Monthly Memos

The Dark Side Of Prosperity

Charles I. Mundale
Executive Director of MCCR

November 1994

While our economy seems to go "cookin' along," as one CEO recently expressed it, our society continues to behave more like a pot about to boil over, and our politics resemble nothing so much as a badly made mud pie. The proverbial visitor from Mars would no doubt conclude we have become experts at the creation of wealth but duffers at the creation of community, which is largely dependent on our use of that wealth. Indeed, the kinds of communities (please note the plural) we have created in Minnesota and elsewhere have been directly related to our prodigious wealth-creating capacity. James Q. Wilson, a political scientist generally associated with opinions conservative, offers an interesting analysis of how this is so.

Prosperity, Prof. Wilson argues, has "enabled people to move to the kinds of towns Americans have always wanted to live in -- small, quiet and nice. As the middle class moved out to the suburbs they took with them the system of informal social controls that had once helped maintain order in the central cities. As employers noticed that their best workers were now living outside these cities, they began moving their offices, stores and factories to the periphery."

So far so good. But prosperity has turned out to have a darker side, the professor continues, for it helped move drugs -- hitherto a sport for the very wealthy and creatively eccentric -- "down market" to the masses, where it created a new set of back-street entrepreneurial opportunities. Meanwhile, the prosperity-driven exodus to the suburbs deprived those left behind in the core cities "of the legitimate jobs that once existed as alternatives to crime, and it emancipated them from the...block clubs, PTAs and watchful neighbors that are the crucial partners of the police."

Robert Reich, the current secretary of labor, generally associated with opinions liberal, has produced a similar analysis, albeit with emphasis on social division rather than geographical separation. Mr. Reich argues that prosperity has been favoring a select group of knowledge workers who have not just fenced themselves off from the trouble spots but are withdrawing "their dollars and support of public spaces and institutions" and investing instead in a "proliferation" of private recreational associations. Their community of physical residence is only of marginal importance to the new elite. The community of interest, to which they are "linked by jet, modern fax, satellite and fiber-optic cable," is their real home.

These two diagnoses -- one of what has happened and the other of what is happening -- illustrate once again the role of irony in human life. Behavior that is rational and sensible turns out to have dark, unintended consequences. As a social myth, the American dream has been a powerful force for material progress, but it ill prepares us for that intractable something that persistently flusters our best-laid plans.

Perhaps that "something" is the "something there is that doesn't love a wall," a lesson poet Robert Frost learned while mending a fence.

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