America’s Worst Idiom

You can’t be successful in America without being lucky.

*Pause for cries of outrage*

Before you decide that I’m a godless communist, hear me out:

Most successful Americans are intelligent, dedicated, and hardworking, but all of them are lucky.

Luck is not a supernatural force- it is tangible, manipulable, and maybe even measurable. For some of America’s wealthiest individuals, luck came in its purest form; inheritance. For others, luck’s only gift was the absence of just enough misfortune to allow their outputs to roughly match their inputs.

Luck, though, is not universal; every Ben Carson story corresponds to the stories of countless young people whose ambitions are sunk by a lack of resources, stability, or opportunity. While breakthrough success stories are inspiring, they shouldn’t inspire policy. It might be gratifying to assume that rough conditions breed winners, but the numbers tell a different story:

When Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce released their 2019 study on social mobility and wealth in education, its findings were equally startling and discouraging. In addition to finding that kindergarteners with low test scores were significantly more likely to achieve high SES (socioeconomic status) later in life than disadvantaged children with high test scores, lower SES children with high test scores were ultimately considerably less likely to enroll in, or complete college. Outside of the classroom, food insecurity reduces a child’s likelihood of graduating high school, and individuals who experience homelessness in college struggle to achieve the same outcomes as their counterparts. Even when these non-wealthy kids overcome the odds and graduate, they do so with a crushing average of $30,000 of student debt.

American Conservatives often denounce efforts to provide necessities like food and housing by warning that impoverished individuals will become “dependent” on the government. In May of 2020, Congressman Michael Conway (R-TX) argued against providing extended food stamp benefits by waning that they created a “moral hazard,” implying that assistance incentivized laziness. Cruelty aside, the ‘help makes you lazy’ philosophy crumbles under the weight of evidence. In addition to being significantly less expensive than enforcing anti-homeless measures, housing removes many of the most significant barriers to employment, essentially providing the bootstraps by which a homeless individual may pull themselves up by. Food insecurity is also a bane to self-sufficiency, and providing a stop-gap between a disadvantaged individual and starvation appears to improve their likelihood of achieving stable employment.

The demonstrably false assumption among governing Conservatives that government assistance prevents self-sufficiency has contributed to our stagnation on the world stage. As I pointed out in my last piece, the United States ranks 17th on the Human Development Index behind 16 other nations with more robust social safety nets. Perhaps more relevant is our shameful slide to 27th place on the global social mobility index. Clearly, our harsh philosophy towards social spending isn’t working.

Now, before you attribute these higher HDI ratings to Government assistance alone, consider employment rates. Rather than sitting on their hands, wasting away in a socialist stupor, the citizens of these nations are significantly more likely to be employed than Americans. Employment sits at roughly 74% in Norway and Denmark, 76% in Sweden, 77% in Germany, New Zealand, Japan, and the Netherlands, 78% in Iceland, and a whopping 80% in Switzerland. By contrast, ‘self-sufficient’ Americans only boast 67% employment, the 28th highest rate.

No one wants the government to bankroll lazy freeloaders, but the risk of a few losers getting a free ride shouldn’t derail effective policy. If we’re genuinely interested in fostering the kind of society where hard work pays off, wealth isn’t simply a birth lottery, and where anyone can make it, we need to start making the sort of investments that are proven to work.