance did not match the extraordinary growth of the 1950s and 1960s. "What's really driving the feeling of overstretch among baby boomers and Generation Xers," Zinsmeister explains, "is the Revolution of Rising Expectations. Our appetites are growing rapidly." Our houses are twice as big as the previous generation's, and the average American consumes twice as many goods and services than did the average American in the 1950s. "We expect much more than earlier generations did," Zinsmeister concludes. A zeitgeist of materialism and a lack of historical perspective is exaggerating our worries about the middle-class's economic health and preventing us from feeling content with the "enough" that we already have.

Fourth, the newcomers have highlighted the key role that increasing taxes have played in contributing to middle America's sense of "income erosion." Whereas federal, state, and local taxes consumed roughly 20 percent of the average two-earner family's income in 1955, that tax burden has increased to 38 percent today.

Finally, the newcomers have raised the obvious, but politically incorrect, issue of stewardship. They have bluntly noted that some American families aren't "making it" today because of their irresponsible spending decisions, not because of inherent injustices in the American economic system. My personal experience--and the experience of dozens of others on the front lines of ministry among the poor--confirms this unpalatable truth.

Take the case of the Gilberts (not their real name), a working-poor family whom I've counseled for over a year. The Gilberts live in a decrepit, malodorous trailer with their three school-age children. Despite the husband's full-time work (at about $7 per hour), the wife's sporadic income from part-time jobs, and a monthly subsidy of $300 in food stamps, the Gilberts live in squalor and frequently run out of groceries, have their electricity and phone turned off for nonpayment of bills, and fall dangerously behind in their lot rent to the mobile-home park. I'm intimately acquainted with their lifestyle and finances and have designed with them a budget that allows the Gilberts to meet all their basic expenses (food, clothing, shelter, utilities, transportation, and medical care) and leaves a little under $100 per month in disposable income. Admittedly, that's not much; but on paper, the Gilberts can make it. In reality, they often spend their money on cable TV, videos, meals out at McDonald's, cigarettes, and shopping sprees at Wal-Mart rather than on groceries and utility bills.

The inequality conversation has focused almost exclusively on economic issues. The reasons for persistent poverty, however, go beyond economics to demographics and culture. Fully two-thirds of the heads of households in the bottom quintile, for example, are single women. The underclass does not contain very many intact married families, nor does it contain many full-time workers. These realities must inform our understanding of why some in the underclass remain poor. Certainly some people are trapped in poverty, having been thwarted in their attempts to better themselves by society's lack of educational and economic opportunities. But others in the underclass have made peace with poverty and stay poor not because of the nature of the American economy but because of their own behavioral choices. As we raise alarms about how some Americans aren't "making it" in today's economy, we must seek to understand all the reasons why this is so. It's irresponsible simply to throw up our hands in disgust, blame "the system," and rush pell-mell toward new schemes of massive wealth redistribution.

Now, all that said, it is also irresponsible, even cruel, to decide that "Well, the American economy works well enough for most folks, and those who are entrenched at the bottom can't be helped anyway." Unfortunately, this is the sort of attitude that sometimes comes across when conservatives try to clarify discussions about poverty and inequality in America. As neoconservative economist Glenn Loury recently complained in a thoughtful, compelling essay:

A conservatism worthy of majority support in this country would not view with cool indifference a circumstance in which so many Americans [in the underclass] suffer such unspeakable degradation. The efforts of various conservative writers to attribute this deep-seated, complex problem to the disincentives of federal assistance programs, the so-called pathologies of black culture, or the cognitive disabilities of certain groups of Americans seem designed mainly to rationalize their disengagement from it. Where is their passion? Where is their moral outrage?

Put simply, it wouldn't be a bad thing if conservatives brought not only more light, but more heat, to these debates.

Through The Lens Of Culture

By raising the stewardship issue, the newcomers highlight the need to stretch the inequality discussion beyond economics to culture. Putting on "cultural eyeglasses" helps us see beyond the less significant, "surface" issues in the conversation to deeper underlying societal problems.

Consider, for example, the issue of CEO compensation. What is most disturbing is not the straightforward economic issue: that a particular CEO makes 200 times more than his employees. The most disturbing issue is cultural: that the norms of corporate life have changed in such a way that some companies feel no obligation to share their prosperity with their employees. Thus far participants in the inequality conversation haven't recognized this as a cultural problem. An article in Harper's argued:

In the years after World War II a distinct relationship was formed between employers and employees. It was built on several implicit assumptions: the employment relationship should be long-term; good performance should be rewarded with promotion; and management should take care of employees. In recent years, however, business realities have changed, calling these assumptions into question.

But have "business realities" alone created the "low-road" corporation--or, for that matter, the self-seeking and lazy employee popularized in the "Dilbert" comic strip? Or are these phenomena rooted in something deeper, such as the cultural problems of hyperindividualism, the loss of moral authority, the worship of choice, and the deterioration of community? Management isn't loyal to employees: executives are looking out for "number one," and they cannot imagine that business is an exercise in the stewardship of human and material resources as well as a profit-making venture. Most employees aren't loyal to their companies either: having drunk deeply at our culture's wells, they worship mobility, novelty, and personal freedom. If in the culture at large the words sacrifice, responsibility, and commonweal have passed from our vocabulary, should we be surprised at the deterioration of labor-management relations? We should ask whether employers and employees of a different cultural moment--say, the 1950s--if transported into today's economic conditions (global competition, the frenzied pace of technological advance, free trade) would respond the way current employers and employees are responding. I'd guess that they would not, because their decisions would be rooted in a different set of moral-cultural values.

Looking through the lens of culture also helps us to see the problems with today's definitions of "success." Liberals point to wage data and groan that workers cannot succeed. Conservatives counter with consumption data showing that the material standards of living for most Americans is at an all-time high; therefore, "success" is still within the average Joe's grasp. A young scholar from Princeton offers a more penetrating analysis of these issues when he writes:

Economic inequality in America has always existed. What has changed is that economic inequality is increasing at precisely the point when meaning and happiness are increasingly determined by the vanities of the world: the desire for fame, the lust for sensation, and the will to power. The alternative sources of meaning and happiness--religion, ethnicity, neighborhood, and family--that mitigated the dramatic inequality of, say, early twentieth century America are disappearing.

What is really dangerous today is not that a big gap between the rich and the poor makes "success" elusive to so many people. What's disturbing is that so many are reaching for such a truncated notion of success. Moreover, those striving for more wealth aren't the only ones who hold this impoverished understanding of success. Apparently, those who have already attained great riches aren't looking any further for meaning and satisfaction. As an insightful essay in the New York Times Magazine explained it, "The rich man's identity is less diversified than ever before: he is distinguished only by his commercial acumen as measured by his net worth."

This is an extremely sobering prospect. If the author is correct in asserting that "the old-money concern with social reputation has been transformed into a new-money concern for commercial reputation," then we are witnessing the death of noblesse oblige. Today many people are upset simply because the rich possess so much wealth. But ought we not be more concerned about the attitude that the rich have toward their wealth, and how that attitude affects how they choose to spend it?

A Healthy Unsettledness

The newcomers have contributed enormously to the inequality discussion. There's a danger, though, in assuming that their comments have resolved the inequality issue and that we can now shelve the discussion. Their correctives should not be allowed to squelch the legitimate concerns the inequality conversation has surfaced. For example, liberals in the debate are right to urge us to avoid evaluating the economy exclusively by its aggregate performance. Doing so masks the genuine struggles of some groups. Disaggregating the data shows that the poorly educated are faring poorly (which isn't terribly revealing) and that even high-school graduates who take some college courses aren't doing so well (which is revealing). This information is helpful to all who work among the economically disadvantaged. It is useful for the urban ministry I direct. It reminds me that while our GED program for adult students is important, to improve our students' earnings prospects in a substantial way, we will have to design ways to help them receive a college degree or technical training that leads to solid employment prospects.

We should also heed the warning that America is experiencing a rise in "neo-feudalism."

The evidence for an increasing segregation by class is scanty but must not be dismissed. For if something like a "secession of the successful" is afoot, we've got a real problem. Secession is bad for the rich, bad for the poor, and bad for American society. It severs the rich from the realities of poverty and despair in America. It creates an atmosphere that dehumanizes the poor and demonizes the rich. It shuts the poor out, away from the people and resources that could help them climb out of poverty. It denies us all the enrichment and challenge that come from building relationships across racial, class, and socioeconomic divides. It exacerbates racial tensions. And it drives a stake in the heart of civic conscientiousness.

The value of the inequality conversation is personalized for me by my relationship with Mrs. Grey (not her real name). A fifty-something African-American mother of three, Mrs. Grey has worked 25 years in the cafeteria of a local nursing home, during which time she has climbed her way up to an $18,000 annual salary. I made $1,000 more than that during my second year out of college. And I was 22, without a family to raise. Perhaps there is nothing inherently unjust in the discrepancy between my earning power and Mrs. Grey's. But the reality of that discrepancy unsettles me. It reminds me that, although social mobility is excellent in America, there are some decent, honest, hard-working, undereducated strivers out there who have difficulty moving beyond the status of "working poor." And the rest of us ought not to forget them. Perhaps there is a place for a conversation about income inequality after all--especially a conversation that is reformed, enriched, and more empirically sound.

Amy L. Sherman is director of Urban Ministry at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her most recent book is Restorers of Hope: Reaching the Poor in Your Community with Church-based Programs That Work (Crossway).

Selected Books and Essays Discussed in this Article

"All Worked Up," The New Yorker (April 22, 1996), pp. 51-55.

Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society

(Free Press, 1995) 272 pp.; $25.

Michael Lind, The Next American Nation (Free Press, 1995). 436 pp.; $25.

"Payday Mayday," The American Enterprise (Sept./Oct. 1995) pp. 44-48.

Rising Tides, Sinking Wages." The American Prospect (Fall 1995) pp. 60-64.

Special section: "Does America Still Work?" Harper's Magazine (May 1996).

Special section: "Economic Anxiety?" The American Enterprise (July/August

1996).

Special section: "The Great Divide," Wall Street Journal (April 11, 1995).

Special section: "The New Rich," The New York Times Magazine, (November 19,

1995).

Special section: "To Have and Have Not," Harper's Magazine (June 1995).

Edward N. Wolff, Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America (Twentieth Century Fund, 1995). 93 pp.; $7.95, paper.

Workers Take It on the Chin," U.S. News & World Report (January 22, 1996),

pp. 44-46.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books and Culture Magazine. July/August, Vol. 3, No. 4, Page 3

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