Are Entitlements Corrupting Us? No
Nicholas Eberstadt assembles a host of empirical trends in order to reach a moral conclusion: that the growth of the entitlement state over the past half-century has undermined the sturdy self-reliance that has long characterized most Americans, replacing it with a culture of dependence that threatens the American experiment.
As far as I can tell, Mr. Eberstadt’s statistics accurately represent the trends on which he focuses. But they are not the whole truth. To understand what is happening in American society with respect to entitlements, we need to take into account at least three long-term developments.
In the first place, we are an aging society. Our massive investments in public schools and universities at the height of the baby boom have given way increasingly to the funding of hospitals and nursing homes. A second trend has exacerbated the consequences of aging: the near-disappearance of the pensions and health insurance for retirees that employers provided in the decades after World War II. The third trend is macroeconomic. During the generation after World War II, the economy grew briskly, and the fruits of that growth were widely shared. Since then, growth has slowed, the distribution of gains has become more concentrated at the top, and less-educated workers have seen their wages stagnate while their benefits wither.
To describe the role of these developments in the growth of entitlements, the usual dyad of dependence/independence is too crude. We must take account of a third term—interdependence—and the principle of reciprocity that undergirds it. When I do something for you that you would be hard-pressed to do for yourself and you respond by helping me with something I find difficult, we depend on one another and are the stronger for it.