The Myth of the American Meritocracy

Poor people deserve their plight. They deserve their paltry salaries, their food stamps that can hardly afford a healthy diet, their untreated illnesses. At least, that's what many conservatives would have you believe.

As fellow blogger Megan Greenwell writes, Americans have a "proud tradition of blaming the poor" for their poverty. And it's getting prouder; over the past year, critics of social programs have increasingly raised their voices against helping low-income Americans break the poverty cycle or improve their communities. Two weeks ago, State Rep. Spencer Swalm, a Republican from Colorado, infamously blamed poverty on single parents. Last month, South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer compared poor people to stray animals and suggested that they "breed" and "reproduce" their poverty without thinking. Last fall, Rush Limbaugh spoke of his disgust toward community service, calling it "insidious" and "nothing more than a well-sounding compassionate label" for the grunge work that prison inmates should be performing ("Let prisoners pick up the trash," he remarked).

Of course, the solution usually proposed by these critics of social welfare is simple: the poor just need to work harder. The underlying message is that if you're rich, you deserve it, and if you're poor, well, you must have failed somewhere along the line. So you were born into a poor family in a segregated neighborhood, where "white flight" decreased the number of tax dollars in your neighborhood, sinking your schools into further disrepair? Better pick yourself up by your own bootstraps.

I am the first to agree that hard work is an essential component of financial success. But as a 2008 Working Poor Families Project report states, "Adults in low-income working families worked on average 2,552 hours per year in 2006, the equivalent of almost one and a quarter full-time workers." In short, a lack of hard work simply isn't the issue: unequal opportunity is.

Over 13 percent of Americans are living under the federal poverty line, an unrealistically low measure that since the 1960s has only taken into account the cost of food and hasn't addressed other essential items in a typical living budget, such as medical bills, transportation, and housing costs. When health care costs and geographic variations are taken into consideration, that percentage jumps to almost 16 percent, or one in 6 Americans. Not the best news for someone who's hoping to buy some bootstraps with his spare change.

On the other side of the spectrum, as of 2007, the top 1 percent of U.S. households held a larger slice of the pie than at any other point since 1928. This mass concentration of wealth is deemed justifiable by conservative critics because of a fundamental problem in how they view opportunity and success in our country. They see the U.S. as a meritocracy, where the richest and most powerful citizens earn their positions through good old-fashioned American grit and determination. They fail to recognize that wealth, family connections, race, gender and other factors strongly impact a person's opportunities in life.

Try selling the meritocracy myth to the 42 million adults and children from low-income working families across America. See if they buy it.

Photo credit: Alex E. Proimos