For those who haven't seen it, Thomas Frank has a very good piece on
plans to destroy --- er "save" --- social security ("The Trillion
Dollar Hustle: Hello Wall Street, Goodbye Social Security") in the
January 2002 issue of Harper's Magazine.
In it, he makes the following claim:
... when the mortality rates are broken down by socioeconomic
factors, it becomes clear that, in fact, African Americans live
about as long as the average for their socioeconomic level.
Middle-class blacks have nearly the same life expectancy as
middle-class whites; poor blacks have nearly the same life
expectancy as poor whites. The tragedy of black America is
largely a tragedy of poverty: so many African Americans die young
because so many African Americans are poor. (37)
As I recall from the last statistical abstract I looked at, about 36
percent of African American children under the age of 6 live in
poverty, versus about 11% of white children, so I entirely agree with
his claim that many more African Americans are poor than whites.
There is something missing, I think, from the above, though.
In his book *Development as Freedom*, Amartya Sen gives evidence that,
even after adjusting for differences in costs of living, Black
American males in certain U.S. cities have a lower chance of reaching,
say, 60 years of age, than do men who live in Bangladesh.
Comparing the mortality rates of all African American men to men
living in other countries, Sen writes:
Even in terms of the connection between mortality and income ...,
it is remarkable that the extent of deprivation for particular
groups in very rich countries can be comparable to that in the
so-called third world. For example, in the United States, African
Americans as a group have no higher --- indeed have a lower ---
chance of reaching advanced ages than do people born in immensely
poorer economies of China or the Indian state of Kerala (or in Sri
Lanka, Jamaica, or Costa Rica). (21)
The reasons for the discrepancies
... include social arrangements and community relations such as
medical coverage, public health care, school education, law and
order, prevalence of violence and so on. (22-23)
Comparing mortality rates of African American men in Harlem to men in
Bangladesh, he writes:
... for example, Bangladeshi men have a better chance of living to
ages beyond forty years than African American men from the Harlem
district of the prosperous city of New York. All this in spite of
the fact that African Americans in the United States are very many
times richer than the people of comparison groups in the third
world. (23-24)
As Sen observes, it is not only poverty which leads to increased
mortality rates, but the failure of social services which can support
the poor. This can also be seen in comparison of European to American
unemployment rates. The latter can be maintained at relatively higher
levels because of the much more generous welfare provisions available
to the unemployed. With its meager and deteriorating support for the
unemployed, the US (according to Sen) would find it intolerable to
maintain such high unemployment rates.
In any case, Frank's article is very good --- well written and
properly indignant at the looming disaster of the privatization of
social security.
Incidentally, Frank also clearly articulates a very important tactic
used by the right:
... the right's belief that it can persuade the public that
government is bad by giving us spectacularly bad government. Just
as Republicans in the Reagan era ran up towering federal deficits
in order to discredit deficit spending, just as congressmen of the
Gingrich era let government services grind to a halt in order to
show just how irresponsible congressmen could be, just as
Republicans of our own day have taken to electing cretins to
positions of great public authority in order to discredit the very
notion of public authority, so the present Social Security
commission uses the possibility that politicians might try to do
away with Social Security as a justification for doing away with
Social Security. (36)
To which one might add that the Democrats have largely been complicit
in the above-mentioned crimes.
Bill
