In short, disruptive and violent children are “left behind” in the public schools, the Bush administration approach notwithstanding. This is one of those “second-best” options, when the first best option—punishing and/or explicitly isolating disruptive and violent students from all other students—is precluded for political or ideological reasons.
Nor is this problem peculiar to the United States. There are some schools in England where classrooms have been described as being “on the knife-edge of anarchy most of the time.”15 In both countries, one-sixth of the children are functionally illiterate.16 This is a painful waste of mental potential, and the poor can afford it least of all.
More generally, government programs to transfer people en masse from bad environments to better environments, in order to improve their prospects in life, ignore vast amounts of empirical evidence that this simply does not work on any scale commensurate with its negative consequences to people into whose midst they are thrust. Moreover, those who promote such programs usually refuse to consider the possibility—even as a testable hypothesis—that it is precisely the presence of people with bad behavior patterns that makes bad environments bad, and a dearth of such people elsewhere that makes better environments better.
Political Implications
The most spectacularly successful political doctrine that swept into power in countries around the world in the twentieth century was Marxism, based on the implicit presumption that differences in wealth were due to capitalists growing rich by keeping the workers poor, through “exploitation.”
This version of the invincible fallacy apparently seemed plausible to people in many different countries and cultures. But, if the wealth of rich capitalists comes from exploitation of poor workers, then we might expect to find that where there are larger concentrations of rich capitalists, we would find correspondingly larger concentrations of poverty.
But the hard facts point in the opposite direction. The United States has more than five times as many billionaires as Africa and the Middle East put together,17 yet most Americans—including those living below the official poverty line—have a far higher standard of living than that of the populations of Africa and the Middle East. It would be difficult to find even a single country, ruled by Marxists, where the standard of living of working-class people has been as high as that of working-class people in a number of capitalist countries.
This is despite the fact that the first and largest of the avowedly Marxist countries, the Soviet Union, was one of the most richly endowed nations in the world, when it came to natural resources, if not the most richly endowed.18 Yet the standard of living of ordinary people in the Soviet Union was nowhere close to the average standard of living of ordinary people in most of Western Europe, or in the United States or Australia. But here, as elsewhere, hard facts have been repeatedly trumped by heady visions, such as that presented in The Communist Manifesto.
Other, non-Marxist, doctrines have been built on the same foundation of assumptions, and they too have had their sweeping political triumphs in the twentieth century, usually in the form of expansive welfare states in the second half of that century, with the 1960s being their pivotal, triumphant decade.
Hypothesis-testing has usually played a remarkably small role in these intellectual, legal and political developments. Indeed, scholars who have tested prevailing views against hard data, and found the prevailing views lacking, have often encountered hostility and demonization rather than counter-evidence.19 Riots to prevent their speaking have disgraced many of the most prestigious academic campuses in the United States—indeed, especially such campuses.20
Social Implications
If these were simply intra-mural contests among the intelligentsia, there would be little reason for others to be concerned about them. But social visions, and even the very catchwords and verbal style in which those visions are discussed, diffuse far beyond those who create and elaborate social visions.
When treating imprisoned murderers in England, for example, physician Theodore Dalrymple found them using the same passive voice sentence constructions found among the intelligentsia when discussing social pathologies. Murderers discussing their crimes say such things as, “the knife went in,” instead of saying that they stabbed their victim.21
An echo of elite intellectuals even appeared in an old musical, West Side Story, where a character says, “Hey, I’m depraved on account I’m deprived.” Intellectuals say it more sophisticatedly, but they are nevertheless saying essentially the same thing. While what they are saying might be a plausible hypothesis to be tested empirically, it is too often treated as an established fact, requiring no such testing.
Yet neither in England nor in the United States was such depravity as rampant violence and other social pathology as common among low-income people in the first half of the twentieth century, when they were more deprived, as in the second half, when the welfare state made them better off in material terms.
The importance of social visions goes far beyond the rhetoric they spawn. In a democratic nation, there can be no welfare state without a social vision first prevailing politically, a vision justifying the creation or expansion of a welfare state. Moreover, the triumph of that vision in Western societies during the 1960s entailed far more than the welfare state itself.
With the prevailing social vision came a more non-judgmental approach to behavior, as well as multiculturalism, a de-emphasis of policing and punishments, and an emphasis on demographically based “fair shares” for all.
The reasons for all these beliefs were elaborated in many ways by many individuals and groups. What has been elaborated far less often are empirical tests as to the validity of those hypotheses, in terms of the results expected from following this vision, versus what actually happened.
It is not simply that the social vision which greatly expanded the welfare state and undermined traditional moral values failed to achieve all its goals and fostered some negative consequences. What is particularly salient is that various social pathologies which had been declining—some for years, decades or even centuries—had a sudden resurgence, as these new and often self-congratulatory ideas triumphed politically and socially in the 1960s, on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the United States, murder rates, rates of infection with venereal diseases and rates of teenage pregnancies were among these social pathologies whose steep declines were suddenly reversed in the 1960s, as all these pathologies soared to new and tragic heights.22 After decades of declining murder rates in the United States, that rate by 1960 was just under half of what it had been in the mid-1930s.23 But the murder rate reversed and doubled from 1960 to 1980,24 in the wake of new legal restrictions on law enforcement, in keeping with the new social vision.
These trends, and reversals of trends, were not peculiar to the United States. A monumental treatise on the decline of violence in the world over the centuries—The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker—pointed out that, in Europe, “rates of violence did a U-turn in the 1960s,” including “a bounce in homicide rates that brought them back to levels they had said goodbye to a century before.”25
Perhaps the most striking—and most alarming—increases in violence and disorder were in places long known for law-abiding, orderly and polite behavior, England being a preeminent example.
American economist J.K. Galbraith happened to be in London in May 1945, when a crowd estimated at “two or three hundred thousand”—and mostly young people—was gathered to celebrate the end of the war in Europe. He wrote to his wife: “Like all British crowds it was most orderly.”26
In sports competition, British competitors were renowned for their sportsmanship. In a 1953 soccer match, for example, the team leading, with only two minutes to go, saw an opposing player snatch victory from them with only seconds left in the game—and members of the losing team stood up and applauded him. But, by the mid-1960s, such sportsmanship was gone, even in Britain’s classic sportsmanlike game, c
ricket. Vulgar insults were now common among British players, and among players in British offshoot societies Australia and New Zealand.27
The same social degeneration affected law-abiding behavior, during the same era. London had a total of just 12 armed robberies all year in 1954, at a time when anyone could buy a shotgun. But, in later years, armed robberies rose to 1,400 by 1981 and 1,600 in 1991,28 despite increasingly severe restrictions on the purchase of firearms. As for orderly crowds, in 2011 urban riots spread through London, Manchester and other British cities, involving thousands of hoodlums and looters who set fire to homes and businesses, as well as beating and robbing people on the streets and throwing gasoline bombs at police cars.29
The coarsening of life took other forms in England, during the era of the new social vision. It was not uncommon for men found unconscious on the streets, and taken to hospitals where the medical staff worked to restore their health, to later speak insultingly and abusively to those who had cared for them. Insults and abuse of medical personnel became sufficiently widespread that the National Health Service posted signs in its facilities, warning that abusive and threatening behavior toward the staff would be prosecuted.30
Other social pathologies, which had existed before, expanded to new magnitudes. These included fatherless children and urban riots. As of 1960, two-thirds of all black American children were living with both parents. That declined over the years, until only one-third were living with both parents in 1995. Fifty-two percent were living with their mother, 4 percent with their father and 11 percent with neither.31 Among black families in poverty, 85 percent of the children had no father present.32
Although white families did not have nearly as high a proportion of children living with one parent as blacks had in 1960, nevertheless the 1960s marked a sharp upturn in white children born to unwed mothers, to levels several times what they had been in the decades preceding the 1960s. By 2008, nearly 30 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Among white women with less than 12 years of education, more than 60 percent of their children were born to unwed mothers in the first decade of the twenty-first century.33
These social patterns were not peculiar to the United States, but were common in a number of Western societies. In England and Wales, for example, 44 percent of children were born to unwed mothers in 2007. Other countries where more than 40 percent of children were born to unwed mothers included France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland. In most of these countries, this represented a major increase just since 1980.34
Urban riots in America, which had been sporadic in earlier years, spread in massive waves from coast to coast during the 1960s. Educational standards and performances in American schools began a decades’ long decline in the 1960s, whether measured by test scores, by professors’ assessments of incoming college students, by students’ own reports of their time spent studying, or by employers’ complaints about a lack of basic skills among the young people they hired.35
The factors on which those with the prevailing social vision relied for educational success—more spending for education in general and racial integration for blacks in particular—proved to be of little or no effectiveness.
Seldom does any era in human history have exclusively negative or exclusively positive trends. Perhaps the most often cited positive achievements of the 1960s in the United States were the civil rights laws and policies that put an end to racially discriminatory laws and policies in the South, especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Although this has often been credited to the social vision of the political left, in reality a higher percentage of Congressional Republicans than of Congressional Democrats voted for these landmark laws.36 But facts that do not fit the prevailing vision tend to be simply ignored.
Much of the social retrogression that took place on both sides of the Atlantic is traceable to the central tenet of the prevailing social vision, that unequal outcomes are due to adverse treatment of the less fortunate. This preconception became a fount of grievance-driven attitudes, emotions and actions—including what has been aptly called “decivilizing” behavior in many contexts.37
Despite what was, at best, a mixed record of outcomes from the new social vision, and the new laws and policies that flowed from that vision, the image of the 1960s has been celebrated in the media, in politics and in academia, especially by those who took part in its social crusades. The response of one of the high-level participants in the 1960s crusades, upon meeting best-selling author Shelby Steele, who had expressed some skepticism about that era, was not atypical:
“Look,” he said irritably, “only—and I mean only—the government can get to that kind of poverty, that entrenched, deep poverty. And I don’t care what you say. If this country was decent, it would let the government try again.”38
Shelby Steele’s attempt to focus on facts about the actual consequences of various government programs of the 1960s brought a heated response:
“Damn it, we saved this country!” he all but shouted. “This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now in hindsight and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend.”39
That a high official of the Lyndon Johnson administration of the 1960s could believe things so completely counter to demonstrable facts was one sign of the power of a vision.
His claim that only government programs could effectively deal with deep poverty was contradicted by the plain fact that the black poverty rate declined from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960,40 prior to the great expansion of the welfare state that began in the 1960s under the Johnson administration. There was a far more modest decline in the poverty rate among blacks after the Johnson administration’s massive “war on poverty” programs began.
As for ghetto riots, these were never as numerous, nor of such magnitudes of violence, in the 1940s and 1950s, as they became in the 1960s, when the social vision behind the welfare state became triumphant in politics, in educational institutions and in the media. Nor were there similar numbers or magnitudes of violence in riots in the 1980s, during the eight years of the Reagan administration, in which that social vision was repudiated.
Much more is involved here than incorrect inferences from demonstrable facts by one man. This was a far too common example of the ability of a social vision to not only survive, but thrive, in defiance of empirical evidence.
“SOLUTIONS”
No one who looks at the facts of life can look very far without encountering not only extreme disparities in outcomes but also the pervasive reality of luck. Some may think of luck in terms of being born rich or poor, black or white, or any number of other social distinctions. But luck extends far beyond such conventional social categories, right down to the individual level.
No one can choose what kinds of parents to have, or whether to be the first born or the last born in a family, much less what kind of surrounding community, with what kind of culture, to grow up in. Yet such wholly fortuitous factors, from the standpoint of the individual, can have a major influence on how one’s life turns out.
As already noted, a study of American prison inmates found that most were raised either by a single parent (43 percent) or raised with neither parent present (14 percent).41 It was pointed out elsewhere that those children who had a parent who was imprisoned ended up in prison themselves several times more often than members of the general population.42 Similarly, in Britain, a study found that 27 percent of prison inmates had been placed in protective child custody at some point while growing up.43
If we have no control over luck, and no control over the past, then it is all the more important that we concentrate on those things over which we can at least hope to have some influence—notably providing incentives affecting future behavior.
Income is an obvious incentive and, because it is an incentive affecting economic behavior at all levels, we cannot treat incomes as if they were just numbers that we c
an change to suit our wishes, without considering how that will change behavior and the economic consequences that follow from behavior. Such consequences of changed behavior affect the output on which the standard of living of a whole society depends.
Nor are those economic consequences something that we can conjure up from our imaginations, or deduce from our preconceptions. The hard facts of history can tell us something and current factual tests of our hypotheses can tell us more.
The same is true of incentives affecting crime, including both law enforcement and punishment. Here, perhaps even more so than with economic issues and incentives, utter ignorance of relevant facts seldom seems to inhibit sweeping and passionate conclusions.
Many people who have never encountered the kinds of dangers inherent in law enforcement do not hesitate to say that “excessive force” was used against someone resisting arrest or even someone threatening the police. People who have never fired a gun in their lives likewise do not hesitate to express shock and anger that “so many” bullets were fired in an encounter with a criminal.*
Even when an overwhelming force of police arrive on a threatening scene, bringing the threat to a complete halt without using any force at all, critics often call that “over-reaction” to the threat, which never reached dangerous levels. The possibility that it never reached dangerous levels precisely because of an overwhelming police presence never seems to occur to such critics.
As regards punishment, a criminal’s unhappy childhood cannot be changed, and whether the person he has become can be changed is by no means a foregone conclusion. Nor are the dangers he represents to other people’s safety, or their lives, dangers that can be banished by saying soothing words like “rehabilitation” or “alternatives to incarceration.”
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