{"id":6884,"date":"2017-07-05T06:37:27","date_gmt":"2017-07-05T12:37:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=6884"},"modified":"2017-07-04T23:36:56","modified_gmt":"2017-07-05T05:36:56","slug":"library-dream-hoarders-richard-v-reeves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/07\/library-dream-hoarders-richard-v-reeves.html","title":{"rendered":"From the library: Dream Hoarders, by Richard V. Reeves"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"By<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s how I spent the 4th of July: \u00a0I spent the morning being lazy, ultimately getting around to the overdue bill-paying, then, in the afternoon, logged on and put in some work hours while my youngest son was playing at a friend\u2019s house (the older two and my husband are away on a Boy Scout trip), and in the evening watched Chess in Concert<\/a> (that is, the DVD from the library) \u2013 great music, muddled plot \u2013 and just now decided to suck it up and borrow The Dream Hoarders as an e-book, having blogged about it<\/a>\u00a0already but still being on the hold list for the paper copy at the library, even though as a general rule I hate reading e-books, and now feel obliged to make notes as I go because the e-book format doesn\u2019t lend itself to flipping through to summarize afterwards.<\/p>\n

So to start with, Reeves defines his targets as the \u201cupper middle class\u201d \u2013 households with income above $112,000, the top quintile \u2013 and says that, despite our hand-wringing over the top 1%, the top 20% have actually done very well for themselves in recent decades, for a couple reasons: \u00a0education\/skills have become hugely important,UMC households are, in general, very stable with much lower rates of divorce\/single parenting, and assortive mating means that high-income men are increasingly paired with high-income women. \u00a0The affluent are also increasingly likely to live in income-segregated neighborhoods, and in a variety of other ways, including health and life expectancy, they are pulling away from everyone else.<\/p>\n

Reeves then traces the advantages that UMC children have relative to the poor: \u00a0to begin with, they are the product of planned pregnancies, and mothers who make special efforts to ensure their and their babies\u2019 health. \u00a0These parents spend more time talking to their preschool and school-aged children, they supervise their homework, they teach them a strong work ethic. \u00a0They provide enrichment opportunities \u2013 books, trips, and so on. \u00a0Educated mothers are even more likely to stay at home and parent full-time than the economic models say they \u201cshould.\u201d \u00a0UMC parents are also more likely to choose a school for their child other than the default neighborhood public school, or to choose homeschooling; by high school, 18% of UMC children attend a private high school, vs. 9% for the middle 40% and 4% for the bottom 40%. \u00a0Of those at public schools, they are (no surprise) disproportionately likely to be living in school districts with high-performing public schools with higher-quality teachers. \u00a0 \u00a0UMC parents are also more likely to volunteer at their children\u2019s school and support PTA groups.<\/p>\n

(Note that Reeves says that he is\u00a0\u201cblown away by how good the teachers are\u201d at his children\u2019s public high school, but he subsequently references his child having attended school in Bethesda, Maryland. \u00a0This was ranked by CNN as the nation\u2019s \u201ctop earning town\u201d in 2012<\/a>, which suggests that, whatever his data may show about the top quintile, his own perceptions in his daily life are warped and he perceives this group as more moneyed, on average, than they actually are.)<\/p>\n

Upon reaching college, UMC children expect not just to get a four-year degree, but surveys show half expect a graduate degree too. \u00a0And private schools have the resources and connections to help students get admission where they want. \u00a0In addition, \u201cmany affluent parents hire college admissions consultants.\u201d \u00a0(Yep, looks like an instance where the people Reeves knows in his everyday life warp his sense of what \u201cupper middle class\u201d life is like for most people.) \u00a0The net result: \u00a0statistically, 60% of UMC children get bachelor degrees by age 25, compared to 33% of the middle 40% and 10% of the bottom 40%. \u00a0(To be honest, while there is a clear difference, it doesn\u2019t make Reeves\u2019 case as strongly as he thinks, if 40% of UMC children don\u2019t succeed in fulfilling their parents\u2019 expectations.)<\/p>\n

Reeves then addresses the type of college those kids attend, and, to be sure, UMC children are far more likey to attend Ivy or other elite schools, or selective schools in general (though as I\u2019m learning, \u201cselective\u201d schools have a pretty wide definition, as nearly all four-year schools seem to have this label). \u00a0To be honest, I can\u2019t get all that upset about the question of whether UMC children are disproportionately likely to attend elite schools, given that fewer than 10% (eyeballing a graph without numbers) of UMC college-attenders do so in the first place.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the end result? \u00a0Income mobility has been decreasing in recent decades: \u00a0poor children are more likely to become poor adults, and UMC children, to be UMC adults. \u00a0Reeves writes, \u201cif you really want a fairer and ore socially mobile society, there is no avoiding an uncomfortable, attendant fact. \u00a0More of our own kids will have to be downwardly mobile.\u201d \u00a0Of course, this is measured purely in terms of relative wealth, and it is true that poor kids rise to the top quintile without some in the top dropping down \u2014 but, at the same time, this is only an issue if we\u2019re measuring relative wealth distribution. \u00a0There\u2019s no reason why overall income levels in the country can\u2019t increase, and the percentage of people earning a \u201cmiddle-class income\u201d in terms of ability to afford \u201cmiddle class comforts\u201d can\u2019t increase, even if, measuring by quintiles, you can only ever have a fixed share of the population in these groupings.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Reeves does have a fair point when he writes:<\/p>\n

My intuition is that upper middle-class adults would be more supportive of redistributive policies and institutions if they were less certain where there own children \u2013 and by extension, grandchildren \u2013 were going to end up. . . .<\/p>\n

As the consequences of falling out of the upper middle class have worsened, so the incentives of the upper middle class to keep themselves, and their children, up at the top have strengthened. . . .<\/p>\n

A vicious cycle has been created. \u00a0Rising inequality means that those who fall out of the upper middle class have a longer drop. \u00a0Parents, then, have both the resources and motivation to put a glass floor underneath our children, doing whatever we can, including hoarding opportunities, to reduce their risk of being downwardly mobile.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Finally, in chapter 6, Reeves gets to the three actions that he calls \u201copportunity hoarding\u201d: \u00a0exclusionary zoning, unfairness in college admissions, and the allocation of unpaid internships.<\/p>\n

Now, Reeves is careful to say that there is a real difference between good parenting and all the workaday efforts to ensure your kids are well-prepared for life, and \u201copportunity hoarding,\u201d which \u201ctakes place when valuable, scare opportunities are allocated in an anticompetitive manner: \u00a0that is, influenced by factors unrelated to an individual\u2019s performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cExclusionary zoning<\/strong>\u201d is hoarding because \u201cmany local ordinances, especially those containing strict rules on density, are anticompetitive barriers around the borders of upper middle-class neighborhoods.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, I believe that density restrictions are harmful because they escalate the cost of housing across the board unnaturally, but that doesn\u2019t seem to be entirely what Reeves is getting at, and his label of \u201choarding\u201d seems on shakier ground:<\/p>\n

Economic sorting at the neighborhood level leads to social sorting in terms of schools, churches, and community groups. \u00a0This means fewer interactions and social ties across social classes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, if I follow him correctly, what\u2019s being hoarded isn\u2019t the ground upon which housing could be built, but the UMC, in segregating themselves, are hoarding all the social capital, the connections, the \u201cI know someone who works in that field you think you\u2019re interested in\u201d opportunities.<\/p>\n

Reeves\u2019 second type of hoarding is around college admissions<\/strong>. UMC applicants are advantaged in multiple ways: \u00a0students who visit campus (more possible, for prospective students from out of state, if you\u2019ve got money) are favored, students who apply early (which Reeves suggests isn\u2019t possible if you need financial aid \u2013 I think he\u2019s talking about an elite school version where you have to commit to the school right away) are advantaged. \u00a0Students where one parent is an alumnus\/a or a donor are advantaged.<\/p>\n

Apparently, though, colleges don\u2019t report the sort of data that would make it possible to document the effect that legacy preferences have, with few exceptions \u2014 he provides a table showing that admission rates for legacies at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown and Stanford is 2 \u2013 3 times higher than the general admission rate.<\/p>\n

Now, maybe in Reeves\u2019 world, it\u2019s a really big deal for kids to attend these elitest of the elite schools, so that his perception is distorted. I just don\u2019t care all that much whether these schools want to preserve \u201cfamily traditions\u201d of attendance, as is the case around here with the clearly less exclusive\u00a0but still clearly selective University of Notre Dame. \u00a0The much bigger issue is not what families do but the fact that too many employers grant their own preferences for graduates from these elite schools, meaning that, from what I understand, admission is really all that matters to be virtually guaranteed at least a major leg up on a high-paying career.<\/p>\n

Reeves\u2019 third hoarding is around jobseeking<\/strong>. \u00a0He starts with the abominable \u201ctake our kids to work day\u201d (which was bizarre from its very conception \u2013 why do children of UMC women need help envisioning at a young age having a career as an adult?) and rightly mentions that children learn very little by visiting their own parents\u2019 workplaces, and moves on to railing against the unpaid internship. \u00a0Here his data seems a bit out-dated, citing a 2011 book (Intern Nation<\/em>) and a 2012 survey, then muddying the argument a bit more by mixing together internships at auditing firms and Goldman Sachs (these are surely all not just paid, but far better paying than a typical summer job a college student might have, and likely selected through a formal campus interviewing process rather than \u201cI know a guy\u201d) and internships at government agencies.<\/p>\n

Now, yesterday I spent more time than I should have trying to find a blog post that I thought I had written on the topic, but this was in the news a couple year ago, and I thought the government was increasing its enforcement of the relevant wage laws, which prohibit for-profit entities from hiring unpaid interns. \u00a0But Reeves\u2019 instances of unpaid internships unfairly doled out to the connected are predominantly internships in government offices \u2014 New York City Hall, the White House, Congress, etc., which means that this really turns into a matter of good government, or lack thereof.<\/p>\n

So we\u2019re nearly at the end of the book, and these three items seem, in the end, relatively small. \u00a0What\u2019s odder is how he ends the book, with four other \u201csolutions\u201d that have nothing to do with \u201choarding\u201d but are simply ways to spend more money \u00a0with the objective of improving outcomes for poor kids:<\/p>\n