The Social Animal

CHAPTER 20 THE SOFT SIDE

THERE’S A CROSS STREET IN WASHINGTON, D.C., WITH A THINK tank on each corner. There’s a foreign-policy think tank, a domestic-policy think tank, an international-economics think tank, and one specializing in regulatory affairs. Many people consider this the most boring spot on the face of the earth.

The research assistants gather at coffee shops, scheming about how to get C-SPAN to cover their boss’s “Whither NATO?” conference next spring. The junior fellows share cabs to Capitol Hill and generously agree to sit on each other’s panel discussions. The senior fellows, the former deputy secretaries of this or that department, engage in a Washington institution called the Powerless Lunch, in which two previously influential people dine and have portentous conversations of no importance whatsoever. Meanwhile, they all have to deal with the emotional consequences of their Sublimated Liquidity Rage, which is the anger felt by Upper–Middle Class Americans who make decent salaries but have to spend 60 percent of their disposable incomes on private-school tuitions. They have nothing left to spend on themselves, which causes deep and unacknowledged self-pity.

When Erica disappeared into the administration as deputy chief of staff, Harold joined these happy symposiasts by taking a job as the Robert J. Kolman Senior Research Fellow for Public Policy Studies. Kolman was a four-foot-ten-inch investment banker on his fifth six-foot wife (that’s thirty feet of combined womanhood) who thought most of America’s problems would be solved if he got invited to the White House more often.

Harold thus found himself in the land of policy johnnies. He found them emotionally avoidant overall, people who had established their credentials as university grinds, built their authority on analytic rigor, and then had congregated, like swallows to Capistrano, at a place where sexuality was rigorously suppressed, pleasure was a low priority, and where if you attended four entitlement-reform conferences you found that your virginity had been magically restored. Harold noticed that his new colleagues were very nice and incredibly smart, but they suffered from the status rivalries endemic to the upper middle class. As law-school grads, they resent B-school grads. As Washingtonians, they resent New Yorkers. As policy wonks, they resent people with good bone structure. They all had NordicTrack machines crammed into their kids’ play areas downstairs, but no matter how hard they labored they were careful never to become beautiful, because if they did they would never be taken seriously at the Congressional Budget Office.

Harold’s office was directly next to a guy whose political career had blown up because of rank-link imbalance. He’d spent the first part of his life defining himself by his career rank. He’d developed the social skills useful on the climb up the greasy pole: the capacity to imply false intimacy; the ability to remember first names; the subtle skills of effective deference. He got elected to the Senate and had come to master the patois of globaloney—the ability to declaim for portentous hours about the revolution in world affairs brought about by technological change/environmental degradation/the fundamental decline in moral values—had achieved fame and a spot as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and was often talked about as a presidential hopeful.

But then, gradually, some cruel cosmic joke got played on him. He realized in middle age that his Senate grandeur was not enough and that he was lonely. Some Senators manage to build friendships once they are in Congress. In fact, a study by Katherine Faust and John Skvoretz found that the friendship networks within the U.S. Senate were remarkably similar in structure to the social licking networks among cows. But this poor fellow never built those friendships. He had spent his entire life building vertical relationships with people above him; he had not spent time building horizontal relationships with people who might be peers and true companions. The ordinariness of his intimate life was made more painful by the exhilaration of his public success.

And so the crisis came. Perhaps alpha-male gorillas don’t wake up in the middle of the night feeling sorry for themselves because “nobody knows the real me.” But Harold’s neighbor went off to heal the hurt as best as he knew how. After years of repression he had the friendship skills of a six-year-old. When he tried to bond, it was like watching a Saint Bernard try to French-kiss. It was overbearing, slobbery, and desperately wanting. Some perfectly normal young woman would be sitting at a dinner party and suddenly she’d find a senator’s tongue in her ear. Having decided in midlife that in fact he did have an inner soul, he took it out for a romp and discovered he had just bought a ticket on the self-immolation express.

Embarrassing revelations surfaced. Call girls appeared in the press with interesting stories to tell. The Ethics Committee met. Late-night comics made jokes. Resignations were handed in and the former presidential aspirant found himself at a think tank sitting around in the afternoons shooting the breeze with Harold.

The Hard Side

Harold also noticed that certain ideas in the wider scientific culture had scarcely penetrated the policy-making world. He found that whether on the right or the left, people in this world shared certain assumptions. They both had individualistic worldviews, tending to assume that society is a contract between autonomous individuals. Both promoted policies designed to expand individual choice. Neither paid much attention to social and communal bonds, to local associations, or invisible norms.

Conservative activists embraced the individualism of the market. They reacted furiously against any effort by the state to impinge upon individual economic choice. They adopted policy prescriptions designed to maximize economic freedom: lower tax rates so people could keep and use more of their money, privatized Social Security so people could control more of their own pensions, voucher programs so parents could choose schools for their children.

Liberals embraced the individualism of the moral sphere. They reacted furiously against any effort by the state to impinge upon choices about marriage, family structure, the role of women, and matters of birth and death. They embraced policies designed to maximize social freedom. Individuals should be free to make their own choices about abortion, euthanasia, and other matters. Activist groups stood up for the rights of individuals accused of crimes. Religion, in the form of crèches and menorahs, was rigorously separated from the public square so as not to impinge on individual conscience.

The individualism of the left and right produced two successful political movements—one in the 1960s and one in the 1980s. For a generation, no matter who was in power, the prevailing winds had been blowing in the direction of autonomy, individualism, and personal freedom, not in the directions of society, social obligations, and communal bonds.

Harold also found that his new colleagues shared a materialistic mind-set. Both liberals and conservatives gravitated toward economic explanations for any social problem and generally came up with solutions to this problem that involved money. Some conservatives argued for child–tax credits to restore marriage, low-tax enterprise zones to combat urban poverty, and school vouchers to improve the education system. Liberals emphasized the other side of the fiscal ledger, spending programs. They tried to direct more dollars to fix broken schools. They expanded student-aid subsidies to increase college-completion rates. Both sides assumed there was a direct relationship between improving material conditions and solving problems. Both sides neglected matters of character, culture, and morality.

In other words, they split Adam Smith down the middle. Smith wrote one book, The Wealth of Nations, in which he described economic activity and the invisible hand. But he wrote another book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he described how sympathy and the unconscious desire for esteem molded individuals. Smith believed that the economic activity described in The Wealth of Nations rested upon the bedrock described in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. But in recent decades, the former book became famous, while the latter was cited but never applied. The prevailing mentality treasured the first but didn’t know what to make of the second.

Harold found that in Washington the highest status went to those who studied things involving guns and banks. People who wrote about war, budgets, and global finance strode around like titans, but people who wrote about family policy, early-childhood education, and community relationships were treated like pudgy geeks at a frat party. You could pull a senator aside and try to talk about the importance of maternal bonds to future human development and the senator would look at you indulgently, as if you were raising money for a group-therapy farm for lonely puppies. Then he’d go off to talk about something serious—a tax bill or a defense contract.

Politicians themselves were intensely social creatures. They’d made their way in the world with these brilliant emotional antennae, but when it came to thinking about policy, they ignored those faculties entirely. They thought mechanistically, and took seriously only those factors that could be rigorously quantified and toted up in an appropriations bill.

The Shallow View

Harold believed that, over the course of his lifetime, this mentality had led to a series of disastrous policies. These policies had produced bad effects for a common reason. They rearranged the material conditions in positive ways, but they undermined social relationships in ways that were unintended and destructive.

Some of the mistakes had emanated from the left. In the 1950s and 1960s, well-intentioned reformers saw run-down neighborhoods with decaying tenement houses, and vowed to replace them with shiny new housing projects. Those old neighborhoods may have been decrepit, but they contained mutual support systems and community bonds. When they were destroyed and replaced with the new projects, people’s lives were materially better but spiritually worse. The projects turned into atomized wastelands, ultimately unfit for human habitation.

Welfare policies in the 1970s undermined families. Government checks lifted the material conditions of the recipients but in the midst of a period of cultural disruption, they enabled lonely young girls to give birth out of wedlock, thus decimating the habits and rituals that led to intact families.

Other policy failures came from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Walmart decimated local shop owners, and the networks of friendship and community they helped create. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away.

Abroad, free-market experts flooded into Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They offered mountains of advice on privatization but almost none on how to rebuild communal trust and law and order, which are the real seedbeds of prosperity. The United States invaded Iraq, believing that merely by replacing the nation’s dictator and political institutions they could easily remake a nation. The invaders were oblivious to the psychological effects a generation of tyranny had wrought on Iraqi culture, the vicious hatreds that lurked just below its surface—circumstances that quickly produced an ethnic bloodbath.

Harold’s list of failed policies went on and on: financial deregulation that assumed global traders needed no protection from their own emotional contagions; enterprise zones based on the suppositions that, if you merely reduced tax rates in inner cities, then local economies would thrive; scholarship programs designed to reduce college-dropout rates, which pretended the main problem was lack of financial aid, when in fact only about 8 percent of students are unable to complete college for purely financial reasons. The more important problems have to do with emotional disengagement from college and lack of academic preparedness, intangible factors the prevailing mind-set found it hard to factor and acknowledge.

In short, government had tried to fortify material development, but had ended up weakening the social and emotional development that underpins it. Government was not the only factor in the thinning of society. A cultural revolution had decimated old habits and traditional family structures. An economic revolution had replaced downtowns with big isolated malls with chain stores. The information revolution had replaced community organizations that held weekly face-to-face meetings with specialized online social networking where like found like. But government policy had unwittingly played a role in all these changes.

The result was the diminution of social capital that Robert Putnam described in Bowling Alone and other books. People became more loosely affiliated. The webs of relationship that habituate self-restraint, respect for others, and social sympathy lost their power. The effects were sometimes liberating for educated people, who possessed the social capital to explore the new loosely knit world, but they were devastating for those without that sort of human capital. Family structures began to disintegrate, especially for the less educated. Out-of-wedlock births skyrocketed. Crime rose. Trust in institutions collapsed.

The state had to step in in an attempt to restore order. As British philosopher Phillip Blond has written, the individualist revolutions did not end up creating loose, free societies. They produced atomized societies in which the state grows in an attempt to fill the gaps created by social disintegration. The fewer informal social constraints there are in any society, the more formal state power there has to be. In Britain you wound up with skyrocketing crime rates, and, as a result, four million security cameras. Neighborhoods disintegrated and the welfare state stepped in, further absorbing or displacing the remaining social-support networks. A careening market, unconstrained by the traditions or informal standards, required intrusive prosecutors to police them. As Blond observed, “Look at the society we have become: We are a bipolar nation, a bureaucratic centralized state that presides over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry.”

Without a healthy social fabric, politics became polarized. One party came to represent the state. The other came to represent the market. One party tried to shift power and money to government; the other tried to shift those things to vouchers and other market mechanisms. Both of them neglected and ignored the intermediary institutions of civil life.

In socially depleted nations, many people began to form their personal identities around their political faction. They had nothing else to latch on to. Politicians and media polemicists took advantage of the psychic vacuum and turned parties into cults, demanding and rewarding complete loyalty to the tribe.

Once politics became a contest pitting one identity group against another, it was no longer possible to compromise. Everything became a status war between my kind of people and your kind of people. Even a small concession came to seem like moral capitulation. Those who tried to build relationships across party lines were ostracized. Among politicians, loyalty to the party overshadowed loyalty to institutions like the Senate or the House. Politics was no longer about trade-offs, it was a contest for honor and group supremacy. Amidst this partisan ugliness, public trust in government and political institutions collapsed.

In a densely connected society, people can see the gradual chain of institutions that connect family to neighborhood, neighborhood to town, town to regional association, regional associations to national associations, and national associations to the federal government. In a stripped-down society, that chain has been broken and the sense of connection gets broken with it. The state seems at once alien and intrusive. People lose faith in the government’s ability to do the right thing most of the time and come to have cynical and corrosive attitudes about their national leaders.

Instead of being bound by fraternal bonds, and occasionally responding to a call for joint sacrifice, a cynical “grab what you can before the other guys steal it” mentality prevails. The result is skyrocketing public debt and a public unwilling to accept the sacrifice of either tax increases or spending cuts required for fiscal responsibility. Neither side trusts the other to hold up their end of any deal. Neither party believes the other would honestly participate in truly shared sacrifice. Without social trust, the political system devolves into a brutal shoving match.

The Soft Side

Harold believed that the cognitive revolution had the potential to upend these individualistic political philosophies, and the policy approaches that grew from them. The cognitive revolution demonstrated that human beings emerge out of relationships. The health of a society is determined by the health of those relationships, not by the extent to which it maximizes individual choice.

Therefore, freedom should not be the ultimate end of politics. The ultimate focus of political activity is the character of the society. Political, religious, and social institutions influence the unconscious choice architecture undergirding behavior. They can either create settings that nurture virtuous choices or they can create settings that undermine them. While the rationalist era put the utility-maximizing individual at the center of political thought, the next era, Harold believed, would put the health of social networks at the center of thought. One era was economo-centric. The next would be socio-centric.

The socio-centric intellectual currents, he hoped, would restore character talk and virtue talk to the center of political life. You can pump money into poor areas, but without cultures that foster self-control, you won’t get social mobility. You can raise or lower tax rates, but without trust and confidence, companies won’t form and people will not invest in one another. You can establish elections but without responsible citizens, democracy won’t flourish. After a lifetime spent designing and writing about public policy, the criminologist James Q. Wilson arrived at this core truth: “At root, in almost every area of public concern, we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously, whether as schoolchildren, applicants for public assistance, would-be lawbreakers or voters and public officials.”

On his wall, Harold had tacked another quotation, from Benjamin Disraeli: “The spiritual nature of man is stronger than codes or constitutions. No government can endure which does not recognize that for its foundation, and no legislation last which does not flow from this foundation.”

Everything came down to character, and that meant everything came down to the quality of relationships, because relationships are the seedbeds of character. The reason life and politics are so hard is that relationships are the most important, but also the most difficult, things to understand.

In short, Harold entered a public-policy world in which people were used to thinking in hard, mechanistic terms. He thought he could do some good if he threw emotional and social perspectives into the mix.

Socialism

As Harold worked his way through the process of discovering how his basic suppositions applied to the world of politics and policy, he came to lament the fact that the word “socialism” was already taken. The nineteenth-and twentieth-century thinkers who had called themselves socialists weren’t really socialists. They were statists. They valued the state over society.

But true socialism would put social life first. He imagined that the cognitive revolution could foster more communitarian styles of politics. There would be a focus on the economic community. Did people in different classes have a sense they were joined in a common enterprise, or were the gaps between classes too wide? There would be a focus on the common culture. Were the core values of the society expressed and self-confidently reinforced? Were they reflected in the nation’s institutions? Did new immigrants successfully assimilate? In the political sphere Harold imagined, conservatives would emphasize that it is hard for the state to change culture and character. Liberals would argue that we still, in pragmatic ways, have to try. Both would speak the language of fraternity, and inspire with a sense that we are all in this together.

Harold didn’t really know whether he should call himself a liberal or a conservative at this point. One of his guiding principles was drawn from a famous quotation from Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

He did know that his job in Washington was to show the locals that character and culture really shape behavior, and that government could, in limited ways, shape culture and character. State power is like fire—warming when contained, fatal when it grows too large. In his view, government should not run people’s lives. That only weakens the responsibility and virtue of the citizens. But government could influence the setting in which lives are lived. Government could, to some extent, nurture settings that serve as nurseries for fraternal relationships. It could influence the spirit of the citizenry.

Part of that is done simply by performing the elemental tasks of the state, establishing a basic framework of order and security—defending against external attack, regulating economic activity to punish predators, protecting property rights, punishing crime, upholding rule of law, providing a basic level of social insurance and civic order.

Some of this is done by reducing the programs that weaken culture and character. The social fabric is based on the idea that effort leads to reward. But very often, government rewards people who have not put in the effort. It does this with good intentions (the old welfare programs that discouraged work) and it does it with venal intentions (lobbyists secure earmarks, tax breaks, and subsidies so their companies can secure revenue without having to earn it in the marketplace). These programs weaken social trust and public confidence. By separating effort from reward, they pollute the atmosphere. They send the message that the system is rigged and society is corrupt.

But Harold thought government, properly led, could also play a more constructive role. Just as remote and centralized power creates a servile citizenry, decentralized power and community self-government creates an active and cooperative citizenry. Infrastructure projects that create downtown hubs strengthen relationships and spur development. Charter schools bring parents together. Universities that are active beyond campus become civic and entrepreneurial hot spots. National service programs bring people together across class lines. Publicly funded, locally administered social-entrepreneurship funds encourage civic activism and community-service programs. Simple and fair tax policies rouse energies, increase dynamism, lift the animal spirits, and encourage creative destruction.

Aristotle wrote that legislators habituate citizens. Whether they mean to or not, legislators encourage certain ways of living and discourage other ways. Statecraft is inevitably soulcraft.

Experiments in Thinking

Harold began writing a series of essays for policy journals on what his soft side approach might mean in the real world. All his essays had a common theme: How the fracturing of unconscious bonds was at the root of many social problems and how government could act to repair this tear in the social fabric.

He began in areas as far removed as possible from the gushy world of emotion and relationships. His first essay was about global terrorism. Many commentators had originally assumed that terrorism was a product of poverty and a lack of economic opportunity. It was a problem with material roots. But research into the backgrounds of terrorists established that, according to one database, 75 percent of the anti-Western terrorists come from middle-class homes and an amazing 63 percent had attended some college. The problem is not material but social. The terrorists are, as Olivier Roy argues, detached from any specific country and culture. They are often caught in the no-man’s-land between the ancient and modern. They invent a make-believe ancient purity to give their lives meaning. They take up violent jihad because it attaches them to something. They are generally not politically active before they join terror groups, but are looking for some larger creed to give their existence shape and purpose. That choice can only be prevented if there are other causes to give them a different route to fulfillment.

Then Harold wrote about military strategy, the essence of guns-and-mayhem machismo. Harold described how military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan had found that it was impossible to defeat an insurgency on the battlefield by simply killing as many of the bad guys as possible. The only route to victory, they had learned, was through a counterinsurgency strategy called COIN, which started with winning the trust of the population. The soldiers and marines discovered that it was not enough to secure a village; they had to hold it so that people could feel safe; they had to build schools, medical facilities, courts, and irrigation ditches; they had to reconvene town councils and give power to village elders. It was only when this nation-building activity was well along that the local societies would be strong enough and cohesive enough to help them provide intelligence about and repel the enemy. Harold pointed out that the hardest political activity—warfare—depended on the softest social skills—listening, understanding, and building trust. Victory in this kind of war is not about piling up dead bodies; it is about building communities.

His next essay was about global AIDS policy. The West had thrown great technical knowledge at this problem and produced drugs that could help treat this plague. But the effectiveness of these drugs was limited if people continued to engage in the behaviors that lead to the disease.

Harold pointed out that technical knowledge alone would not change behavior. Raising awareness is necessary but insufficient. Surveys show that vast majorities in the most severely afflicted countries understand the dangers of HIV, but they behave in risky ways anyway. Providing condoms is necessary but insufficient. Most people in these countries have access to condoms. But that doesn’t mean they actually use them, as rising or stable infection rates demonstrate. Economic development, too, is necessary but insufficient. The people who most aggressively spread the disease—often miners or truck drivers—are relatively well off. Providing health-care facilities is also necessary but insufficient. Harold described a hospital in Namibia where 858 women were receiving treatments. After a year of effort, they could get only five of their male partners to come in for testing. Though it meant a death sentence, the men would not come to the hospital. In their culture, men did not go near hospitals.

Harold visited a village in Namibia where all the middle-aged people were dead from AIDS. The children had nursed their parents into their graves. And yet, against all the most primal incentives of survival, the children were replicating the exact same behaviors that had led to their parents’ deaths. He pointed out that the cause of this behavior defied all logic, as well as the principle of rational self-interest as commonly understood. The programs that actually changed behavior did not focus primarily upon logic and self-interest. The programs that worked best tried to change an entire pattern of life. They didn’t merely try to change decisions about safe sex. They tried to create virtuous people, who would not put themselves in the path of temptation. These programs were often led by religious leaders. These men and women spoke in the language of right and wrong, of vice and virtue. The people leading these programs spoke the language of “ought.” They talked about salvation and biblical truth, and safer sexual activity was a by-product of a much larger change in outlook.

This is a language unaddressed by technical knowledge. It’s a language that has to be spoken by an elder, a neighbor, by people who know one another’s names. Harold pointed out that the West has thrown a tremendous amount of medical and technical knowledge at the HIV/AIDS problem, but not enough moral and cultural knowledge, the kind of knowledge that changes lives, viewpoints, and morality, and through those larger patterns alters the unconscious basis of behavior.

Then Harold got closer to home. He described how suburbia had strained community bonds across modern America. He pointed out that, in the 1990s, developers built vast, exurban housing developments. In those days if you asked home buyers what they wanted in their development, they said a golf course—the sign of status. But if a decade later you asked people what they wanted, they said a community center, a coffee shop, a hiking trail, and a health club. These folks had overshot the mark. They moved out to far-flung suburbs to get their piece of the American dream, which they equated with big property, but they missed the social connections that come from living in more densely populated areas. So the market had partially responded, with pseudo-urban streetscapes in the middle of the sprawl—dense downtown areas where people could stroll and eat at sidewalk cafés.

Social Mobility

Harold’s biggest research project was about social mobility. His basic premise was that over the past few decades scholars had spent too much time thinking about globalization, the movement of goods and ideas across borders. Globalization, he thought, was not the central process driving change. For example, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, offshore outsourcing was responsible for only 1.9 percent of layoffs in the first decade of the twenty-first century, despite all the talk and attention. According to Pankaj Ghemawat of Harvard Business School, 90 percent of fixed investment around the world is domestic.

The real engine of change, Harold believed, was a change in the cognitive load. Over the past few decades, technological and social revolution had put greater and greater demands on human cognition. People are now compelled to absorb and process a much more complicated array of information streams. They are compelled to navigate much more complicated social environments. This is happening in both localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening if you tore up every free-trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the cognitive-load paradigm holds that the most important part of the journey is the last few inches—the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Through what sort of lens does the individual perceive the information? Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? What emotions and ideas does the information set off? Are there cultural assumptions that distort or enhance the way it is understood?

This change in the cognitive load has had many broad effects. It has changed the role of women, who are able to compete equally in the arena of mental skill. It has changed the nature of marriage, as men and women look for partners who can match and complement each other’s mental abilities. It has led to assortative mating, as highly educated people marry each other and less-educated people marry each other. It has also produced widening inequality, so that societies divide into two nations—a nation of those who possess the unconscious skills to navigate this terrain and a nation of those who have not had the opportunity to acquire those skills.

Over the past decades there has been a steady rise in the education premium, the economic rewards that go to people with more education. In the 1970s it barely made economic sense to go to college, some argued. There wasn’t a big difference in the income levels of college grads and non–college grads. But starting in the early 1980s, the education premium started to grow and it hasn’t stopped. Today, money follows ideas. The median American with a graduate degree is part of a family making $93,000 a year. The median person with a college degree is in a family making $75,000. The median person with a high-school degree is in a family making $42,000 and the average high school dropout is in a family making $28,000.

Moreover, there is a superstar effect, even at the top. People who possess unique mental abilities become prized; their salaries soar. People with decent education but fungible mental traits become commodities. Their salaries trudge slowly upward or even stagnate.

These mental abilities tend to get passed down in families, and so you get an inherited meritocracy. It doesn’t matter as much as it did in the 1950s whether you were born into an old Protestant family whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. But it still matters a great deal what family you were born into, maybe more than ever. A child born into a family making $90,000 has a 50 percent chance of graduation from college by age twenty-four. A child born into a family making $70,000, has a one-in-four chance. A child born into a family making $45,000 has a one-in-ten chance. A child born into a family making $30,000 has a one-in-seventeen chance.

Elite universities become bastions of privilege. Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose surveyed the top 146 U.S. colleges and found that only 3 percent of the students there came from families in the bottom economic quartile. Seventy-four percent of students came from families in the top quartile.

A healthy society is a mobile society, one in which everybody has a shot at the good life, in which everybody has reason to strive, in which people rise and fall according to their deserts. But societies in the cognitive age produce their own form of inequality, lodged deep in the brains of the citizenry, which is more subtle than ancient class distinctions under feudalism, but nearly as stark and unfair.

Harold pointed out that most nations have tried to battle this problem, spending a lot of money in the process. The United States has spent over a trillion dollars to try to reduce the achievement gap between white and black students. Public-education spending per pupil increased by 240 percent in real terms between 1960 and 2000. Major universities offer lavish aid packages and some of the richest, like Harvard, waive tuition entirely for those from families making less than $60,000 a year. The United States spends enough money on an-tipoverty programs to hand every person in poverty a check for $15,000 a year. A mother with two kids would get a $45,000 check every year if the programs were converted into a simple transfer.

But money can’t solve the problem of inequality because money is not the crucial source of the problem. The problem is in the realm of conscious and unconscious development. Harold needed only to compare his upbringing to Erica’s to see this. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that encourages human-capital development—books, discussion, reading, questions, conversations about what they want to do in the future—and some children are bathed in a disrupted atmosphere. If you read part of a story to kindergarten children in an affluent neighborhood, about half of them will be able to predict what will happen next in the story. If you read the same fragment to children in poor neighborhoods, only about 10 percent will be able to anticipate the flow of events. The ability to construct templates about the future is vitally important to future success.

In 1964, before the cognitive age had truly kicked in, rich families and poor families were demographically similar, which meant that children up and down the income scale began adulthood with similar outlooks and capacities. But as more and more demands were put on mental processing, gaps opened up and more-educated children grow up in different landscapes than less-educated children. More-educated children live amidst virtuous feedback loops. High skills and stable families lead to economic success, which makes stable family life easier, which makes skill acquisition and future economic success easier. Less-educated children live amidst vicious feedback loops. Low skills and family breakdown leads to economic stress, which makes family breakdown even more likely, which makes skill acquisition and economic security even harder to achieve.

Today college-educated and non–college-educated people inhabit different landscapes. Over two-thirds of middle-class children are raised in intact two-parent families, while less than a third of poor children are raised in them. About half the students in community colleges have either been pregnant or gotten somebody pregnant. Isabel Sawhill has calculated that if family structures were the same today as they were in 1970, then the poverty rate would be roughly one-quarter lower than it is today.

Vast attitudinal gaps have opened up as well. As Robert Putnam has shown, college-educated people are much more likely to trust the people around them. They are much more likely to believe they can control their own destinies and to take actions in order to achieve their goals.

People on both sides of the divide tend to want the same things. The highly educated and the less-educated tend to want to live in stable two-parent homes. They tend to want to earn college degrees and have their children surpass them. It’s just that the more-educated have more emotional resources to actually execute these visions. If you get married before having children, graduate from high school, and work full-time, there is a 98 percent chance that you will not live in poverty. But many people are unable to achieve these things.

As Harold conducted his research on poverty, family disruption, and other issues related to social mobility, he sometimes wanted to just shake people and tell them to get their act together. Show up for the job interview. Take the SAT test you registered for. Study for the final so you can graduate from college. Don’t quit your job just because it’s boring or because you’ve got a minor crisis at home. He knew that at some level there is no substitute for individual responsibility and no prospect for success unless people are held accountable for their decisions and work relentlessly to achieve their goals.

On the other hand, he knew it was no good to just give bootstrap sermons. Flourishing depends on unconscious skills that serve as a prerequisite for conscious accomplishments. People who haven’t acquired those unconscious skills find it much harder to fall into a workday routine and trudge off to a job each morning even if they don’t really feel like it. It will be harder for them to be polite toward a boss who drives them crazy, to smile openly when they meet a new person, to present a consistent face to the world, even as they go through different moods and personal crises. They’ll find it hard to develop a fundamental faith in self-efficacy—a belief that they can shape the course of their life. They’ll be less likely to have confidence in the proposition that cause leads to effect, that if they sacrifice now, something good will result.

Then there are the psychic effects of inequality itself. In their book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that the mere fact of being low on the status totem pole brings its own deep stress and imposes its own psychic costs. Inequality and a feeling of exclusion causes social pain, which leads to more obesity, worse health outcomes, fewer social connections, more depression and anxiety. Wilkinson and Pickett point, for example, to a study of British civil servants. Some of the civil servants had high-status, high-pressure jobs. Others had low-status, low-pressure jobs. You’d think the people in the high-pressure jobs would have higher rates of heart disease, gastrointestinal disease, and general sickness. In fact, it was the people in the low-pressure jobs. Low status imposes its own costs.

With his soft-side approach, Harold put his faith in programs that reshaped the internal models in people’s minds. If you felt, as Harold did, that in some low-income communities achievement values were not being transmitted from one generation to another, then you had no choice but to try to instill them. That meant you had to be somewhat paternalistic. If parents were not instilling these achievement values, then churches and charity groups should try. If those institutions were overwhelmed, then government should try to step in to help people achieve the three things they need to enter the middle class: marriage, a high-school degree, and a job.

“All of us need to be prodded to do things that will improve our long-term well-being, whether it is eating the right foods or setting aside funds for retirement,” Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill write in their book Creating an Opportunity Society. “Low-income families are no different.” There was no single policy that could build these unconscious skills. Human-capital policies are like nutrition. You have to instill them constantly. But Harold did see a sequence of policies that could help those who are cut off from the social-mobility ladder.

The biggest impact comes from focusing on the young. As James Heckman argues, learners learn and skill begets skill, so investments in children have much bigger payoffs than investments in people who are older. Parenting classes teach teenage moms how to care for their children. Nurse home visits help provide structure for disorganized families and provide on-the-job pointers for young mothers. Quality early-education programs have lasting effects on childhood development. Sometimes the IQ gains fade away as children from quality preschools enter the regular school population. But social and emotional skills do not seem to fade away, and those produce lasting gains—higher graduation rates and better career outcomes.

Integrated neighborhood approaches like the Harlem Children’s Zone produce the most impressive results. These programs offer a deluge of different programs, all designed to put young people into a high-achieving counterculture. KIPP academies and other “no-nonsense” schools significantly improve their students’ prospects. These schools, like the one Erica attended, give students a whole new way of living, much more disciplined and rigorous than they are used to.

The most important thing about any classroom is the relationship between a teacher and a student. Small classes may be better, but it’s better to have a good teacher in a big class than a bad teacher in a small class. Merit pay for teachers should help keep talented teachers in the classroom. Students learn best from someone they love. Mentoring programs also create relationships. Students are much less likely to drop out of high school or college if they have an important person in their life, guiding them and encouraging them day by day. The City University of New York has a program called ASAP, which has an intensive mentoring component and seems to increase graduation rates.

The first generation of human-capital policies gave people access to schools, colleges, and training facilities. Second-generation policies would have to help them develop the habits, knowledge, and mental traits they needed to succeed there. It’s not enough to give a student the chance to go to a community college if, once she gets there, she finds the requirements confusing, the guidance counselors rude and unavailable, the registration process baffling, the important courses already full, and the graduation requirements mysterious. These obstacles defeat students lacking social capital. Second-generation human-capital policies have to pay attention to the hidden curriculum of life as much as to the overt one.

A Nation of Grinders

The more time Harold spent thinking about politics and trying to form a governing philosophy, the more he realized that personal development and social mobility were at the heart of his vision of a great society. Social mobility opens up horizons because people can see wider opportunities and transformed lives. Social mobility reduces class conflict because no one is sentenced to spend their days in the caste into which they were born. Social mobility unleashes creative energies. It mitigates inequality, because no station need be permanent.

Harold found himself in a nation with two dominant political movements. There was a liberal movement that believed in using government to enhance equality. There was a conservative movement that believed in limited government to enhance freedom. But historically, there once had been another movement that believed in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. This movement had its start on a small Caribbean island a few hundred years ago.

In the eighteenth century, there was a little boy who lived on the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean. His father abandoned him when he was ten. His mother died in the bed next to him when he was twelve. He was adopted by a cousin, who promptly committed suicide. His remaining family consisted of an aunt, an uncle, and a grandmother. They all died within a few years. A probate court came in and confiscated the small bit of property he had inherited from his mother. He and his brother were left destitute, orphaned, and alone.

By seventeen, Alexander Hamilton was managing a trading firm. By twenty-four, he was George Washington’s chief of staff and a war hero. By thirty-four, he had written fifty-one essays of The Federalist Papers and was New York’s most successful lawyer. By forty, he was stepping down as the most successful treasury secretary in American history.

Hamilton created a political tradition designed to help young strivers like himself. He hoped to create a nation where young ambitious people could make full use of their talents, and where their labor would build a great nation. “Every new scene, which is opened to the busy nature of man to rouse and exert itself, is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort.”

“Rouse” … “exert” … “energy.” These are Hamiltonian words. He promoted policies designed to nurture this dynamism. At a time when many people were suspicious of manufacturing and believed that only agriculture produced virtue and wealth, Hamilton championed industry and technological change. At a time when traders and financial markets were disdained by the plantation oligarchy, Hamilton promoted vibrant capital markets to stir the nation. At a time when the economy was broken into local fiefdoms, run by big landowners, Hamilton sought to smash local monopolies and open opportunity. He nationalized the Revolutionary War debt, creating capital markets, and binding the nation’s economy into one more competitive exchange. He believed in using government to enhance market dynamism by fostering competition.

The Hamiltonian tradition was carried on in the early nineteenth century by Henry Clay and the Whig Party, which championed canals and railroads and other internal improvements to open up opportunity and bind the nation. That cause was taken up by a young Whig, Abraham Lincoln. Like Hamilton, Lincoln had grown up in a poor family and was fired by an ambition that knew no rest. But Lincoln gave more speeches about labor and economics than he did about slavery, and sought to create a nation that would welcome self-transformation and embrace the gospel of work.

“I hold the value of life is to improve one’s condition,” he told an audience of immigrants in 1861. Under his leadership, the Civil War–era government unified the currency, passed the Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act, and railroad legislation. These policies were designed to give Americans an open field and a fair chance to spread the spirit of enterprise, enhance social mobility, and so build the nation.

The next great figure in this tradition was Theodore Roosevelt. He, too, believed in the character-building force of competition, its ability to produce people who possessed the vigorous virtues he lauded in his 1905 inaugural address—energy, self-reliance, and initiative.

Roosevelt, too, believed that government must sometimes play an active role in encouraging the strenuous life and giving everyone a fair chance in the race. “The true function of the state, as it interferes in social life,” he wrote, “should be to make the chances of competition more even, not to abolish them.”

This Hamiltonian tradition dominated American politics for many decades. But in the twentieth century, it faded. The big debate of the twentieth century was over the size of government. The Hamiltonian tradition sat crosswise to that debate.

But Harold came to believe it was time to revive that limited but energetic government tradition—with two updates. Hamiltonians of the past lived before the dawning of the cognitive age, when the mental demands on young strivers were relatively low. That situation had changed, and so a movement that sought to enhance social mobility would have to handle the more complicated social and information environments. Furthermore, Hamilton, Lincoln, and Roosevelt had been able to assume a level of social and moral capital. They took it for granted that citizens lived in tight communities defined by well-understood norms, a moral consensus, and restrictive customs. Today’s leaders could not make that assumption. The moral and social capital present during those years had eroded, and needed to be rebuilt.

Harold spent his years in Washington championing a Hamiltonian approach that offered second-generation human capital policies. He never developed what you might call an ideology, an all-explaining system of good government. The world was too complex an organism for that, too filled with a hidden tangle of latent functions for some hyper-confident government to come in and reshape according to some prefab plan.

Nor did he have a heroic vision of political leadership. Harold had a more constrained image of what government can and should do. The British philosopher Michael Oakeshott was issuing a useful warning against hubris when he wrote, “In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behavior in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.”

When thinking about government Harold tried to remind himself how little we know and can know, how much our own desire for power and to do good blinds us to our own limitations.

But he did, like most Americans, believe in progress. Thus, while he had an instinctive aversion to change that alters the fundamental character of society, he had an affection for reform that repairs it.

He spent those years writing his essays, peppering the world with his policy proposals. Not many people seemed to agree with him. There was a New York Times columnist whose views were remarkably similar to his own, and a few others. Still, he plugged away, feeling that he was mostly right about things and that someday others would reach the conclusions he had reached. Karl Marx once said that Milton wrote Paradise Lost the way a silkworm produces silk, as the unfolding of his very nature. Harold felt fulfilled during his think-tank years. He wasn’t always happy when Erica would disappear for weeks at a time, but he felt he was making some contribution to the world. He was confident that his “socialist” approach, in one guise or another, would someday have a large impact on the world.