Fairness in Denmark and the USA

At the bus stop we use most often in Århus, there have been a series of very eye-catching posters or public service advertisements by the Fagligt Faelles Forbund, which seems to be a large trade union alliance.

The first one here says simply "Rich kids live longer." That struck me deeply. The visual design is clever, a cute rich kid in tennis clothes with a nice, healthy apple, contrasted to a worse-dressed, chubbier (presumably poorer) kid with a candy bar.

The ad that was up last week, the next one here, says, "Rich kids last (stay healthier) longer," showing a girl dressed as a worker with a grubby face and a big wrench, contrasted to a well dressed rich girl with a lap top. Again a striking visual impact with a message that is hard to miss.

Interestingly, these differences are far more true or prevalent in the USA than in Denmark, but you would not see this kind of public service ad, putting a social class issue so starkly, in the USA, where we try to pretend that social class differences don't exist. Even though people work very hard to navigate around them and make sure that their kids end up on top of the social heap, rather than underneath it.

This is something I have devoted part of my career to working on, particularly doing research in the last ten years on how to help diminish the computer and Internet gap between rich and poor kids, so that the gap doesn't get even bigger.

The third ad says, "Rich kids learn more." In the USA, one of the common reactions is to blame the poor themselves. This ad could easily be read by people in the USA to say, "See poor people learn less, so their poverty is their own fault."

I don't think many here would interpret this ad that way. There seems to be a recognition of what I have seen in my own and other peoples' research, that poor kids come to school with so many disadvantages that they need extra help just to try to stay in the same classroom as kids who grow in families with lots of books, time to read to kids, etc. It makes me very proud of my son, Rolf, that he is working for two years in Teach for America in a poor school in New York City, working directly on this very problem.

I tend to think of Denmark, indeed all of the Scandinavian countries, as societies that try very hard to be equal and fair. Still people here worry that some of the long term protections that have been extended to keep social class differences at a minimum are breaking down. Incomes are more unequal now than they have been for four decades.

I don't know what social repercussion these ads will have here. The trade union is obviously worried about trends in a changing economy which tends to shift even more income to people who work with words rather than tools (in both Denmark and the USA). I do know that it makes me rather proud of people in Denmark that they are able to talk about these kinds of issues openly and seem to have worked hard to make it so poorer kids don't learn less, have worse health, and die younger. I wish that we were talking about that in this election season in the USA instead of John Edward's haircuts, Mitt Romney's religion and even, rather remarkably, whether Obama was really black enough in his early life.

So if you want to read something a bit more relevant in the States, try Obama's book, Dreams from My Father, where someone does talk about how poor and minority people can get ahead in the U.S.