Thomas Frank answers Larry Bartels

Last month, I linked to a paper (PDF) by Princeton's Larry Bartels taking issue with Thomas Frank's bestselling What's the Matter with Kansas?

I focus on four specific questions inspired by [author Thomas] Frank’s account: Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic party? Has the white working class become more conservative? Do working class “moral values” trump economics? Are religious voters distracted from economic issues? My answer to each of these questions is “no.”

Via Eric Alterman, I see that Frank has issued a rejoinder (PDF). Frank makes an especially strong case against Bartels' definition of the white working class:

Arming himself with a fact that is well-known to poll-readers everywhere—that society’s very poorest members tend to vote Democratic— [Bartels] simply switches the labels, claims that those poorest Americans are “the working class,” and—hey presto!—declares the problem solved. Nothing to worry about, go back to sleep.

Bartels performs this spectacular feat of reassurance by defining “working class” as “people with family incomes in the bottom third of the income distribution,” (11)3 which is to say, people with household incomes below $35,000. To justify this definition, he brushes off other ways of determining working-classness. First, subjective self- identification: You can’t trust people to give their own class accurately, Bartels writes, because that might be an effect as well as a cause of their political views. (page 11. Remember this: it will resurface later on.) Second, Bartels argues that educational levels can’t be used to determine “socio-economic status” because more people get college degrees now than in the old days.

And that’s it. Bartels’ own definition—household income below $35,000—is simply supposed to be beyond controversy, as he implies in a double-negative passage so windingly indirect that I had to read it over three times to get it:

Nevertheless, as a general matter, it does not seem implausible to suppose that people’s relative positions in the current income distribution provide a meaningful, historically consistent indication of their socio-economic status.

Well, I can think of half a dozen reasons why it is implausible, and I’m not even a political scientist. Maybe those people are students or recent college graduates or just starting out in the workforce or not married yet: They will promptly cease to be “working class” by Bartels’ estimation as soon as they get a promotion or get married. Maybe those people are professionals who just don’t make very much money, like, say, a newly minted poli-sci PhD who is an instructor or an adjunct somewhere: They may be struggling but they are not “working class” by anyone’s definition. Or maybe those people are retirees, living on pensions or Social Security—a large and growing segment of the population, but not necessarily “working class.”

In fact, according to a pair of professors who have also analyzed the NES data for 2004, over a third of Bartels’ “working class” demographic are, in fact, retirees. Eight percent are disabled. Only a third of his chosen cohort are actually employed, and only half of these are over the age of thirty. This is not a profile of “the working class” as anyone uses the term. This is “the poor,” “the young,” and “the retired.”

Comments

[J Hogan]

Even (wrongly) accepting Bartels' definition of what constitutes the 'working class' in the NES data, what is mising from this polemic is that the everyday consequences of residing in the lower third of incomes have changed significantly over the 50 years of NES data. The income divide between top and bottom thirds has widened significantly so that many people in the middle third have an economic status more resembling the lower third of the '50s data. So, any non-robotic, just-plot-the-data-stupid, effort to extract a trend from such data requires an assessment of the changed meaning of being in that bottom third.