Upward Mobility

A society with no upward mobility is said to be stagnant. When people are born into social castes and have no opportunity to improve their lot in life, the entire society suffers. Since ancient times, the ability for those at the very bottom of the social pyramid to move up has been one of the ways in which we gauge the health of the entire body politic.

Even societies where there are slaves demonstrate the value of upward mobility in their rate of manumission. For instance, in ancient Rome there was such a high rate of slaves being freed by masters that in 357 B.C. the State decided to capitalize on this and levied a five percent tax on manumission.

http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/romeslavery/qt/082707ManumiTax.htm

It is estimated that 1350 slaves were set free each year in Rome after the tax law was passed. It stands to reason that before passage of the tax, even more slaves were set free each  year, since every tax tends to diminish the activity on which it is based.

In early Colonial America, the tradition of manumission was also followed, and after being freed, some slaves became extremely successful, owning land, attaining to great wealth and even owning slaves themselves. For instance, Anthony Johnson was born in Angola in 1600 and was captured by an enemy tribe and sold into slavery to Arab traders. Johnson arrived as a black slave in Virginia in  1621 and was sold to a tobacco planter named Bennet. In 1635 Johnson and his wife Mary were set free. In 1647 Johnson already owned some property; records show he bought a calf. In 1651 Johnson acquired 250 acres. He now owned four white and one black indentured servants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_(colonist)

This is an example of extreme social mobility. Johnson did not merely go up one rung on the social ladder, from slave to free, but also several rungs, so that he himself was now on a social par with those who used to own him. This kind of rags to riches success story, of course, is not something that can happen to everyone in a given society, but that it can happen is very important to the social fabric, because it allows for hope of reward for dedication, ingenuity and hard work. It also shows every member of the society that nobody is guaranteed any position by birth, but that the roles to be played are fluid. Just as one person may rise, another may fall.

To the extent that the opportunity for social advancement is not available to all in any given society, it is much more likely that stagnation will set in, and that the motivation to try to achieve a better life for oneself will be lessened.

In the United States after the civil war, there were no more slaves, so the lowest rung on the social ladder now became the domestic servant. According to Nobel prize winning economist George Stigler, there was a premium on domestic service between 1900 and 1940, in that because it was seen as distasteful work, employers were willing to pay more for it than for other kinds of service.

This table is from piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Stigler1946.pdf 

People in domestic service were often foreign immigrants or poor blacks. One of the benefits of domestic service was that those who served eventually learned a lot about the culture of their employers and were then able to use the information acquired in order to better their social situation.

This quote is from Stigler 1946.2

So while the position of domestic servant was distasteful in many ways, it was a tool that ambitious outsiders used in their pursuit of upward mobility.

This table is from http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Stigler1946.pdf

While some might assume that the freest society is one in which there is no social stratification, a lessening in stratification also leads to fewer opportunities for upward social mobility. For instance, in Table II above we can see that during the great depression which led to World War II, both in Germany and in the United States, and to a much  lesser extent in Great Britain, there was a drop in the employment of domestic servants.

Stigler makes an interesting conjecture about the sort of income distribution that allows for domestic service: "..the equality of the distribution of income, rather than the amount, may be a factor of considerable importance. A society with relatively many families at both ends of the income scale would provide both a large supply of servants and a large demand."  (Stigler 1946.7). What this means is that it does not matter how many dollars of income are involved, but the relative distribution of this income into high and low groups.  Unless there is a wide variety of incomes, there will be less social mobility. The more even the income distribution, the less social mobility will be available to anyone, and the more stagnant the society will become.

After World War II, domestic service in the United States went down and stayed down, with only the very wealthy having servants. The result is that very few people one meets today have ever been a servant or employed a servant. Servants are something we usually only encounter in fiction. Our society is much more egalitarian, and by extension there are also fewer opportunities for meaningful upward mobility.

The Myth of the Self-Made Man

A little before I left for Galveston, I read an article that made me think about our current socio-economic reality and how it relates to people like Jean and Pierre Laffite and also to their offspring, such as Pierre's children and grandchildren by Marie Villard. But I had no time to sit down and organize my thoughts about this. So I just shared the article on my Twitter feed and moved on.

The article was published on Slate by John Swansburg, and it was called "The Self-Made Man: the Story of America's Most Pliable, Pernicious and Irrepressible Myth."  I have linked the article here, so you can go read it in its entirety. It is very, very long, contains a lot of historical details and is sort of apologetic of the good fortune of some, including the father of the author, who happens to have been one of those "self-made men."

The article is nuanced, has a reasonable tone, is not too dogmatic, but it was basically written to appeal to the progressive sensibility. There's a lot of truth to what it has to say, but at the same time, it misses what to me is the real point of upward mobility and the melting pot.

 Some of the points the author made include these perfectly unobjectionable observations:

• get-rich-quick schemes are a by-product of gullibility in the general public that has allowed itself to swallow the myth that extreme success is open to everyone, regardless of effort, talent or other qualifications.
• The myth of the self-made man has changed over the years from being based on the Puritan work ethic, where industry, hard work and frugality were its basis,  which also allowed for circumstances shaping the man, to some sort of idea of individual drive being the chief qualification, so that if you want it badly enough success will come, and now ambition is in itself a virtue.
• A lot of the self-help industry is based on this myth.
• People who did succeed were not entirely self-made, as they came from families where the skills and virtues that led to success were already taught and part of the socio-economic and cultural heritage of the entrepreneur.

Nobody is self-made, so, of course, taken in its most literal sense, there is no such thing as a self-made man. Our DNA comes from someplace. Our flesh, including our brain cells and our most basic predilections all come from others, passed down through a long chain of ancestors, the earliest of which were not even human.

"You're self made, eh?" the Progressive scoffs. "Well, did you invent bipedalism all by yourself? How about the wheel? Language? Writing? Algebra?" 

In a somewhat less absurd move, Swansburg points out that Jewish immigrants to the United States who became successful in the garment industry already had garment industry experience in Europe, before immigrating. That makes sense. But does it take away from the achievements of the few who succeeded grandly, despite poverty and a language barrier?

Or how about the fact that many East Asian immigrant children come from a culture where literacy and studiousness are already very much valued and encouraged, which is why they tend to excel in academics far and above their Anglo-Saxon classmates, whose ancestors were still illiterate savages at a time when the East had a well developed culture?  Does this mean that we should put quotas on university entry by Asian-Americans?

The fallacy is in thinking that the melting pot and upward mobility in the United States was ever supposed to be based on dispossessing people of the individual advantages that came from belonging to a particular family or ethnic group. The idea was always that you got to compete based on everything you left home with, and that nobody would ever penalize you for what sort of home you had. Rising based on your own merit was not supposed to be tempered by handicapping certain people for coming into the race with certain built-in advantages. In fact, the myth of the self-made man was that everybody was allowed to shine based on their built-in advantages, regardless of anything else.

"But it's not fair that some people come better equipped!" some complain.  Fair to whom? To the consumer who wants to buy inexpensive well-made garments? To the university that seeks the brightest students? To the employer who is looking for the best workers money can buy?

Social Darwinism is frowned upon. as a misunderstanding of the theory of evolution. But the theory of evolution, some have pointed out, is a tautology. It is true by definition. If traits are selected for in future generations based on the survival of the fittest, then how do you determine who the fittest were, except by looking around to see who survived? Fittest does not mean some kind of absolute virtue -- it just means most adapted to the particular environment. When the environment changes, the traits that make us most fit also change.

In today's market, those who are willing to do necessary blue collar work are at an advantage over the merely studious, because the market is flooded with college graduates who have no useful skills. Half a century ago it might have been different. Tinker with the marketplace, and you change the fitness of all the participants.

Upward mobility at present is at an all time low, some complain. I'm not sure whether that is true or not, but I do know that even during slavery, there was upward mobility for blacks. Marie Villard was a descendant of slaves, but she was a free woman who owned property. Though miscegenation laws prevented Pierre Laffite from marrying her, his children by her were well provided for under a binding contract. After a few generations, the descendants of Marie Villard had been so assimilated into New Orleans society that they did not even know they were black. They remembered they had a famous "pirate" in their lineage, but they conveniently forgot about Marie Villard. (Source: Davis, The Pirates Laffite.)

That is in fact how upward mobility and the American melting pot worked. Though all people have certain advantages inherited from their ancestors, over time we become assimilated to the point where we no longer remember where we came from, and then it may appear that we are entirely self-made. It may be a myth, but it is also one of the advantages of the American culture of the nineteenth century, because by allowing people to forget their origins, society was able to let individuals fully claim every useful trait that came built in, to the advantage of not only the individual, but also society as whole.

Jean Laffite never denied his roots. He was proud of his ancestors and of the way he used what he inherited from them to become a successful entrepreneur, leader and patriot. Was he a self-made man? As much so as anyone ever was. He was just unusually honest about where he came from. That was perhaps his greatest flaw, and the reason he never received the recognition he deserved.