I am (generally) a big fan of Paul Krugman. I probably don’t qualify as an out and out Krugmaniac, but most of the time I’m pretty Krugmany, if you know what I mean. I even subscribe to his newsletter, and why not? Because it’s free! (In your face, Milton Friedman!)
But—and clearly there’s a “but” here—I have a bone to pick with Paul over one of his most recent missives—the one headed, most snappily—"Hypocrisy, meet stupidity”, Paul, after slapping around both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (a little), goes on about this and that and then offers up a link, to wit:
Canada has much higher social mobility than the U.S. — children born to low-income families have a much better chance of moving up the ladder. As my Stone Center colleague Miles Corak writes, a lot of the difference is explained by Canada’s willingness to spend money helping the poor.
Well, if you follow this link, you’ll get to Dr. Corak’s paper, posted on his site, “Economics for Public Policy”, The “middle class” is within easier reach for low income Canadian children, than it is for low income Americans, and you’ll get this chart:
Dr. Corak explains the chart as follows: “Canadian children raised by parents with incomes at the bottom 10 percent can expect to be earning enough as a young adult to place them much higher, above the 40th rung of a 100 rung income ladder, and significantly higher than their American counterparts. To reach a similar point on the income ladder an American child would have to have parents who ranked as high as the 39th percentile.”
Well, true enough, according to Dr. Corak’s data, whose validity I am not competent to dispute, but I will dispute the integrity of his graphic. You will note that the horizontal legend runs from 0 to 100. The vertical, however, runs from 30 to 70, making the 10 percentile gap between outcomes for American versus Canadian children look more than twice as large, as judged by the eye rather than the brain. In fact, a hurried glance suggests that American children born into the bottom 10th percentile just stay there, while their Canadian brethren sprint 40 rungs ahead.
I believe I was in high school that I stumbled across a little book called How to Lie With Statistics,1 which contains about 75% of the information you can find in Edward Tuft’s pretentious cash cow, The Visual Presentation of Quantitative Information, and which describes Dr. Corak’s little hustle to a tee, although it (possibly) was not intentional. People have a natural tendency to make their findings look as dramatic as possible—“This proves my point!”—but Dr. Corak is a Ph.D., after all, and Ph.D.s are supposed to know about these things. When I worked under contract with the National Center for Education Statistics (with a BA in English, not a Ph.D. in anything) within the U.S. Department of Education (for 19 years), we had a rule that all charts had to show the “bottom” (typically 0 but not necessarily) and the top (often 100 but often not), with broken lines to indicate omitted ranges. These are often overlooked anyway, but at least some measure of care and integrity is maintained.
Well, that’s a lot of shouting about one little graphic, but I’m just getting started (to shout). I was particularly intrigued by Dr. Krugman’s second sentence, “As my Stone Center colleague Miles Corak writes, a lot of the difference is explained by Canada’s willingness to spend money helping the poor.” Maybe Dr. Corak wrote that somewhere, but I couldn’t find it in the post that Dr. Krugman linked to, nor in any of the links that Dr. Coark included in his post. However, if you do some searching, you’ll come across the full paper, “Intergenerational Mobility between and within Canada and the United States”, by Marie Connolly, Miles Corak, and Catherine Haeck, which includes the following remark about why the two countries differ:
The distinct difference between the countries is the significant pockets of very low bottom to top quintile mobility in parts of the southern states [of the U.S., of course]. This is a concentrated area of low upward mobility covering a significant proportion of the population that does not have a parallel in Canada, or at least to the extent it does covers a rather small proportion of the Canadian population.
In other words, the distinct difference between the two countries is slavery. Despite all the talk about “colonialism” these days, the treatment of nonwhite peoples by the European conquerors shapes the history of the entire western hemisphere to a degree that is still rarely recognized. Much of the “turbulence” of Latin American history is due to the fact that until the years following World War II, almost all the economic, social, and political power was in the hands of a tiny European or quasi-European elite, differentiated from the mass of the population largely along racial lines. The actual makeup of populations varies significantly from one Latin American country to the next, but racial distinctions are always significant.
Canada, as the Connolly, Corak, and Haeck paper suggests, has the smallest “traditional” nonwhite population (I’m excluding, of course, the recent large immigrations from Asia)—4.3%, according to the most recent Canadian census.2 The U.S. has a Native American population of about 1 percent and a black population of about 15 percent, with a still growing Hispanic population of about 18 percent. Neither of these latter two populations has any parallel in Canada.
People like Dr. Krugman often wonder, wistfully, why there never was a socialist movement in the United States It might be more profitable to wonder why there is no socialist movement anywhere these days, but I can answer the former question: for two reasons, one good and one bad, but both unpalatable to traditional liberals.
The good reason is that life was better in America than in Europe for the poor—the poor European, at least. Uniforms from the American Revolution show that enlisted men (“common men”) were as tall as officers, a phenomenon that did not start appearing in Europe until the 1960s. It’s true that life for the working class in the U.S. was harsh, surely until the 1950s, but in Europe it was much harsher.
The second reason is that life was not better in America than Europe for blacks—it was worse. Slavery was the worst of all, of course, but even after slavery ended racism was endemic throughout American society. The American labor movement was, prior to World War II, almost entirely and explicitly for white workers only. The “No Irish Need Apply”3 signs came down slowly, but the “No Blacks Need Apply” never did. Organized labor could barely take root in the South at all, because the very thought of poor blacks and whites combining drove the ruling class whites into a frenzy, causing a largely informal form of social segregation to be institutionalized during the Populist Era into an explicit one, a process entirely endorsed by poor whites, their racial prejudice proving stronger than their supposed economic interests, to the intense frustration of liberal theorists. In fact, segregation in the workplace was maintained informally in the North almost as efficiently as it was formally in the South, though in the North at least white workers could enjoy the benefits of unionization.4
Much has been done in the area of race relations, but, judging from the 150-odd studies Radley Balko has collected demonstrating the racial bias in America’s criminal justice system, it seems we have a ways to go. As Radley’s many studies suggest, one way we could make it easier for blacks to advance economically is to stop throwing them in jail at the drop of a hat—often done not for racist reasons, but via a general policy of cash-hungry local and state governments to look for ways to squeeze money out of anyone violating a wide host of trivial offenses, both by multiplying offenses and by increasing fines.
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1. By Darrell Huff, published in 1954 and still available.
2. Francophone Canadians, of course, have their own story to tell, and I will leave it to them to tell it.
3. There was an interesting historical debate over whether “NINA” signs ever existed, with the answer, supplied by high school preppies, being emphatically “yes”! At the time, I wondered why no one ever thought to consult Mark Twain’s Roughing It, where it is said of Buck Fanshaw, an outstanding ruffian, “His word was, ‘No Irish need apply’.”
4. It’s been abundantly proved that liberals in Congress acquiesced in social legislation that was racist in effect (and, in the case of federal housing assistance, explicitly racist) prior to the sixties. They could do so in relative good conscience, particularly in the early fifties, before the real migration of blacks out of the South began, because, except in a few areas in some big cities, their constituents were very largely white. I’ve discussed the phenomenon of “white socialism” several times
