CALIBAN'S ABODE

...Put differently, a subculture is not a consistent whole but an entity shot through with conflicting elements: "commitment to values, norms, and other cultural themes may often involve ambiguity, ambivalence, and the simultaneous holding of alternative or contradictory beliefs...

...13 This suggests that a view of the lower-class person as one who, for example, is "engaged in an unremitting search for sex" may be a highly oversimplified version of a more deeply textured reality...

...of the political spectrum, the simplicities of the New Left...

...But the inequalities of today need not be the inequalities of tomorrow: what is produced by human action can be changed by human action...

...Banfield claims, however, that lower-class violence is better accounted for by the high incidence of mental illness rather than class subculture...

...In contemporary usage class refers to the position of people relative to "the means of production" or similar "life chances...

...An upper-class individual defines himself in relation to "the future of his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren" and is also concerned about the future of the "community, nation, or mankind...

...But race has fallen on hard times, and as a result Banfield's formulation comes to seem attractive to the kinds of minds who would earlier have been drawn to race...

...This may account for the attraction urban ills have for the conservative: he contemplates them with the relish of a fundamentalist preacher gazing upon a sinner...

...The lower-class man is constantly searching for "action" and this probably contributes to making "lower-class life extraordinarily violent...

...Traditionally American workers have dreamed of becoming small businessmen, but a small business comes to seem a less and less viable alternative in a. modern economy...

...He is far from self-confident...

...The latter reads: "The incidence of mental illness is greater in the lower class than in any of the others...

...To the questions of why, and what can be done, Banfield provides clear answers that apparently flow from the best of modern social research...

...Not only are the two inferences unsupported, but they have no factual base...

...Just as racist dogma focuses on the fixed biological constitution of man as the source of behavior, so Banfield's class concept directs attention to the relatively immutable "inward" traits of individuals...

...Today this pleasure does not appear to be unduly postponed in any class...

...Culture, therefore, is a source not only of order and stability but of disorder and change, and what is true of culture as a whole is true of subcultures as well...

...So, for example, the ghetto riots of the sixties were not "political" phenomena...

...7 One wonders whether T. H. : Huxley's remark about Herbert Spencer applies to Banfield as well: "Spencer's definition of a tragedy was the spectacle of a deduction killed by a fact...

...they emerge 3 The Urban Villagers (New York: Free Press, 1962), p.24...

...q CALIBAN'S ABODE...

...While not denying that such a culture exists, Banfield goes beyond it, so to speak: Extreme present-orientedness, not lack of income or wealth, is the principal cause of poverty in the sense of "the culture of poverty...

...His bodily needs (especially for sex) .. . take precedence over everything else—certainly any work routines...

...The finding that welfare payments are sometimes higher than earnings at minimum wage does not tell us whether it does in fact act as a disincentive, under what conditions, and for how many it will be a disincentive...

...But if a class is defined in terms of psychological orientations rather than social location, then structural change becomes for all practical purposes an irrelevant consideration...

...Lower-class poverty is "inwardly" caused (by psychological inability to provide for the future and all that this inability implies...

...are empirical...

...out of conflicts for control over property and political power...

...pp...

...PROSPERO: A devil, a born devil on whose unfortunate nature Nurture can never stick...

...This means that the logical status of Banfield's concept of class comes to be equivalent to that of race: the thought and behavior of members of a class, as with members of a race, are unrelated to the nature of the society...

...Now, at minimum, a somewhat different picture of the problem of "abnormal behavior" and class emerges from this discussion than from Banfield's statement that is presumably based on it...

...much of what appears to whites as `Negro' behavior is really lower-class behavior...

...The poverty that people are so CALIBAN'S ABODE exercised about is really a matter of relative deprivation...

...132 f. he says "changes so slowly as to be for all practical purposes fixed," Prospero's order is the best of all possible worlds...

...The book is about major American preoccupations: a walk through the city streets discloses poverty, deteriorated housing, crime, delinquency, segregation, addiction—the whole gamut of problems in what seem to be more concentrated forms than ever before...

...The problems of these people are not primarily those of racial prejudice, though it undeniably exists...

...Concentration on the present may be needed for survival in the present...

...His occupational career consists of a ceaseless drift from one unskilled job to another...

...A further implication, one upon which Banfield's entire analysis rests, is that culture exerts an independent affect on behavior...

...He also possesses a strong sense of responsibility to the community and frequently decides to serve it...

...The page cited from a monograph by Hollingshead and Redlich occurs in the 7 Joel F. Handler and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth, The "Deserving Poor": A Study of Welfare Administration (Chicago: Markham, 1971), p. 143...

...For more is at issue here than academic thrust and parry...

...Although the notion of class seems central to Banfield's analysis, in a very real sense he is not talking of class at all...

...Support for the existence of the deferred-gratification pattern used to be found in Kinsey's report that middle-class people began having sexual intercourse at a later age than those in lower strata...

...The lower class, in short, is being reproached and condemned for not conforming to a pattern of behavior that is probably disappearing in the rest of the society...

...CALIBAN'S ABODE cept through long-term evolutionary processes...

...outbreak[ s] of animal—usually gang, male animal— spirits" or "the foray for pillage . . and here also boys and adults of the lower class are the principal offenders...

...He, therefore, inhibits any self-indulgent impulses toward sex or violence lest these damage his "provision for the future...

...The lower-status patient will attribute his troubles to unhappiness, tough luck, laziness, meanness, or physical illness rather than to factors of psychogenic origin...

...But that does him an injustice and misses the real political import of his position...

...Their response 458 —to live in the present—is a "cultural" one, but it could change fairly rapidly if circum stances would permit future payoffs for present self-denial...

...If concepts are perverted to make reality seem something other than it is, we find something of the same process when we raise an empirical question: To what extent does Banfield offer a valid description of the "inward" nature and behavior of the lower-class person...

...B.] Hollingshead and [Frederick C.] Redlich, Social Class and Mental Illness [New York: Wiley, 1958], p. 175, and S. Minuchin et al., Families of the Slum (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 34...

...His positive evaluation of self-expression is probably linked to his tolerant, "perhaps even encouraging view of unconventional behavior in sex, the arts, and politics...

...chapter, "Paths to the Psychiatrist...

...Less paradoxically, Banfield's concept of class is quite different from what is commonly understood by it in most social and political analyses...

...Where once the inequities he might have railed against could be justified by recourse to the differing needs of superior and inferior racial stocks, today one refers to the "basic needs" of fixed and unchanging cultural milieus...

...lack of enough income to support `essential welfare,' " there is very little of it in the city...

...A more complex picture of subculture emerges from descriptions by those not committed to a perception of social reality as fixed and unchanging: A constant source of frustration to most lower-class individuals is their awareness that despite the surface validity of the self they present, their behavior is not consistent with some of the standards of the larger society which they have internalized, often in spite of themselves...

...Forces flowing from class and culture are far less inexorable than those immanent in biological structure...

...rather, they were either "rampages...

...Although Banfield claims that class rather than race is important, in this sample, at least, race does seem to have some sort of independent effect: "71 percent of the blacks want a job either `very much' or `somewhat' as compared with 50 percent of the whites in Milwaukee...

...This criticism was developed in reference to the culture of poverty theory, but it is applicable to Banfield...

...He is "radically improvident" and anything "he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless...

...No "data" support the statement that present-oriented persons are unconcerned about the welfare of their grandchildren yet unborn...

...MURRAY HAUSKNECHT that even despotic rule is not per se against nature...

...In short, poverty is "the effect rather than the cause" of the culture of poverty...

...Bureau of the Census, Pocket Data Book, USA 1971 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), p. 313...

...In contrasting the effects of "disincentives" to work, Banfield notes that raising the income tax rate does not seem to have much affect on the motivations of the middle class...

...The idea of "subculture," for example, was partially a consequence of the realization that the culture of a modern society was not a unitary whole —as one moved from group to group one expected to find differences, contradictions, counterpushes and pulls...

...This fact alone shows 13 Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), p. 383...

...Given this glorification of self-denial along with his penchant for unsupported inferences and his conception of class and culture, there seems to be an insistent perverseness in his approach...

...Some patterns are strongly valued, while others exist at more superficial levels because circumstances permit no alternatives: the experience of middle-aged, unskilled workers at the poverty line suggests that their future will be as bleak as their past...

...Nor may Caliban claim, according to this view of the "just society," that his material needs are not being met by that order...

...If large numbers of people in all classes are choosing only one type of behavior, how valid is it to talk of the existence of a pattern of a deferred gratification that distinguishes one stratum from another...

...But for the transmutation to work a somewhat similar operation must be performed on the concept of culture...

...Most of those caught up in this culture are unable or unwilling to plan for the future, or to sacrifice immediate gratifications in favor of future ones, or to accept the disciplines that are required in order to get and to spend...

...As a "value" it becomes a motive of individuals through "the socialization process," and socialization, in turn, insures that culture and personality are integrated and mutually reinforcing, thus functioning as a force for social inertia...

...But "perverseness" suggests mere idiosyncracy where, in fact, we are dealing with a modernized version of an older ideo logical bias...

...Since no one claims a lack of concern about sons and daughters in the lower class, the only empirically supported proposition left is that members of all classes are concerned with their children's welfare...

...12 U.S...

...Banfield's use of the term "culture" has a similarly tendentious quality...

...And even if low-income earners could subject themselves to extra deprivations by adhering to the bourgeois virtue of regular savings, the money they would put in the bank could not make as much difference to their children's education, say, as investment programs of highly paid executives...

...Concepts define the world for us, and our understanding of reality goes a long way to determining what policy and action we are willing to back...

...If poverty is defined as "want...

...He is bedeviled by "feelings of self-contempt" and is inclined to be "suspicious and hostile, aggressive yet dependent...

...Moreover, the nature of lower-class culture is such that much behavior that in another class would be considered bizarre seems routine...

...At the same time he "deplores bigotry" and "abhors violence...

...Any description of a subculture inevitably emphasizes distinctive characteristics...

...12 Even dis counting for inflation, this suggests a rapidly declining rate of deferred gratification...

...6 What appear to be strong impulses to action under one set of circumstances may be severely weakened by a change in circumstances...

...To take the extreme case, despotic rule is unjust only if it is applied to beings who can be ruled by persuasion or whose understanding is insufficient: Prospero's rule over Caliban is by nature just...

...Race categorizes in terms of biological givens, traits beyond control or change ex al., op...

...By the standard invoked by Banfield, one which 14 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp...

...A traditional function of race has been to justify and defend inequality and domination...

...Banfield's use of "cul ture" does not, however, allow for these es sential distinctions.' There is an additional complexity...

...Unfortunately, cultural realities are not so straightforward and uncomplicated, though Banfield would like us to believe it is all this simple...

...To raise, as Banfield does, the specter of class and culture as implacable forces with an unbreak 5 See Herbert J. Gans, People and Plans (New York: Basic Books, 1968), Chapter 22...

...4 Ibid., p. 249...

...There is something of this in Edward Banfield's influential book The Unheavenly City,' which perhaps explains why some remnants of the New Left have demanded that it be banned in schools and universities...

...that is, people feel poor, they suffer not from a "lack of income but from a lack of status...

...Banfield's formulation is thereby to be seen as a species of conceptual alchemy...

...The Unheavenly City is oriented to the needs of a policy-maker who is finally admonished not to be too active...

...Banfield's stress on class subculture resembles the emphasis of the "culture of poverty" theorists...

...His idea of class has, for some, its ideological attractions...

...Sometimes the reported facts, when traced to the source, do not have the same meaning or significance that Banfield's text gives them...

...An unexciting conclusion to be sure, but certainly a better basis for prudent social policy than one drawn from dramatic but factually unsupported propositions...

...What some would have us see as permanent is, in reality, impermanent...

...that is, unaffected by changes in material conditions...

...It follows, then, that "it is naive to think that efforts to end racial injustice and eliminate poverty, slums, and unemployment will have any appreciable affect upon the amount of MURRAY HAUSKNECHT rioting that will be done in the next decade or two...

...Consequently, "more abnormal behavior is tolerated" by the lower strata "even though the behavior may be disapproved by class norms...

...By the same token there is no evidence supporting the proposition that future-oriented persons are concerned about their potential grandchildren, to say nothing of upper-class people who worry about greatgrandchildren...

...Herbert Gans, one of Banfield's primary sources on class subcultures, notes that "Classes are strata-with-subcultures that grow out of the national economy and society...

...Thus the transmuted concepts of class and culture perform the ideological tasks once fulfilled by baser intellectual coinage...

...On page 174 the following paragraph runs to the top of page 175, the page cited by Banfield: Although the patient presents a lifelong history of hostility, suspicion, and extreme lack of consideration of others, so far as we are able to determine neither his family nor others in his environment--even when his behavior became violent—considered him a "psychiatric problem" . . . people in all strata have blind spots regarding psychopathological implications of unusual behavior or even deliberately avoid thinking about them...

...At a time when any answers, much less unequivocal ones, are in short supply, his analysis is likely to seem attractive and persuasive...

...If the lower class were to disappear . the most serious and intractable problems of the city would disappear with it...

...Banfield cites this paper, but does not respond to the theoretical and empirical points it raises...

...Some propositions, however, are implications of the main proposition...

...Banfield is aware of critical assessments of the data but chooses not to discuss them...

...Each class has a "distinctive psychological orientation," and that of the lower-class person involves an inability "to discipline oneself to sacrifice present for future gratifications" largely because of an inability "to imagine a future...

...neither does a culture's idea of what constitutes a "decent," worthy, respectable, etc., mode of life...

...People commonly situated find ways of adapting to or coping with the exigencies of their situation and, therefore, a common economic fate gives rise to distinctive patterns of life or a "subculture...

...Therefore want can be defined by a standard that changes so slowly as to be for all practical purposes fixed...

...social and cultural realities change through human action...

...Not all group responses to exigencies are cultural in the sense that they are so deeply embedded, culturally and psychologically, as to be highly intractable to change...

...Some of the difficulties of relying upon unsupported inference is illustrated by data gathered by a survey of AFDC mothers in six counties of Wisconsin including Milwaukee: over half the respondents had positive attitudes about working, and "most AFDC recipients would like to work if their children could be taken care of, especially younger women or women with recent employment...

...e Charles A. Valentine, Culture and Poverty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 120...

...The only possible instance of "bizarre" behavior found here is in a quotation from an interview: "In fact everybody in our family has to worry about it [money] except my old man when he gets drunk...

...MURRAY HAUSKNECHT able grip on people is nothing less than a process of mystification...

...4 Classes, then, are not given by God or Nature...

...Class and culture emphasize that men's lives are the result of historical forces, that the style and quality of life are not fixed by nature or the supernatural...

...It is difficult to discover in modern American urban life those virtues cherished by conservatives...

...Banfield, too, can and has been read as a "racist" by those who want him banned...

...The one empirical datum in the course of this argument is only tangentially related to it...

...The label "cultural" implies that patterns of thought and behavior cannot be explained by racial or psychological theories...

...The research literature indicates that in the lower class there is a distinct tendency not to defer gratifications— although this pattern is found not only in the lower class...

...he belongs to no voluntary associations...

...He cannot rule his body by persuasion...

...Banfield's fundamental proposition about the city is that "its characteristic form and most of its problems" are the result of its population, particularly the lower-class population...

...Once race was supplanted as the dominant intellectual orientation, and attention focused on modern societies, the conception of culture as a unitary and consistent whole could no longer be maintained...

...It is more likely, though, that these difficulties come from the nature of his arguments which in many ways reflect, from the opposite end 'Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970...

...Consider some of the conditions that must prevail if such a pattern is to become established and continue: an orientation to time that makes connections between present and future behavior demands some freedom from constant preoccupation with meeting pressing immediate needs—shoes for the children and next month's rent...

...To be oriented to the future requires some reasonable basis for believing that present behavior will result in a better future...

...8 Banfield's note, page 276, reads: "Jerome K. Myers and B. H. Roberts, Family and Class Dynamics in Mental Illness (New York: Wiley, 1959), p. 174...

...His "prejudice" is of a more fundamental kind than vulgar racism...

...Having preschool children, which might seem an excellent rationalization for a lack of interest in jobs, turned out, on the contrary, to be associated with "the desire to have a job...

...He is selfconfident about his ability to shape the future through his own actions, and he realizes that this entails a sacrifice of present gratifications for future returns...

...In this understanding of class, people are connected with the economic realities that underlie their lives...

...Since what had to be explained seemed to be relatively persistent and fixed in the history of a society, and since the societies under examination were in fact slow to change, the consistent and mutually reinforcing elements of 462 culture were stressed, elements producing consensus and stability...

...But in an age when even a Republican president recognizes the prophetic voice of Keynes, one wonders whether any future-oriented policy-maker, duly concerned about the "community, the nation . . . mankind," could in good conscience accept so backward-looking a view of man and society as that offered to him by Edward Banfield...

...This carries a citation from the McCone Commission Report on the Watts riot which notes that grants under Aid to Families with Dependent Children were greater than what could be earned at minimum-wage jobs...

...Banfield sees "deferred gratification" as one of those autonomous cultural patterns that remain "for all practical purposes fixed...

...See also [A...

...Powerful accidental (by which is meant, nongovernmental and, more generally, nonorganizational) forces are at work that tend to alleviate and even to eliminate the problems...

...Want involves a standard of "basic needs" and these do not change much from one generation to the next (if they do they are not basic...

...These themes run together with traditional political ideologies: liberals and radicals are generally favorable and conservatives take the dim view...

...Banfield then states, "it also appears that many poor persons will not put forth effort to get `extras' once they have been assured of a level of living which, while extremely low, seems to them to be `enough.' " This is followed by the further proposition that "the higher the floor that is put under incomes, the greater the number of workers who will see no reason to work...

...To talk of class as merely "distinctive psychological orientations" is to divorce personal lives from the realities that influence them, hide the inequalities that rule those lives, and obstruct a perception of the possibilities for changing the social structure and, thereby, the lives of men...

...8 One, a study of the families of delinquent boys, confirms after a one-page survey of the literature the association of "poverty and pathology...

...460 MURRAY HAUSKNECHT with the data, though, is assessing its significance...

...These conflicts produce systems of inequality that determine the kinds of lives men can lead...

...Thus here, as with other problems such as unemployment, little can be done, though this does not mean that calamity impends...

...In fact, fewer and fewer people in all classes seem to be denying themselves pres ent pleasures...

...One powerful accidental force at work is economic growth...

...But it is equally plausible, on the basis of what we know, to see the persistence of the pattern as a functional adaptation to severely restrictive life situations...

...The remainder of the page contains two case histories of "compulsory promiscuous" behavior of a middle-class and a lower-class girl...

...Banfield recommends to his notice the beneficial consequences of such "accidental forces" as "economic growth"—a modern, secular version of "the divine hand" that used to produce the harmonious society...

...Class and race are classificatory concepts...

...his prejudgments concern the necessary structure of a human community...

...But "low-income earners" react differently: "That they will not work when welfare payments are as much or more than they could earn is to be expected, of course...

...3 The subcultures "are responses that people make to the opportunities and deprivations they encounter...

...Only "one-third of the Milwaukee respondents had previous experience with AFDC," and the "percentage of white women who were repeaters was higher than for black women...

...But those who see no contradiction between justice and inequality must distinguish strata in terms of their moral qualities: Man is so built that he cannot achieve perfection of his humanity except by keeping down his lower impulses...

...A contrast with the upper class highlights some of the details...

...The objections raised by Gans and others are known to Banfield (he cites the relevant literature) but he makes no attempt to deal with them...

...In other words, wherever there are large concentrations of "boys and young men of the lower class," as there are in black neighborhoods, the necessary conditions for riots exist...

...Deferred gratification" may originate as a way an emerging class copes with a hostile social and political environment, but it can eventually become part of a moral code to which everyone is expected to conform...

...Those remarks were misinterpreted of course—Rose himself was not prejudiced, and did not like those who were—but if he had seen fit to do so, he could have phrased what he had to say so that there would have been no possibility of misinterpretation...

...such a statement follows from the meaning of present orientation...

...9 A major difficulty 9 For a review and analysis see S. M. Miller et...

...All quotations except if otherwise noted are from this book...

...Members of a class possess mutable characteristics that change with changes in society...

...Such judgment is often equal to being sentenced for life to the "bughouse...

...On the other hand, it is not exactly clear what poverty is...

...A citation from Myers and Roberts is for part of their discussion of the importance of money in the lower class and the psychological stress its lack entails...

...that is, class refers to social fate as it is determined by the economy of the society...

...on whom my pains Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost...

...While his description is based upon a fairly large and familiar body of social science research data collected over the past two decades, there are some major difficulties in the way Banfield chooses to use the data...

...His "class" converts an idea antagonistic to the meaning and implications of race to the political and ideological ends served by the latter...

...A significant portion of the lower class is black, but it is class rather than race that is important here...

...285-302...

...it ignores or minimizes aspects of a subculture shared with other groups which motivate actions in ways different from what is assumed to be the main thrust of the subculture...

...This concept developed, in part, as a reaction to that of race: cultural anthropologists were committed to demonstrating that the culture concept was a better explanatory notion than race...

...SIMILAR questions can be and have been raised about the factual basis of the central thesis: lower-class individuals are incapable of deferring gratifications...

...cit.--of the conditions that would have to be fulfilled in order to get valid data testing Banfield's proposition see S. M. Miller and Ronnie Steinberg Ratner, "The American Resignation: The New Assault on Equality," Social Policy, May-June 1972, p. 8. 11 Louis Schneider and Sverre Lysgaard, "The Deferred Gratification Pattern: A Preliminary Study," American Sociological Review, April 1953, p. 143...

...If these necessary conditions are not present it is difficult to see how one can reasonably expect lower-class persons to defer gratifications...

...10 al., "Poverty and Self-Indulgence: A Critique of the Non-Deferred Gratification Pattern," in Louis A. Ferman et al., eds., Poverty in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), pp...

...Unfortunately, this sentiment is realistic...

...2 2 Political Influence (Glencoe: Free Press, 1961), p. 66...

...There is, of course, the further difficulty of whether the two types of dis incentives mentioned are comparable...

...Even if one could save significant amounts, the opportunities one is saving for must be present in the future...

...There are other peculiarities in the use of CALIBAN'S ABODE data...

...At the opposite extreme stands the lower 456 class person "living from moment to moment...

...and does not vote unless paid to do so...

...Today the fit between the latter's ideology and reality seems better than ever...

...What would one say of the rationality or even the mental health of those who persistently deferred pleasures in the face of only slim chances of future payoffs...

...On page 172 they note that while "perception of the psychological nature of personal problems is a rare trait in any class" it is most frequently found in the upper strata...

...Three sources are cited in a footnote...

...As he himself points out, not all his statements have the same status vis a vis known fact: Most of the statements about time horizons...

...10 For a summary statement-based on Miller et...

...If it means "destitution .. . lack of income sufficient to insure physical survival," then no one in the city is destitute...

...The worst thing that can happen to a Class V person is to be labeled "bugs," "crazy," or "nuts...

...they are themselves deductive . . . arrived at from premises that have been inductively established...

...What appears to blacks as racial prejudice is in reality "class prejudice or, at any rate, class antipathy...

...But it also resonates, as we shall see, with some darker currents running through American consciousness that make his perspective additionally seductive...

...14 If, on the other hand, Prospero and Caliban as moral beings are more like than unlike, Prospero's order will be called into question...

...Since he also believes in the value of "self-expression," his behavior may occasionally resemble that of lower-class persons, but "whereas the lower-class individual is capable only of present-oriented behavior, the upper-class one can choose...

...the contemporary city appears to justify their worst apprehensions about the long-term drift of a liberal society...

...his future is "fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him...

...it serves further to shroud reality in mystery...

...Seeking to become a valid person in a more conventional way remains attractive even though the probability of success may be low...

...The lower-class person shares moral aspirations and qualities with others in the society...

...He tends to remain unmarried and has no attachment to "community, neighbors, or friends...

...And as with age his body uglier grows, So his mind cankers .. . The Tempest Celebrated as the cradle of civilization, the source of civility, change, and progress, the city has also been damned as the locus of evil, and for many Sodom and Gomorrah are still the archetypal urban communities...

...In theory it is possible to remedy this by such schemes as the negative income tax, but these schemes probably would not work since "the lower-class person prefers near destitution without work to abundance with it...

...The main proposition, namely, that individuals and cultures have differing time orientations toward the future is of this character...

...Between 1960 and 1970 consumer installment credit rose from $43 billion to $101.2 billion...

...Banfield quotes a standard laid down by the economist Alfred Marshall in the 19th century and suggests that it can still serve today: "'a well-drained dwelling with several rooms, warm clothing, with some changes of underclothing, pure water, a plentiful supply of cereal food, with a moderate allowance of meat and milk, and a little tea, etc....' " By this standard there is little want...

...Banfield is aware, of course, that many psychological traits change relatively quickly, but any changes in orientations like present-mindedness, he emphasizes, "must occur very slowly" because they are rooted in culture...

...In a previous work Banfield said of a Chicago official, His remarks about Puerto Ricans and Negroes also won him support from "reactionaries...