Poverty, as a recent "On the Media" episode said, is having a moment.
I think it's also because of Alissa Quart's book Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, which I keep hearing about but hadn't been paying as much attention to until this Cory Doctorow thread.
Both the "On the Media" episode and the Doctorow post (and I assume Quart's book) talk about Horatio Alger. Here are some facts I never knew about that person, the writer of what we commonly refer to as "Horatio Alger stories":
- His stories were not about boys who made it through hard work — they were boys who befriended "powerful, older men who use their power and wealth to lift those boys up. An Alger hero is never self-made."
- Alger was a minister who was drummed out of the ministry for raping adolescent boys. He got out of going to prison because his father, who was also powerful in the religious world, promised Horatio would leave the ministry. That's when he turned to writing!
- Alger then adopted two young boys. Hmm.
The "On the Media" episode includes a clip from a 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. speech I don't think I've ever heard before, in which he points out the hypocrisy of white Midwesterners thinking they made it on their own, when their grandparents or great-grandparents benefited from homesteaded land at the same time that formerly enslaved people were being denied any recompense for their enslavement. (In the clip, King didn't even touch on the fact that the land itself was stolen from indigenous people.)
I can't recommend that "On the Media" segment highly enough, mostly because of the part about Jack Frech, who's from Athens County in eastern Ohio. He recounts how major media figures have come there over the decaades to talk about poverty. His well-earned perspective is that no one wants to know the truth about what it means to be poor and why people are poor.
Not only do we not have a ladder out of poverty in this country, we have (as Barbara Ehrenreich said) a greased chute to keep people in it.
Two other parts of the "On the Media" episode dealt the role of luck vs. the idea of meritocracy, and in the rags-to-riches segment, where Horatio Alger came up, there were facts I never knew about Ben Franklin's story.
I've written about the role of luck a number of times before (and other times that I haven't published here). It's one of my obsessions. I don't know why it's hard for so many people to acknowledge its role in their success, from such basics as the era and place they were born, to their sex, race, or other attributes, to the specifics of their family's contributions or the government's role in their family's wealth.
Here's one retired professor who did a pretty good job of examining all the ways his life is the result of luck vs. pluck.
Why can't more of us think a bit harder about the reasons for our outcomes, then turn that new perspective into change and mutual aid?
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Past posts on related topics
Luck of the Wealthy (from 2011)
The Lucky Michael Lewis (from 2012)
Just Pay More Money (from 2015)
If You Care About Children's Brains (from 2015)
Another Natural Experiment: Removing SSI Payments (from 2022)
3 comments:
Dang — when I saw “retired professor,” I thought that was going to be me. I wrote a post called “Fluke life” about how I got a tenure-track job.
Alger novels are truly strange. Having read at least eight or ten, I think it’s more accurate to say that the men befriend and aid the boys. There is hard work (that’s what makes the boy worthy), but there’s extraordinary luck — finding a wallet, saving a child in danger, &c. And it’s typically not rags to riches — it’s from rags to a life that’s ’spectable (as one character calls it).
Girls are treated strangely. And Ragged Dick has two boys setting up a household together.
I've never read any Horatio Alger stories, as you can tell from my post. I was thinking of looking into them after writing this, but I'm not sure it's worth the time, given my to be read pile. So thanks for adding more nuance to what I took from Cory Doctorow's version.
The thing with the lucky isn't that they didn't work hard. Often they did. It was necessary but not sufficient, however. The poor often work just as hard, or harder. That's the part that the well-off don't believe.
I don't remember reading your Fluke Life post back in 2017, and I see I didn't comment. I must have missed it somehow. Yes, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. You worked hard, and did everything you were supposed to, but if you hadn't had some lucky breaks, in the early-1980s academic economic environment, you may have ended up as a permanent adjunct. (My brother-in-law, with a Ph.D. in Italian literature from Harvard in about the same year, ended up in that boat, as romance language departments began downsizing on their way toward elimination.)
But if you had been born 10 years earlier, maybe you would have had an easier time on the job market. Or if you were second- or third-generation academic (like the professor in the link I did include), you would have ended up at Stanford. Luck comes in different forms.
I’d suggest Ragged Dick — it’s representative, and you could probably read it in a couple of hours. To think that generations were raised on that stuff.
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