The Future of Capitalism by Paul Collier

Author:Paul Collier
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

8

The Class Divide: Having it All, Falling Apart

I and my cousin embody avoidable divergence. Why has it happened? What can be done?

In many families, the adults have acquired more education and skills than ever before in human history; they are more inclined to marry people like themselves than ever before; men have adopted a revolutionary family norm of equality and co-operation never before seen; and parents are nurturing their children more intensively than ever before. Success stabilizes such families; their children inherit the success of the parents. These families are having it all: they are becoming dynasties.

In many other families, the adults have little education, and the skills they laboriously acquired have lost their value. They too are more likely to marry people like themselves, but this is due to shrinking opportunities: assortative mating among the educated has left women with fewer chances of marrying upwards; men have retained the traditional norm of breadwinner but are no longer able to live up to it; and parents have retained the traditional norm of leaving education to the school. The mounting tensions of failure destabilize the family; children inherit the instabilities of their parents. These families are falling apart.

Many of the characteristics that are responsible for successful families are not just good for the families themselves, but good for the entire society. Conversely, many of those that are responsible for failing families are not only private tragedies, but social catastrophes. In reversing the new divergence, the place to start is with strengthening the families that are falling apart. We must face the reality that social paternalism has failed: the state cannot substitute for the family. But families need support as never before, an approach that I am going to call social maternalism.* But not all the practices of successful families are benign for society. Since you are reading this, you are likely to be part of this group. In this chapter, you must wait your turn, but your turn will come.

BOLSTERING STRESSED FAMILIES

The people who end up in low-productivity jobs often start their lives with parents ill-equipped to raise them. As we saw in Chapter 5, there has been a sharp increase in the number of children raised in households lacking one or both biological parents. Unfortunately, this often does damage that is irreversible. The implication of these brutal facts is that public policies need to begin early in the child’s life, both helping families to stay together, and supplementing parenting with other forms of support.

Putting the family together

Somehow, the proposition that two-parent families are something to be encouraged has become identified with the political right: ‘social conservatism’. But only the wildest shores of anarchism have ever espoused free love. As Baroness Alison Wolf, one of Britain’s most revered experts on social policy, says: ‘no known human societies have ever operated a sexual free-for-all. On the contrary, they have all had a well-recognized institution of marriage . . . Society after society has had rules, often draconian, designed to force men who fathered children to wed the mothers.

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