Economics or Culture?

I was pleased to come across an editorial in last Wednesday’s (3/18/2015) Raleigh News and Observer that provides further evidence in support of the key point made in my 3/10/2015 post, Poverty/Inequality Update #2.  The editorial by Ross Dothat poses the question - “Is the social crisis among America”s poor and working class - the collapse of the two-parent family, the weakening of communal ties - best understood as a problem of economics or of culture?”  Referencing Charles Murray’s analysis in “Coming Apart” and Robert Putnam’s recent book, “Our Kids”,  Dothat suggests that “it would take a cultural counterrevolution to bring back the stable working class families of an earlier America.”

Mr. Dothat points out that in spite of significant changes that have taken place in the U.S. economy such as deindustrialization and shift to a service economy which has favored women and made low-skilled men less marriageable, “lower-income Americans have more money, experience less poverty and receive far more safety-net support than their grandparents ever did.”  In other words, as Mr. Dothat states “In a substantially poorer American past with a much thinner safety net, lower-income Americans found a way to cultivate monogamy, fidelity, sobriety and thrift to an extent that they have not in our richer, higher-spending present.”  The bottom line is “however much money matters, something else is clearly going on.”

The editorial then proposes that the something else is a “dramatic social fragmentation among vulnerable populations” in the wake of the 1960s cultural revolution and a dramatically more permissive society.  However, rather than blaming the poor for making bad moral choices, he places the greater part of the blame on the upper class for “failing to take any moral responsibility (in the schools it runs, the mass entertainment it produces, the social agenda it favors) for the effects of permissiveness on the less-savvy, the less protected, the kids who don’t have helicopter parents turning off the television or firewalling the porn.”  

If we accept the above analysis, in order to resolve the existing tragedy of “Fishtown”, we need to answer the following two questions.  Can we ever achieve a counterrevolution and bring back the stable working class families of an earlier America and, if so, how can this be accomplished?  We may never succeed in putting the genie back in the bottle.  The cultural forces that have led to the current situation may be as difficult to reverse as stoping a snow ball from rolling downhill  and cause it to roll back uphill.  Do those of us with the education and the financial resources have the will and the ability to reverse the run away permissiveness rampant in our society today?  It would require us to do a far better job of monitoring behavior in our schools and by rejecting the trash entertainment currently being fed to us and our children by Hollywood and the TV producers.  How can we back away from a seemingly insatiable public appetite for sex and violence in our entertainment and, of particular importance,  mitigate the serious problem of substance abuse that devastates the lives of so many.  We need to refocus on  those four virtues specified by the founders of our nation as being essential for the success of a society based on individual freedom and responsibility, i.e., integrity, industriousness, marriage and religiosity.  I believe that it can be done but I have serious doubts that it ever will be done.