Writing in National Review Online, political analyst Ryan Streeter posits that the nation’s economic problems are in essence a symptom of cultural deficiencies. It’s an interesting premise that brings up important issues, and I think Streeter effectively captures some of the impulses and concerns that animate the Occupy Wall Street movement:
[W]e seem to be going through a “crisis of aspiration” in America that was underway before the recession. This crisis has sources that are deeper than any jobs plan can address—at least in the near term.
A crisis of aspiration is not merely a crisis of ambition to pursue the American Dream, though it certainly includes that. It is also a crisis rooted in demographic realities and policy failures that make aspiring to a better life harder than it used to be, and not even worth the effort for some people. Jobs plans can help, but we need something more like a cultural renewal to reverse the trends that threaten America’s role as the world’s number-one “aspiration nation.”
Skipping over the unspecified policy failures he mentions and arguing that “jobs are not enough,” Streeter (a very sharp analyst and a personal friend of mine) then outlines several economic problems which indicate this crisis of aspiration, such as decreasing job-creation by new enterprises, slow new-business creation, the declining employment rate (percent of the population in full-time jobs), and so on.
Interestingly, however, except possibly for his observation that “Households aren’t forming the way they used to” and related thoughts about churchgoing and completing education among the lower-middle class, all the examples of dysfunction Streeter provides (as noted in the previous paragraph) are instances of economic deficiencies, not social or cultural decadence. And even the reduced incidences of young people forming households and finishing their education have an obvious likely economic foundation: the difficulty in landing good jobs in which an individual can expect sufficient loyalty from his or her employer or enough alternative employment available in the market to allow for one to make a commitment to a bourgeois life.
The bourgeois life, after all, depends on work and investment, two things that have been of steadily declining security in the U.S. economy of the past decade.
Nonetheless, Streeter argues that social and cultural problems are behind much of the past decade’s economic stagnation:
the traditional pillars of upward mobility in America—family, work, and an enterprising spirit—were beginning to crack for some time before the economy tanked. The cracks didn’t happen all at the same time, or in the same way, but their parallel trajectories at least suggest a loss of confidence in the future or, at times, even a kind of nonchalance about it, among too many Americans.
One suspects that Streeter is thinking in particular of the Occupy Wall Street crowd as exemplifying that trend, and he may be right about them. But that is a vanishingly small group of people.
The really important question is the direction of causality for the culture as a whole: are young people having trouble adopting bourgeois values because they have been educated into indolence or because the job market is weak and they find it increasingly difficult to obtain the fundamental element in creating a bourgeois life—a good and steady job?
Certainly no one is more attuned to the importance of culture in building an economy and good political choices on the part of the public than we at The American Culture, and I have no great belief in Economic Man (the notion that people tend to make choices based in great part on their perceptions of the likely affect on their economic condition). Yet I think that the causality is the opposite direction from the way Streeter sees it. I think that the bad economy of the past decade has hit the nation’s young people hard, and even those that do see much good in bourgeois values are finding it very difficult to implement them in their own lives.
Streeter states that the crisis of aspiration he identifies predates the latest recession. That is probably true. But the U.S. economy has been weak for more than a decade, not just since the recession (and thus can explain the crisis predating the recession). The figures show, for example, that personal income in the United States has shrunk since the year 2000, and the unemployment numbers among the young have been on a long slide. Have these things been caused by young people’s failure to form families—or are they in fact the very reason young people are finding it hard to form families? Until evidence is provided to show that young people are refusing jobs in great numbers, I am inclined to believe that the latter is the case.
To me, there is a much more obvious cause of the bad economy than the decision of young people to put off forming families: the burden of government on society and the economy has been increasing rapidly since the latter years of the Clinton administration, a process that worsened during the Bush administration and accelerated greatly in the Obama years. Economic stagnation always has its worst employment effects on those with the fewest skills and experience: the poor and the young.
To be sure, the nation’s young people have been given a bad deal by our public schools—their heads stuffed with relativism, pitiful hatred of ambition and diminution of real accomplishments (the “everybody gets a trophy” syndrome), excessive inflation of self-esteem, and the like. It’s really something of a disgrace, in fact. They have probably assimilated these ideas to a significant extent. But it seems to me that regardless of whether they want to live lives of self-reliance and achievement, it is very difficult for today’s ill-educated young person to accomplish that in such a dreary, stagnant economy.
Thus I would suggest that we fix the economy and the nation’s education system (by allowing families real choice in where their kids go to school), and let today’s young people find their way in a growing economy that at least makes self-reliance possible and rewards achievement. If they refuse the offer and decide to continue living with their parents and protesting against the villainous “1 percent” that is the central theme of President Obama’s perpetual reelection campaign, their parents will have a right to criticize them and hold them accountable. The rest of us might well then absent ourselves from the discussion.
In the meantime, I am disinclined to accommodate any excuses for the federal, state, and local governments’ steady destruction of the economy and our society through the economic equivalent of witch-pressing. Fix the economy, I say, and the nation’s young people will be just fine. I may be wrong about that, but I am certain of one thing: failure to fix the economy ensures that a large proportion of the nation’s young adults will find their aspirations crushed.
Streeter acknowledges the importance of economic growth in the development of good personal character, even as he emphasizes a need for social and cultural reform (a matter on which I agree with him):
We need leaders at all levels who are willing to challenge our schools, civil-society organizations, higher-education institutions, and investors and businesses to do all they can to reverse our aspirational decline, just as much as we need politicians to enact the reforms needed to make aspiration worth the effort once again.
Those would all be jolly good things to have, but the real issue for me is causality: What bad things are preventing what good things from happening? In my estimation, it is largely a matter of bad government policies eating away at the economy such that aspiration is indeed perceived as not “worth the effort” for many a perfectly rational young person today.
Streeter has done a very good thing in his essay in reminding us of the connection between culture and the economy, even though I think that what he sees as the biggest problem is in fact just a major symptom of the real catastrophe. The economic destruction perpetrated by all levels of government in the United States in the past dozen years or so is undermining young people’s ability to see a decent future for themselves. It is also doing that to their elders.
Although it is not the nation’s only cultural problem by any means, the governments’ strangling of the economy is clearly eroding the foundations of the nation’s culture. That is a tragedy—or more accurately, a monumental crime.