The Magic Returns

Someone on LinkedIn posted this picture of a billboard somewhere, and then had a bit of a rant about it. I agree that it's off, but it's not terrible. The problem with this isn't that it's necessarily inaccurate. I'm sure that a lot of people who started poor did all of these things on their way to becoming more well-off. The problem with this message is that it's facile and oversimplified. The citation of Proverbs 10:4 is a standard formulation in things like this: "hard work" makes one wealthy in and of itself. But I'm pretty sure that the world's wealthiest people would affirm that simply because work is difficult, highly time consuming or requires a lot of effort doesn't mean that it's effective or efficient at building wealth. There are plenty of ways to work very hard, yet come out in a worse position than one started in. This billboard may have just simply said: "Life outcomes are invariably tied to character" and left it at that.

And that's a shame, because there are things that people can do to make their lives better. The difficulty becomes that in the real world they tend to a) require some level of access to resources and b) entail the risk of those resources. If there are no guarantees in life, than there is no level of work ethic that can guarantee success in any given endeavor, including working one's way out of poverty. But then again, perhaps that's really what Proverbs 10:4 is there for: to offer, but not directly state, that doing the right things and showing the right virtues will lead to a divine intercession into personal economics that will ensure the desired outcome. Of course, that leads to the unfortunate tendency to judge what cannot be directly seen, namely a person's internal drive and traits, based on something that can, the external trappings of wealth. (Directly observing one's work ethic would likely require spending more time with a person than would be practical.)

Just like Juan Williams' understanding that conservative family values are the simple and self-evident answer to all of the problems of black America, to the point of referring to them as "magical" in Enough - The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America - and What We Can Do About It, this billboard works under the assumption that people have been ignoring obvious quick fixes out of some misguided ignorance, gullibility and/or immorality. But what's really missing is a lack of trust. People who work hard rarely do so simply because they get off on the expenditure of effort. Instead, they're expecting some sort of return on that investment. (And have I noted that all investments come with an element of risk?) Without that expectation, a standout work ethic is as likely to be seen as foolish as it is virtuous. As the Demotivator says: "Quitters never win, and winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots." And while the intentional systems that stopped many people from winning may have been dismantled, it's irrational to expect that this fact alone would have restored trust in the utility of striving.

To do that, people should be mentored through learning the skills, tools and processes they'll need to master to be truly successful. But billboards with magical thinking and Bible citations are easier. Okay, that's less than 100% fair. But this billboard simply replaces Juan William's exhortation to put off childbearing and replaces it with savings, investment and giving back to the community. It feels just as moralizing and directed at conservative Whites now as it did then. (And, to fair, maybe that is the target audience, as if often is in American respectability politics.)

Another problem with this billboard is, well, that it's a billboard. There really isn't room on it for much more than a few sentences, and I suspect that I wouldn't want to try to take all of it in if I happened to be driving by at highway speeds. As suspect as Juan Williams' statistics were in his book, the book format gave him the space to lay them out, and thus support his case. And sure, there's a URL for more information, but I am convinced that taking the time to either write it down or look it up on a phone while driving is a bad idea. So I'm not convinced that anything further would actually be read. And by itself, the billboard comes off as simply condescending, indulging in the stereotype of Black Americans as uneducated and disinterested in family life. Sure the marriage rate in the Black community is lower than it is for other ethnic groups (it started to decouple in the 1960s), but a majority still marry. (Given current trendlines, however, that may not be true for much longer.)

As an aside, there's a certain irony in expecting people to use marriage as an escape from poverty, given that many people tend to delay marriage until they've accumulated a certain level of wealth; disparities in wealth between Black and White Americans also show up in marriage rates, for that reason. And that leaves out the fact that marriage rates are lower and divorce higher, among those people with lower educational attainment (and this holds across the United States at large). People with the money to finish college are the most likely to be successful in marriage, but a college education itself does a pretty decent job of keeping people out of poverty. While it's true that the married tend to be better off than the unmarried, the causal relationship appear to work such that the better off are more likely to become, and remain, married, even if they wait to do so. And since trends toward assortative mating in the United States have closed off much of the mixing of classes in the marriage market, the potential mates those in poverty are likely to attract are going to be in poverty themselves. And while two may live more cheaply per person than one, poor families still have trouble saving.