FINNEGAN’S SLEEP

In Finnegan’s cliche-ridden world, the rich — backed by callous conservatives (a redundancy: all conservatives are callous) — make vicious war on the young and needy, cruelly depriving them of schools, jobs, wages, and hope. It is truly a cold world, for the life of the poor is harsh and unforgiving. It is also a new world, for this harshness is novel, peculiar to our own especially vicious epoch: Never have things been so hard for so many; never have class lines been so rigid; never has a system been so heartless; never have the lives of the young been so bleak. And seldom has a book been so wrong — so willfully determined not to learn from history.

The thesis of Cold New World is that many young Americans are caught in an economic “downdrift,” falling from the middle to the lower class because of state-sanctioned decline and stagnation. But Finnegan’s four heart-rending examples all turn out to have belonged to the underclass from the beginning: a young black man born to a drug-addicted, teenage, single mother in the slums of New Haven; addled white skinheads in the slums of Los Angeles; immigrant farm-workers in Washington state; and a black family in a small, east Texas town by-passed by the civil-rights movement. These are not people falling; they had nothing to fall from. They are people failing to rise.

Finnegan presents them as victims of economic stagnation, but what soon becomes evident is that their real problem is isolation from the surrounding middle class. Through no fault of their own, they have been reared as social illiterates — with no knowledge of culture, no sense of religion or moral community, no sense of direction and purpose. They are not without brains and ambition, but they have never been given the habits of mind needed to use them. They are deprived — not so much in the sense that they have little now, but in the sense that they lack what they need to get more later. They break appointments, drop plans in mid-sequence, and spend what money they get largely on gimmicks and toys.

This is where the economic solutions proposed in Cold New World break down: Even if well-paying jobs existed in the numbers that Finnegan wants, it is not certain that the poor would be able to hold them or use them as stepping-stones to better things. Trying to make the liberal case, Finnegan doesn’t realize how much more strongly he makes the conservative case: Intangibles do matter.

But even the facts from which Finnegan starts aren’t quite right. In fact, his facts aren’t quite present. He insists that we face hard times. “Real hourly wages have fallen significantly over the past twenty-four years,” he declares, without citing any figures. “The median household income has fallen, and the national poverty rate has risen,” he adds, again without figures. “The malaise that afflicted so many of these kids,” he writes of his young subjects, “is more general than some indices might suggest.” But how does he know? In place of citations, the reader gets would-be Dickensian descriptions of a “darkening, fearsome world” where “nearly everyone . . . feels these downdrifts . . . [and] fears their fetid, chilly breath.”

His assertions seem based (though he doesn’t say) on data from the Employer Survey that indicate hourly wages paid non-supervisor production workers have suffered a comparative decline. What he ignores is evidence that though there are fewer well-paying jobs for unskilled workers, there are proportionally fewer unskilled workers to fill them. If the discrepancy in wages has grown, it is due to huge increases at the higher end. Finnegan claims that recent trends have “left thirty percent of the country’s workers earning too little to lift a family [of four] out of poverty.” But he doesn’t mention that many people earning these lower wages — students, teenagers, people working part-time, and young people in entry-level positions — do not have families of four to support.

In a monograph soon to appear from the American Enterprise Institute, Marvin Kosters argues that the Employer Survey is skewed to count only the lowest-paid workers and records only hourly wages — not non-wage benefits (like pensions and health insurance) or irregular payments (like bonuses and profit-sharing). Kosters concludes:

Average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers is seriously misleading. . . . Real wages have declined for some demographic groups. However, the average worker’s total pay has increased by about fifteen percent since 1973, after adjustment for inflation. . . . If the methodology now being used to measure price increases is used to adjust for inflation, workers’ average pay has increased by at least ten percentage points more.

This picture — of general prosperity, with some small but real pockets of poverty — is far more consistent with the empirical evidence of low unemployment, high consumer confidence, and growing home ownership than is Finnegan’s view of a great mass of misery beneath a thin upper crust. Neither do the facts support his picture of youthful malaise. “A new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that young people are getting happier,” writes James Glassman in the Washington Post. “The real story about kids is the opposite of the chaos and anguish painted in the press.”

Finnegan not only misstates the extent of America’s ills; he assigns them the wrong causes. “For what it’s worth,” he says, “I blame the government” — and the selfish middle class: “Having reaped the benefits of all this public investment” — the New Deal, public schools, public works, the GI Bill, etc. — “my generation (and our parents’) decided at some point that taxes on our hard-earned incomes had become an undue burden, were almost un-American, and a Reagan-like amnesia became convenient to all the tax-cutting. Thus, over the next generation, government had largely withdrawn support for education, poor children, public works.”

But what does “withdrawn support” mean? Government still spends massively — if not effectively — on education, police, and welfare. It was exploding tax rates coupled with imploding results — bad schools, high crime, deteriorating services — that kicked off the tax-cutting fevers of the 1980s, not eruptions of greed. Finnegan blames the middle class for deserting the cities when they started to crumble — seeming to think it had a civic duty to stay and suffer. People in the middle class would point to the chaos wrought by earlier incarnations of Finnegan’s theories and claim they had no choice.

Finnegan rightly laments the frightening growth in childhood poverty — a harrowing rise of thirty-seven percent, between 1970 and 1995. He blames this, of course, on “political neglect of children, particularly poor children, . . . as taxpayers increasingly shirk traditional obligations to the young.”

What he does not connect poverty to is what everyone else sees as the driving force of most social pathology: the rate of out-of-wedlock births. Nearly everything that is cold and new for children in our world is linked to this critical factor. “Children born out of wedlock to never-married women are poor 50 percent of the time,” observes a lengthy report prepared by the Heritage Foundation. “By contrast, children born within a marriage that remains intact are poor 7 percent of the time.” Not all the people of whom Finnegan writes are directly touched by out-of-wedlock birth, but there is not a social pathology for which he blames other causes that does not bear some relation to this cause. Not to name it in his orgy of blaming is an act of either stupidity or evasion.

Finnegan’s view of the cures for child poverty are as old-fashioned as his view of its causes. He demands nothing that has not been attempted many times before — and failed every time: more regulation, more taxes, more old-style welfare, more forced school busing, and much, much more money for public schools. Of course, experience shows that money isn’t always the answer — especially in the schools. In one notorious case, Kansas City spent $ 1.8 billion on target schools, only to see reading levels stagnate and the gap between black and white students widen. Meanwhile, private and church-run schools continue to achieve success with much less money.

When not demanding that we pour money down various rat holes, Finnegan proposes to revive civic life with compassionate attitudes toward crime and drugs. Though surveys show repeatedly that the poor are terrified of crime — and his own reporting shows the devastation of drugs — he finds this the one place where government has been only too active: “Everyone seemed to feel the state, particularly the police and the courts, crouching hungrily at the edge of their lives.” The result is a “grotesque orgy of imprisonment . . . driven primarily by the politically irresistible, utterly ineffective ‘War on Drugs.'” The law is the ultimate enemy: “We jail the poor in their multitudes, abandon the dream of equality, cede more and more of public life to private interests . . . [while] those who can afford [it] lock themselves inside gated communities and send their children to private schools.”

But it was, of course, the bad public schools, drugs, and crime that created the gated communities and private schools Finnegan deplores. Cold New World is an extended exercise in mistaking effects for causes.

Pervasive in Finnegan’s work is his conviction that absolute equality is something the state can and ought to provide. He has learned nothing from decades of experience in the Soviet bloc, Western Europe, Israel, and the United States: The harder the state tries to mandate equality, the more wretched life for its people becomes. Every effort ever tried to overstep certain limits of activism has failed — and created a truly cold, new world in its wake.

The lesson most Americans seem to have grasped from all this is that while the state can do some things — insure against natural disasters, for example, and sweep away artificial barriers such as race bias — further efforts bring a train of troubles. Nearly two years ago, the New York Times ran an essay by William Julius Wilson that made an argument much like Finnegan’s: The absence of well-paying jobs in the inner cities is what led to decay, and the state has a duty to create jobs there and force businesses back. A flood of mail immediately came in from readers insisting that Wilson had it backwards: Business was driven out by taxes, regulations, and crime, and cities had an obligation to become business-friendly before they tried to get business back. When such a response comes from a basically liberal readership, the mandated-equality party truly is over — everywhere except in the pages of Cold New World.

One suspects that the main purpose of William Finnegan’s book was to make William Finnegan feel good. Good in the first place because he is so much better than we are: He bleeds for these people. And good in the second place because he never forgets how much better he is than the people he writes about — a creature from a world beyond their dreams. This attitude, which used to get missionaries sauteed and devoured, has gotten Finnegan considerable flattery instead. “He has staked out as his beat the disenfranchised — the sort of people most educated, privileged, white people have no contact with and could care less about,” runs one blurb on the dust jacket. He “opens doors that most writers would be reluctant even to approach,” adds another. There you have it: He cares; no one else does.

But people who actually care tend to think about others and the effects of their words upon them. They tend to notice when events disprove theories and when the advice they are giving turns bad. Finnegan goes on as though Lyndon Johnson had just proposed the Great Society, as though it were 1964 and all things still seemed possible, as though government were the answer to every problem and poverty could be cured by the stroke of a pen. The last thirty years have bypassed the author, who hasn’t noticed that the things he wants brought our great cities near to death, while the things he hates have recently been bringing them back.

When does a point of view become self-indulgence, even a matter of preening? One leaves this book with a feeling of anguish, not just at the chaotic lives of its unhappy subjects, but at the fixed state of its author’s mentality. This is a book you will cherish — if you think that the Great Society was not great enough, that the administration of New York’s John Lindsay was the high point of municipal governance, and that Franklin Roosevelt was a scrooge and Robert Kennedy a spoilsport. If, however, you are one of the four in five Americans who have learned to think differently, you will put down Cold New World in despair.

A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery lives in Alexandria, Virginia.