{"id":478,"date":"2016-11-21T17:57:46","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T22:57:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/?p=478"},"modified":"2016-11-21T17:57:46","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T22:57:46","slug":"invisible-inequality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/l-stires.com\/thinking-slowly\/invisible-inequality\/","title":{"rendered":"Invisible Inequality"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>The people who benefit least from American capitalism are mostly likely to be killed or maimed defending it, according to a new paper<\/a> entitled \u201cInvisible Inequality: The Two Americas of Military Sacrifice\u201d by political scientist Douglas Kriner and law professor Francis Shen. And it wasn\u2019t always that way.\n

The centerpiece of their investigation is a study of the socioeconomic status of American soldiers killed or wounded in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Iraq\/Afghanistan wars. Of course, the Pentagon does not provide such data, but they do list the home towns of the dead and wounded. The authors determined the median family incomes in the home counties of each casualty. Obviously, this introduces \u201crounding error\u201d into the data, but it gives valuable\u00a0information about whether the dead and wounded come from richer or poorer parts of the country. Here are the data for fatalities<\/a>, with the median incomes adjusted to reflect\u00a0dollars from the year 2000.<\/p>\n

Clearly, as the U.S.\u00a0has come to rely less on the draft and more on other forms of recruitment, what was once shared sacrifice has become more unequal. The results for non-fatal casualties are quite similar.<\/p>\n

The authors attribute these results<\/a> to two processes. The selection mechanism<\/i> refers to differential selection into the armed forces of young people whose economic opportunities are limited, making them responsive to financial incentives the military offers. The sorting mechanism<\/i> refers to the assignment of lower socioeconomic status soldiers to higher risk positions in the military, since they lack the education or job skills that would make them more useful away from the front lines.<\/p>\n

It has been noted that soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan have a higher survival rate than in previous wars, but return home with more serious injuries. This means that inequality continues long after the war. The authors note several studies<\/a> showing that social class is an important factor affecting the health outcomes of veterans. Veterans from poorer counties return to communities with fewer resources to help in their readjustment, and their injuries place an additional financial burden on those communities.<\/p>\n

Kriner and Shen did a national survey<\/a> showing that only about half of the public is aware of these inequalities. They asked the following question of a national sample: \u201cThinking about the American soldiers who have died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, what parts of the United States do you think they are coming from?\u201d The alternatives were more from richer communities, more from poorer communities, or equally from richer and poorer communities. Forty-five percent believed that the sacrifice was shared equally, while 44% realized that poorer communities carried a larger part of the burden.<\/p>\n

Finally, they did two\u00a0web-based experiments<\/a> measuring how Americans react to correct information about military inequality. In one of these, half the respondents were told that many more of the Iraq and Afghanistan fatalities came from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, while those in the control group were not given this information. Fifty-six percent of those in the control group said the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, compared to 62% given information about inequality of sacrifice. A similar result was obtained in a second study measuring willingness to engage in future wars. As the authors state<\/a>, \u201cThe invisibility of casaulty inequality artificially inflates public support for war and the leaders who wage it.\u201d<\/p>\n

We know from attribution theory<\/a> that if the public believes that people in the armed forces freely chose to serve out of personal motives such as patriotism, rather than being driven by environmental forces such as economic necessity, they are more likely to be held responsible for the outcomes of their decisions. Thus, the invisibility of military inequality may contribute to tendencies to blame these vicitims<\/a> for their deaths or injuries, since they \u201cfreely chose\u201d to enlist.<\/p>\n

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