So How's the Family?. Arlie Russell Hochschild
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The highest ratings of child well-being went to the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—nations that, far more than the United States or United Kingdom, tax the rich, regulate commerce, and provide public services such as paid parental leave. The lowest overall ranks went to the nations most strongly pursuing a free-market agenda—the United States and United Kingdom, both of which ranked in the bottom third for five of the six key dimensions of child well-being. The United States ranked dead last among the twenty-one affluent countries in child poverty and ranked second to last in “family and peer relations” and “behaviors and risks.” The likelihood of a child skipping breakfast, becoming fat, smoking pot, or getting pregnant—on all these measures the United States and United Kingdom ranked worse than nearly all the other nations. Indeed, American girls had the highest rate of teen pregnancy.19
When asked how often they eat their main meal of the day with their parents “around a table,” nearly 80 percent of the children from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries reported “several times a week”—in contrast to 66 percent of American children. A smaller proportion of American children described their peers as “kind and helpful” (53 percent) than did OECD children overall (66 percent). Compared with their OECD counterparts, a smaller proportion of American children ate breakfast each morning or fruit every day, and more 13- to 15-year-old Americans were overweight (25 percent vs. 13 percent). A higher proportion of teens in the United States had smoked pot in the last year (31 percent) than had teens from the OECD countries that provided information on its use (21 percent). In addition, each child in the study was shown a picture of a ladder and was told the top of the ladder (10) is the “best possible life for you” and the bottom (0) “the worst possible life for you” they were then asked where on the ladder they stood. In how far up they placed themselves, the U.S. children ranked a low 18 out of 21.20
A 2010 follow-up study, UNICEF Report Card 9, recounted the same bad news—the United States ranked 23 out of 24 nations in the proportion of its children in poverty, beating out Slovakia, which came last.21 The United States ranked 19 out of 24 in education and 22 out of 24 in health.
What are we to make of these findings? Most of us assume that richer countries offer children better lives than do poorer countries. But by itself, a nation’s wealth does not improve the average well-being of its children. Nor is a higher proportion of stay-at-home mothers correlated with higher ratings in the well-being of children. Norway has one of the highest proportion of women aged 15 years and over in paid work (62 percent), but it ranked 7 out of 21 in overall child well-being. The United States, with its lower proportion (57 percent) of women in paid work, ranked 20 out of 21 in the overall well-being of children.22
Many Americans I have spoken to about the UNICEF report have responded with one reason or another why the high-state-support model would not work for the United States. “You can pay for state supports for working parents in little Norway with its population of 5 million,” one man told me, “but not in a country as big as the U.S.”23 Yet the sheer size of a nation’s population does not correspond to its Report Card ranking. Germany, with its population of 82 million, won higher scores in child well-being than Austria with its 8 million. Gathered together, the children of the 500-million-strong European Union rank higher than those of the 312-million-strong United States.
Still others point to the high proportion of poor minorities in the United States. “It’s easier for Europeans to earn higher average scores on child well-being than it is in America,” one woman explained, “because the U.S. has more minorities and immigrants who pull down our scores.”24 Although it is hard to compare the United States with the European Union in numbers of minorities—official figures are not comparable—France and Germany are home to roughly the same proportion of immigrants as the United States, yet they still score higher in child well-being.25
On the heels of the UNICEF study, the British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett offered in their landmark book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger the most comprehensive cross-national overview we have of studies on the well-being of adults.26 Drawing on 400 scholarly studies, the authors compared twenty-three of the richest countries in the world, looking at such things as rates of obesity, violence, drug abuse, mental illness, teen births, suicide, levels of social trust, school performance, social mobility, infant mortality rates, and overall health and life expectancy. Using studies based on data gathered by the United Nations, the OECD, and WHO, among others, Wilkinson and Pickett divided nations not by their wealth or government support for working families but by the gap between each nation’s richest and poorest 20 percent.27 In nearly all measures of human well-being, the low-gap nations were far better off than the high-gap nations—namely, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and especially the United States.
People in high-gap societies, they reported, suffer a homicide rate ten times that of people in low-gap nations as well as eight times the per capita rate of teen births and three times the rate of mental illness. Populations in high-gap societies are more likely than those in low-gap societies to disagree with the statement “most people can be trusted.” They worry more about muggings and rape, their children are exposed to more violence, and they live with larger prison systems. Again, it is not a nation’s GDP that correlates with these problem rates but, along with other factors, the size of the gap between rich and poor.
It is not simply that unequal societies have more poor people and the poor are more distressed than the rich. Even middle-class people in high-gap societies, the authors found, suffer poorer health, more mental illness and obesity, and feel less safe in their communities than do the reasonably affluent in low-gap societies. Those earning household incomes of $60,000 in high-gap countries suffer higher rates of death from all causes than do the $60,000-income people living in low-gap countries.28 Similarly, infant mortality is lower in low-gap Sweden than in high-gap England for families at every occupational level.29 Within the United States, Wilkinson and Pickett also compared low-gap states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and North Dakota with high-gap states such as Texas and Louisiana, where homicide, teen pregnancy, and high school dropout rates are higher.30
Evaluating Wilkinson and Pickett’s research, some scholars have confirrmed the authors’ findings regarding different rates of distress but have pointed out inconsistencies, too. Claude Fischer notes that between 1970 and 2003, U.S. homicide rates dropped by 30 percent even while inequality rose. However, he also concludes that “even the skeptics . . . do not argue that inequality is good for anyone but those on the top of the pyramid.”31 Another critic has questioned why the authors analyzed drug use instead of alcoholism, which is a bigger problem in low-gap Scandinavia than in the high-gap United States.32
As the “good outcome” nations are nearly all Scandinavian and the “bad outcome” nations are Anglo-American, Fischer observed, we are comparing the culture of “Sven” to that of “Jack.” Surely he is right that national culture matters. But if the political policies that result from Jack’s approach hurt families, maybe Jack should take a cue from Sven.
Another study of change over time in the United States provides powerful support for Wilkerson and Pickett’s thesis. In his book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010, the conservative political scientist Charles Murray traces the move between 1960 and 2010, during which the U.S. shifted from being a low-gap society to a high-gap one.33 Drawing on five decades of U.S. government data as well as a host of national attitude surveys, Murray compares the top 20 percent of non-Hispanic whites in the United States (those with bachelor’s degrees or higher, who are employed as managers or professionals) with the bottom 30 percent (those with high school diplomas or none, employed in blue-collar or low-level white-collar jobs).
In 1960, he found, rich whites (in their 30s and 40s) fairly similar to poor ones. Most were married, went to church, took pride in their work, and felt attached to their communities. Children were born to married mothers, and most couples stayed married and raised their kids together.
A half century later, family life was pretty much the same at the top and drastically worse at