Captain Obvious To The Rescue!

With all apologies to Faithful Reader M.S., who is the original Captain Obvious, she's been promoted to Major Obvious, and the title of Captain has been bestowed on Jim Manzi, primarily for a post he had yesterday, while guesting at Andrew Sullivan's, on the subject of poverty and behavior.

I like Jim's writing; he's been one of the people I most enjoy reading at The American Scene. But his piece really struck me as quite inane. I don't know if it's supposed to be some sort of Telling Truth To Power, but when he says

Human agency matters. Many people have it within their control to improve their economic standing.

I really don't know how I'm supposed to respond. Should I be slapping my forehead in shock? "Oh, Dear Lord! He's right! Human agency does matter!"

Of course he's right. There I would go further and say that, with the exception of people who are really mentally deficient, only human agency matters. Our reaction to events affects our circumstances, and especially our attitudes about them, much more strongly than the actual events.

But it's incredibly simplistic to say that Adam Shepard, the kid written about in the post, had no advantages over the other folks in the homeless shelter he showed up at. He's a college-educated, young male. Jim admits this point, but tries to gloss over it, saying

He also had the accumulated social capital represented by his upbringing and education.

There's a whole lot of weight being carried by that phrase, 'accumulated social capital.'

Let's do a thought experiment. Andrew and another fellow, Bob, from the homeless shelter both decide they want to apply for a job, say as a sales clerk at Office Max. Imagine they are both white, with similar age, health, and other demographics. But, while Andrew is a college grad, Bob didn't finish high school. Andrew can speak in complex sentences, using grammatically correct English, while Bob speaks the local street slang, the only language he's ever really known.

Assuming that Andrew and Bob give the exact same answers to every question the interviewer asks, the only difference being Andrew speaking all civilized-like, who do you think is going to get that job?

And, I would argue, the question of grammar is a very small example of Andrew's vast inherent advantages over Bob in the competitive job market. There's knowledge, self-confidence, the fact that Andrew has a lifelong habit of waking up at a certain time because he's knows he has to be somewhere (job, class, swim team practice) by a certain time. Maybe Bob has never held a steady job, and he hasn't woken up at a particular time since he was in sixth grade. That might be a tough thing to learn how to do at the age of 25 years old.

These are the sorts of things that I sort-of take for granted. I'm damn sure Jim does, at least while he was writing this post. I've had limited experience with folks who didn't have the advantages I had growing up, of a set of educated parents who had high expectations of me, but also high confidence in me, and raised me to believe that I could accomplish anything I set my mind to. I know that things that seem as obvious to me as walking or breathing are absolutely not that way for them.

While I may not make millions in this life, I know that I will never starve, because I was raised, as I expect Andrew was, to understand and be able to execute the sorts of things that are necessary to get ahead in our culture - punctuality, neatness, the ability to understand new problems and apply my intelligence to figure out how to solve them.

I'm not saying that these skills can't be gained later in life. But I think it is pretty obvious, bordering almost on tautological, to say that it was a hell of lot easier to gain them when they were part of the background noise of my life growing up than it would be to pick them up in adulthood.

So, while I would never argue that people are slaves to their circumstances, and would agree that people can have remarkable success coming from the roughest of backgrounds, the sort of attitude that 'we just have to expect people to act better' is really, well, unhelpful. Behavior does matter more than circumstances, but lifelong circumstances shape behavior, and failure to acknowledge this is a serious flaw in any political worldview.