New Study: The Affluent Are in Denial About Their Class Privilege

Race is a continuing problem in America that has no easy solution.  Another growing problem is soar wealth disparity where a small portion of the citizenry owns much more of the nation's wealth than the vast majority of the rest of us combined.  The Republican Party's reverse Robin Hood agenda and efforts to usher in a new Gilded Age with modern day equivalents of the robber barons of old has only served to exacerbate the problem.  Nowadays, one has a far better chance for upward social mobility in Europe than in America and a number of studies have labeled Canada as the new home of the American dream.  What's amazing as the concentration of wealth has intensified and millions of Americans struggle to get by financially is that the wealthy refuse to see their privilege and the advantages it grants to them.  With luck and hard work some will still live the American dream, but many will not no matter their efforts.  A piece in Salon looks at the willful denial of so many of the wealthy.  Here  are excerpts:

Income is correlated with right-wing politics, meaning wealthier people tend to be slightly more conservative. While there is no singular reason for this, both history and observational anecdotes suggest that those with wealth and privilege tend to distort the reason they were so successful, chalking up their success to right-wing ideological canards like "hard work" — rather than admit they were helped by other social factors. (President Trump is a great case study, as he exaggerates the degree to which his father helped him build his empire: during the first 2016 presidential debate, Trump bragged that his father gave him "a very small loan in 1975," which he built "into a company that's worth many, many billions of dollars." That "small loan" was actually $60.7 million.)

Now, a new social psychology study has uncovered the extent to which this tendency appears to be pathological among the moneyed elite. Titled "I ain't no fortunate one: On the motivated denial of class privilege," the new study, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that those who were posed questions about their class privilege responded by "increasing their claims of personal hardships and hard work, to cover [their] privilege in a veneer of meritocracy." 

Dr. L. Taylor Phillips, a professor of management and organizations at New York University Business School, and co-author Dr. Brian S. Lowery, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, wrote in their study. "Evidence of class privilege demonstrates that many life outcomes are determined by factors not attributable to individuals' efforts alone, but are caused in part by systemic inequities that privilege some over others."

The authors emphasized that, in the United States, people are conditioned to believe that we live in a meritocracy and to attribute success or failure primarily to one's talent and hard work. When members of the upper-middle or upper class are confronted with evidence that class privilege plays a major role in determining socioeconomic status, their self-regard is challenged. To maintain their sense of self-worth, they will exaggerate their own hardships or focus on the amount of work they do — even though class privilege does not preclude the reality of non-class related hardships and many people work very hard without achieving socioeconomic mobility.

All of the studies found that, when participants who came from class privilege were confronted with that fact, they tended to focus on their personal hardships and work ethic in order to protect their self-regard from facing the reality that much of what they owned was given to them through luck and systems of oppression rather than individual merit.

She said that the individuals studied will specifically claim that they work harder at their jobs and will point to struggles from their lives to make the claim, "'Oh, you say I have this privilege and that's unfair, but actually look at these other things in my life, they kind of counteract or they kind of balance it out. It's all a wash.'"

Dr. Phillips also connected this mindset to a tendency toward classist and racist beliefs. . . . Dr. Phillips explained, summarizing the mentality as arguing that "'I'm here in this position, someone else's in this different position. Rather than because the system is unfair or because I've benefited from something unfair, which would then threaten my self regard, instead it's easier for me to claim that there's actually some sort of difference between us that makes this all fair. . . . It's actually because this group is worse in some way, or this individual person is worse in some way.'"

In the study, Phillips and Lowery emphasize the importance of the meritocracy myth in creating these delusions.

"The ideology of meritocracy is woven deeply into the cultural fabric of American society," the authors write. "The very 'American dream' that attracts and attaches so many to America suggests that if one works hard enough, they can succeed, no matter their class or background. As a result, systemic inequity is a tricky subject for American psyches: while most Americans subscribe to meritocratic ideologies that abhor such inequity, many also benefit from inequities. To resolve this tension, we find that the class privileged specifically claim hardship and effort because these are symbols of merit: they help cover privilege in a cloak of meritocracy."

Until one admits they system is stacked in favor of the wealthy, real solutions will be difficult to achieve.

Trump Offers Little New in Economic Policy that Most Aids the Wealthy

Other than wanting to throw out trade treaties that could have a negative boomerang effect on America, Donald Trump offered little new in his much vaunted economic policy speech in Detroit yesterday.  The take away?  That Trump like so many Republicans before him is relying on his low intellect supporters to be induced by hate, racism, and xenophobia to back policies that harm them economically.  Trickle down economics have never worked and after 36 years of broken promises one would think even the Neanderthals of the GOP base would be able to figure this out, but sadly such is not the case.  Both the New York Times and the Washington Post slam Trump's proposals.  Here are highlights from the Post editorial:

Mr. Trump’s economic policy speech to the Detroit Economic Club managed to embrace the worst of traditional Republican doctrine while repudiating the best of it.

Harking back to a nonexistent period “when we were governed by an America First policy,” Mr. Trump blamed the economic collapse of Detroit, and many other untoward economic trends, on trade, specifically free-trade agreements — such as the North American Free Trade Agreement — which the postwar GOP has generally supported, along with many Democrats. Not only would Mr. Trump scrap the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership with 11 other Pacific Rim nations, he would “renegotiate” NAFTA and “walk away” if Mexico and Canada don’t do what he wants. You may or may not like NAFTA and similar deals; they create winners and losers across the $17 trillion U.S. economy. Even critics must agree that, by now, they are firmly woven into the American economic fabric — and that unraveling them would be profoundly disruptive, perhaps creating “jobs and higher wages” for some, as Mr. Trump promises, but destroying them for many, many others.

On taxes, though, Mr. Trump reverted to GOP orthodoxy, offering cuts for upper-income Americans as a growth elixir. He promised to abolish the estate tax and to reduce the current seven income tax brackets to three, with a top rate of 33 percent. The former idea would benefit a relative handful of super-wealthy families; the latter would blow a gargantuan hole in federal finances unless Mr. Trump also ended deductions and other loopholes, most of which benefit upper-income households disproportionately. Yet he promised to close only one: the “carried interest” deduction whereby Wall Street investors can have certain earnings taxed at the lower capital gains rate rather than as ordinary income. It’s a good idea but would save the Treasury only about$1.8 billion per year.

Mr. Trump called for a new tax break, a deduction for child-care expenses. Though ostensibly for the benefit of hard-pressed families, the proposal will do nothing for the nearly half of American households who don’t owe federal income taxes at all.

There was, in short, little in the way of tangible benefit for the downscale Americans for whom Mr. Trump claims to speak. Possibly to draw attention away from that fact, Mr. Trump framed his proposals as a salve for such injustices as “rebuilding other countries instead of our own” and “resettl[ing] millions of refugees at taxpayer expense” while our infrastructure “fell into disrepair.” Brimming with statistics, larded with footnotes, Monday’s speech was meant to instill “message discipline” in the Trump campaign. But even that message’s most carefully scripted version is held together by smoke, mirrors and scapegoating.