Small Futures: Children, Inequality, and the Limits of Liberal Reform
deLone, Richard H.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - Not too many years ago, in simpler times, there were basically two kinds of books: highbrow and lowbrow. The distinction, derived from modernism in the...
...the people who were poor yesterday are not often found among those who are poor today...
...Which brings us--take a deep breath--to the Report of the Carnegie Council on Children, Small Futures: Children, Inequality, and the Limits of Liberal Reform, by Richard H. deLone...
...Finally, there are deLone's own proposals for "reform," including a full employment policy and improved, expanded services...
...Inequality is static in that the poor stay poor...
...One can but wonder how the Carnegie Council on Children came to endorse this ominous work, but in undertaking to peddle it to the public, the Council would now seem to have an obligation to explain what "future themes of egalitarian policy" it intends to pursue, and how...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1980...
...He argues that the children of the poor are constantly bombarded by cultural signals and other evidence of the hopelessness of their plight, and realistically turn their backs on traditional avenues of upward mobility, particularly education...
...Nevertheless, deLone formulates a "situational theory of child development" to explain why the poor .stay poor...
...But in the very last pages it turns out that this surely will not be enough, that perhaps the most important issues are "the basic content of day-to-day experience and human relations.., that might well constitute the future themes of egalitarian policy...
...Liberalism promises equal economic and political rights--the right to property and the right to vote, for instance--with the full expectation that inequalities will exist in the outcomes...
...Small Futures is indeed a frightening book, and also a poorly argued, less-than-honest one...
...Typically, the eyebrow book has no readership to speak of, save critics and reviewers (and one sometimes wonders about even them...
...Reformers, he says, have forever sought to achieve their goals in the next generation, by focusing on the improvement of the young...
...B O O K R E V I E W S ~1761761761761761 Not too many years ago, in simpler times, there were basically two kinds of books: highbrow and lowbrow...
...SMALL FUTURES: CHILDREN, INEQUALITY, AND THE LIMITS OF LIBERAL REFORM Richard H. deLone for the Carnegie Council on Children Harcourt BraceJovanovich / I12.95 Steven Lagerfeld Democratic Party, but that deep and largely implicit set of assumptions shared by both major parties and by the overwhelming majority of Americans, a world view whose origins lie in the thought of men such as Adam Smith and John Locke...
...That much, certainly, is explicit in the thought of "men such as Adam Smith and John Locke...
...Of the many hybrid varieties that have developed since, the eyebrow book, the book written solely to be reviewed, is surely the most curious...
...His America is a rigid, highly stratified, "caste society" in which poverty is extensive and upward mobility for the poor is limited...
...DeLone's depiction of the nature of inequality in a liberal society presents similar problems...
...Inequality is not so static as deLone would have us believe, nor is mobility so limited...
...The name is again derived from the author's intention, which in this case is simply to raise eyebrows, to attract attention to a particular point of view...
...And when deLone goes on to fault reformers for rejecting economic equality as a goal but also for accepting it and failing to achieve it, one begins to wonder whether the root of this muddled understanding of liberalism lies in confusion or convenience...
...lowbrow books were intended for everyone else...
...Their record, he argues, is one of consistent failure...
...In the last few years, however, the government has increasingly withdrawn from the eyebrow business and private foundations have moved in...
...Yet many of the scholars upon whom deLone relies in drawing this picture--for example, Seymour Martin Lipset, Stephan Thernstrom, and Christopher Jencks --will have difficulty recognizing the final canvas...
...As several reviewers, including Michael Harrington (in an otherwise favorable review), have noted, deLone's reading of his sources is selective and careless, or, I would again suggest, perhaps simply convenient...
...And if black youths feel they confront "small futures," they are certainly not acting like it...
...One could almost have made such a case regarding black children at one time, but the income of black families has been rising rapidly for almost two decades now...
...Highbrow books were the province of critics and cognoscenti...
...inequality persists and can only be remedied through structural reform...
...The bookjacket copy fondly recalls that the Council's previous book, All Our Children, "was published to wide acclaim and front-page recognition," apparently an exercise in eyebrow greasing...
...DeLone avoids describing the implications of such a program, but clearly the state would be called upon to direct his reform of everyday life...
...DeLone goes on to claim that there is a fundamental contradiction in liberalism, between its affirmation of political equality and its failure to deliver economic equality, which cannot be resolved and is therefore displaced upon the young...
...In 1976, blacks made up 10.7 percent of the college population, as opposed to only 4.6 percent in 1966, and in some family income groups, such as the $5,000 to $9,000 range, a larger proportion of blacks (17 percent) were enrolled than whites (15 percent...
...The federal government pioneered this field in the 1960s with its elaborate white-paper reports, written by a host of social scientists with good "name recognition factors" who nevertheless managed to commit a startling number of mistakes and misinterpretations, which were discoveted only much later...
...It is a frightening thought...
...Its purpose is to be reviewed and discussed in the appropriate magazines and newspapers so that its main points can ease, familiar but unexamined, into the intellectual debate, such as it is...
...His chief proposal, however, is for a program of redistributive taxation that would insure each family an annual income equal to one-half the median income for a family of its size ($8,400 for a family of four)--hardly a radical idea given the polemic that precedes it and the programs already under consideration by all kinds of liberal reformers...
...If deLone detects cultural signals of hopelessness, it is probably because he and his colleagues are listening to their own broadcasts...
...Between 1966 and 1976 black college enrollment, to take one example, almost quadrupled...
...The distinction, derived from modernism in the arts, was based on the kind of audience an author intended to address...
...This amounts to something like intellectual forced entry into the issue, for the contradiction deLone sees in liberalism simply does not exist...
...Kenneth Keniston, executive director of the Council, author of its previous book, and its main celebrity, quickly announces in his foreword to Small Futures an attack on "economic and political liberalism--not the 'liberalism' of one wing of the Steven Lagerfeld is a Program Consultant with the Institute for Educational Affairs...
Vol. 13 • April 1980 • No. 4
