Nathan Glazer: Inequality in American Society

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Americans, unlike the citizens of otherprosperous democracies, not to mention

those of poor countries, do not seem tocare much about inequality. One mightthink that our attitude toward it mustsooner or later change–especially nowthat the newspapers are ½lled with sto-ries of the money and perquisites ceoshave extracted from their companies.But even after the Enron and other scan-dals, most Americans remain apathetic

about inequality: What we have today isoutrage against those who do not playfair–not outrage over inequality as such.In recent surveys, furthermore, Ameri-cans have named the state of the econo-my, terrorism, and education–but notinequality–as the most important issuesfacing the nation.

In a way, this is surprising. After all,the United States is the most unequal of

the economically developed countries–and that inequality has been increasing.If Americans don’t care about inequality,

it obviously isn’t because inequalitydoesn’t exist here.

One could argue that they don’t careabout inequality because the poor dopretty well in America, if one looks atmeasures of consumption rather thanincome. And in this vein one could arguethat while Americans don’t care aboutinequality, they do care about poverty

and have provided an adequate ‘safetynet’ to protect against impoverishment.But the presence in the United States of the homeless, beggars, soup kitchens,and the like does not suggest great con-cern for the poor. In fact, the UnitedStates does much less than Europeancountries to redistribute income to the

worse-off. According to theoecd

,transfers and other social bene½ts(which we may assume go mostly frompeople with more income to people withless income, though that is not uniform-ly the case) amounted in 1999 to 11 per-cent of gdp in the United States and 18percent of gdp in the countries of theEuropean Union, with a range among

the larger European nations from 20 per-cent in Germany and France to 16 per-cent in the United Kingdom. The UnitedStates is particularly de½cient in familybene½ts and unemployment and labor-market programs–1 percent of gdp forthese, against 5 percent in the EuropeanUnion and a whopping 8 percent in Swe-den. The United States also lags behindin old-age, disability, and survivor’s ben-e½ts–7 percent versus 12 percent in theEuropean Union.

These differences also extend to thetreatment of the working poor, makingit dif½cult to sustain the argument thatAmericans do care about the conditionof the poor but make a distinction be-

tween the working and the non-working

Dædalus Summer 2003 111

Nathan Glazer, a Fellow of the American Acad-

emy since 1969, has written extensively on issues

of ethnicity and race in American society. He is

professor of sociology and education emeritus at

Harvard University.

Nathan Glazer

on Americans& inequality



poor. The legal minimum wage in theUnited States in the early 1990s was 39percent of the average wage, as against 53

percent in the European Union. And ourunemployment bene½ts are below thatof most eu countries. Only the UnitedKingdom matches us in miserliness–but in the United Kingdom one may getthese bene½ts for fours years, as againstsix months in the United States. Notori-ously, the United States does not requireemployers to provide any paid vacations,

while European countries mandate onaverage four weeks–France and Sweden,½ve. The contrast between Americanand European family bene½ts is alsostriking. European family bene½ts (pay-ments for each child, which do not existin the United States) are for all: the stateoffers such aid as a means of strengthen-

ing the nation. (One wonders whethersuch bene½ts will maintain their popu-larity as the immigrant and Muslim pop-ulations in the European welfare statesexpand. A visiting Norwegian economistnotes in conversation the large familiesof Pakistani immigrants in Norway whocan live, without working, on familybene½ts, and who continue to receive

these bene½ts if they return to Pakistan.Even the model services of the Scandina-vian countries may be strained by suchdevelopments.)

Recently two important studies havehelped us to think about the puzzlingdifference between European and Amer-ican attitudes toward poverty and in-equality. One is a long paper by threeeconomists–Albert Alesina, EdwardGlaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote–titled“Why Doesn’t the United States have aEuropean-Style Welfare State?” (pub-lished in 2001 in the Brookings Papers on

Economic Activity), from which most of the facts given above have been taken.The other is a book by Seymour Martin

Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (2001).

Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote assertthat the American pattern of a smallgovernment and a smaller welfare statehas deep historical roots: “From the verybeginning of the expansion of the publicsector in the late 19th century, the Unit-ed States and Europe show very distinc-tive patterns . . . . [T]he absolute differ-ence grew as the welfare state expanded

both in Europe and the us . . . .” Thismakes it dif½cult to explain the currentpattern by recent political events such asthe Reagan administration. This is not toexclude the political factors that affectinequality and poverty and the size of the welfare state, which would be silly,but it does remind us that there may be

large, historically rooted factors that op-erate independently of given administra-tions and their philosophies.

What then are these factors? Accord-ing to Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote,they could be aspects of the Americaneconomy, of the American political sys-tem, or of something else. They use theterm ‘behavioral’ to characterize this

‘something else’–those noneconomicand nonpolitical factors that may ex-plain why the United States is divergent.(I would call such factors ‘social’ or ‘cul-tural.’)

The authors begin by deploying aneconomic model to compare the UnitedStates with European countries. Despiteits formidable mathematical form, theirmodel operates on some simple assump-tions: that economic factors will affectthe self-interested political decisions of people, and that these in turn will affectthe policies of government in a democ-racy. What this model shows is thatAmericans, unlike Europeans, do not actas much on the basis of direct economic

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Note by NathanGlazer



self-interest: even though inequality isgreater in America than in Europe,Americans are less inclined than Euro-

peans to demand energetic governmen-tal action to redistribute income fromthe well-off to the less well-off.

So why don’t Americans vote for moregovernment action against inequality?One possible explanation is that there ismore social mobility in the United Statesthan in Europe, so if those with less in-come expect that in time they will have

more, they may be less concerned withthe protection provided by a true safetynet–that is, a developed welfare state.

The evidence on whether there is actu-ally more social mobility in the UnitedStates than in Europe is unclear–sur-prisingly enough, it has been unclearsince Seymour Martin Lipset and Rein-

hard Bendix began studying the questionforty years ago. But whatever the factsabout social mobility, it is clear that thebeliefs about social mobility are very dif-ferent in the United States from whatthey are in Europe: Alesina, Glaeser, andSacerdote report, using the World ValuesSurvey, that “71% of Americans, but on-ly 40% of Europeans, believe that the

poor have a chance to escape from pov-erty.”

After their consideration of economicfactors, which explain little, and politicalfactors, which explain more (because of our complex political arrangements–think of the electoral college), Alesina,Glaeser, and Sacerdote come to their ‘be-havioral’ factors. Here they regard one asdecisive, far outranking any others intheir various regressions: the racial fac-tor. A cross-country comparison relatessocial spending to a measure of ‘racialfractionalization,’ and a cross-state com-parison in the United States relates thepercentage of blacks in a state to the sizeof the welfare bene½t. Race seems deci-

sive in explaining indifference toinequality.

At the same time, they remark on cer-

tain regnant beliefs that seem to meequally compelling here, and not at alleasy to disentangle from racial preju-dice: “Opinions and beliefs about thepoor differ sharply between the UnitedStates and Europe. In Europe the poorare generally thought to be unfortunate,but not personally responsible for theirown condition. For example, according

to the World Values Survey, whereas70% of West Germans express the belief that people are poor because of imper-fections in society, not their own lazi-ness, 70% of Americans hold the oppo-site view . . . .” Recall that Americans be-lieve, and Europeans don’t, that the poorcan work their way out of poverty.

The poor, from other evidence, seemto share in these distinctively Americanbeliefs. According to Alesina, Glaeser,and Sacerdote, work patterns in theUnited States seem coherent with thisbelief: there is a strong positive correla-tion between earnings and hoursworked. People in the top quintile in theUnited States work longer hours than

people in the middle quintiles, and peo-ple in the lowest quintile work muchfewer hours. If you work more in theUnited States, you are less likely to bepoor. Patterns in Europe are different. InSweden, all work the same number of hours. In Italy and Switzerland, the poorwork longer hours. Alesina, Glaeser, andSacerdote note, too, that there is a rela-tion between the belief that luck deter-mines income and the amount of socialspending in a country. The United Statesspends the lowest amount on social wel-fare and also has the lowest percentageof people who believe that luck deter-mines income. In other words: whenpeople are impoverished, Americans


Americans& inequality



don’t chalk it up to ‘bad luck’–theyrather assume the poor are responsible,in large part, for their poverty.

Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote’s bot-tom line: “Americans redistribute lessthan Europeans for three reasons: be-cause the majority of Americans believethat redistribution favors racial minori-ties, because Americans believe that theylive in an open and fair society, and thatif someone is poor it is his or her ownfault, and because the political system is

geared toward preventing redistribution.In fact the political system is likely to beendogenous to these basic Americanbeliefs.” In effect, we have the politicalsystem we do because we prefer its re-sults–such as limiting redistribution toblacks.

Lipset and Marks agree on the role of

beliefs and the importance of the politi-cal system in explaining American atti-tudes toward inequality. But they givemuch less attention to the racial factor,incorporating it into the larger theme of the ethnic and racial diversity of theAmerican working class, one of themany factors that has been noted in thecentury-old discussion of why there is

no large socialist party in the UnitedStates.

I do believe the speci½c racial factorthat emerges so sharply in the regressionanalysis of Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacer-dote has to be acknowledged. But I alsobelieve it is linked to the larger structureof American diversity, in religion, in eth-nicity, and that it is this larger structurethat is the key factor in shaping theAmerican welfare state.

We can see the effects of this distinc-tively American diversity and its impacton the provision of welfare more thantwo hundred ½fty years ago, when theincreasing sectarian divisions in theoriginal colonies began to affect the wel-

fare institutions of the New England

colonists; one hundred ½fty years ago,when the incoming Catholic Irish creat-ed their own welfare institutions; one

hundred years ago, when we saw similarinstitutions created by Jewish, Italian,and other immigrants.

What originally had been institutionscreated by the state or established reli-gions in the early colonies, following thepatterns of Europe, were broken up andprivatized under the impact of increas-ing religious and ethnic diversity. And so

Harvard College, founded as an institu-tion of higher education by the Bay StateColony and its established religion, mu-tated into a private and independent in-stitution, no longer supported or gov-erned by the state or by a dominant reli-gion. The establishment of what mighthave become in time a uniform state

public educational system was broken bythe immigration of the Catholic Irish.The new immigrants were cared for inlarge measure by their own religion-based social welfare institutions.

In the United States, the governmentbegan late making provisions for thoseaffected by the industrializing society,and never fully replaced religious groups

and other nongovernment charitableinstitutions in providing social welfare.Of course, this network of institutionsstill exists and is very extensive. Alesina,Glaeser, and Sacerdote give us the aston-ishing estimate that charitable contribu-tions in the United States in 2000amounted to $691 per capita, comparedto $141 in the United Kingdom and $57 inEurope as a whole.

So where do blacks factor in? The situ-ation of African Americans was indeeddifferent. No other ethnic group in theUnited States had to face anything likethe conditions of slavery, or the ½ercesubsequent prejudice and segregation towhich blacks were subjected. And the

preexisting conditions of fractionated

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Note by NathanGlazer



social services affected them too. Likeother groups, they established their ownchurches, which provided some services,

within the limits set by their prevailingpoverty. Like other groups, too, theyturned to preexisting systems of socialservice.

Owing to their economic condition,African Americans were much moredependent on America’s primitive pub-lic services, and in time they became thespecial ward of the American welfare

state. Having become, to a greater extentthan other groups, the clients of publicservices, they affected, owing to the pre-vailing racism, the public image of theseservices.

But there is something more than raceand diversity that shapes our character-istic system of beliefs–something dis-

tinctively American, connected to ourfounding values as a pioneer society cre-ated by English settlers. Lipset andMarks place great weight on these initialfounding values.

What is English or Scottish or Welshor Scotch-Irish, and what is Calvinist orPresbyterian or Anglican, in our found-ing would be very dif½cult to sort out.

Still, there is a distinctive pattern of val-ues we see in the United Kingdom aswell as in the United States, and that we

can also discern to some extent in theother settler societies founded by theEnglish, centered on the belief in effortand merit and opportunity as againstegalitarian provision by the state. Wecan see this pattern in public opinionpolls. The United Kingdom lags behindEurope on most measures of inequalityand redistribution, and it also places

more blame on the poor.In sum, a satisfying answer to the puz-

zle of America’s relative indifference toinequality must, I think, consider a num-ber of factors: common institutional ori-gins in the British Isles; the impact of re-ligious diversity and immigration; agreater faith in equal opportunity than

in government-established equality–allhave played a role in shaping Americanattitudes. The racial factor is important,too.

All this, and our distinctively complexpolitical structure, has produced greatinequality in the United States–andthere is no evidence that Americans to-day want it otherwise.


Americans& inequality

Nathan Glazer: Inequality in American Society

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