26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Draws sharp distinctions, November 29, 2006
This book is aimed at drawing distinctions between subjective matters of identity and objective matters of income and beliefs. Each identity is as good as any other, but being poor is worse than being rich. Michaels accuses the left of having lost its focus on objective equality, to the point of glorifying poverty.
Treating poverty as a matter of identity is, according to Michaels, a pernicious strategy for willfully ignoring the problem that increasingly many people are increasingly poor, and have less and less opportunity to move out of poverty. Moreover, by fighting battles of identity -- WalMart and Wall Street women each making some percent less than the men -- we may ignore the fact that all the WalMart workers make a hundredth of what the Wall Street workers make. He does not argue against fighting injustices of identity so much as argue for prioritizing and looking at the problems in perspective.
The book draws sharp distinctions between the kinds of arguments that make sense for identities and those that make sense for wealth and ideology. It is a call to action in addressing "equality of opportunity" for everyone (the American Dream), hand in hand with reducing economic disparity.
This is an important social commentary, clearly and engagingly written, and exposing one of the great hidden weaknesses of politics in the United States. You may or may not be convinced, but reading it will broaden your view and sharpen your perspective.
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22 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I buy the argument; you should buy the book., October 31, 2006
Prof. Michaels most persuasive point is that our society has neglected the laudable goal of striving for socio-economic diversity in our institutions in favor of emphasizing other classes of diversity. He relies on strong rhetorical skills to make this, and most of his points. He does not focus on the detailed statistics that would be necessary to convince many professional social scientists, but the prospective audience for this extended op-ed piece is more the general reader, who may be provoked into finding their own numbers to butress their arguments. The writing style is necessarily polemical, and it is likely that all readers will find some things with which to disagree. However, in contrast to other critics of modern implementations of diversity, the present author likely otherwise shares many views with advocates of diversity. Even those who take issue with Michaels' conclusions will find his ideas worth considering. His closest intellectual bedfellow is Thomas Franks, to whom considerable reference is made, along with a host of other timely sources (who may be dated in a few years!). I found the short book easily digestible in two hour-long evening readings.
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18 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Readable, sometimes Brilliant, but Glib, February 4, 2007
This is an engaging, sometimes brilliant, book that is also deeply flawed. It is wonderfully well written. The author can turn a phrase and produce the occasional memorable maxim. For example, he says "Diversity, like gout, is a rich person's disease" (p108) and he says regarding the diversity obsession in elite American institutions that "the supposed left has turned into something like the human resource department of the right, concerned to make sure that women of the upper middle class have the same privileges as the men"( p114). The early chapters on the biology of race and "Our Favorite Victims" (which argues that our obsessions with race and gender have obscured our vision of economic inequality) are especially subtle and illuminating.
Still the book suffers two flaws: whenever it treats hard sociological facts the interpretation is typically glib, and the author offers few if any concrete proposals to address the problem of economic inequality. Regarding the first problem, three examples will suffice.
1 On page 98, the author provides the average SAT scores for students in 10 income categories, ranging from less than $10,000 dollars (872) to more than $100,000 dollars (1115). The average SAT goes up with each step up the income ladder. The problem he fails to note, however, is that race or ethnicity is even more important than income in accounting for variation in SAT. In 2006 Blacks averaged 863 and Asians scored 1088 on the SAT, and Asians from families earning $20,000-$30,000 outscored blacks from homes earning over $100,000 by over 60 points. Income is important but ethnicity is more important. In terms of school achievement, "it is more important to be born Asian than born rich," as Lawrence Steinberg once put it.
2 Michaels assumes that white suburban schools are better funded than black/urban schools (p87, passim), and that this accounts for differences in student performance but the evidence is quite clear that more money is spent on urban schools per student than any other type of school. Schools with 50% or more minority students spend 9% more than those with 5% or fewer minority students. My area would be typical. Atlanta City schools spend 50% more per student than suburban counties such as Cobb and Gwinnett but the latter greatly outperform Atlanta on standardized tests. The school district that spends the most in the country is Washington DC and it is arguably the worst school district in the country. There is no relationship between expenditures and student performance, something we have known since the Coleman Report of 1966. Family variables, especially family composition, explain most of the variation in student achievement.
3 The author observes that the academic left has claimed that domestic abuse occurs in every social class but that in fact poor women are 7 times more likely to be abused than wealthy women (pp.117-119). This is true but it hides what is the real variable of importance--marital status. According to the Justice Department and the National Crime Victimization Survey, single women are 4 times more likely to be abused than married women, and divorced and separated women are 10 times more likely to be abused than married women. The income findings are largely a function of the fact that married couples have much higher incomes than single/separated/divorced households.
Regarding the paucity of concrete policy prescriptions, one has to assume that Michaels wants to increase taxes on the rich and distribute the money to the poor but that is no guidance at all. He does seem to prefer that affirmative action shift from race/ethnicity/gender to social class, but as many have observed, such a shift would benefit whites and Asians disproportionately. The single concrete proposal he makes is reparations for slavery. Of course, this is rather ironic, given that the main point of the book is that obsessions with race and gender have blinded us to issues of income inequality, but the larger problem with such a proposal is contained in statements like "reparations are a technology for trying to create a world that comes as close as possible to the world we would have had if neither slavery nor Jim Crow had happened" (p128-129). You have to work very hard to be that facile. Had slavery never happened the descendents of those who in fact were enslaved would be living in West Africa and yet the 37 million people currently living in the US of African descent have a combined income much larger than the combined income of the 650 million sub-Saharan Africans. The typical person living in Western Africa lives on less than 2 dollars a day. By the author's logic, the descendents of slaves are the ones who should be paying reparations. Did I say "glib?" That is absurd.
Brad Lowell Stone
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