RUTHFULLY YOURS

Reeves is on firm ground in describing the charmed life lived by the upper fifth of society. People in this echelon have pulled away from the rest, with their earnings and wealth steadily increasing in recent decades relative to the larger population. Compared with those lower down on the income scale, those at the top enjoy stable marriages, good health, longevity, safe neighborhoods, superior schools, and steady employment. But according to Reeves, these upper-middle-class Americans have become “dream hoarders.” They have figured out how to preserve their status and pass it on to their offspring. Thanks in no small part to their parents’ advantages, as well as a host of social practices and public policies, the children born to this class are more likely than their peers to graduate from college, especially a selective or prestigious one; attain good jobs; and earn top-quintile incomes themselves. Meanwhile, children born lower on the economic scale struggle to rise, with most never making it into the top 20 percent. To Reeves, this fact alone is deeply unfair and represents a failure of the American Dream.

Dream Hoarders is not just a j’accuse, but a call to action. Something must be done to clear the channels of opportunity, and Reeves recommends that key aspects of private conduct and public policy be structured in service of that goal. But his desire to speed the path upward runs into some serious impediments.

Theorists have long acknowledged, and Reeves agrees, that the main obstacle to social mobility, and indeed to the very existence of a level playing field, is that powerful machine of social reproduction, the family. Compared with those who have less income and education, affluent parents are blessed with a host of advantages, many of which they secure through their choices about how to live their lives. As Charles Murray has noted in his magisterial Coming Apart (to which Reeves only alludes), people in the top tiers are more likely to be well-educated, get and stay married, be dedicated and attentive parents, work hard at their jobs, obey the law, and invest in their communities. They live healthier, more orderly, and longer lives. By contrast, the habits, behaviors, and communities of those lower down on the American totem pole are fast deteriorating, and these trends tell on their children.Reeves recognizes that these developments are hard to arrest. And he concedes he must meet the challenge of deciding what counts as a legitimate versus an illegitimate advantage, and thus what changes he is willing to recommend to give the less well-off a leg up and make good on his conception of fair opportunity.

He is of two minds about the habits and practices of the upper middle class. He praises affluent parents for their devotion and diligence and the personal attention they lavish on their children, but is concerned that these very virtues tilt the playing field. He doesn’t specify precisely which of their efforts he would leave undisturbed, but they can be surmised from the reforms he proposes. Seeking out safe and pleasant neighborhoods, engaging in enriching activities (including paying for tutoring, lessons, and private schools), helping with homework and college applications, and throwing cash in children’s direction for college, summer support, and even subsidies beyond graduation, would appear to be allowed. But other now-commonplace parental interventions—such as pulling strings to procure jobs—would not.

Reeves also devotes considerable attention to policies and practices that assist well-off families in securing their perch. His main targets are exclusionary zoning, legacy admissions, and unpaid internships. He also provides a familiar laundry list of other proposals, including supplying low-cost, long-term contraception, funding free SAT preparation, eliminating tax credits and savings plans used primarily by higher-income families, and improving lower-income schools by paying teachers more or luring them into less affluent communities.

But is there any reason to believe that these measures will make much difference, especially against the untouchable benefits that privileged parents personally provide? Assessing effects requires taking a harder look at the problem Reeves is purporting to solve.

Reeves claims that the prospects for upward mobility are dismal and deteriorating, at least compared with his benchmark ideal of random sorting, which would have only a fifth of children from each quintile staying where they are. Based on that, he cites data showing that our society has both a “glass ceiling” and a “glass floor”—with more than 20 percent of children born at the top staying there, and significantly fewer in the lower tiers managing to rise. He is also concerned with differences in educational prospects that correspond to income. As befits a member of the elite knowledge class, he has a college fixation and is especially obsessed with children’s unequal chances of ending up at a “selective” college. But the data he cites on educational opportunity and income mobility tell a mixed and equivocal story—one less consistent with  “privilege hoarding” than he claims.

Reeves himself admits that mobility rates have never been completely random, and he notes that “scholars are divided on whether relative mobility rates have worsened” since the middle of the 20th century, when the GI Bill sent unprecedented numbers of Americans on to higher education. Moreover, a look at Reeves’s charts reveals that income mobility across quintiles is still substantial, with 20 percent of children born into the bottom fifth rising out of that tier, those born in the middle quintiles as likely to move up as down, and only a minority born into the top tier managing to stay there. Inheritance of educational status is somewhat stickier, but not rigidly so. About 40 percent of those born to parents in the top educational quintile maintain that status, while most in the bottom quintile obtain more years of education than their fathers did.

The real question, though, is not whether privilege breeds privilege, but whether that propagation is actually unfair or socially destructive. Reeves never provides a well-thought-out theory of optimal mobility—a tall order, to be sure, but one that is essential to his avowed goal of persuading us that existing intergenerational mobility rates “are lower than they ought to be.” His lack of rigor takes its toll. In his desire to convince us that something is wrong and that something must be done, he draws a questionable analogy between the rigid class structures he abandoned when he left his native England and impediments to class mobility in the United States today. He mashes together social practices seemingly amenable to policy fixes with obstacles grounded in culture, behavior, and family life. Toggling between equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes, he often flirts with equating the two.

He states that the goal should be “equalizing human capital development” and a “distribution of market merit” that “is more even,” and he routinely presents raw disparities as proof that our society is broken. But elsewhere he endorses normative and meritocratic concepts of fair chances and equal opportunity that he knows cannot possibly produce anything like equal results.

So how much mobility should there be? It’s far from clear from Reeves’s materials that mobility is “too low” or that opportunity is unfairly blocked on a wide scale.

One question that preoccupies Reeves is whether significant numbers of deserving “diamonds in the rough” are failing to improve their lot. Do we have good reason to believe that capable children born lower down on the ladder are being held back? The case Reeves presents on this crucial point is remarkably thin. Indeed, he mostly asks us to take on faith that significant numbers of lower-income students are being shut out of higher education, especially from the most selective institutions, and that this situation has dire consequences for society. He baldly states that “increasing the number of smart poor kids making it to the top will mean an improvement in quality and productivity” without offering any proof or giving any sense of how much improvement can be expected.¹ His treatment of a suggestive study led by the Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby purporting to show that academically proficient children of lower-income parents attend selective colleges less frequently than similar affluent students is far too cursory. How capable were the students in this study, and how many lower-income students with the highest scores are forgoing selective colleges? Where are they going instead? And why is this happening? Are these discrepancies due to lack of ambition, less interest, a desire to stay close to friends and family, financial concerns, or a simple lack of awareness of options? (A later Hoxby paper suggests that prestigious colleges rarely try to recruit low-income students outside their geographical region.) Finally, in light of research showing that students with similar college-entrance credentials end up with the same earnings regardless of their school’s rank and selectivity, would sending more capable low-income students to places like my own University of Pennsylvania rather than Penn State really make much difference to mobility and life outcomes? Answering these questions accurately is necessary to any argument that getting a greater number of deserving students into selective colleges will serve the meritocracy and enhance upward mobility.

Finally, even if we could give the equally talented the same chances, it’s not clear how many more people would ascend, because it’s not clear how many are being left behind. The goal of more mobility runs up against the core dilemma of the meritocracy—which is that talent, effort, and ambition, which determine the ability to climb, are not randomly distributed up and down the social scale. And although Reeves acknowledges that “class is made up of a subtle, shifting blend of economic, social, educational, and attitudinal factors,” he strenuously avoids admitting what everyone in their heart of hearts knows: There is no substitute for having the right parents. Reeves makes gingerly mention of genetics, but says little about how innate endowments might affect the distribution of smarts and thus the chance of getting ahead. He does grudgingly admit that the growing phenomenon of assortative mating means that the children of the top 20 percent may well possess greater academic and cognitive prowess than the rest, although how much is anyone’s guess. And then there are the upper-class child-rearing habits he details, with which he simply can’t or won’t interfere. It bears repeating that these alone scotch anything close to random chances and equal results.

Against these powerful forces for inequality, Reeves’s policy proposals look weak and meek, recalling, in the words of David French, a “political culture that spends 90 percent of its time talking about 10 percent solutions—investing vast sums to move the margins.”Most items on his list are shopworn and already known to be largely ineffectual. Others, such as abolishing legacy college admissions, are hardly worth the pages he devotes to them. Reeves himself admits that legacy preferences at top colleges affect a tiny number of people. And in light of recent evidence that the vast majority of legacy applicants are as well- or better-qualified than other affluent high-achieving students, abolishing legacies would have virtually no effect on mobility. Reeves touts the “symbolic value” of abolishing this undoubted weight on one end of the scale, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this step would make little or no difference to society overall.

Observing correctly that extramarital child-rearing interferes with women’s self-betterment and hurts low-income children, Reeves also suggests making long-term contraception free and widely available, a step his Brookings colleague Isabel Sawhill has long advocated. But a look at the demography shows that better and more contraception isn’t the answer. As noted by Charles Murray and others, the steady increase in low-income extramarital births is not currently driven by teen pregnancies (which have dropped steadily for decades, in keeping with a general trend of older age for first births) but by mothers in their 20s and 30s. Unless these women are expected to postpone childbearing indefinitely or even forgo it, better contraception will merely delay but will not prevent single-motherhood. The real culprit is low marriage rates, which are due to problematic relations between the sexes, the paucity of marriageable men, and—it should be said—the easy availability of…contraception. There is no pharmaceutical fix for those problems.

Other recommendations, although intriguing, will almost surely disappoint. One obstacle to more mobility, according to Reeves, is the dramatic growth in student internships, many unpaid, and their proven importance to future job prospects. According to Reeves, 60 percent of students occupy an internship position in the course of their college career, and employers claim to rely on internship experience in post-graduation hiring. Affluent students can better afford to take these positions, and they often use their parents’ influence or networks to snag plum assignments.

But even if parents were to stop pulling strings and the system became more meritocratic, how much difference would it make? The chips could well fall where they do now. Sought-after internships favor products of the Ivy League and other top colleges, which are loaded with affluent students, because the college admissions office is expert at screening and sorting. Two recent conversations, one with the internship director at a prestigious government legal office and another at a fancy magazine, illustrate this. The first said that his office had stopped taking the best students from lesser-ranked law schools, because “they just didn’t measure up to the Harvard Law guys.” The other told me, “When we revved up our pipeline from Yale, as opposed to taking people from here and there, it was like night and day.” In other words, looking for needles in haystacks is hard work, time-consuming, expensive, and often doesn’t pan out. Top colleges, for better or worse, are the world’s most elaborate, efficient, and ruthless human-resources departments. As long as selective colleges favor the privileged, internships will, too.

Then there is exclusionary zoning. Reeves claims that restrictions on land use allow the top fifth to “hoard” their “good” schools and “good” neighborhoods, those talismanic places he assumes are now mostly reserved for the well-off. He is right that zoning rules and restrictions can drive up costs and throttle growth and are due for a serious rethinking. But Reeves offers no hard proof that measures such as reducing lot size and allowing more high-rises would make more than a few lower-income people better off or lift them up the economic ladder.

Data do suggest that pilot initiatives that relocate poorer families to more affluent neighborhoods, such as Moving to Opportunity or Section 8 housing vouchers, can produce measurable improvements in some children’s outcomes, at least in the short term. But it’s far from clear that these can work on a widespread basis. Upscale neighborhoods that receive large numbers of poorer families do not, unfortunately, remain the same. Given a growing divergence by class in lifestyle, family structure, and behavior, there is no reason to believe that the well-off will be willing to live near those they deem less desirable neighbors. And the people who can best afford to walk with their feet will find ways and means to do so. Even if zoning rules change, class sorting will likely continue.

The real problem with Dream Hoarders, though, is that Reeves adopts a myopic zero-sum mindset. Given his focus on quintiles and on climbing the greasy pole upward, some of this is unavoidable. After all, the blessed top fifth can consist only of, well, the top fifth. The inexorable arithmetic means that for everyone who climbs, someone must fall. And society can accommodate only so many dentists, investment bankers, and research scientists. As a practical matter, room at the top is limited. Thus Reeves’s exhortation to his fellow elites: If you believe in upward mobility, you must accept downward movement for your own children. If some poor child grows up to be a tech billionaire or brain surgeon, that means yours can’t.But what of those who never get near a selective college? What about the rest of us? What is missing from this book is any vision for society as a whole and for the very ordinary, un-special people who make up most of it. He ignores the bottom 80 percent, except as a launching pad for the deserving few. He says little about how to make the non-elites’ lives better, more satisfying, more dignified, and more decent. Although he does occasionally lament our growing inequality, the reason he gives is that it makes it harder for people to rise. What comes through loud and clear is his belief that the prospect for upward mobility is the hallmark of a good society, and more chances to make it to the top are the test of a fair one. And in making the highest quintile his focal point, Reeves gives off the unmistakable sense, common among well-heeled policy types, that joining the educated elite is the ultimate prize and the only life worth living. He has trouble looking past the aspiration of college for all and devotes outsized attention to selective colleges and reforming their admissions practices.

Reeves’s preoccupation with elevating the few through the needle’s eye of selective schools and upscale neighborhoods is both cramped and misguided. “Good” schools and “good” neighborhoods have not always been so scarce, or so exclusively the purview of the privileged. As Charles Murray has described, people from different social classes used to more commonly live and go to school together, with well-off managers often residing down the street from factory workers and plumbers. I grew up in such a place, a midsize city in upstate New York. My family, which was barely middle class and for many years not quite, occupied a modest home in a neat but distinctly unglamorous neighborhood where a few upper-class families mixed with small-business owners and working people.

Yet our neighborhood possessed every feature that would today make it “good.” I recall no crime, violence, graffiti, litter, menace, loitering, vandalism, boom boxes, or illegal drugs. My neighbors were courteous, civil, helpful, and considerate, and would not think to disturb others with loud music or rowdy partying. Doors, cars, and bikes were left unlocked. I never saw a gun and rarely saw a policeman. A few scruffy lawns and wilted, overgrown gardens were the worst offenses. Above all, the neighborhood was a safe and serene place where children could wander on their own. In those respects, it was like the upper-middle-class, high-priced, distinctly un-diverse suburb I inhabit today.

The public schools I attended were of the same ilk. Although no-frills and austere by current standards, they were places of peace and order. Everyone knew the rules, which were unapologetically enforced. The teachers were well-spoken, conscientious, and knowledgeable. Children who wanted to learn could do so.

The world is very different today. The affluent segregate themselves in the fastness of their own enclaves, and the middle and working classes are all but locked out of the nicest spots in the most desirable cities and suburbs. Reeves just accepts this as a given and never asks why. Why have the affluent walled themselves off? Why is life for the top quintile so pleasant, albeit isolated and expensive, with life below bleaker, harsher, more disordered, and more dangerous?

Although the forces that have led us to this juncture are complex, there is no doubt that people at the top and bottom have indeed “come apart” in myriad ways. In family structure, work behavior, educational achievement, drug abuse, social aspirations, public and private deportment, thrift, and crime rates, the divergence proceeds apace. Murray has told us this tale, and Reeves doesn’t stress it enough. Most important for his purposes is that common standards of behavior have virtually disappeared. That is one reason life toward the bottom has deteriorated so dramatically and  the upper classes are so intent upon fleeing from the growing disorder below. And that escape has become an expensive luxury good.

Looking back to the past tells us that it doesn’t have to be that way. Hoarding implies scarcity: There’s only so much to go around, so if some have more, others must have less. But Reeves takes the hoarding idea way too far. Nice places need not be scarce, and they don’t need to be expensive and the purview of the well-off. That some neighborhoods are safe, decent, pleasant, and orderly does not rule out others being so. That some schools are sites of learning and excellence does not prevent more from also meeting that standard. The key foundations for desirable neighborhoods and schools—and for a good and meaningful life more generally—can be more broadly shared and indeed could be available to all.

The “goodness” of such places is mainly a function of the conduct, values, and mindset of the people in them. Good neighborhoods need people with respect for law, property, and their surroundings, families that stay together, children who study and behave, fathers who stick around, and people who work diligently at whatever work they can do. They also depend on civil society: social and political clubs, community organizations, religious institutions, volunteers, viable small businesses, and safe, clean, well-kept public spaces where people can gather and come together. Not everyone can have top earnings or a fancy, prestigious job, but order, civility, and public decorum can be far more common than they are. Once, they were.

How can we arrange things so that more people with different levels of affluence can prosper and live meaningful lives? How can we make the advantages that the rich now “hoard” more widely available, thus reducing their incentive to separate themselves? Although these goals are elusive and difficult for any society to attain, ours can probably do better. But the changes required would be far bolder than the tepid ones Reeves proposes, which do little to disrupt current “structures of privilege.” And more dramatic reforms might also advance the causes he holds dear, including enhancing mobility and reducing inequality.So here goes my laundry list.

Let’s start with Reeves’s proposal to ban legacy admissions. Not only would this increase fairness, but it would discourage private contributions. This would, in turn, promote the worthy goal of defunding the Ivies and other selective universities, which have become counterproductive sites of snobbery, dogma, and progressive indoctrination. Save for the kind of scientific research that benefits everyone, they don’t need any more money and could do with much less.

But we shouldn’t stop there. As suggested by the late Justice Antonin Scalia during oral argument in the Grutter affirmative-action case, selective admissions should simply be abolished and students admitted by lottery, except for math and hard sciences, for which a simple test can determine entrance. The steep pyramid of colleges, in which the affluent crowd monopolizes prestigious institutions, will be immediately flattened, and the need for affirmative action would disappear. In this respect, our system would simply mimic those in northern European countries like Holland and Germany, where enrolling in the university nearest to home is the usual practice and there is no clear elite pecking order. And since fewer than a fifth of colleges take less than half their applicants, with only a tiny group much more competitive, this change would have no effect on most institutions of higher learning.

While we’re at it, we should give up on the fetish of college for all by significantly reducing the number of students attending four-year academic programs to no more than 10 to 15 percent of high-school graduates. The government should dial back on student loans and grants to universities, except for scientific research.

That step, which would reduce the burden of educational debt, is not as drastic as it appears, since many students who start college end up dropping out and only 25 percent of high-school graduates manage to obtain a four-year degree. At the same time, we should step up the effort to recruit highly qualified low-income students to the most selective colleges across the country—something that Caroline Hoxby’s research tells us is not currently taking place. Finally, we should copy some of Western Europe’s most successful economies by tracking more students into job-related nonacademic programs, and by redirecting the private and public money that now goes to universities to creating and maintaining such programs.

More broadly, the amounts freed up by defunding elite colleges and private schools should be used to help average Americans. The Gates Foundation and other rich private philanthropies should stop chasing after educational schemes of dubious value and devote their billions to improving community colleges, supporting the people who attend them, and dramatically expanding vocational programs.

Although Reeves does mention vocational education, he does so only in passing. That option should receive renewed emphasis. And private donors should provide grants to thousands of students of modest means, including stipends for rent and living expenses, to enable them to do the summer internships that Reeves claims are now so important to getting ahead.

In light of the findings of Nicholas Eberstadt and others that workforce participation for less-educated Americans, especially men, is now lower than it was during the Great Depression, foundations should fund efforts to get the least-employable Americans back to work. They should blanket the country with job-readiness programs, perhaps in conjunction with actual businesses. They should support work-supervision initiatives and employ armies of young college people to cooperate with employers to improve the quality and socialization of the workforce.

These initiatives should be directed at instructing, supervising, and overseeing less-qualified and entry-level workers with inadequate work experience, skills, and work ethic, including ex-prison inmates and people with criminal records. They should also pay for retraining programs for the unemployed and for grants to those wishing to relocate for jobs far from home.

Dream hoarders and their offspring should start small businesses that employ the unskilled and pay and treat them well, even if they lose money. They should push to tighten the influx of foreign low-wage labor as well as temporary visa holders in middle-tier positions, which will open up thousands of jobs at the entry level and above. And they should put pressure on employers to increase wages and improve working conditions for those “jobs Americans won’t do,” to allow Americans without elite training to make a living, however modest.

Elites should get behind a consensus expectation that Americans will actually do whatever jobs are available, and should support creating incentives to work. This could mean tying benefits—such as more generous food stamps or housing assistance—to employment. Although marriage promotion has had little success to date, awarding bonuses to married couples under federal and state programs and reconfiguring the safety net to eliminate marriage penalties as much as feasible are important steps, if only to send the right message.

A renewed emphasis on improving the order and safety of public spaces would help those who can’t afford private enclaves. This would require cracking down on vandalism, public loitering, drunkenness, homelessness, and begging, and devoting more resources and private voluntary efforts to such spaces.

We should revitalize noblesse oblige by recruiting a reserve army of the able-bodied and affluent retired. This population, in combination with young people and recent college graduates, should be engaged on a massive scale to work in day-care facilities, after-school programs, drug-treatment and rehabilitation centers, and clinics for low-income people. They should offer themselves as home health aides for the working classes and other ordinary people who cannot afford institutionalized care or have trouble paying for such services. They should volunteer in droves to visit young single mothers and low-income families to help care for and feed their children. And they should dedicate more of their savings to paying the bills for all of these services. Such private initiatives will keep government bureaucracies from growing.

Finally, in their mission to help the “forgotten man,” the “dream hoarding” upper classes should put themselves on the line directly, going out of their way to mix with people outside their bubble. They should quit their pleasant, pricey suburbs and hip neighborhoods en masse and move into the inner city and out to depressed small-town and rural areas spread across the country. They should likewise abandon private schooling and send their children to the local public schools (and no cheating with selective magnets). Instead of opposing recycling plants, soup kitchens, halfway houses, migrant centers, and institutions for wayward youth being placed on their street or anywhere near their neighborhoods, they should encourage and embrace them and devote their spare time to volunteering in those places.

Most items on this wish list will strike people as pie-in-the-sky—impractical, infeasible, carrying too many negative or unintended consequences, and with no reasonable chance of being adopted any time soon. But that fact alone is emblematic of our myopia—and Richard Reeves’s. He states more than once that we must want for other people’s children what we want and expect for our own. But since it’s a good bet that most of his readers are, like Reeves, comfortably ensconced at the top of the heap, that feel-good apothegm translates into this: The upper classes should want all children to be upper class and should not expect anyone to settle for less.

Despite its surface appeal, this idea is obviously impossible. Not only can it never happen, but it provides no blueprint for society as a whole. Channels of opportunity are vital and everyone deserves a fair chance. But strive as we might, not everyone will move up, and most will never approach the commanding heights. How much more important it is to concern ourselves with those destined to spend their lives below—that is, with most of us.

1 And as Robert VerBruggen has noted in National Review, he fails to present some important supportive evidence, including data gleaned from his own Brookings Institution website, showing that low-income students scoring in the top third on academic tests are less likely to end up with high incomes than top-quintile students with comparable scores.