Yes, it would be nice if we all had rich friends
What's missing from the latest David Brooks column
David Brooks’ latest column has some interesting news today, but it’s missing out on something really, excruciatingly important.
First, the news:
But as you may have seen, a giant new study led by Raj Chetty of Harvard and three others found that poor children who grew up in places where people have more friendships that cut across class lines earn a lot more as adults than children who don’t. One of the most powerful predictors of whether you rise out of poverty is how many of the people you know are well off.
The size of the effect is astounding. Cross-class friendships are a better predictor of upward mobility than school quality, job availability, community cohesion or family structure. If these results are true, then we have largely ignored a powerful way to help people realize the American dream.
Brooks spends a lot of time delving into why those cross-class friendships are so economically powerful, and gets misty-eyed about his time at summer camp1.
My camp friends have gone off to become teachers, electricians, home builders, social workers, doctors, a fireman. I would say they are extremely comfortable in social settings different from their own. I would say they have realized how fun it is to resist the natural temptation to hang out with people like themselves. All of us in our band have enjoyed the pleasure of unexpected friendship, something our segmenting society makes it harder and harder to create.
So here’s what Brooks’ column is missing: Any information or ideas about why “our segmenting society makes it harder and harder to create” these cross-class relationships — or how we might actually encourage and foster those relationships.
Consider this 2017 report from the Center for American Progress:
Millions of students across the country attend schools that are intensely segregated by economic status. Today, 40 percent of all low-income children—or 10 million students—attend schools with poverty rates reaching 75 percent or higher.2
Rising income inequality has contributed to these trends of economic segregation and thus further exacerbates many of the nation’s student achievement issues. When it comes to high-school completion, students attending high-poverty schools—or schools where at least 75 percent of students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch—only have a 68 percent chance of graduating. In comparison, students attending low-poverty schools—or where 25 percent or less of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch—have a 91 percent chance of graduating.
It’s getting worse. Here’s what the LA Times reported earlier this year:
The segregation of young students from low-income families — brought on by climbing Latino enrollments and the departure of white and middle-class families — has worsened across the country over a 15-year period, contributing to widening achievement gaps along economic and racial lines, a new study has concluded.
That didn’t just happen:
Public housing and subsidized housing, for example, is “overwhelmingly concentrated in segregated school locations,” said Orfield, the editor of a just-released anthology on civil rights and education policy. “People are living where they’re living because there was a decision made about where to enable the rental of subsidized housing to happen.”
All of this is expressed in rather anodyne language, so let me express a bit more directly what I think is going on:
Rich people don’t really want to hang out with the rest of us.
If they can, they wall themselves off behind gated communities. If they’re not quite at that level, but still have means, they’ll sure as hell move to places with “good schools” and other high-achieving families. Most folks surely want to give their own kids the best opportunities — but let’s be frank here: They probably also fear their children being dragged down by the less-than-desirable elements. They have no interest in risking their family’s future in order to lift up somebody else’s kids.
Why don’t the cross-class friendships happen more often? Because the people who have the power choose not to let it happen. I’m not sure how to fix that, but I think acknowledging it is probably the first step. David Brooks probably means well, and he might have great memories of summer camp, but fixing today’s problems will take more than a little bit of hazy nostalgia.
Today’s recommendation
He realizes that even the option to go to summer camp means there was probably a lot of economic diversity missing from this experience, right? Not sure what the cost for Incarnation Camp was in Brooks’ day, but right now two-week stays for the youngest campers start at $900 a week. Not a lot of poor kids are going to be there.
Emphasis added.