Lincoln Unbound (23 page)

Marriage and child-­rearing bear so directly on the status of the American Dream because commitment to the old norms is being redistributed upward. Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia has carefully demonstrated how the highly educated (with a ­college diploma or higher) are less likely to divorce, less likely to have children out of wedlock, and less likely to commit adultery than the moderately educated (high-school degree or some college) and the least educated (no high-school diploma). From 1982 until today, the percentage of nonmarital births among the moderately educated exploded from 13 percent to 44 percent. The figure for the highly educated is only 6 percent.

The advantages of the highly educated are self-­reinforcing because they marry one another at a greater rate than they did before—­itself a driver of inequality. These highly educated parents pass along their attitudes, habits, and knowledge to their children. One sociologist calls the parenting style of the upper middle class “concerted cultivation.” It is focused unceasingly on every aspect of preparing their children to make their way in a high-­achieving world. Well-­educated parents spend much more time than they used to caring for their children, and parents in nuclear families spend more time—­increasingly more—­than ­single ­parents. The gap in educational achievement between kids of high-­ and low-­income families has been growing.

While highly educated ­people enjoy a virtuous circle—­marrying one another, and transferring their advantages to their children—­high-­school-­educated men suffer a vicious one. The economic pressure on these men makes it harder for them to marry; the lack of marriage, in turn, denies them the social stability that creates the so-­called marriage premium of higher earnings.

Lower-­skilled males have been dropping out of the labor force for the last three decades. In other words, they weren't available for a job even if one was open. Many of them worked fewer hours than they had before, and they were more likely to be unemployed. These trends held even when the economy was booming. So what are the men doing? Men without a high-school degree have been spending more time on leisure, while college graduates have been spending less. Among lower-­skilled men without a job, the extra time went to sleeping and watching television.

The starkest indicator of the travails of the working class is the collapse of life expectancy among its less educated members. According to a study published in the journal
Health Affairs
, adults without a high-school degree have life expectancies that have reverted almost all the way back to the level for all adults in the 1950s and 1960s. Among whites, the gap between college-­educated women and women without a high-school degree is ten years, and between men with those levels of educational attainment, thirteen years. It's almost as if they don't live in the same country.

In a lecture about Lincoln, historian Jean Baker notes the contrast between a photograph of Lincoln in 1846 after his election to Congress and one of Dennis and John Hanks, who lived in the old Lincoln household back in Indiana. Lincoln is posing in a studio in a frock coat and satin vest. The two Hanks stand outside a log cabin in Conestoga boots and shabby clothes. Lincoln looks like a lawyer; they look like hillbillies. You might not believe that they knew one another, let alone that they had once lived under the same roof.

It is stark visual demonstration of the gap between their two worlds, a gap that Lincoln wanted to close by extending the reach of bourgeois America. The same gap, in a different form, increasingly yawns between today's upper middle class and above and the ­people they have left behind in down-­at-­the-­heels communities in Middle America, in the inner city, anywhere, really, where education and self-­discipline are lacking.

So, what would Lincoln do today? His essential formula wouldn't have to change much: Economic growth. Policies to enhance the market and ensure that it is as fluid and flexible as possible. Education. An ethic of self-­reliance, free of control by or dependence on others. And a commitment to order and self-­regulating conduct. We should be a strenuous society that demands individual exertion and rewards it, and that is open to all, without favor or prejudice. We should be a country where you can make your way and you
have to
make your way.

Of course, the world has vastly changed a century and a half later. We are about as far in time from Lincoln in his political prime as he was from the America of the early 1700s, when all of 275,000 Anglos lived here and the colonies were still legislating against Catholic priests. Today no one wears stovepipe hats. Lawyers don't ride horses to work. We have gone from an industrial to a postindustrial economy, and computing is the steam power of our change.

We can't say with certitude how Lincoln would react if he were dropped into our America. I don't want to be guilty of Cuomo-­style ideological body snatching. But if we take Lincoln as we find him in the nineteenth century and assume no major changes in worldview, we can tease out the broad contours of, or at least certain hypotheses about, an updated Lincoln platform. In what follows, I describe the major items with a broad brush and a focus on the economy and individual advancement. I fill in some of the details with my own policy preferences, without presuming that Lincoln would have necessarily endorsed any of them.
*

EMBRACE WHAT IS NEW.
Lincoln the modernizer wouldn't have any patience for an economics born of nostalgia or of distrust of the workings of the market. That was the province of his ideological opponents, a George Fitzhugh scorning free competition for elevating the ethic of “every man for himself,” a John C. Calhoun fretting that “modern society seems to me to be rushing toward some new and untried condition.” Lincoln would have been delighted by the rise of Silicon Valley and entranced by the iPhone, fascinated by robotics and thrilled by the astonishing advances in biotech. If the latest agricultural implement captivated him, the world of high-­tech would have been a delightful dream. What is the Internet but the greatest means ever devised by man to conquer time and space, the same end that Lincoln sought through the new technologies of his day?

We have seemingly magical devices at our fingertips, yet our growth has been halting. Reviving it will require an era of economic reform of the sort we have undergone before, and not too long ago. Beginning in the late 1970s, the United States reacted to a crisis of slow growth with a renovation of its private sector and reaped an economic boom.

It dumped what historian Walter Russell Mead disparagingly calls “the blue model.” The American business landscape in the mid-­twentieth century was controlled by a few big firms, free of foreign and often domestic competition, comfortable in the swaddling of extensive government regulation. This environment ­afforded ample room for far-­reaching and costly unionization. As foreign competitors rose up, and as consumers demanded more choice and the regulations favoring big business were rolled back, the private sector became more nimble and less bureaucratic. As Mead notes, it ended lifetime employment, paid productive workers more, moved away from defined-­benefit pensions, automated jobs, and ran free of the old constraints of unionization.

These changes had painful social costs, but so did the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy and so did the transition from slavery to free labor in the South (to say the least). On the foundation of this reform of the private sector, the United States managed to maintain its 21 percent stake of a much more competitive global economy, at the same time its output per person outstripped that of Japan and many European countries. The challenge during the current period of disappointing growth—­extending across the Bush and Obama years and reaching a nadir with the bursting of the housing bubble—­is to wrench the entire economy onto as efficient a footing as possible and to clear away hindrances to economic change.

The public sector exists in a mid-­twentieth-­century time warp. It is heavily unionized, incredibly generous with benefits for its employees, and bureaucratic in its practices and unresponsive to customers. It should be modernized, a process that it resists through sheer political clout. Both the education and health-­care sectors—­growing rapidly, dominated by government, and squeezing the middle class with ever-­escalating costs—­should be brought into the twenty-­first century and subjected to the tempering fire of competition. The tax system should be reformed to cut rates and limit loopholes and deductions toward the goal of reducing disincentives to save, invest, and work. The transformation of the insurance and finance sectors into quasi-­public utilities through regulation should be resisted and reversed. So long as these large swaths of American economic life are unreformed, we will underperform.

We can't know what particular domestic economic agenda Lincoln would have signed up for. We can know he would have favored whatever market-­oriented economic change he thought best suited to the development of human capacity and the increase of national wealth. Stagnation was anathema to him, and with technology driving an ongoing revolution in communications and drawing together commercial markets as never before, today he presumably would have had less patience for it than ever. Lincoln's famous admonition in an 1862 message to Congress, “as our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew,” applies with especial force to a twenty-­first-­century country saddled with so many residual twentieth-­century practices and structures.

EMPHASIZE EDUCATION.
Lincoln talked of the importance of education from the first, although not with much specificity. He lived out his own commitment to it in his early years, with all his reading and self-­directed study. His son Robert, on the other hand, didn't have to rely on his own personalized schooling. When President Lincoln pushed back against Massachusetts Republicans who wanted too many appointments as he was forming his government in 1861, he mollified them with some flattery. He attested “that he considered Massachusetts the banner State of the Union, and admired its institutions and ­people so much that he had sent his ‘Bob' . . . to Harvard for an education.” From illiteracy to Harvard in two generations isn't so bad.

The Lincoln family experience constituted an exaggerated version of the norm for something like 100 years. From roughly the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, Americans stood on a rapid up escalator of educational attainment, with children getting much more schooling than their parents. Now research shows that a driver of inequality is the fact that educational progress has failed to keep pace with technological advance. Several decades ago, we had the best-­educated young ­people of any country in the world. Lately, we have been falling back in terms of educational attainment compared to other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development (a club of more than thirty advanced democracies).

The answer can't simply be more spending. We spend more per pupil than most countries around the world, substantially exceeding the OECD average. While we have more than doubled per-­pupil spending the past four decades, results have largely stayed flat. The high-school graduation rate is lower than it was in the late 1960s, and reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress haven't changed for seventeen-­year-olds since the early 1970s. We could double spending all over again, and so long as we were pouring the money into the same system, we would get the same dismal result.

The education status quo, conceived in the industrial era and set in amber there, should be dynamited. It is particularly atrocious in urban areas. Parents should be empowered with a system of choice and provided with the information to pick the best schools. Funding should follow the child, with leaders of schools given freedom from union contracts and entangling regulations so they can work to create the best possible environments conducive to learning and to attracting students.

Higher education, too, desperately needs reform. It is too expensive and too often fails to deliver value. The cost of attending college has roughly tripled since 1980. It is too inefficient at graduating students. Four-­year institutions graduate less than 40 percent of their students in four years, and less than 60 percent in six. It is too irrelevant to the job market. Many college graduates end up in jobs that don't require a degree, including about half who majored in the humanities. It is too lax. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in their book
Academically Adrift
, found that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.”

We should rethink the current architecture of financial aid, which helps drive up costs in a never-­ending cycle, and find other ways to credential young ­people besides a BA, with an accent on practical, job-­focused training. The signer of the law that gave us land-­grant colleges devoted to the workmanlike subjects of “agriculture and the Mechanic Arts” would understand the imperative to make postsecondary education as economically useful as possible.

The magnitude of the overall challenge in education is such that our default should be to think big, and think radical. We either improve our schooling, or eventually settle into a permanently stratified society.

RESIST DEPENDENCY.
Lincoln resented his father for making him labor and keeping the proceeds for himself. He preached a gospel of work, and wanted as many ­people as possible participating in the commercial economy. He made the basic principle of working for your living—­not taking from others, or living off others—­a foundation of his antislavery advocacy. Allen Guelzo goes so far as to write that Lincoln defined slavery “as any relationship which forestalled social dynamism and economic mobility.”

Lincoln might find it strange that the American government, which he envisioned as a support for economic advance and an instrument of freedom, would create a system largely about ­people living, in whole or part, on others. The central business of American government is not building things or “investing.” It is not fostering opportunity, or even defending the country. It is taking money from some ­people and giving it to others. It transfers resources from the young to the old, and from the rich to the poor, in the vast shuffle of wealth that is the modern welfare state.