Upward Mobility

Here at the Spherical Model, we talk about the interrelationships of the political, economic, and social spheres. Freedom affects prosperity, and both are significantly affected by the civilization level of the people.

I came across a long piece by Megan McCardle for Bloomberg News (I’m estimating 25-30 pages, but online it’s a bit uncertain) about the state of Utah, where I grew up. And the interrelationships are evident.

Let’s start with some descriptions. The story begins with the population: 192,672. That’s the city proper. But that’s not really accurate. That puts it in the range of the Tri-Cities in Washington State (Kennewick, Richland, and Pasco together), which has a small town feel, and not even a 4-year college. The Salt Lake metropolitan area is actually well over a million. And if you extend the area north to Ogden and south to Provo, you’re up to nearly 2.5 million. It’s not as big as, say, Houston, but it’s significant in population size.

Salt Lake City, view from airplane, May 2014

Salt Lake City and surrounding areas have a high percentage of Mormons, since the valley was settled by Mormons after they had been driven from five previous homes by mobs burning and looting their property and killing them. (The Governor of Missouri had signed an extermination order, which made murdering Mormons legal.) So, it’s no wonder they wanted a place of their own, away from threats, where they could settle permanently.

Going back there, when daughter Social Sphere went to college, she commented, “I’ve never seen so many blonds.” I hadn’t noticed it growing up, but she was right. It’s a little startling after Texas. A lot of the Utah population comes from the northeastern US, plus many from England and Scandinavia (my heritage). So blonds are common.

But there are other notable demographics as well. Hispanics are around 22%. Then there are sizable populations of Pacific Islanders, and Asians (Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka), and Bosnians.

There are only about 2.7% blacks. There has never been a migration of blacks to Utah. There has also never been slavery, and blacks (and women) had the vote all along, before statehood in the 1890s (statehood took away the women’s right to vote for a couple of decades). McArdle asserts that institutional racism is the reason blacks stay away—I have to say that’s an incorrect assessment of the people, and of the Mormons. But I’ll save that debate for another day.

Anyway, some of the comparisons between Utah and other places are like apples and oranges just because there isn’t an underlying racism issue. And another overriding question is, can the things that are working be transferred elsewhere, or is it because of the Mormons?

Upward Mobility

Upward mobility—the American Dream—is more likely in Utah than in the rest of the US. The main impetus of the article is to explore why there is this upward mobility gap:

A child born in the bottom quintile of incomes in Charlotte [North Carolina] has only a 4 percent chance of making it into the top quintile. A child in Salt Lake City, on the other hand, has more than a 10.8 percent chance—achingly close to the 11.7 percent found in Denmark and well on the way to the 20 percent chance you would expect in a perfectly just world.

Government Spending

Government spending isn’t the reason. Utah’s government seems to commit very limited funds for both fighting poverty and for education. “Utah is dead last in per-pupil education spending.” It’s not last in educational outcomes, however. For K-12 schools, it ranks 22nd, but in higher education it ranks 2^nd. For overall education it ranks 9^th.

They have a surprising solution for homelessness that seems to be working, called “Housing First.” It turns out, if you just outright pay for housing for the homeless, before dealing with the cause of that individual’s homelessness, it’s cheaper and more effective than the crisis-led practice of dealing with them once they show up in emergency rooms.

As McArdle summarizes:

That’s the thing about the government here. It is not big, but it’s also not … bad. The state’s compassionate conservatism goes hand-in-hand with an unusually functional bureaucracy.

Volunteer Help

Besides actually cheerful, helpful government workers, the biggest factor seems to be community involvement, with an army of volunteers.

The volunteering starts in the church wards, where bishops keep a close eye on what’s going on in the congregation, and tap members as needed to help each other. If you’re out of work, they may reach out to small business people to find out who’s hiring. If your marriage is in trouble, they’ll find a couple who went through a hard time themselves to offer advice.

Besides the very local, very personal volunteering, there’s also larger, more institutional helping. Welfare Square is visited by governments all over the country and the world, to see how it’s done, and to see what they can replicate. It’s not just a food pantry; it’s a production facility—actually a network of production facilities: bakeries, dairies, canneries, farms, orchards, and more.

Here in Houston we have a peanut butter cannery producing for Church welfare storehouses in Utah and all over. It’s run by volunteer labor. Additionally, the cannery is used by the Houston Food Bank to produce about 400,000 jars a year for local food pantries. The only jars actually sold are to Mormons buying a case or so for their personal family pantries. All the rest is donated to the poor.

LDS Peanut Butter Factory in Houston

Help from the Church is intended to be temporary. And recipients are expected to do volunteer work in exchange for the help, whenever physically possible. Usually help will be to tide a household over for a matter of a few months, all the while helping them find gainful employment, or head toward the training or education they need. There’s no life-long welfare help in the Church.

McArdle contrasts that with government programs:

This combination of financial help and the occasional verbal kick in the pants is something close to what the ideal of government help used to be. Social workers used to make individual judgments about what sort of help their clients needed or deserved. But such judgments always have an inherently subjective and arbitrary quality, which courts began to frown on in the middle of the 20th century, in part because they offered considerable discretion for racial discrimination.

Turning government welfare into an automatic entitlement based on simple rules undoubtedly made it fairer, and kept people from slipping through the cracks. But making it harder to remove benefits from people who stopped trying also made it easier for people to make understandable short-term decisions which turned into long-term dependence, leaving a significant number of people disconnected from work and mired in multi-generational poverty.

One of the factors in upward mobility is what BYU research David Sims calls “middle classness that’s so broad it’s almost infectious.” He means that young people are exposed to social differences beyond how they were raised. Moving up looks possible. And belief leads to efforts to succeed.

Lots of Marriage, Not Much Alcohol

Mormons contribute some additional social benefits. Mormons don’t drink alcohol, so poverty-related outcomes of alcohol addiction are a much smaller problem in Utah.

Also, Mormons are more likely to be married. We’ve talked about the formula for avoiding poverty in America at the Spherical Model from time to time. That comes up again here:

Economists Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins famously estimated that we could reduce poverty by 71 percent if the poor did just four things: finished high school, worked full time, got married and had no more than two children — and the number of children was the least important factor in that calculation.

Salt Lake Temple,
photo from the Conference Center
in the rain, January 2012, by Social Sphere

Marriage avoids poverty not only for the couple as individuals, but also for the children in the next generation. Marriage builds social capital. In areas of the US where it looks like upward mobility is racially caused, “once they controlled for the family structure of the community, that effect disappeared. Marriage seems to have more of a correlation with mobility than race does.”

And not just the families of married parents benefit; neighborhoods benefit:

If you live in a neighborhood full of single mothers who had a hard time finishing school, that’s probably the future you’ll expect for yourself and your own kids. If you live in a neighborhood full of thriving two-parent families, that’s probably the future you’ll envision, even if your own father disappeared when you were 2. Marriage matters at the individual level, but it also matters at the community level, because the community can strongly shape individual behavior.

That sounds just like something we’d come up with here at the Spherical Model. Families are the basic unit of civilization. You need a critical mass of families with intact married parents in order to get out of savagery and into civilization.

Results

So, here’s what you need, if you want Utah’s results of exiting poverty. You need married parents raising families with stability and caring. You need a volunteer force to care for the less fortunate. You need people willing to care for one another, rather than leaving that to government. And you need minimal government bureaucracy that, where necessary, is done with care and efficiency.

You might get that where there’s not a handy supply of Mormons. I’m even hopeful that it is possible. That’s what the Spherical Model shows. But if you need social capital to get underway, it sure is handy to start with a Mormon population.

Welfare with Dignity

This past week, by illegal (in my opinion) executive order, the president gutted the welfare reform passed in the 1990s and signed (and taken credit for) by Bill Clinton, removing the requirement of working or showing effort to find work. The president wants it to be a pure handout, an entitlement, separated from the idea of work.

I don’t know his motivations precisely, but I do know this about human nature: work brings dignity. Working for wealth is more meaningful to the human soul than a free handout, particularly an expected one received without gratitude. A handout with no strings attached is a disincentive to work—and the result is a depressive effect on the soul, turning an otherwise productive human being into a mere parasite.

Rather than deal with the numbers on and off welfare during this current depression, I’d like to look at an exemplary private program, begun 76 years ago during the last Great Depression. This is the welfare program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons. The program was highlighted last night in a segment of Rock Center with Brian Williams.

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According to the Church’s website,

The objective of the welfare program is to care for the needy while teaching principles that will help people become self-reliant and retain their self-respect.

That’s the “teach a man to fish” principle, so he can eat for a lifetime, as opposed to the “give a man a fish” strategy, where he eats just for a day.

How does the Church do what it does? By living the principles of civilization: donating time, money, and caring. Every month a Sunday is dedicated to fasting—skipping two meals. The cost of these two meals is donated—above and separate from tithing—as fast offerings. In other words, actual food is given up, voluntarily, to provide food and other needs for the poor. It may be easier for rich people to give up the cost of two meals (and some are much more generous, because they can afford to be), but it helps the soul to feel the hunger for the sacrifice. No one asks or checks up to see who is hungry (and people with health reasons for not fasting, such as diabetics or pregnant moms, are not expected to), and while records are kept for tax deduction purposes, no one is forced or expected to pay any specific amount. There is value in generosity by choice that simply can’t be there with coercion.

The Church’s welfare program has been visited as an example by presidential administrations and other visitors for many decades. It’s kind of mind-boggling. The stores of food and supplies are used worldwide, and are distributed to storehouses around the world. We have one in Houston.

Besides the storehouses, there are also production facilities. Where I grew up, we had fruit farms; that was true when we lived in Washington State as well. My husband grew up in an area with a tuna canning facility (not still in use). Here in Houston we have a peanut butter cannery. [The facilities and equipment were upgraded last year; I wrote about it here. The cannery is also used in a joint project with the Houston Food Bank, to produce about 100,000 jars that go directly into the hands of local families in need.]

There was a month, during graduate school, when a summer internship fell through. I was working part-time, but until a job in his field materialized, we were in dire straits, with a small baby. We had counted on the summer money to get us through not only the summer, but the coming school year. We turned to the local bishop, the lay pastor of the congregation. He got us what we needed. The Relief Society president, the leader of the women’s auxiliary, came and met with me and filled out a “shopping list,” food and supplies we would receive without cost. This included cloth diapers, which I was used to using but needed more of. (Today I think disposable diapers are more likely to be on the list.) Most of the food was produced by voluntary labor of church members, and then some products were purchased by the Church, but not by us.

In exchange, we served where we could. Mr. Spherical Model got assignments on various Saturdays to work, along with some youth and other leaders, on the pig farm an hour away that produced pork products for the storehouse. It was messy, filthy work—that makes me appreciate farmers who do the work all the time. They mucked out barns. They separated the pigs from the bores. They identified the ones due for, uh, removal of reproductive organs. The volunteers didn’t have to perform that surgery, just helped the full-time workers.

It was a hot Indiana summer (90 degrees and 90% humidity that we called 90/90 days), and we had no air conditioning in our little car. There was a traffic stall on the way home from one of these assignments, and Mr. Spherical Model and his cohorts had to spend an extra hour sitting in the heat, smelling one another. Fortunately we had vinyl upholstery, but it took a lot of cleaning and a long time to get the odor out. I refused to let Mr. Spherical Model into our apartment with those filthy clothes. I made him drop all but underwear in the hallway, which I then carried quickly to the laundromat in the next building over. (Fortunately, at that time no one lived in the apartment across the hall, so no indecent exposure took place.)

It was honest labor. If we had not taken the assignment, someone else would have, whether they had received storehouse help or not. Serving is what Mormons do.

We were fortunate that summer work in the department came through, and we had only that single month as receivers of help. But many people are not so fortunate. As with the rest of the population, Mormons are suffering high unemployment today in rates similar to the rest of the population. The Church has an employment specialist in every congregation, to help individuals with their resumes, to practice interview skills, and other employment help. In addition, there is online help, also employment centers—available not just to Mormons, but to anyone in need. It’s helpful that, during these times of extended crisis, there are opportunities to serve—to feel the dignity of being useful—while also gaining work experience.

There’s an anecdote from To Kill a Mockingbird, that I wrote about in one of my first blog posts, that talks about real charity:

The young girl, Scout, learns how her father, Atticus, has helped someone too poor to pay for legal help Scout’s father had done. The man feels his debt, and periodically brings stove wood (because he can’t pay with money, since he doesn’t have enough). And eventually both Scout’s father and the man will know that the debt has been duly paid.

I say it was still charity, in the good sense. Atticus Finch did his work as a lawyer, knowing the client had no money but had a need. He could have gotten stove wood for himself. But he allowed the repayment as a kindness, to show he respected the man’s willingness to work, to show the man wasn’t demanding help he couldn’t pay for. Their good will toward one another is charity (caring), in both directions.

The Rock Center story referenced above says that 600,0000 orders a year are distributed through storehouses, and in addition funds are made available to local leaders, for purchasing goods where storehouses aren’t in close proximity. Additionally, worldwide humanitarian aid is given as disaster relief, as well as long-term help. (Information here). As a hurricane starts threatening the US coastline, trailer trucks full of relief supplies are filled and sent out on the road to be in place in the first hours after the storm—often before either Red Cross or government help arrives. All donations to LDS Humanitarian Aid go 100% to the people in need. Most help is volunteer, but where there is overhead, it is paid for through tithing donations so that no aid donations go to overhead costs.

When people assume that government must supply an economic safety net, I don’t argue that such a net should exist; but I know, because I’ve seen the example, that it can be provided better by private volunteer charity than by government redistribution.