Is unsorting America even possible?
Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort,” considered Americans’ tendency to self-segregate into communities “with people who live, think, and vote like we do.” There are also economic consequences to that. Inequality follows.
American society has “become less random” as it has “become more unequal,” observes Princeton sociologist Dalton Conley. He offers a quirky thought experiment in The New Yorker on how, had we the will, we might tackle inequality resulting from geography and the birth lottery. His answer to the problem that “when rich people are asked to pay more in taxes, or to send their children to school with poorer kids, they tend to move,” is a lottery of another sort.
But is inequality a problem for most Americans? Or do they see inequality as “the way things are.” Meritocracy, the prosperity gospel, and royalist sentiment argue vigorously for the status quo. Whatever. Conley’s is a thought experiment:
The core issue is that our social contract is based on place: we make decisions and fund our government in a fundamentally local way. This means that, the more we live in separate clusters, the less incentive we have to help one another, and that creates a feedback loop that worsens with time. Meanwhile, our political divisions deepen. We are more geographically polarized by social attitudes and partisanship than at any time since the Civil War. This is true across regions, within states, and even among neighborhoods. Political scientists argue about why this is happening—but nobody disputes that it is taking place.
Conley suggests a taxing lottery that follows us wherever we go:
What if, instead of paying taxes where we reside, and then reaping their benefits locally, we sprinkled taxation and revenues randomly—and therefore evenly—across the United States? What if, instead of paying a third of my taxes to New York City and State, I instead paid them to Pod No. 2,264—a group to which I was randomly assigned by a lottery the year I turned eighteen? What if, instead of camping out on the sidewalk the night before the school-enrollment date in hopes of getting my kids into a well-funded public school, I received a monthly check from Pod 2,264 that was meant to pay for my children’s schooling wherever I wanted to send them? In such a system, the retreat of affluent people from the places where they live doesn’t matter. In fact, it doesn’t matter where anybody lives. Nobody can escape contributing to the public sphere, no matter how far they move.
I’m already skeptical. First, because the rich would never consent to such a system and, second, because they’d manage to divert their funds away from public schools to private ones, as they are doing today with vouchers. But do go on.
Organizing everyone into randomly assigned pods may sound insane—and it isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, or at all—but it isn’t any crazier than the way things are set up now. Today, the vast inequalities across school districts, cities, counties, and states depend upon boundaries that evoke a prior, agrarian epoch. The whole idea that we should make policy by parish stems from the Elizabethan Poor Laws, which, at the end of the sixteenth century, set up hyper-local social safety nets; in a time of small-scale agriculture and cottage industries, when economies were regional and most people died within miles of where they were born, hyper-locality made sense. But it doesn’t make sense anymore.
Agreed. What to do about it? Having studied John Rawls and still having my draft card from the Vietnam-era draft lottery somewhere though, let’s see where Conley’s going.
In the midst of the Vietnam draft lottery, the political philosopher John Rawls proposed his own idealized blueprint for a fairer society, in a book called “A Theory of Justice.” In his imagined world, we cast our votes not from our current stations in life but from what he called the “original position”—a Platonic state in which we don’t know what place in the world we might occupy. Imagine if the federal budget were hashed out not by Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell but by unborn souls who had no idea whether they would come into the world poor or rich, Black or white, male or female. Rawls argued that, in such a reality, utilitarianism—the pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number—wouldn’t prevail. Instead, we would seek to improve the lot of the worst off, since any of us could draw a losing number. When important matters are determined by lottery, we become more empathetic.
Sure, Conley writes, “some of us would lose in a more lottery-based society. But many of us would win.” But that happens now with the birth lottery in which many people die “within miles of where they were born.”
But it’s less stressful to think about over Sunday coffee than whether you’ll die an untimely death from our national bullet lottery.