52
The Family and Social Justice
Last year we wrote a pamphlet for publication
by the Institute for Public Policy Research
(Young and Halsey 1995) urging a policy of
child-centredness for the New Labour Party
of Great Britain. To introduce it we asked
Gallup to survey opinion among those aged 16
and over on the future prospects of children;
'Do you think that children today have a bet-
ter future infront of them than you hadwhen
you were a child, a worse future, or about the
same?' The overall result was: Better 8 per
cent, Worse 63 per cent, Same 15 per cent,
Don't Know 4 per cent.
The large majority for 'worse'showed up in
all age groups; and regions, with parents of
children under 16 being particularly pes-
simistic. The only exceptions ,were people of
65 and over, while people in the top class
(socio-economic categories A/B) who replied
'worse' were in a much smaller majority than
in other classes.
Our aim in the pamphlet was to persuade a
party and a particular country. Here we want
to put essentially the same argument into a
wider historical and geographical context
As a model and foundation of the just soci-
ety, the family is not a property of the political
right. It has been virtually forgotten thatonce
upon a time the Labour Party- socialist
believed that a good factory or town or coun-
try should be one ruled by the principles gov-
erning a respectable working-class family. Of
course, words are great deceivers in social dis-
course. Only in our own generation has the
family come to mean the nuclear family. That
is far too narrow a definition for the purposes
of social policy. Declining fertility and accel-
erating geographical mobility have strained
and weakened the extended family. Older
political views of how to create a new com-
monwealth or a new Jerusalem or Socialism
A. H. Halsey and Michael Young
presupposed a dense network of community
relations, delivered by a technology and a pro-
ductive organization which put great restraint
othe movement of individuals. Even the
great migrations tended to be the movement
of tribes from one geographical point to
another, maintaining their cultural, linguis-
tic, and familial traditions (Schluter and Lee
1992). We now live in a world in which the
labour market is virtually global; communica-
tion and transport technology develop with
remorseless rapidity, and the possibilities of
freedom seem to have no bounds. Some intel-
lectuals, especially in the 1960s and 1970s,
haveseenfreedomaspossibleonlyifwccanall
escape from the webof obligations created and
maintained by family and community (Den-
nis 1993).In other words, we are talking about
residential . and relational patterns of life
which, in effect, are still adapting themselves
to shifts in the technological and economic
base of production. Modern politics is a cease-
less attempt to optimiZe the values of liberty,
equality, and community as our command
over nature opens new possibilities,as kinship
systems adapt to shifts between the domestic
and the formal economy, and as the occupa-
tional profile of the economy is more or less
rapidly transformed away from I:Ilanuallabour
towards skilled middle-class jobs, and away
from life-:long, full-time long hours and low
wages, towards-mobile, part-time short hours
and high wages.
The social sciences live under a handicap
imposed by these circumstances. Yesterday's
realities remain with us as today's concepts.
There is a tired old joke used by lecturers to
social-science beginners about the man who
reduced the GNP by marrying his house- -
keeper. Measurement is fraught with concep-
tual difficulty. The Victorians, even Alfred
 51
Introduction to The Bell Curve Wars
Steven Fraser

Newsweek called it 'frightening stuff,' worry- point in a thick statistical armature. But
ing that it 'may be a mirror for our morally despite the hedgerows of caveats and equivo-
exhausted times,' a book that 'plays to public cations with which the authors surround their
anxieties over crime, illegitimacy, welfare most provocative claims, The Bell Curve is an
dependency, and racial friction.' However, explosive device. Its premises, its purported
contributors to a symposium in The National findings, its prescriptive advice for what ails
Review described it as 'magisterial,' and noted American society are-whether or not the
that it 'confirms ordinary citizens' reasonable authors deliberately designed them to be so--
intuition that trying to engineer racial equality shocking. . .
in the distribution. of occupations and social TP,ere is, for example, the book's hubris;
positions runs against not racist prefudice but the clear implication that it constitutes a kind
nature, which shows no such egali arian dis- ofRosetta ston<: with which to decipher in one
tribution of talents.' Time magazine rejoined fell swoop all of the country's s.ocial patholo-
by characterizing the book as '845 pages of gies. Once we correctly understand the role of
provocation-with-footnotes,' a work of'dubi- statistically measured intelligence, the inex-
ous premises and toxic conclusions.' Rushing . orable logic of the social arithmetic .that sorts
to the book's defense, the WallStreet]ournal us out into rich and poor, powerful and pow-
decried the liberal media for ganging up to erless, will become blindingly apparent. The
excoriate the book, and in particular for authors assure us we will no longer 'gropewith
engaging in 'a frantic race to denounce and symptoms instead of causes' or 'stumble into
destroy Charles Murray' (one of the book's supposed remedies that have no chance of
two authors). While Forbes applauded the working.'
book, and Murray's Jeffersonian vision; New lt is hard to recall when there last appeared
York Magazine saw it as 'grist for racism of a work of such daunting omniscience, one
every variety.' A columnist for The New York offering such presumptuous singleminded
Times gloomily concluded: 'At least Rush wisdom. Many of the most painful dilemmas
Limbaugh has a sense ofhumor.' Meanwhile, afflicting our society, when viewed through
the book was being featured on 'Nightline' the prism of The Bell Curve, seem if not reme-
and showing up on the shlves ofK-Marts all diable then at least cleansed of their bewilder-
over the country. ing complexity. L>w intelligence lurks in the
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Struc shadows of 'irresponsible childrearing and
ture in American Life by Richard]. Herrnstein parenting behavior.'It looms again as 'a cause
and Charles Murray is clearly the most incen- of unemployment and poverty.' Indeed, not
diary piece of social science to appear in the only poverty and unemployment but crime,
last decade or more. It's easy to understand unwed motherhood,school failure, workplace
why. The Bell Curve irritates every abraded accidents, welfare dependency, and broken
nerve in our public consciousness about race families emerge demonically out of the Pan-
and social class. In for:rn it is practically a dora's box of sub-par IQscores. This news
model of acad-emic etiquette, sober not about our social afflictions is terrible, but the
inflammatory in style, dutifully acknowledg- simple elegance of the authors' diagnosis is
ing contrary views, encasing irs own view- nonetheless intellectually stunning.

From The Bell Curve Wars by Steven Fraser (Basic Books, 1995). Reprinted with permission.
780 Introduction to The Bell Curva Wars
Then there is the book's profound fatalism
and austere elitism, both so extraordinary in
a habitually optimistic and democratically
inclined nation.Ifgroup differences in intelli-
gence are to some large degree hereditary and
therefore intractable, and if we have become a
hierarchical society, polarized into an empow-
ered 'cognitive elite' at the top and a socio-
pathic 'cognitive underclass'at the bottom-a
hierarchy that merely replicates an ascending
slope of IQ scores--then, the authors feel
obligated to tell us, public policy stands help-
less to do anything about it: thus, 'success and
failure in the American economy, and all that
goes with it, are increasingly a matter of the
genes that people inherit,' and 'programs to
expand opportunities for the disadvantaged
are not going to make much difference.' Grim
pronouncements indeed. Inequality, inequal-
ity of the most fundamental sort, is our inex-
orable fate however much the nation's
democratic and egalitarian credo might groan
in protest.
Yet alongside this air of fatalistic resigna-
tion, Murray and .. Hermstein convey an
equally astonishing sense of activism and mis-
sionary purpose, which also helps account for
the book's remarkable notoriety. They worry
about 'dysgenesis,' or what others. have less
elegantly characterized as the 'dumbing-
down of America;' due to the higher fertility
r:ates of the 'cognitive underclass.' Here the
authors are more sanguine about the efficacy
of public policy, suggesting, albeit with some
tentativeness, given the extreme delicacy of
the subject, that changes in immigration law
and welfare and public health reforms tar-
geted par icularly at unwed mothers might
arrest the genetic degradation of the national
stock. Not since the eugenics craze of the
1920s has this line of thought occupied a seri-
ous place on the national agenda.
Numerous other claims and assertions have
genera ted flash floods ofletters to the editor in
every major magazine and newspaper, not to
mention over-the-air commentary on scores
of radio and television shows. For example,
the authors' insistence on the predominance
of our genetic make-up over environmental
factors in determining how well we do on an
IQ test stirs controversy; so too, their pre-
sumption that 'intelligence,' or what some
psychometricians callg, is a uniform, quantifi-
able power measurable across differences in
history, culture, and environment. All of
these issues and more are examined in the
essays that follow.
But above all, of course, it is what The Bell
Curve says, or at least seems to say-notwith-
standing disclaimers by the authors in and
outside of the text-about race, intelligence,
and social hierarchy that has ignited the media
firestorm. In a country necessarily preoccu-
pied throughout its whole history with race
relations, the book's claim to offer scientific
proof of the inferiority of black people was
bound to eclipse all its other possible subjects
in public-debate. The authors demur, noting
that there's hardly a word about race--or
rather that the book is only about the 'white
race'-until chapter 13, more than halfway
through the main body of the text. More to the
point, the subtitle of the book says it's about
'intelligence and class structure in American
life,' not about intelligence and race. In some
sense the authors are quite right. The book is
indeed about. class in America, a stark fact
noteworthy in its own right. However, The
Bell Curve colors the class structure in unmis-
takable shades ofblack and white, neutralizing
simmering tensions over economic inequality
with highly charged notions of race phobia
and inferiority.
Words like 'class' and phrases like 'class
structure' are rarely heard nowadays. To sud-
denly see them blazoned across the jacket of a
best-selling book by two conservative social
scientists is therefore especially striking. Yet
for well over a century, from the age of] ackson
through the age of FDR, such words were a
common enough part of our national vocabu-
lary. Usually they were deployed to signal
serious maldistributions of power and wealth
and often carried with them a moral oppro-
brium directed at landed, industrial, or finan-
cial elites. Then, sometime after World War
II, questions of class inequalities lost their
urgency, subsided, and even vanished from
the public arena. To watch them resurface in
the pages of The Bell Curve is a bracing
reminder that the abrasions of social class
remain an abiding reality for Americans,
whether they are mirrored in popular rhetoric
or not. More than that, however, the 'class
struggle,' as retold in The Bell Curve, marks a
seismic shift in the moral valence of the idea of
class in American life.
If at one time, examining the nation's class
structure implicitly called into question the
moral legitimacy, democratic commitments,

and economic fairness of the country's most
powerful institutions and wealthiest individ-
uals, The Bell Curve is telling us that the shoe
is now very much on the other foot. While the
authors lament the social isolation of the 'cog-
nitive elite,' walled offfrom the rest of society
in its privileged compounds, the brunt of the
book is about the transgressions of the lower
orders, cognitive or otherwise. At a time when
most indices record expanding inequalities in
American life--not only in income and wealth
distribution, but in public and private school-
ing, in matters ofhealth care, even in our vary-
ing capacities to rear the newborn-The Bell
Curve naturalizes those phenomena, turns
them into inescapable symptoms of a biologi-
cal class fate. At the same time, by associating
the 'cognitive tinderclass' with every grisly or
disturbing form of social behavior'from crime
to unwed teenage motherhood, the authors
direct our gaze away from those institutional
centers of power that in an earlier era might
have had to shoulder the blame for our most
grievous inequalities and social pathologies.
Once a way of interrogating the powerful,
in the hands of Murray and Herrnstein, the
study of 'class structure' has become instead
ari implicit indictment of the powerless, the
'scientific' rationale others may use to find
them blameworthy . and to prepare some
condign punishment. This too helps account
for the book's renown. It allows for discussion
of the vexed issue of social inequality at a
moment when the hierarchies of American
life grow more distended and rigid; but it lets
the anxieties and resentments naturally
aroused by those developments flow down-
ward toward a defenseless 'cogpitive under-'
class.' The fact that that class turns out to be
disproportionately black is undoubtedly an
important political and psychological conso-
lation for some-:-and it severely weakens the
authors' contention that their book is not
about race. Still, The Bell Curve's distinctive
class agenda is made unmistakably clear when
the reader is reminded that 'the high rates of
poverty that afflict certain segments of the
white population are determined more by
intelligence than by socioeconomic back-
ground.'
The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and
the Future of America responds to these and
other vital issues raised by the Murray and
Herrnstein book. There is no neat way to
pigeonhole the essays that follow. Some criti-
Introduction to The Bell Curve Wars 781
cize The Bell Curve's premises regarding gen-
etics, the nature of human intelligence, and
the very concept of race. Some dispute its sta-
tistical methods and findings or the credibility
of its sources. Others question its depiction of
America's 'class structure' or the book's
policy recommendations. Several speculate
about the remarkable public reaction to the
book. A few do a bit of everything. Taken
together they comprise a powerful antidote to
a work of dubious premises and socially
alarming.predictions.
As StephenJay Gould once took on Herrn-
stein and Murray's predecessors in his book
The Mismeasure of.Man, so here he attacks The
BellCurve's scientific pretensions as he dis-
mantles its four most basic premises regarding
intelligence and genetics: that intelligence can
be described by a single number; th a t it is
capable of ranking people in some linear
order; that it is genetically based; and that it is
immutable. Cognitive psychologist.Howard
Gardner questions the scientific underpin-
nings of The Bell Curve by noting that it
ignoies the past 100 years of biological, psy-
chological, and anthropological research that
challenges the notion of a single, uniform, and
innate human intelligence, or g. He argues
instead for the r:oncept of 'multiple intelli-
gences'--practical, social; musit.'<ll, spatial,
arid so on-and for the cnormously;important
but underrated role of training in the attain-
ment of any kind ofintelligence. The scientiflc
assault is joined from yet another quarter by
the eminent psychometrician Richard Nis-
bett. Based on his painstaking examination of
all the existing serious scientific studies of
intelligence, Nisbett finds that most point to a
zero genetic contribution to the black-white
differential in IQ He concludes that Murray
and Herrnstein's slipshod treatment of this
and other vital statistical questions would
prohibit their publication in any respectable
peer-reviewed journal. New Republic editors
Jeftrey Rosen and Charles Lane question the
integrity of the book's scholarly infraStrUC-
ture. Scr tinizing The Bell Curve's footnotes
arid bibliography, Rosen and Lane conclude
that the authors have in effect synthesized
the work of 'disreputable race theorists and
eccentric eugenicists' in mounting some of
their key arguments. Dante Ramos of The
New Republic similarly comments that there
is 'too much counter-evidence relegated to
endnotes, too much tendentious data
782 Introduction to The Bell Curve Wars
interpretation, and too many not-quite-
credible studies.'
A number of commentators have ques-
tioned the book's historical nearsightedness;
for example,its conspicuous failure to explain
the long-term decline in poverty during the
reign of the welfare state (roughly from 1940
to 1970). In his essay here, Thomas Sowell,
conservativeintellectual and Forbes magazine
columnist, challenges the authors' claims
about the genetic basis for ethnic group differ-
ences in intelligence by appealing to the his-
torical record. He points out that the relative
performance of various ethnic groups on
intelligence tests has changed greatly over
time, and that these ethnic groups have dra-
matically shifted position on the IQ ladder
even while their rates of intermarriage
remained low and unchanged. This has been
true not only of Ashkenazi Jews (the most
favored 'race' within Murray and Herrn-
stein's 'cognitive elite'), but of Poles and Ital-
ians as. well. Jacqueline Jones, historian of the
working poor, both black and white, argues
that The Bell Curve is only 'the most recent in
a long. line of efforts to prove the congenital
inferiority of poor people in general ... and
black people in particular.' Her essay is an eye
opening comparison of The Bell Cun'e with
those now long-forgotten justifications of
slavery and segregation that rested on the
alleged mental inferiority of African Ameri-
cans. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W. E. B. Du
Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard,
unearths an apposite observation by Freder-
ick Douglass that reminds us of the creative
labors of past master classes seeking some jus-
tification for their domination in the failingsof
those they dominated. Gates notes that The
Bell Curve appears at a moment in our history
when its behavioral explanation for the per- .
sisting misery of our inner cities sits well with
an electorate, and especially a Congress,
deet>ly reluctant to commit substmtial
resources toward the eradication of poverty.
Andrew Hacker, author of Two Nations:
Black and White, Separate, Hostile , Unequal,
and Alan Wolfe, author of several books on
American intellectual life, challenge The Bell
Curve's version of today's class structure.
Rejecting the book's thesis that the sort of ver-
bal virtuosity or expertise at abstraction that
tends toshow up well on IQtests is the equiv-
alent ofintelligerice, Hacker denies that a caste
of high test scorers or 'testocracy' dominates
our society. He furthermore asks why Murray
and Hermstein fail to analyze the criminal
behavior of the white collar 'cognitive elite'
(which after all entails a very substan ial finan-
cial burden on the rest of us), speculating that
the authors' social prejudice leads them to
treat their crimes as less menacing 'because
their commission calls for brains rather than
brawn.' Alan Wolfe, who calls The Bell Curve
a 'Communist Manifesto for the mind,' shows
that the book's attempt to prove there has been
a revolution in the country's class structure
falls apart upon close inspection. Wolfe main-
tains that there's no evidence of a relationship
between test scores, even at the best colleges,
and later career success, and no hard linkage
between IQand job performance; nor does IQ
predict income disparities later in life. John
Judis, who writes about American cuhure and
intellectual history, notes that for a book
ostensibly about the recent and alarming
growth in disparities of income, wealth, and
. standard of living, The Bell Curve is remark-
ably silent about such clearly relevant consid-
erations as the decline of trade unions, the
out-sourcing of manufacturing, the growth of
foreign competition, and so on.
Judis is even more upset, as are a number of
other contributors, with the book's implica-
tions for public policy. He homes in on the
authors' evasiveness, showing that despite
public denials by Murray, The Bell Curve
builds a brief on behalf of eugenics and the
continued rule of the 'cognitive elite.' Mickey
Kaus, author of The End of Equality, is dis-
turbed . by the harsh vision of America,
appearing near the end of The Bell Curve, in
which the 'cognitive underclass'ends up con-
signed to the stern ministrations of a: 'custo-
dial state.' Citing an avalanche of evidence
suggesting the environmental basis of ethnic
differences in intelligence, Kaus concludes
that, in contrast to The Bell Curve's relentless
attack on most meliorative measures, there's
every reason to believe improving the awful
environment in which many black children
grow up will markedly close The Bell Curve
gap. So, too, the esteemed social scientist
Nathan Glazer, while more agnostic about the
underlying reasons for IQ differences,
laments the book's 'quietism regarding our
greatest social problem' when there's still so
much that could be attempted to remedy the
plight of African Americans.
A number of the contributions to The Bell

Curve Wars express the moral. forebodings
conjured up by a book so at odds with the
nation's democratic and egalitarian faith.
Martin Peretz, publisher of TheNew Republic,
muses about the book's alarming reverbera-
tions in a country that sometimes seems all too
much in a hurry to forsake its historic belief in
equality. Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor
of The NewRepublic(whose essay.is a response
to an article by Murray and Hermstein
appearing in that magazine) refuses to grant
some privileged status to the authors' putative
'science' or to credit their portrait of them-
selves as heroic venturers into the intellectual
unknown. Instead, he characterizes their
views as 'old, dreary and indecent, philosoph-
ically shabby and politically ugly,' and argues
that the determinism and materialism of the
Murray and Herrnstein position are at odds
with the American credo of individual free-
dom.
Wieseltier strikes a personal note, remark-
ing on the significance ofhis own Jewish ori-
gins in the Herrnstein-Murray view of the
world. Hugh Pearson, the biographer ofHuey
Newton, does something similar. While he
deplores . mudabout The Bell Curve, he
doesn't want African Americans to use it as a
psychological crutch, a justification 'to con-
tinue viewing ourselves as victims,' clinging
to 'old standards' and 'old solutions.'
Public reaction to the bookis very much on
the minds of other contributors as well.
Michael Lind, an editor at Harper's magazine,
is particularly intrigried by the 'sudden and
astonishing legitimation, by the leading intel-
lectuals and journalists of the mainstream
American right, of a body of racialist pseudo-
science.' His essay explores the recent trans-
formation of the conservative movement that
now embraces an outlook that, evn through
the Reagan years, was repudiated by the intel-
lectually responsible right wing.
Randall Kennedy of the Harvard Law
School is deepy! worried about the enormous
hype surrounding the publication of The Bell
Curve as well as its acceptance by important
arbiters of public opinion as 'within the pale of
respectable discussion,' despite its conspicu-
ous deficiencies and its defamation of African
Americans. Such a triumph lends great cre-
dence to a long tradition of pessimism
Introduction to The Bell Curve Wars 783
about the future of race relations in America.
Kennedy probes the mores of the mass
media to help explain how a book avowing a
theory ofblack inferiority achieved such legit-
imacy.
Orlando Patterson, author of Freedom, con-
eludes with an essay that ranges widely across
much of the treacherous scientific and socio-
logical terrain covered by The Bell Curve.
Along the way, he asks a fundamental ques-
tion raised by the book's success: 'Why is it
that, in a land founded on the secular belief
that 'all men are created equal,' we are so
obsessed with the need to find a scientific basis
for human inequality?'-an obsession that
invariably seems directed at African Ameri-
cans. Patterson notes, for example, that
although there are clear regional variations
between rural white Southerners . and their
Northern urban counterparts in measured IQ
as well as in cultural and economic perfor-
mance, no one has ever soun cl.a national
alarm bell about these differencesexcept in
the most sympathetic tones. 'While we do not
neglect such discrepancies, we d.o. not make.
them the occasion for 'wantonly insulting and
dishonoring these people.' The reason is both
obvious and chilling. If rural whit p ople are
onsidered members in good standing of the
nation's social and moral community, black
people are . forever on probatio:Q:;.Professor
Patterson's essay probes the reasons why.
The Bell Curve Wars does not preteJ!d to
offer a unified viewpoint. Its contributors
have. varying estimations of the book they
were assembled to write about. But even the
most conservative among them find them-
selves disturbed; either by one or several of its
more suspect premises or conclusions, or by
what the extraordinary reception accorded
The Bell Curi>e might portend for our society.
Inescapably, one must wonder whether its
ubiquitous presence serves to validate-
through its voluminous pages, its social scien-
tese, its panoply of graphs, charts, and
appendices--feelings deeply buried in our
society about the inferiority of Mrican Amer-
icans, feelings that have in recent years once
agaip bubbled to the surface. What The Bell
Curve Wars hopes to provide is a multifaceted
challenge to a book whose prognosis for the
future of America could hardly be grimmer.

Marshall, judged that national wealth could
be adequately measured without reference to
the vast labour of women in the domestic
economy. It was believed then that the pro-
portion of all labour carried out in the home
and in voluntary activity in the communitY
was to become less and less determinant of
national wealth. Economists knew perfectly
'Well that , the total of goods and services
exchanged was thereby underestimated. But
they thought - that trends would make this
phenomenon less important; and that in any
case adding up the goods and services
e changed through markets and bureaucra-
cies was valuable in its own right.
The sexual division of labour is now quite
different, and women especially are typically
in part-time employment, even in their (now
shorter) period of childbearing.This has hap-
pened partly because more and more women
have left behind the unpaid economy of the
home and joined the paid economy of indus-
try. The strugglefor a rise in the all-round sta-
tus of women has fired one of the great social
movements of the century and, though there
- is still a long way to go before something like
equality is, achieved in home as well as in the
workplace, gr_eat progress has been made. But
the drawback is that attention has focused so
much on the relations between adult men and
women. For every ten thousand words about ,
the rights and interests of women in relation to
men, there have been a hundred about the
rights and interests of children.
We hope that _ in the next stage of this great
debate, the right:s--'-and, we hope, the duties of
women and ofmen-are reklted to the inter-
ests of children.There have been attempts by
economists to produce extended or alternative
accounts of national income and product, and
there have been attempts to produce indica-
tors of altruism which might well- be devel-
oped to measure the extent to which a given
generation allocates its energies as between its
own satisfaction and the welfare of children.
We seek measures of the moral as well as the
matenal economy, for example of child atten-
tion and neglect.
The values which underpin the family
when it is stable-duty, loyalty, love-have,
we think, been in retreat for a long time now.
In the family, seen as a small collective of a
special kind, the _emphasis is on co-operation
rather than competition, and on long-term
commitment rather than choice.In the family,
The Family and Social Justice 785
individuals are not valued so much for what
they do--for their possessions or their suc-
cess, their ach ievements or their accomplish-
ments-as for what they a re. As members of
the family, they can have a commitment to
other members which is more or less unlim-
ited, or, if limited, then less so than in most
other relationships. At any rate, in the ideal
type of family, relationships are not based on a
reciprocity of self-iriterest-'I'll do this for
you if you'll do this for me'-but on a bond
w h ich goes beyond self-interest and rational
calculation. The mother does not enquire
whether she will be repaid before she does the
washing for a sick daughter, the daughter
whether she can afford the time to nurse her
mother through a long illness.
Seen in this way, the family is at the heart of
the moral economy, It teaches people the most
precious ability of all, the ability to transcend
self-interest and regard the interests of others
as in some way their own: the kind of altruism
which is at the heart of the collective con-
science and which holds all societies together.
When it is working well, the family is the seed-
bed of the virtue from which all the civic
virtues stem, just as, when things go wrong, it
can be the font of all the vices. '
The moral economy is always in tension
with the market economy. The market econ-
omy is bound to value peo-ple more !or what
they do than for what they are-for their effi-
ciency, their productivity, their achieve
ments--and to encourage people to compete
against each other. The nepotism which is
prized in the family is despised in the econ-
omy. The emphasis is on the choice which is
beloved of economists and Which? magazine.
Whatever it is they are doing, people are more
a ware of otl1er places where they might choose
to be, at other circumstances, in other offices,
with other men or other women, on other
moonlit nights. Modern society is bedevilled
by the profusion of choice which can play
havoc with the tranquillity even of the ordi-
nary, relatively stable family, when all the
members of it are hurrying down their own
peculiar paths of individual fulfilment with
hardly rime to sit down together for a meal or
just to be with each other. But the values of the
market have become more dominant and ,
needless to say, we are not thinking just of the
last 18 years.
It is not only that the measurements of
economists are less than satisfactory. We are
786 The Family and Social Justice
also deficient in sociology with respect to the
measurement of the quality of life, perhaps
especially for children and old people. We
could, and indeed we do, take the view that the
essential prerequisite for a civilized genera-
tion is the constant, enlightened, and sup-
ported attention to each child of two
committed parents. Not quite true, some will
say, and not quite possible, many others will
add. Certainly many a good citizen has been
reared by grandparents, and many lives have
been saved by 'agents' such as health visitors
or a sanitary inspector;and many a path way of
opportunity has been opened by an inspiredor
sympathetic schoolteacher. All this is true,
and Heaven be praised; for politics cannot do
everything. Bureaucrats do not work on
August Bank Holiday Monday.Only mothers
and fathers give unreasonable care, and every
child at some time needs precisely that. We
cannot precisely define committed parenting,
especially in a society where men are being
drawn back towards the domestic economy,
where there is cohabitation, divorce, and sep_;
aration as well as paid employment for moth-
ers all on the increase. Being formally married
or registering a birth from the same address
are crude substi utes for adequate measure-
ment of the quality of parenting. We do iwt
even have estimates of the time spent by par-
ents with children, though American studies
suggest that this has halved in the past decade.
What governments can do is to foster the
social conditions thatm;J.Ximize the chances of
committed parenting. Governments, there-
fore, work indirectly through fiscal regimes
that transfer mc,mey to or away from parents,
through the provision of public services in
health, education, and welfare, through
relieving mothers of loneliness, anxiety, and
ignorance, providing them with expert and
protracted childcare services and with the
income they must have if their children are to
stay out of poverty.These are the dimensions
of the moral order that we seek to measure.
What is necessary here is a review of the
costs and benefits to society as a whole of the
rapid movements in family structure which
are daily taking place. We cannot, for exam-
ple, be content with the recently fashionable
view that children simply bounce back from
divorce, and that new relationships simply
add to a child's sum of reliable parents, grand-
parents, and siblings.
As socialists we are particularly concerned
with the fact that such a high proportion of
children are being brought up in poverty, and
without absorbing the norms of responsibility
and purposeful devotion to the creation or
reformation of the next generation which, in
the past, we have taken for granted. We note,
for example, that in 1992lone parents had an
average gross income of 159 per week, less
than half of the average for the country as a
whole(342.93 per week).The evidence from
the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) is
that children are increasingly slipping into
poverty compared with adults. A new form of
the lunatic nineteenth-century system, in
which children were disproportionately born
110 the poor, has been recreated, even though
the fertility rates of the better-off moved in the
direction of sanity after the Second War.
Moreover, punitive attacks on the allowances
paid to lone parents which derive from ideo-
logical determination to reduce statespending
seem peculiarly unlikely to raise the standards
of upbringing vouchsafed to future genera-
tions. There is neither social justice nor social
efficiency here.
Over the past two decades there have been
sustained attempts to define an index of
human development. The Human Develop-
ment Reports 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993 give
details of progress in the movement towards
comparable statistics. They refer mainly to
industrial countries, though they tell us the
numbers for the world as a whole and for cat-
egories and regions within it: they also indi-
cate both current performances (1990) and
trends (1960-1990) of life expectancy, real
GNP per capita, and child welfare in various
ways. Obviously they could be improved, and
there is good technical discussion of roads to
improvement in the 1993 volume. We could
use them to indicate progress in terms of th.e
major values sought by democratic socialists
as follows:
I. Freedom or extent of individual choice.
2. Equality of access to essential capabilities.
3. Social solidarity or belonging to the coun-
try in question.
Point (1) can be measured by longevity and
income, (2) by income distribution and (3) by
the incidence of suicide, drug abuse, family
break-up, and so forth. No doubt we could-do
better. But we can ca ch a glimpse of trends in
the United Kingdom from these tables. The
United Kingdom is placed tenth in the