Class inequality and national harm

Daniel Akst is a member of the Newsday editorial board.

Fifty years ago, Kurt Vonnegut published a short story about a society beset by radical egalitarianism.

Titled "Harrison Bergeron" and set in 2081, it features a government official called the Handicapper General who is determined to make everyone equal. This entails attaching bags of lead birdshot to graceful ballerinas, and hiding the faces of the indecently beautiful behind masks. Smart people are required by law to wear devices that emit excruciating noises every few seconds, shattering their concentration.

It's a radical and heartbreaking piece of fiction. And it raises profound questions -- about the extent to which people are entitled to the fruits of their good fortune, about what we owe one another, and about the role government should play in rectifying nature's unfairness.

Those questions are especially pertinent now, half a century later. Inequality has been growing for a generation in this country, and both our economy and political culture are changing in ways likely to exacerbate it. It's been growing in other countries too, but among comparably affluent nations, we are a leader, and that's a dubious distinction deserving of more attention than it receives.

The problem is twofold. First, the global economy has evolved in ways that heap ever greater rewards on the brightest and most self-disciplined people. Blue-collar workers, meanwhile, buffeted by trade and technology, have had their world turned upside down.

And second, America does less to ameliorate these trends than most comparable countries. They have universal health insurance, for example. Higher education is cheaper (if inferior). Taxes are higher on the highest earners. Workers get a greater share of income.

In some ways, we are victims of our own success. By ruthlessly emphasizing merit, we seemed to be moving toward a fairer society. But a funny thing happened on the way to utopia: We didn't get there. Class mobility seems to have stalled. High-earners marry one another, exacerbating income differences.

The psychologist Richard Herrnstein, who studied the heritability of intelligence, foresaw what was coming back in 1971. "Greater wealth, health, freedom, fairness, and educational opportunity," he wrote, "are not going to give us the egalitarian society of our philosophical heritage. It will instead give us a society sharply graduated, with ever greater innate separation between the top and the bottom."

Vonnegut's egalitarian dystopia is an eloquent warning against government abuses in the cause of equality. That was a reasonable worry in the days when communism was very much alive. Maybe it still is.

But what a difference half a century makes. Our economy may yet evolve in ways that reduce inequality, perhaps by raising the value of plumbing, auto repair and other skills that can't be delivered from China or superseded by technology. Yet cheap overseas labor and distance-obliterating networks threaten many white-collar jobs, too. So I'm betting on even more inequality ahead.

Highly unequal societies aren't very stable or pleasant, but thankfully, hanging weights and noisemakers on the gifted isn't in the cards. The focus instead must be on improving K-12 education, including a much stronger trade-skills curriculum. College simply isn't the answer for everybody -- and isn't the place for learning that should have occurred in high school.

But first, our elites have to recognize that the country's future is bleak unless a way can be found for blue-collar Americans to earn a reliable middle-class living. It's tempting to give all of them dubious sheepskins and call it a day. But we'd only be handicapping ourselves -- with illusions.