JACOB RIIS GOES TO MCDONALD'S.

Chris Arnade, who may have coined the phrase "front row kids," came from a hardscrabble neighborhood in Florida, earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, discovered that using his quantitative skills to value derivatives proved more rewarding than using them to get funding for some time on a particle accelerator.  Then the financial crash happened.  He subsequently became curious about addiction, and then about life more generally in the poorer quarters where the ragged people go.

It seems fitting with Christmas and the Feast of Stephen approaching to devote Book Review N^o. 13 to his Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America.  Although Mr Arnade began by talking with, and photographing, addicted and homeless people in New York City, his travels took him all around the States.

His narrative focuses on place and faith, two dimensions of the human environment that are frequently discussed by the chattering classes, although sometimes that becomes an exercise in oversimplified aggregation.  Thus, in the most recent presidential election, the journals of opinion became a forum for "Should these places be abandoned?"  The exodus of the ambitious people, which Mr Arnade recognizes as part of his own experience, likely began long before the black swan events confounded the models of option pricing.  The people who remained, however, had their reasons for remaining, the despair of their existence notwithstanding.

Likewise, in the matter of faith, it's easy for members of the political class to create an aggregation of Others who believe in the literal truth of the Bible and the sinfulness of same-sex marriage and other secular delights.  That's not the sort of congregation Mr Arnade found: there might be such churches, just as there are the mega-churches in less downscale communities with their Prosperity Gospels, and there are the congregations of the World Council of Churches (that nobody goes to anymore?) preaching their Social Gospel that contemporary social democratic urges are simply what the Apostle Paul had written about.  The congregations he visits, however, worship in repurposed storefronts rather than high street edifices, and witness is are more about mutual support and recognizing one's frailties and seeking purpose, and they're not necessarily Christian, and the finer points of theology or political purpose are not in the message or the prayers.

What then, about the social science?  I invoked Jacob Riis for a reason:  Dignity, like How the Other Half Lives before it, is more likely to provoke other people to dig into the causes and cures.  Here it gets challenging, as Mr Arnade observes, "our nation's problems and differences are just too big, too structural, and too deep, to be solved by legislation and policy out of Washington."  Moreover, Mr Arnade sometimes refers to the people he meets as "back of the back row."  Another way of putting it is: people in desperate circumstances who, had they lived in the Roman Empire of Tiberius Caesar or the Bohemia of King Wenceslas, would be ... dead.  The back row problems he documents are what, two hundred years ago, we would understand as ... the ordinary challenges of life.

Likewise, the circumstances which induced Mr Arnade to leave are relatively recent.  "A community built on non-credentialed value -- place, faith, and race -- didn't work for me and excluded me."  That's always been the promise of the common schools and the bourgeois norms, isn't it?  It worked well enough for Mr Arnade, and applied globally, it has worked tolerably well for some people who, fifty years ago, might have confronted the same odds as the shepherds abiding in the fields and the peasant gathering winter fuel.  It's not clear now whether the gathering places of the back row kids were abandoned by the front row kids, or whether other forces were at work.  As institutions emerge and evolve only slightly faster than geologic time, there are likely to be plenty of research opportunities.  With the competition to get to the front row turning into a positional arms race, with accumulating evidence that on occasion, the meritocrats get things wrong, bigly, this might be the time to bet on emergence: new ways of recognizing talent whilst continuing to improve the odds for people born into the most difficult of circumstances.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)