Okay, perhaps I should have said “Paul Krugman has a far more sophisticated grasp of the uniquely divided nature of the American working class than he had demonstrated in many of his previous public comments”, but heads like that don’t get the clicks, and I don’t have to tell you that “Literature R Us”, frequently referred to as “Click Bait R Us”, both in the Valley and on the Street, is all about the clicks.
Anyway, if you follow LRU at all, you may have come across posts like “Uh, Professor Krugman, I have a question.”, in which I excoriated Dr. Krugman, as I am so often wont to do, for sighing, as he is so often wont to do, in an issue of his weekly newsletter, over the fact that Canada is so much “better” than the U.S.:
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.
In my post, I went on to argue that, if you followed the link Dr. Krugman gave, and read Dr. Corak’s paper, you might reach the conclusion that Dr. Corark’s findings didn’t entirely justify Dr. Krugman’s complaint. And I also went on to say, a bit scornfully, “People like Dr. Krugman often wonder, wistfully, why there never was a socialist movement in the United States”, and went still further on to supply an answer—that the American working class was divided racially, a divide that was never really healed, thanks very largely to white bigotry.
Well, as it turns out, Dr. Krugman, if not ahead of me, was very largely abreast of me, for in his latest newsletter, circa June 2, he not only drops that bomb, but links to a 2001 study by Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote titled Why Doesn’t The US Have A European-Style Welfare State?, whose abstract reads as follows:
European countries are much more generous to the poor relative to the US level of generosity. Economic models suggest that redistribution is a function of the variance and skewness of the pre-tax income distribution, the volatility of income (perhaps because of trade shocks), the social costs of taxation and the expected income mobility of the median voter. None of these factors appear to explain the differences between the US and Europe. Instead, the differences appear to be the result of racial heterogeneity in the US and American political institutions. Racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters. American political institutions limited the growth of a socialist party, and more generally limited the political power of the poor.
So the good doc knew all along!
Afterwords
In my own piece, I argued that another reason why socialism never took root in the U.S. is that, while life in the U.S. for the working class was certainly far harsher than anything experienced today, it was far better than the life endured by the European working class. Furthermore, class divisions in the U.S., while certainly visible, are far less so than in Europe, or, really, any other major country. We never had a landowning ruling class with remotely the power and endurance of that of other countries, power that lasted for centuries and shaped every cultural institution.1
I have argued elsewhere that European socialism itself was a “moment”, largely prompted by the advantage Europe possessed as being, by and large, a “modern” society in a world that was largely pre-modern, coupled with the special surge in economic growth that occurred when Europe finally stopped trying to destroy itself in the first half of the 20th century. Since then, we have seen the resurgence of capitalism, to the dismay of Dr. Krugman and others, who saw in socialism the opportunity of the rule of the technocrats like themselves. And this is the ultimate reason that liberals like Dr. Krugman so bitterly resent the failure of socialism in the U.S.—because it denies them the opportunity to be in charge. Yet, as Dr. Krugman has so often so bitterly charged, those blessed European technocrats are always fucking up, over and over again!
1. It’s certainly “arguable” that the “Virginia Dynasty” of presidents, aka “the wig men”, constituted a land-owning elite, but they didn’t own all the land, and, anyway, both wigs and Virginians disappeared from the White House after the 1820s.
