Human Service Cartels: The Soft Repression of the Mediocracy

Dissidents

In 1978, Vaclav Havel, a founder of the dissident organization Charter 77 and later president of the Czech Republic, published “The Power of the Powerless,” an essay that led to his imprisonment but also contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. The thesis of the essay was that state oppression was dependent on the small actions of ordinary citizens, famously described by the greengrocer religiously putting a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite!” While the greengrocer might have been skeptical about the message, the failure to commit such quotidian acts might be perceived as disloyalty to state apparatchiks with the likelihood of punitive consequences to follow. Rather than risk adversity, the greengrocer self-censors, assuring peaceful coexistence with comrades as well as the perpetuation of a regime maintained by an extensive nomenklatura, party officials ensuring continuation of the received wisdom. Despite an imposed, artificial coherence bound by diktat, the Soviet bloc would be distinguished by uniformity, monotony, and entropy (Havel, 1985).

Havel drew on Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas, who noted the rise of a “new class” despite the insistence that Marxist Communism assured equality for the proletariat. Djilas observed a growing number of “professional revolutionaries” gathering privileges distinct from the masses, facilitated by the state monopoly on virtually all activities. “The new class may be said to be made up of those who have special privileges and economic preference because of the administrative monopoly they hold,” Djilas complained (1957, p. 39). State control was not limited to the polity but extended to all features of life, including the economy, education, and the arts. The contradiction between state ideology and social reality became fodder for George Orwell, who understood that monopolies suffocated freedom in the West as well as the Soviet bloc, immortalized in Animal Farm (1956). For Orwell (1946), a modern, totalizing society exacted a price on freedom of expression, the ultimate casualty being truth:

Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.

Dissidents in Soviet bloc countries resorted to samizdat to elude state censorship, smuggling manuscripts to the West for publication. Coincidental to student protests in Prague, the Hungarian, George Konrad’s The Caseworker (1974) was published in English. “The client vanishes behind his case, the official behind his function,” Konrad wrote, muzzled by an impersonal, bureaucracy.

It’s like swallowing fistfuls of mud: I can neither digest it nor vomit it up. In the last ten years I must have said, “Have a seat, please,” thirty-thousand times. Apart from colleagues, witnesses, informers, prying newspapermen, and a few offensive mental cases, it was distress that drove most of them to my desk. In most instances their anguish was massive, tentacular, and incurable; it weighed on me in this room where people cry, “Believe me, it hurts,” “I can’t go on,” and “It’s killing me,” as easily as they scream on a roller coaster. On the whole, my interrogations make me think of a surgeon who sews up the incision without removing the tumor (p. 15).

Rather than champion the proletariat, Konrad’s caseworker acknowledges his role in extending the authority of the state through soft repression. “I have remained what I am, a fair-to-middling technician of the machinery for dealing with social tension, skeptical enough to try, in my moments of anxiety, to find excuses for myself, but sufficiently compliant to avoid dismissal” (p. 90).

Mud resurfaces as a motif for Michnik (2014), a Polish journalist incarcerated for 6 years as a result of his opposition to Soviet satraps. In a corrupted regime, the ethical intellectual had little choice. “To advance in a career, one had to accept the rules of the game. One had to choose hypocrisy over truth, opportunism over principles, cutting and intrigue over straightforwardness, and shallowness over greatness” (p. 132).

As Djilas, Havel, Konrad, and Michnik challenged orthodoxy in Eastern Europe, critics in the West weighed-in on dysfunctional institutions. Thus, a generation of future human service professionals might wonder how their forebears, schooled in Orwell, Illich (1971, 1975), and Freire (1975), had come to concede the mediocrity that would infuse their work. Professional hype of public service notwithstanding, licensed occupations in human services—marriage and family counseling, children’s services, school counseling, social work, probation, and parole, among others—have evolved as cartels whose primary objective is amplifying their membership’s influence, income, and benefits: influence assured by reserving positions for graduates of accredited university programs, income generated from out-of-pocket payments or insurance and buoyed by civil service requirements restricting employment to duly licensed professionals, and health and pension benefits facilitated by favorable tax provisions. As public service has become an incidental consideration for cartels, which have used their state-granted professional monopolies to advance the interests of members over—as well as in opposition to—citizens, dysfunctional conduct of even elite professions has emerged as a cardinal issue in the contemporary service economy. Case and Deaton (2020), for example, recount how the medical and pharmaceutical cartels have been implicated in “deaths of despair,” increasing mortality due to alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide. With regard to opioid addiction, iatrogenesis—physician induced illness—has become literally epidemic, doctor prescriptions of FDA-approved medication accounting for almost half of all opioid deaths in 2017 (p. 140).

Yet, most of the damage inflicted by human service cartels has been more prosaic, authorized by public institutions, as evident in public schools referring insubordinate, low-income K–12 students to psychiatrists for medication management and/or juvenile services, many children eventually inducted into the school-to-prison pipeline; child welfare agencies removing children from parents struggling with protracted poverty to provide a safe and secure environment for their offspring; and local law enforcement subjecting the mentally impaired to arrest and jail after a failure to replace state mental hospitals with community clinics through a national experiment in deinstitutionalization. A century after the Progressive Era promised public benefit through expertise, the cumulative harm has become incontrovertible, especially damaging to the minority poor. Rather than admit complicity in institutional harm to citizens, the human service cartels circle their wagons, quick to ascribe harm to rogue agents, underfunded programs, and inadequate policy provisions. The solution, they insist, is more money and authority.

Of course, any modern society benefitting from scientific advances evolves organizations championing the accomplishments of members. The advent of the germ theory staunched the spread of communicable disease, just as discoveries of medication, such as insulin, prolonged life. The benefit of early childhood education, long enjoyed by the affluent, has been promoted for the minority poor as well. And experiments in decision making have contributed to long-range strategies for economic prosperity of the general population (Stoesz, 2020). Widely acclaimed achievements notwithstanding, professions are loath to admit the institutionalized disservice often perpetrated on the public, a striking omission given their members’ superior education, wealth, and influence (Frank, 2016; Reeves, 2017). Two issues have emerged to threaten professional hegemony. First, human service personnel serve as sentries and agents of public institutions that circumscribe the opportunities of the minority poor (McKnight, 1995). Second, critics note that professional cartels flourish parallel with the rise of ethnonationalist populism as liberal political parties once pledged to the working class opt to serve their professional compatriots instead, leaving blue-collar voters defecting to authoritarian leaders (Judis, 2016). Both of these inconsistencies contradict the preferred narrative that professions should be understood as providing discreet and impartial services to individuals, advancing public well-being.

The Professions Emerge

In the United States, the trajectory of the professions was charted by Mills (1966) who attributed the rise of PhDs to the popularization of science, which “was greatly accelerated by the urgent need for industrial and agricultural” research, propelled by the proliferation of land grant universities (p. 70). Certainly, American higher education was due for an upgrade. When polymath and pragmatist William James enrolled in Harvard College in 1861, the institution instructed students in Latin and Greek, religion, and philosophy; science was housed in the Lawrence Scientific School, affiliated but independent of Harvard. As late as 1868 Harvard boasted all of 529 students—all undergraduates—instructed by 23 teachers; the college had no formal admission standards, socializing young men in proper conduct, augmented by a heavy dose of hazing (Richardson, 2006, pp. 41–47).

Intellectual complacency of ante-bellum America would be upended with the embrace of research, adopting the German university model, famously at Johns Hopkins University in 1876 in Baltimore. Within a generation, professional societies emerged: the American Economic Association in 1885, the American Psychological Association in 1892, the American Sociological Association in 1905, and the American Political Science Association in 1906 (Mills, 1966, p. 71). Extending the Progressive promise of expertise for public benefit, the professions also provided a means to address rampant political corruption. Thus, the rise of the professions dovetailed with the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, basing federal hiring and promotion on merit. In short order, a professional credential became the ticket for secure employment, decent pay, and no small amount of authority. Employment prospects for professionals burgeoned during the Progressive Era with the deployment of agencies designed to protect the public: the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the Food and Drug Administration in 1906, the Public Health Service and the Children’s Bureau in 1912, and passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution authorizing a federal progressive income tax, generating the revenues necessary for expanding federal authority, along with establishing the Federal Reserve, in 1913.

Immigration, urbanization, and industrialization provided any number of opportunities for Progressive reformers, especially those credentialed by nascent professional organizations. Provoked by the disturbing photographs of Jacob Riis and accounts by muckraking journalists such as Lincoln Steffens, Sinclair Lewis, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Progressives offered expertise to address social squalor. Yet, professionalism was not uniformly endorsed, even by the experts. The economist Veblen (1899) challenged the motives of newly empowered administrators:

The interests with which this discipline is approached is therefore not commonly the intellectual or cognitive interest simply. It is largely the practical interest of the exigencies of that relation of mastery in which the members of the class are placed. In point of derivation, the office of government is a predatory function, pertaining integrally to the archaic, leisure-class scheme of life. It is an exercise of control and coercion over the population from which the class draws its sustenance (p. 248). But Veblen was swimming against a professional riptide, however unpredictable its ultimate manifestation.

In a celebrated 1915 address to the National Conference on Charities and Corrections, a more establishment figure, Flexner (1915), provided the keynote address as a result of his having elevated medicine as a profession. Flexner pronounced that efforts to alleviate poverty by altruists working among the immigrant poor did not meet professional standards:

professions involve essentially intellectual operations with large individual responsibility; they derive their raw material from science and learning; this material they put to a practical and definite end; they possess an educationally communicable technique; they tend to self-organization; they are becoming increasingly altruistic in motivation. (p. 156)

No doubt, the attendees were disappointed to learn that Flexner equated social service with newspaper journalism and so redoubled efforts to organize professional organizations. Flexner’s role as a philosopher of applied social and medical science would lead him to establish the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.

Any quibbles about what constituted professionalism would be overcome by the Great Depression, however. Suddenly, the incipient organizations that Progressives had established were elevated to the national stage to address economic devastation. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s initiatives, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, among others, had a primary objective of providing jobs to millions of unemployed men, but perforce required the services of thousands of bureaucrats. When these initiatives were consolidated into the American welfare state by the Social Security Act of 1935, professionalism became the norm in state and federal government.

Yet, profound errors in judgment would foreshadow the Progressive professional project. In 1924, a social worker was deposed in the Virginia case of a poor mother, Carrie Buck, who had a baby out of wedlock, probably due to rape by a relative. Carrie’s mother, a poor White woman from an unstable family, was labeled “feebleminded” by a Eugenics enthusiast, who advocated the sterilization of wayward women. Testifying about her examination of Carrie’s 7-month-old infant, the social worker stated, “There is a look about it that is not quite normal. But what it is, I can’t tell.” Although the judge used the social worker’s testimony to authorize Carrie Buck’s sterilization in accord with state law, the case was challenged and eventually decided by the Supreme Court, where Justice Holmes wrote the majority opinion authorizing involuntary sterilization in 1927: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” (Black, 2003, pp, 108–132). Subsequently, tens of thousands of poor women along with other “defectives” were forcibly sterilized.

The Tuskegee syphilis study would become a similar embarrassment to professionals. Begun by the U.S. Public Health Service in 1932 before the advent of antibiotics, 600 Black sharecroppers were recruited to study the effects of long-term syphilis, the men in the study group receiving a placebo or mineral supplements, which intentionally had no medicinal effect, while “controls” went about their normal activities. Despite the advent of antibiotics to treat syphilis in 1947, the study continued, none of the subjects receiving medication. Providing essential coordination to the field project was a public health nurse. In 1960, a researcher, Peter Buxton, questioned the ethics of continuing the study, but the Public Health Service refused to shut it down or provide antibiotics to any of the subjects, insisting that their autopsies were necessary for medical science. It was not until 1972, after Buxton alerted a San Francisco journalist of the study that it was shuttered (Jones, 1981).

In Buck v. Bell and the Tuskegee syphilis study professionals aligned with the state to oppress the poor. Yet, a burgeoning welfare state would employ tens of thousands of professionals, not only at inception but through the 20th century with the addition of program after program: Social Security Disability Insurance in 1956, the creation of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) in 1972, welfare reform in 1996, the addition of the drug benefit to Medicare in 2003, the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. While interests varied with each of these additions, a common denominator validated the professional project by enlisting legions of economists, public administrators, accountants, and lawyers, experts often aligned with trade associations having a stake in policy change (Berkowitz, 2020).

The Welfare State

The American welfare state, a byzantine array of silo programs administered by federal departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, the Veterans Administration, and The Treasury, often complemented by parallel state agencies, extended the professional project into virtually all aspects of family, civil, and community life, in the process subverting the helping capacity of low-income neighborhoods (McKnight, 1995). Universities partnered with government, establishing professional schools that trained civil servants; when private agencies contracted with government to provide services, professional qualifications were inserted into agreements, so academic credentials became the sine qua non for public service. Initially, American institutions of higher education had adopted the British Oxbridge (a conflation of Oxford and Cambridge) model, educating students in religion, ancient languages, and philosophy, but the introduction of the German model, focusing on science and research, furthered the professional project, as Flexner had shown. Subsequently, two quite different orientations evolved: the profession as philosophically imbued art as had been the case with law and religion versus the profession as research-based, applied science as with engineering and medicine. But during the latter decades of the 20th century, accelerating demand for professional experts required of an expanding welfare state, papered over the issue.

A hallmark of the 20th century, the training of professionals was promoted by professional societies at colleges and universities, all private entities, autonomous of government. Autonomy not only served to buffer a profession from government—or in the rare event, actually opposing the state as when the American Medical Association fought government “socialized medicine” in the form of Medicare—but also assured the space to prosper according to priorities of well-credentialed membership. Yet, autonomy would prove a promiscuous asset. While freedom from government interference allowed some professions to flourish, it permitted others to wither. As turf claiming defined expertise, professions sought to negate competition through licensure, an arduous state-by-state process since the federal government had no such authority. But the payoff was huge: those successful achieved a legislated monopoly in their field. “Professionalization,” concluded Louis Menand, “is a system of market control” (2001, p. 415). As organizations of experts emerging during the Progressive Era,

professions are largely self-regulating: they set the standards for entrance and performance in their specialized areas, and they do so by the light of what is good for the profession rather than what market conditions or external forces, such as legislators or citizens’ groups, demand. (Menand, 2010, p, 103)

Since professional activity was specialized, beyond the competence of the layperson, only other professionals could regulate activities of their members, including the certification of training programs through accreditation. The net result was a multiplicity of closed systems—a veritable bureaucratic blizzard—constructed by professional societies, university training programs, accreditation, state licensure, and civil service requirements.

As an extension of Progressivism and the expansion of the welfare state, the professional project was decidedly liberal. University training programs were populated by liberal professors who understood their role of funneling young professionals to success either directly through positions in government or indirectly through nonprofits organizations or private practices reliant on government reimbursement. Amplified through journal publications, media contacts, and professional associations, experts demonstrated how their knowledge and skills benefited Americans. Evidence of efficacy and efficiency conveniently elided, the liberati—the literary left—was secure, protected by university tenure, civil service employment, and social entitlements, enjoying hegemony through much of the 20th century (Stoesz, 2005).

In microcosm, then, each human service profession enjoyed the latitude to expand or degrade its public remit. Although they represented closed systems, the professions were neither homogenous nor invariable. The classic professions—law, the military, and the clergy—predate the Enlightenment, while the modern professions based on science have evolved any number of specializations, evident in medicine, engineering, and psychology. A useful distinction separates the full-status professions, such as law and medicine, which operate independently on a fee-for-service basis, from the semiprofessions, such as teaching, social work, public health, and nursing, whose practitioners work for a salary in large organizations (Etzioni, 1969). While the label “semiprofession” implies subordination, in fact, this need not be the case. Nursing, for example, once clearly subordinate to physicians, has followed Flexner’s admonition with a vengeance, requiring a research thesis for the master’s degree as well as original research for the doctorate. In contrast with the MD, a practice degree, the result has been paradoxical: in only a few decades, Dr. Nurse, often a female with a research PhD, is arguably more knowledgeable than Dr. Physician, commonly a male MD.

Within the semiprofessions—nursing, public health, teaching, and social work—fields have fared quite differently. Adhering to science, nursing and public health have enjoyed wide public respect. Teaching and social work, on the other hand, perceiving their work as more an art than a science, have flagged in public regard. In contrast with nursing and public health, a student studying teaching or social work can earn a “terminal degree,” meaning they have acquired the necessary knowledge and skills to operate independently, by having displayed their aptitude in the field in an internship under the supervision of a mentor but without having conducted research that would contribute to the knowledge base of their profession.

The risk of semiprofessional status has been derogation of ethical commitment to public service in favor of complying with organizational mandates. While all professions claim public service as a primary concern, necessary to secure the legislated professional monopoly, the independent professions are more able to prioritize ethical conduct, while the semiprofessions are tempted to replace ethical commitments with organizational requirements. A fundamental problem with professions has been evaluating the caliber of their work. With the post-Enlightenment professions, accountability has been determined by outcome research, which serves to justify the state sanctioned professional monopoly.

In the absence of empirically determined effectiveness, however, the professions are vulnerable to the accusation that they have erected organizational edifices to justify rents, that is, unearned income by virtue of excluding competitors (Mazzucato, 2018). No better example of defending a professional rent was the attempt of California educator organizations to ban Teach for America from operating in the state. A widely adopted nonprofit, Teach for America recruits graduating students from premier colleges, trains them over a summer, and assigns them to urban and rural schools in economically depressed areas. Several studies by reputable policy analysis organizations found that Teach for America volunteers performed as well if not better than teachers with traditional degrees (Teach for America, n.d.). California teacher organizations objected, contending that Teach for America subverted the salary structure and benefits enjoyed by conventional educators, but the ban failed (Wiley, 2020). The behavior of teacher unions in obstructing education reform has also been chronicled in Newark (Russelkoff, 2015).

In public service, defending professional perks becomes conspicuous when teachers and social workers revert to toady mode when push comes to shove, especially when their salaries, benefits, and work conditions are supported by collective bargaining agreements. Those teachers and social workers who perceive an unacceptable disconnect between organizational requirements and professional ethics tend to defect from the public sector, leaving for greener pastures, that is, more responsive clients in private schools or private practice, respectively. Regardless of the ethical problems associated with government service, probably the majority of semiprofessionals begin their careers in the public sector. While some will depart at the first opportunity, the colleagues left behind will tend to be less enterprising and less up to date with regard to knowledge; gradually, the bureaucracy takes its toll, requiring the sacrifice of independence for an adequate salary and a stable job.

The Professions Fail

Wedded to the silo programs of the welfare state, the semiprofessions prospered, the civil service promising decent salaries, good benefits, and job security. How they engaged the public would be another matter, however. Secure within the semiprofessional bubble, few accounts of substandard performance came to public attention, except for the occasional news expose, a disaffected expert, or an outraged consumer. From inception, the welfare state offered inadequate benefits within a bureaucratic structure that citizens were required to navigate (Tani, 2016). “Red tape” impedes access to benefits, especially for those lacking knowledge, resources, and perseverance, often the minority poor. Paradoxically, the very programs intended to provide basic benefits and services to the disadvantaged actually exacerbate inequality by imposing “administrative burdens” that dissuade those eligible for assistance from receiving aid, especially the minority poor (Herd & Moynihan, 2018, p.31).

SSI provides a striking illustration insofar as it serves the disabled poor. A federal benefit of US$783/month is sufficiently meager to encourage the disabled to work, also a priority of the Americans with Disabilities Act; however, a requisite Plan to Achieve Self Support is so complicated that only 568 people of 8 million SSI recipients received authorization to work in 2018. A critic observed that SSI induced dependency by a “Kafkaesque nightmare” imposed on the poor who often received benefits based on cognitive deficits (Ne’eman, 2020). Although professionals staffing government agencies often possess discretionary authority to facilitate claims, they often neglect to do so, contributing to low take-up of programs designed for the poor; between 30% and 60% of low-income citizens forfeit benefits to which they are eligible (Sunstein, 2019).

In other instances, eligibility for benefits is depressed by “churning,” frequent eligibility redeterminations predicated on notoriously episodic earnings associated with low-wage work. Woodhouse (2020) observes how 3-month recertification requirements reduce the number of children eligible for health insurance: “Each year, hundreds of thousands of children fall out of coverage because of churning or fluctuations in family income” (p. 147). It stands to reason that increased access to healthcare would reverse striking inequities that disadvantage ethnic and racial minority children and youth.

Occasionally, professionals assert consumer welfare over bureaucratic mandates. Among the first of professional defectors was Torrey (1974), a psychiatrist with a mentally ill sister, contributing to his critical analysis, The Death of Psychiatry. Mistreatment of the mentally ill plumbed the depths of professional ineptitude as when, after World War II, mental health experts advocated replacing archaic and deteriorating state mental hospitals with community mental health centers. Aided by the advent of psychotropic medication and federal funding, the promise of more humane care convinced state officials to discharge patients en masse, facilitated by court decisions focusing on patients’ rights. The resultant calamity would find patients refusing to take medication due to adverse side effects, the federal government reneging on its funding of community mental health centers, and states relying on court decisions to minimize care. Eventually, the largest institutions providing care for the seriously mentally ill would be jails: the Los Angeles County Jail, Chicago’s Cook County Jail, and New York’s Rikers Island. Unsuited for mental health care, jail staff often resorted to solitary confinement, further harming impaired inmates. Unsupervised, mentally ill inmates gouged out their eyeballs, slashed their genitals, and opened abdominal cavities (Torrey et al., 2014). A half-century later, the nation’s experiment in community mental health care continues at the expense of the mentally ill.

Meanwhile, Lipsky (1980) provided one of the first critiques in an analysis of storefront bureaucracies: welfare departments, courts, and schools. Citing wide discretionary authority under conditions of scarce resources, human service professionals rationed services, often surreptitiously through “bureaucratic disentitlement.” Rather than adapt public policy to the circumstances of citizens, agency staff found creative ways to deny benefits to those likely eligible. Deceptive tactics, such as insisting applicants provide additional documents and return for interviews, requiring hours waiting for the next available appointment, referring consumers to distant agencies, insisting that English be used in all communication, and simply being rude, effectively reduced citizen demand for services as prospective consumers gave up.

Welfare offices were among the worst offenders because they served the minority poor. When welfare reform was a hot topic during the early 1990s, a former welfare recipient complained, “there is no accountability in the social service field. None demanded, none supplied” (Funicello, 1993, p. 252). But, the conversion of family welfare to a discretionary program managed by states in 1996 offered almost unlimited opportunities to jigger public assistance to the disadvantage of the poor. Under the new welfare law, a worker from a California department was recorded responding to a complaint from a recipient:

Quit trying to take our money. You are not special; you are a piece of shit. That’s what the Department of Social Services Health and Welfare Agency thinks of you. So get off your fat, lazy ass, you bitch, because we’re sick of you. And guess what? You have already lost your case. We just want to let you know what we think of you. We think you’re garbage. Everybody thinks you’re garbage. Go somewhere else and leach, you bitch. (“Inhuman Services,” 1997, p. 16)

One welfare recipient reflected on the psychological cost of interacting with agency staff:

I’ve felt the poorest with the people who were supposed to be helping me. I get that their jobs suck and they’re over-worked, but I go out of my way to not be another asshole customer. I have my paperwork and a list of questions ready to go. I have all my references, my pay stubs, medical bills, everything. Sometimes I don’t have a document, but then it’s on my list of questions, to find out what I can use as a substitute. But often, none of that matters, because I am poor and asking for benefits that I am qualified for and entitled to as a citizen, and in some people’s eyes that makes me less human. (Tirado, 2014, pp. 53–54)

Accordingly, state welfare staff discouraged the eligible poor from receiving benefits. One analysis of welfare-to-work programs found that the “preferred institutional outcome [was] having applicants drop out of the welfare system” by subtle, but no less, effective means.

The work-first welfare intake structure is meant partly to punish or shame those who pass through it partly to teach a lesson and issue a challenge for ‘improved’ behavior, and partly to weed out those who are not strong enough to withstand its demands. (Ridzi, 2009, pp. 36–37)

A study of a suburban welfare office concluded that the “upside” of welfare reform was a product of workers denying benefits, which reduced the caseload (Lawinski, 2010, p. 67). Another analyst concluded that race was a critical factor in welfare receipt:

nonwhite applicants in welfare offices face more unprofessional behavior from caseworkers than whites: withholding crucial information, refusing to provide applications, and other forms of outright rudeness. States with higher African American populations have tougher rules, more stringent work requirements, and higher sanction rates. (Eubanks, 2017, p. 79)

Public education often mirrors public welfare as a disservice to the minority poor. The “school-to-prison pipeline” popularized by Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, funneled low-income minority children from public education to juvenile detention—occasionally diverted to foster care—increasing the likelihood they would become adult offenders:

Like the victims of a crippling or wasting disease, once drawn into the prison pipeline, massive numbers of young people lose their opportunity to live happy, productive lives, not because of festering microbes but because of yeas spent behind bars. (Edelman, 2007, pp. 1–2)

Abetted by the 1994 Gun Free Schools Act, “zero tolerance policies” (ZTP) targeted miscreant students who were often prescribed mood altering medications but when noncompliant were referred to juvenile authorities. Often foster care served as a way station, child welfare professionals maligning poor parents for neglecting their children. With a semantic nod to deinstitutionalization, child welfare analysts coined “disproportionality” to account for relatively high number of Black and Hispanic students interdicted by professional teachers, social workers, and guidance counselors, ironically admitting racism in institutional procedures. Many of their minority charges were diverted to juvenile authorities contributing to the rise of “the new Jim Crow,” public institutions of social control replicating ante-bellum slavery (Alexander, 2010).

The capricious use of foster care complementing ZTP resulted in a new epithet directed at human service professionals: Jane Crow. As disproportionality sanitized the racist outcomes of children’s service professionals, the rise of Black Lives Matter underscored how child welfare served to control minority families. “The reckless destruction of American families in pursuit of the goal of protecting children is as serious a problem as the failure to protect children,” contended a law professor, “We need to understand that destroying the parent-child relationship is among the highest forms of state violence” (Quoted in MacFarquhar, 2017). Elevated consciousness of the punitive nature of children’s services led parents abused by child welfare agencies to demonstrate in 2020 in New York against the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, chanting, “No justice, no peace; ACS is the police.” A related organization, the Movement for Family Power, asserted parental rights in opposition to child protective services and the destruction of minority families by overzealous professionals, intent on placing minority children in foster care (Fitzgerald, 2020).

The flipside of overzealous child welfare interventions has been professional ineptitude in protecting abused children. In 1989, as a result of LaShawn A. v. Gray, the District of Columbia’s Child and Family Service Agency (CFSA) was required to upgrade child welfare staff, electing to hire only Masters of Social Work. But children known to CFSA continued to perish, nine in 2008 alone, the year marking the deaths of four children at the hand of their mother, an active case. In 2013, the District would agree to a US$2.6 million settlement for failing to protect the children (Weil, 2013). In Los Angeles, 2013 marked the death of Gabriel Fernandez, whose abuse, known to child protective workers and supervisors, resulted in trials of his mother and her partner for homicide as well as four social workers of the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) for felony neglect. While the mother and partner received life and death sentences, respectively, the case against the social workers was dismissed, not only inciting demonstrations against DCFS but also divulging more deaths of cases active with DCFS (Bergman & Knappenberger, 2020).

A discerning public would have noted that the debacles associated with mental health, public welfare, and children’s services were overseen by well-credentialed professionals. In each instance, reforms that emerged from the Progressive Era were elaborated, professionalized, and funded by government in order to advance a social project writ large, but in each instance, the results were not just underwhelming but often inflicted considerable damage on entire cohorts of Americans. Yet, the professional monopolies erected during the 20th century served the perpetrators of these tragedies well, protecting them from accountability. Insofar as their failures came to public attention, the response from beleaguered professionals was a consistent appeal for more funding and more authority.

Pragmatism Forsaken

A profound paradox has been that professions emerged coincidental to pragmatism, a distinctive American philosophy, which placed a premium on measurement of outcomes generated by experiments. Not incidentally, pragmatism was congruent with populism, evident in the popularity of “thought experiments,” everyday strategies that citizens, individually and collectively, employed to confront difficulties, assess alternatives, and solve problems. By the same token, pragmatism was embraced by Progressive professionals as a way to amplify democracy while making public policy accountable. As noted above, those disciplines embracing empiricism, such as medicine, public health, and nursing, have fared relatively well, while those favoring art as a basis for practice, such as teaching and social work, have flagged. In the absence of outcomes, the latter tends to opt for “moral metaphysics” to justify their remit.

A dynamic philosophy often vulgarized as “what works,” pragmatism flagged late in the 20th century, for lack of a moral grounding as Louis Menand observed, “pragmatism provided no stable criteria of how values are to be judged” (2001, p. 404). If moral philosophy revolves around choice, what was the platform upon which decisions were made? Chief among 20th century moral philosophers was Rawls (1971) who posited two key abstractions: the “veil of ignorance” and the “difference principle.” In search of neutral ground for a robust formulation of equality, Rawls suggested that the optimal approach would require anyone to be ignorant about everyone else with regard to determining social affairs, essentially the Golden Rule with blinders. The problem with the “veil of ignorance” is that it denies history, which effectively circumscribes options. In search of justice, Rawls proposed that everyone in an equitable society should have the same opportunities; those suffering from disadvantage should have resources reallocated to compensate for their misfortune. The problem with the “difference principle” is that government becomes the default for opportunity since it has the authority and resources to redistribute sufficiently large benefits to achieve equity. The issue with Rawls is not the merit of his arguments, but their relevance for a complex society, harnessed to historical precedent at the same time predicated on government.

Enter Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Discontent with Rawls’s preference for abstraction to address real problems, Sen (1999, 2009) proposed a “capability approach” to human flourishing. Instead of being part of a “herd” driven by external forces, Nussbaum (2000) insisted that people relish freedom to construct their own lives. “A life that is really human is one that is shaped throughout by these human powers of practical reason and sociability” (Sen, 1999). Nussbaum (2000) expanded the capability approach to women in developing countries, identifying 10 requirements for the prosperity of women, values that radically diverge from opportunities characteristic of patriarchal societies:

Enjoying long life

The agenda presented by Sen and Nussbaum amplified the full spectrum of human possibility, yet, the matter of rewarding accomplishment remained. Thus, David Schmidtz proposed “desert” as a way to acknowledge pluralism in social affairs, recognizing that “character, effort, and achievement” are essential in crafting social policy with regard to reciprocity. If society distributes awards in relation to cooperative effort, then “desert as normally understood is part of the glue that holds society together as a productive venture.” Moreover, “If we are to do justice to individual persons, then when their individuality manifests itself in constructive effort, we had better be prepared to honor that effort, and to respect the hopes and dreams that fuel it” (2006, pp. 38, 39).

Such moral pluralism requires a mechanism for reconciling individual efforts with society, a function served by democracy. Here Stein Ringen has been instructive. For Ringen (2007), a vigorous and universal democracy provides the means to achieve human flourishing, providing the mechanism for making necessary policy adjustments to optimize society. But, Ringen is no utopian, recognizing the limits of how social affairs can be managed. Just as elected officials can be held accountable for their decisions by voters, so public policy must offer citizens alternatives to state programming. Competition from the private sector provides a basis for correcting errant public programs as well as generating improvements that the state is often unwilling to adopt when programs are captured by professionals in order to increase their rents. Health care and pensions illustrate how parallel private organizations force their public counterparts to be more effective, efficient, and innovative. Similarly, revenues demanded by public programs can be assessed in relation to the cost of private options, providing a corrective to the imposition of ruinous taxes demanded by public programs, otherwise embedded in the state monopoly of social provision. Significantly, Ringen cites Sen and Nussbaum with respect to anchoring moral philosophy in choice:

People need more than rights in order to be free: they need first the right to make their own choices but then also the power to do so. The power of choice comes from a combination of resources with individuals and options in arenas. People who have rights, resources to make use of rights, and a social environment that offers them relevant options to choose from have real power of real choice. (p. 190)

As a method for understanding how groups navigate a complicated environment, pragmatism accounts for different interests exploiting opportunities and resources to attain prosperity. Just as individuals make informal hypotheses—“bets”—on the future when confronted with a choice of direction, so groups aver to optimize the benefits to members in determining a collective choice trajectory. Successful bets by individuals evolve into habits, which minimize distraction and maximize efficiency, but can become illogical as well, sometimes with adverse consequences. Similarly, groups adhere to ideology, shortcuts in the maze of options, simplifying decisions, but sometimes introducing error on a massive scale. The results are often messy, sometimes contradictory, and occasionally tragic, but, history suggests, far superior to an all-knowing directorate charting the future as Eastern European dissidents understood. Nor are groups of equal influence, as pluralists might hope, increasing the moral burden on those advocating social justice. Although a dynamic democracy and an open society become prerequisites to collective well-being, this impinges on the structure, prerogatives, and authority of professional groups, raising fundamental questions about their relationship to social prosperity writ large. The implication is no less consequential for citizens who find their liberties and opportunities abrogated by professionals, allegedly acting on behalf of the minority poor.

Grand Challenges

In the absence of empirical evidence demonstrating efficacy, professions often retreat to expansive assurances about public benefit, social justice frequently enlisted as a moral trope. Social work is illustrative insofar as its remit transcends multiple institutions: public assistance, juvenile justice, education, mental health, family services, and child welfare. Initiated in 2013, following an unsuccessful attempt to establish a federal National Center for Social Work Research, which would replicate the National Institute of Nursing Research, academics relied, somewhat improbably given the long and deep Progressive legacy in social affairs, on a German’s 1900 challenge to solve math problems, launching Social Work’s “Grand Challenges.” Organized around three themes—“individual and family well-being, strong social fabric, just society”—the Grand Challenges (n.d.) were further articulated by 12 topics, such as “ensure healthy development of all youth, eradicate social isolation,” and “end racism.”

While such objectives are undoubtedly laudable, their realization is contingent on critical research, a mindset willing to challenge professional orthodoxy as well as the institutional capacity to place public well-being above professional interests. Thus, despite its alleged commitment to the impoverished, victims of discrimination, and minority rights, social work research has been decidedly underwhelming. For example, the robust debate about family welfare from the 1980s through the 1990s, leading to the welfare reform of 1996, yielded negligible research by social workers on minority poverty, when tens of millions of dollars in funding were diverted to private research firms, instead (Stoesz, 1996). Moreover, the implosion of child welfare in recent decades has revealed not only minimal, critical research on children’s services but an attempt to construct a cartel protecting a suboptimal status quo (Stoesz, 2016). Finally, the removal of immigrant children from their parents, initially during the Obama administration, then their subsequent incarceration by the Trump administration has generated a paucity of research on this reprehensible practice, social work organizations opting for equivocation, “calling for a balance between security and human rights” (Haidar, n.d.).

Despite a preference for professional maintenance, a small cadre of social workers has taken the profession to task for its lapse in critical research. A fundamental problem has been “confirmational bias,” employing variables, methods, and designs that validate a preconceived notion, usually that well-intentioned professional interventions invariably produce salubrious outcomes (Epstein, 1990, 2004; LeCroy, 2010). Indeed, the de facto rejection of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), comparing treatment groups to a control group, conspires toward confirmational bias. The consequence of inferior research not only validates professional presumptions, while also dodging the issue of damage inflicted on clients, but also derogates professional knowledge, effectively reducing it to propaganda. Second-rate knowledge is congruent with institutional priorities, “creat[ing] knowledge monopolies and research cartels in which dissenting opinions and major issues are censored” (Gambrill, 2006, pp. 308–309). Protected from public scrutiny by independent professional organizations and universities, researchers are inclined to self-censure in order to sustain their privilege in a second-class knowledge community rather than roil the waters, especially in the absence of a tradition of accepting falsification as a tenet of inquiry.

In such a context, social work’s Grand Challenges function as a moral metaphysics, offering the illusion of public service; however, in the absence of rigorous research, the result is a sanctimonious defense of a substandard status quo. Because institutional failure is embedded in autonomous organizations protected from public oversight, citizens are hapless when professional performance compromises their welfare. In the case of social work, this is poignantly hypocritical insofar as that profession’s remit has focused on the disadvantaged, minority poor, those without the necessary leverage—knowledge, skills, and resources—to hold it to account. While endless rotations in the metaphysical hamster wheel occupy academics, the quotidian problems of Americans they have pledged to serve are neglected. An echo chamber inscribed by professional journals through which faculty communed with one another in order to attain promotion and tenure by virtue of esoteric publications, the once celebrated life of the mind degrades to the life of the grind. Predicated on the infinite expansion of American colleges and universities, promotion and tenure beckoned for younger faculty, the holy grail of the academy, until the coronavirus trashed the higher end business model and the prospects of attaining an academic sinecure vanished. Until very recently, metaphysics would serve as a primary route to permanent employment in higher education.

But no longer. American social work exists in an affluent society for which high-quality data are essential for decision making. Thus, in the absence of social work’s generating research on issues of compelling public import, other disciplines have moved into the vacuum. Poverty is a case in point. In recent decades, psychology and economics have provided important insights about the causes and consequences of scarcity (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013) via “behavioral economics.” Popularized by Nudge (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008) and Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman, 2011), behavioral economics was the culmination of modest RCTs, which revealed that people not only make suboptimal decisions regarding resources, but these inferior decisions often become habitual. Later, “identity economics” emerged to explain how poor decision making compromised entire communities (Akerlof & Kranton, 2010). These explorations have produced important schools of thought as well as the deployment of a seminal institution to understand poverty and its remediation, the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Conceived to address poverty in developing countries, J-PAL established a North America division in 2013 to deploy RCTs in more affluent countries. In 2019, J-PAL founders Esther Duflo and Abhijit Bannerjee, authors of Poor Economics (2011), were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, joining Akerlof and Kahneman as previous laureates.

American social workers might well have followed this vector of inquiry, crafting RCTs related to predatory lending and state lotteries, as mechanisms exacerbating individual and community disadvantage, or altruism on the part of providers, in order to understand how circumstance compromises professional conduct. Such lines of thought were conceivable, especially since the technology of RCTs was in the public domain, essentially free; however, social work retreated to the safety of moral metaphysics—Grand Challenges—even as other disciplines were making major inroads in understanding the causes and remediation of poverty.

Hard Repression

Soft repression, the informal mechanisms of social control employed by human service professionals, is directly linked to hard repression by agents of rabble management, often understood as oppression. While human service agencies are typically associated with soft repression, juvenile and criminal justice are institutions of hard repression, representing organizations having the authority to incarcerate offenders. Many minorities are inducted into the “school-to-prison pipeline” at an early age, which is staffed by professional sentries: psychologists, teachers, social workers, juvenile service officers, and counselors.

Pivotal has been the Gun Free Schools Act of 1994, which required schools to expel any student bringing a gun or knife to school, although what constituted a weapon was often exaggerated, sometimes to a comic degree as a Pop-Tart chewed to resemble a pistol resulting in a student’s suspension (Hastings, 2013). According to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, Black males are twice as likely as White males to be arrested after altercations at school, resulting in a suspension rate of 20%, compared to 7% for White boys (Lewin, 2012; St. George, 2012). The use of police to sort out disciplinary problems has complemented ZTP through which students are intercepted and expelled outright from school for acts including bringing over-the-counter medication to school, disrespecting school staff, and failing to abide by strict school behavioral codes. One 8-year-old boy who had brought a toy gun to a Miami school was not only expelled from his home school but assigned to a correctional school for problem children in another city (Thompson, 2011). Indeed, the problem prompted the Supreme Court to suggest that Miranda rights are indicated for children who encounter the police at school (“Miranda Rights for Children,” 2011). The expulsion of problematic students benefits schools insofar as such students tend to have weak academic skills, so that they are less likely to take tests, the results of which may reflect negatively on school instructional performance.

ZTP augmented juvenile incarceration. The United States locks up more than 66,000 youth at an average annual cost of US$88,000 per detainee, a

youth control complex” that “encompasses everything from zero-tolerance schools in which a kindergarten scuffle is more likely to lead to handcuffs than a talk with the principal; to the heavily policed streets low-income youth of color travel; to the child welfare system, which, like the public schools, has become a feeder system for juvenile lockups; to popular culture, which perpetuates the figment of hoodie-clad hordes at the gates. (Bernstein, 2014, pp. 6, 281)

As Alexander (2010) has documented, the institutional linkages that bind the American carceral state have precedent in Jim Crow. Yet, the more subtle interactions resulting in the incarceration of such high proportions of minorities are less acknowledged. For example, in Kansas v. Glover, the Supreme Court ruled that police have broad authority to investigate drivers of vehicles based on license plate checks. Outstanding tickets or a revoked license can result in immediate arrest and impoundment of a vehicle, both entailing high costs for the driver, even when the arrest is later invalidated (Seo, 2020). In a country where people rely on cars for transportation, this presents the problem for motorists “driving while brown/black”—DWB. As one observer noted, “every driver regularly violates some provision of the byzantine traffic laws, but African American and Latinx drivers are twice as likely as whites to be stopped for a traffic infraction” (Cole, 2020, p. 14). When local government depends on fines from law enforcement, police target out-of-state, minority drivers who are more likely to pay a fine than assert a challenge in court.

As a result of court decisions establishing “qualified immunity” for police, minorities experience the brunt of law enforcement: half of African American men are arrested by age 23 (Cole, 2020, p. 14). Most offenses are misdemeanors; however, aggressive District Attorneys often convince minority offenders to “plead out” an admission of guilt in exchange for a reduction of fine and/or time in jail. Guilt, however, has long-term consequences, impeding access to employment, welfare, and education benefits, effectively attenuating upward mobility. While these impose obvious penalties for individuals, the consequence for their communities is striking when a high proportion of residents are subject to interdiction. The American carceral state exceeds that of other countries; per 100,000 population, Oklahoma’s lockup rate is 1,079, next is Louisiana 1,052, followed by Mississippi 1,039, far above other developed countries, such as Australia 167, the UK and Wales 141, or Canada 114. Some 60% of inmates are minorities of color, and 40% are African American (Wagner & Sawyer, 2018). Hard repression is not only extraordinarily expensive but also devastating to minority communities.

The colonization of communities of color by police serves as the backstory of the carceral state. The deaths and permanent damage to minorities—Michael Brown, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake—has contributed to the rise of Black Lives Matter accompanying demands to reform the police from a domestic military to a community service agency. One report found that, adjusted for city population, from 2013 to 2019, Blacks were three times more likely to be killed by police than Whites (Bult, 2020). If incarceration has been the common denominator for controlling minority miscreants, that institutional disposition has been underscored graphically by lethal force.

Economic Involution

Early in the 21st century, the United States suffered two deep economic disruptions. Commencing in 2008, the Great Recession burst a housing bubble inflated by exotic financial instruments, prompting the federal government to shore up banks with an infusion of funding from The Treasury. The Great Recession plundered working-class households having seen their incomes stagnate since the 1970s, largely due to offshoring manufacturing jobs. Although the North American Free Trade Agreement featured prominently in the deindustrialization of America, trade had expanded rapidly since the end of World War II, facilitated by international trade and lending organizations, such as the World Trade Organization and World Bank, respectively. The arrival of the information age accelerated outsourcing and with it, capital flight, leaving elected officials with less revenue to meet social program obligations. As Dani Rodrik observed, “hyperglobalization” led to “domestic disintegration” evident in the rise of ethnonationalism (2019, p. 33). Subsequently, domestic policies predicated on neoliberalism contained, then reversed welfare state expansion worldwide. In an effort to sustain competitiveness while honoring social entitlement commitments, national governments cut taxes, running-up national debt with some deficits exceeding annual gross domestic product (Stoesz, 2018).

Subsequent inequality blossomed as noted in Figure 1 (Rose, 2020, p. 7): the poor (with income less than US$32,500) fell from 16% of the population to 13%, while that of the lower middle class (from US$32,500 to US$54,400) plunged from 31% to 16%, the middle class (from US$54,500 to US$108,500) dropped from 47% to 36%, but the upper middle class (US$108,500 to US$380,500) soared from 6% to 33%, and the rich (US$380,500 and above) from 0% to 2%, appeared for the first time in significant numbers (Samuelson, 2020).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Size of income classes by year.

Financially bereft as a result of offshoring well-paying jobs which were replaced by employment offering significantly lower wages, the lower middle class gradually found itself dwelling in the secondary labor market, blue-collar workers competing with the working poor for jobs. At the same time, better jobs were requiring higher education and migrating to cities: “On one side, cities with little human capital and traditional economies started experiencing diminishing returns and stiff competition from abroad,” noted one analyst. “On the other, cities rich in human capital and economies based on knowledge-intensive sectors started seeing returns and took full advantage of globalized markets” (Moretti, 2013, p. 106). Not surprisingly, the resentment of abandoned blue-collar voters toward “the snobbery of more-privileged Whites” (Collins, 2017, p. 4) became poignant, in 2016 vaulting Donald Trump into the White House.

Then, on the brink of recovery from the Great Recession, the novel coronavirus spread worldwide, posing to replicate the 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions. Nations quickly closed borders, instituted testing and tracking, and recommitted attending to the public’s health; however, nations varied considerably in their ability to hold the virus at bay. The United States, in particular, failed at containment, leaving the task to governors, some more aggressive than others. Tragically, the politicization of wearing masks—Democrats deferring to public health experts admonishing citizens to wear masks countered by Republicans who perceived masks as proscribing individual liberty while negating economic growth—contributed to a spreading virus, evident in high rates of infection and death. By Fall 2020, more than 216,000 Americans had succumbed to the virus. As a result of the public health crises, the economy cratered, contracting 9.5% in the second quarter (32.9% annualized); businesses closed, unemployment claims skyrocketed (“Big Tech Earnings Surge,” 2020). Nor was the damage limited to the United States: the second quarter loss to the European Union was higher, 12.1%, raising the specter of a worldwide depression (“Europe’s Contraction is Worst on Record,” 2020).

The economic fallout of these events was extensive, the Great Recession leaving minorities with significant home equity losses, and millennials confronted with a second setback, prompting reconsideration of marriage, home purchases, and having children. On the cusp of recovery from the Great Recession, the coronavirus plunged the economy into recession as many independent entrepreneurs such as dentists, restauranteurs, and small shop owners were suddenly without customers. As universities anticipated plunging enrollments, sports venues were canceled, and suspended preschools impeded mothers from working, a once vibrant economy was suddenly in free fall. The social contract, already weakened by globalization (Mishra, 2017), fueled resentment toward those protected from insecurity, initially unions; however, suspicion could be directed at professional cartels as well. Indeed, the resentment of noncollege educated workers toward professional elites has been offered as an explanation for the rise of ethnonationalism internationally (Judis, 2016).

In response to economic collapse due to the pandemic, governments resorted to Keynesian stimulus funding, paradoxically a strategy embraced by Republicans as well as Democrats. Ultimately, the federal government would pump US$16 trillion in liquidity to salvage the economy from the Great Recession (Carter, 2020, p. 521). Federal funding to address the coronavirus, US$4.2 trillion by May 2020 (Sergent et al., 2020), may well eclipse stimulus for the Great Recession. But federal stimulus funding has not been equitable. As Pearlstein (2020) argues, The Treasury’s strategy is to “print money to buy as many bonds as necessary—to keep credit flowing to the business sector, no matter the risk.” Such vast and indiscriminate buoying of the economy, “magic money mocking the normal laws of economic gravity,” according to one economist (Mallaby, 2020), entails two profound risks: First, printing money for the purchase of corporate bonds favors publicly traded corporations embedded in Wall Street, as opposed to smaller businesses integral to Main Street; second, increasing government debt entails interest payments, US$378 billion on debt of US$18 trillion (Amadeo, 2020), which must be paid annually to assure “the full faith and credit” of the United States, an allocation which not only competes with other appropriations but could also explode with an increase in interest rates. With the economy staggering, a “K” recovery appeared likely, separating the have-yachts from the have-nots, increasingly desperate group of small retailers and unemployed workers, cast adrift. Approaching the 2020 election, the economic casualties of the coronavirus mounted, including 4 million business closings along with 6.2 million to 8.7 million workers whose jobs have disappeared (Van Dam, 2020).

As conventional explanations of economic activity fail, unstable periods revive an interest in political economy, which posits reciprocity between the polity and markets as essential for prosperity. As Reich (2015) explains, “Government doesn’t ‘intrude’ on ‘free markets.’ It creates the market” (p. 5). But government’s capacity to craft capitalism through regulation, as was the case through much of the 20th century, faltered. Recently, critics have targeted “casino capitalism,” implying economic players place bets of comparable probability (Brill, 2018; Mazzucato, 2018); yet, this fails to acknowledge the structural ways public policy rewards the affluent, via establishing think tanks promoting a neoliberal agenda, using the courts to favor business over workers, consumers, and communities, defenestrating regulations, defunding social programs, and opposing tax increases. As Madrick (2020) observes, public policy tilts toward the corporate sector, “the big oligarchical companies hav[ing] the lobbying and campaign-financing muscle to mold the rules in their own favor.”

In this manner, 20th-century Keynesianism has morphed into 21st-century “economic involution,” shaping the polity and capital to advantage the affluent, assuring the wealthy and well-connected outsize rewards, leaving minimal, tentative benefits for workers via low hourly wages and the poor via safety-net benefits. Just as tax cuts in recent decades have tilted the economy, favoring the affluent, so Supreme Court decisions, culminating in Citizens United, have shifted the polity to favor the plutocracy, diverting “dark money” to political campaigns, untraceable contributions perversely employing the IRS 501(c)(3) “social welfare” tax classification (Mayer, 2016). Thus, the mid-20th century’s virtuous circle of political economy, however imperfect, has been eclipsed by a 21st-century sequel, a vicious circle of economic inequality, social division, and political instability.

Economic involution rewards professionals as card-carrying members of the meritocracy, approximating the “one percent” and corporate CEOs. While professional remuneration may be less than that of the egregiously wealthy, they benefit in regular pay with benefits, especially compared to blue-collar workers and marginal workers who depend on social benefits. Borrowing the label of the Indian aristocracy, later appended to the Boston elite, Thomas Piketty charts the international rise of the “Brahmin left,” battened pay and security assured by professional education through meritocratic means (2020). In the United States, this has been chronicled as well (Frank, 2016; Reeves, 2017). As the public expresses reservations about “professional cartels,” protected by educational qualifications, licensing, and zoning, the relatively generous perks of the meritocracy have come under scrutiny (Appelbaum, 2019, p. 329).

The Mediocracy

Once promised by Progressives as a corrective to structural flaws early in America’s industrial era, professionalization has become less a blessing and more “a problem from purgatory.” In some respects, issues emanating from human service cartels, particularly rents and inferior services, are less severe than those confronted by dissidents of the Eastern bloc of the Soviet Union; after all, the United States is an open society governed by laws made by democratically elected representatives with a legacy of adhering to science to generate innovation and prosperity. By contrast, Soviet dissidents could target an inert, monolithic state, condemning, and ridiculing Moscow.

Regardless, the social class implications of the meritocracy with respect to struggling working-class and poor Americans are profound. As Michael Sandel argues, the meritocracy has not only reaped the rewards of a globalized economy but controls the levers of national politics as well. The noncollege degreed comprise almost two thirds of the population, their work in manual labor, the service sector, and clerical work controlled by their better educated peers. The consequence, Sandel (2020) contends “devalues the contributions of those without a diploma, fuels prejudice against less-educated members of society, effectively excludes most working people from elective government and provokes political backlash.” The price of upward mobility for meritocrats is the resentment of the less educated.

Coined by a progressive British politician and sociologist Michael Young, “meritocracy” signified a new elite predicated on talent. Emerging after the decline of the industrial age, Young offered a simple, if satirical equation:

I + E = M

where I represents intelligence, E effort, and M merit (Young, 1958, p. 94). A quite real American meritocracy was described by another Brit ex pat, Richard Reeves, who noted that intelligence had been codified by IQ tests and weaponized in higher education through ubiquitous entrance exams, such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, while effort was gauged by undergraduate and graduate degrees graded according to the prestige of academic institutions. As college graduates engage in “assortative mating”—finding partners of comparable merit—generational inequities become virtually hereditary, augmented by selective education beginning in preschool and extending through college via legacy admissions. A new American elite, M, classified as the upper middle class and differentiated from industrial era wealth, has emerged in relation to attaining professional degrees from prestigious institutions and assuming leadership of powerful organizations.

Yet, the rise of the meritocracy perforce posed a disturbing question, Young proposed, “Who will do the dirty work?” Widening economic inequality perforce demanded a class of employees willing to manage the occupational debris, that “vast floating army” of the un- and underemployed of industrial work, the millions of fugitives from the Great Recession and coronavirus economic meltdown, all enlarged by the service workers of the “gig” economy as well as those who opted out altogether by joining the informal economy. Notably, the low episodic earnings of the working- and welfare-poor contributed to stress and an assortment of mental problems, such as depression, substance abuse, and addiction while subverting family stability, inviting domestic violence and child abuse. As Young concluded sardonically, “Without intelligence in their heads, the lower classes are never more menacing than a rabble, even if they are sometimes sullen, sometimes mercurial, not yet completely predictable” (p. 190).

However unpredictable the American lower class, it poses difficulties by mucking up the institutional machinery, incurring costs for noncompliance which justify soft repression, or the more draconian disposition and higher costs for criminal activity which justify oppression, through incarceration. In this respect, professionals provide services under guise of compassion and helpfulness even as they lack access to the levers that would obviate the need for their intercession. More profoundly, professional education ratifies their altruistic motivations, matched with employment security and advancement that is the envy of their working-class and poor clients. Forsaking rigorous research that might disabuse them of the efficacy of intuitive interventions, human service professionals remain smug in the assurance of their good works, which is affirmed by their allegiance to moral metaphysics, facilitated in no small regard by the powerlessness of their charges.

The repression narrative is counter to the assurances of the human service cartels, of course, which insist that the public is defended against the inevitable mayhem, predation, and anarchy in its absence. Such certitude notwithstanding, law professor Edelman (2017) has concluded that much of public welfare criminalizes the poor,

In too many parts of the country, the reigning bureaucratic culture assumes that applicants and recipients are dishonest and fraudulent in one way or another. Lacing public benefits with harsh rules and making violation of those rules into crimes are the products of decades of policies meant to punish struggling mothers and children.

Even after the expansionary eras of the New Deal and Great Society, Edelman notes that “our attitudes have gradually coarsened again, and the nasty side has returned” (p. 92).

Yet, correction of soft repression by American human service cartels has become ever more elusive, a product of state licensing, autonomous university training programs, and independent professional associations, each invested in the authority that migrated to the professions during the 20th century. Adept at self-promotion, professional assurances of fidelity to public benefit actually resemble a Potemkin village, a faux moral edifice, particularly in light of the inferior services provided to, to say nothing of the damage inflicted on, the minority poor.

The first volley across the bow of the occupational cartels was fired by the Obama administration, which proposed “best practices” along with a symbolic US$7.5 million through the Department of Labor to fund nonprofits working with states to review licensing standards. The Obama White House noted that licensed occupations earned 7% higher wages compared to the unlicensed, controlled for education, training, and experience, but attenuated mobility, especially for those moving from state to state, such as military spouses. The Obama initiative targeted state licensing of occupations that adversely affected skilled immigrants as well as former felons (“New Steps to Reduce Unnecessary Occupation Licenses That Are Limiting Worker Mobility and Reducing Wages,” 2016). Yet reforms directed at cosmetologists and florists fail to address the larger disservice of better paid and more powerful professionals serving the minority poor.

More substantively, the Evidence-Based Policymaking Act (EBPA) of 2018 formally introduced tiered funding from federal agencies supporting human services. Requiring all federal agencies to establish personnel and protocols to guide federal funding, EBPA prioritizes funding for programs demonstrating effectiveness through more than one RCT, less revenue for quasi-experimental studies, and even less for promising interventions based on nonexperimental designs. As EBPA becomes operational and replicated by states with necessary research capacity, the era of “policy by guesswork” will come to a close. As many federal programs comprising the American welfare state have been intended to aid the minority poor, disadvantaged Americans can expect more critical assessments of those programs on which they depend (Stoesz, 2020). Still, the issue of opposition to extant services remains. In response to EBPA, professions reliant on impressionistic evidence, such as education and social work, are apt to resort to empirical obfuscation to dispute conclusions inconsistent with their professional status.

The mediocracy has also been legitimized through the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). Overseen by a board of directors consisting of almost exclusively presidents of second- and third-tier institutions of higher education, CHEA (n.d.) establishes policy for accreditation of 2,000 colleges and universities and 50 professional associations. Through a process of peer review of documents submitted by applicant institutions and site visits by faculty and administrators from accredited colleges and universities, CHEA employs the “back-scratching” method of accountability, assuring that only minor deficiencies are identified, which can be easily corrected, effectively blocking fundamental educational reform. With respect to professions pledged to public service, but which have elided rigorous research as a graduation requirement, education and social work prominent among them, CHEA could insist that professional programs require completion of a research thesis for graduation. For accreditation and reaccreditation, the research requirement should specify formal survey methods and RCTs. The imposition of a rigorous research requirement would likely reduce the number of currently accredited programs by one third, a reasonable price for substandard professional performance.

Until rigorous research culls defective, damaging programs, low-income families have little choice but rely on those few human service professionals who act on their ethical commitment to public service, publicly exposing interventions that harm clients, notifying the press they are quitting jobs damaging to citizens, and organizing opposition to nefarious activities sponsored by the state. While professionals acting on their ethics are noble, the problem is larger than individual conscience, institutionalized and maintained by organizations little known to the public. In the absence of institutional reforms, individual professionals departing from the mediocracy are apt to become scapegoats; even when their whistle-blowing results in public repudiation of organizational practices, the careers of such renegades are over.

Unchecked, the quotidian conduct of human service professionals, which subverts the opportunity of poor minorities, endures, encoded in public policy. Accompanying the creation of human service cartels, the classic attributes of monopoly appear, inferior service at inflated prices. Yet, the impact of professional cartels is not uniform. As an information age economy organized around social capital defines mobility (Piketty, 2014), a meritocracy, once militating against advancement predicated on wealth and connections (Reeves, 2017), morphs into a mediocracy, elevating professionals to manage the subordinate poor. Their prerogatives guaranteed by civil service and union agreements, relatively good pay and benefits, and promoted by trade associations, members of human service cartels enjoy middle-class accoutrements, their children receiving adequate educations, their retirements secure. Members in good standing of the primary labor market (the college educated with full-time jobs and benefits), human service professionals oversee denizens of the secondary labor market (noncollege educated workers receiving hourly wages for episodic employment, without benefits) whose circumstances generate the turmoil, desperation, and poverty, which, cartels insist, can only be addressed by professional interventions.

The class implications of this dynamic would not have been lost on Soviet dissidents in Eastern Europe during the 20th century. Assiduously, under the most adverse and perilous circumstances, they waged a war on information perpetrated by the state to reverse the public’s collusion with hard oppression. The soft repression of 21st-century America may be less conspicuous and malign, but it is no less consequential for the minority poor, upon whom the human service cartels depend for their livelihood.