Last September, the U.S. radio station NPR ran a story about a woman named Nellie Riether. Riether, a single mother of two living in small town New Jersey1, lost her job in office building design when the coronavirus pandemic first hit. She got by for a few months by relying on the U.S. equivalent of the Pandemic Unemployment Payment, but when the Republican-controlled Congress allowed those payments to lapse in the summer, she had to start relying on her savings. Savings could only last so long, though, and as the months dragged on, Riether found herself with faced with increasingly difficult financial decisions. By the time NPR’s report aired, she was considering moving into her sister’s home with her two teenage children.
There is nothing particularly exceptional about this story. Riether was never among the worst off in America, and as of September she was not among those worst affected by the virus. But her tribulations are all the more revealing for having been partially mitigated. Analysis of social dynamics has a tendency to focus on extremes – the top 1% whose fortunes are guaranteed by the inexorable logic of compound interest; the bottom 10% who would have to raise their incomes by an order of magnitude just to have some prospect of escaping their debts. There is some sense to this: extremes can show us what happens when familiar patterns are played out to their logical conclusion. But such outcomes are rare by definition. Most of us in the developed world live lives like Nellie Riether’s. These are lives lived for the most part in a state of precarious equilibrium, occasionally punctuated by a shocks, positive or negative, which shift us up or down to new equilibria, each one potentially no more stable than the last.
Riether’s story is particularly useful for understanding what it means to be vulnerable to such shocks
Consider first the ways in which Riether was not vulnerable. First and foremost, she lived in 21st century America – the richest country in the world at the richest time in human history. She even occupied a relatively privileged position – white, suburban, educated, and economically secure enough to have emergency savings to dip into (something which cannot be said of nearly half of Americans or one third of Irish people). These privileges would come to offer her some protection from the shocks she faced: savings to use up, family to ask for help, the prospect of another job when the previous one vanished.
But nor was Riether ever invulnerable. Her first vulnerability was her status as a woman in a patriarchal society. She would no doubt have been familiar with many of the liabilities of this position – increased risk of gender based violence, unfair social expectations, petty discrimination – but most pertinent to this story is the association between womanhood and single parenthood. The NPR piece does not tell us how Riether became a single mother, but a look at the statistics suggests a decent probability that her gender played a role – in both Ireland and America, the vast majority of single parents are women.
On becoming a single parent, Nellie Riether would have accrued another source of vulnerability. Across societies, single parents are more likely to experience poverty, more likely to be evicted or become homeless, and more likely to be a member of the working poor. In this case, the absence of a second earner in her household meant that when Riether lost her job, her family was left without any private income. This in turn left her vulnerable to the U.S. Congress’s failure to renew emergency unemployment payments last summer, which itself left her without any income to pay her rent.
If, having exhausted all other possibilities, Riether did decide to move with her children into her sister’s house, that too would have been a source of vulnerability. In his book Evicted, sociologist Matthew Desmond marshals vast quantities of statistical and ethnographic evidence to argue that residential instability is a crucial driver of poverty in the developed world. Even controlling for income, class, and other relevant variables, those who have experienced a “forced move” in the last year (not all evictions are called evictions) are more likely to experience depression, job loss, material hardship and a move to a high crime neighbourhood. Forced moves are also self-reproducing – when people have to leave one home in a rush, the place they move to in that emergency is unlikely to be suitable in the long term.
Three aspects of Riether’s experience are particularly worth noting.
The first is its cyclical pattern. Each adverse shock made the next one both more likely and harder to deal with. If she hadn’t been a single parent, the job loss might not have been so hard; if she had more savings, she might not have had to move. This cyclical pattern is the defining feature of the “poverty trap”, the phenomenon whereby a lack of resources imposes costs and risks which make accruing more resources very difficult. The poverty trap is often a source of alienation across classes – people with money wonder why people without it don’t just save more or work harder, not appreciating how hard it is to work and save when you’re dealing with, say, a physical disability, an addiction, or a mental illness, all of which are themselves made more likely by poverty.
But notice also that Riether did not start off poor. Nellie Riether became poor because she lives in a society which has deliberately made it more difficult for single mothers to prosper. The infamous 1996 U.S. “welfare reform” bill imposed work requirements for benefits to single mothers - inevitably making their lives harder when a recession comes and there is simply no work to be found. Possessing the income but not the security of a successful professional, Riether had essentially been living her life in the poverty trap without being poor. This apparent contradiction suggests that we need a more general theory of vulnerability, one which doesn’t reduce it down to the material conditions it so often produces.
That brings us to the third notable aspect of Riether’s vulnerability spiral, which is that it can be roughly understood as having two key elements: increasing exposure and increasing insecurity. Exposure is basically the total number of strong adverse shocks you experience over a lifetime. For Riether, those shocks would have been becoming a single mother, losing her job, and having to move. Note that not all shocks are negative, and some have mixed effects – Nellie Riether may well view becoming a single mother as the best thing that ever happened to her, but it typically does make people more vulnerable. The opposite of exposure is shelter, as in, “He lives a sheltered life.”
The other source of vulnerability is insecurity, which is sometimes better thought of as the absence of security, and which refers to the total resources available to you for dealing with shocks as they come. Nellie Riether’s sources of security include her savings, her education, and maybe even the ability to get her story published by national news outlet like NPR.
To understand how these two phenomena combine to determine someone’s vulnerability, imagine society as being like a staircase, with prosperity at the top and poverty at the bottom. At the top, the stairs are nice and deep, the steps are short, and the woodwork is sturdy and well-maintained. The bottom half of the staircase, meanwhile, is shallow and vertiginous – more a mountain to climb than a path to follow. The depth of the stairs is like your exposure: How comfortably can you stand on each step? How likely are you to slip and fall? The height of the stairs is like your security: How far do you fall when you get knocked down? How hard is it to climb back up?
I like this analogy for two reasons.
First, it gives you a sense of the dynamics of vulnerability. The closer you are to the top, the easier it is to climb, the less likely you are to fall, but also the less difference it actually makes how far along you are. The further down you are, the steeper the climb, the more precarious your position, but also the more each step makes a difference to your overall wellbeing. In short, it illustrates why Nellie Riether spiralled the way she did: the further she fell, the harder it was to climb back up again, and the easier it was to fall down further.
The other good thing about the metaphor is that you can elaborate on it to describe a more sophisticated model. Does the staircase get narrower as you approach the top, so that only so many people can fit on each step? What damage do you sustain when you tumble down the stairs? When can we lift up those alongside us, or pull up those behind us? When do we push others down to get ahead? Can we turn the staircase into an escalator, so that everyone gets better off at once?
If you want to get really nerdy about it, you can express the framework mathematically, as follows:
(Number of shocks*average strength of shocks)/total resources to withstand shocks = vulnerability
where the numerator describes your exposure and the denominator describes your security. It matters here that the operators in the equation are multiplication and division symbols, rather than addition and subtraction symbols. Maybe you only get one or two big shocks in your life, but if they’re really big then that can be very consequential. Or, conversely, if you sustain a lot of little blows over the course of your lifetime, you might be able to push through them all, especially if you have a lot of resources to deal with them. But if you don’t have any resources at all, even small shocks could leave you very vulnerable.
Hopefully, you’re getting a sense by now of this framework’s wide applicability. The “shocks” which count towards your exposure can include anything from an injury to a job loss to a death in the family. Likewise, the diverse set of potential resources which could provide you with security includes savings, education, social networks, race, family, proximity to population centres, or even your personality.
You don’t even have to focus exclusively on people. There are all kinds of things that we refer to as being exposed, insecure, and vulnerable: minds, military bases, balance sheets, the IT systems of health service executives. The shocks these things are exposed to are all different, as are the resources needed to make them secure, but they are all fundamentally systems which can be made more or less vulnerable by our efforts to regulate and reform them. For the sake of symmetry, let’s illustrate this point with reference to one of the many systems governing the course of Nellie Riether’s life: the American system of legislative democracy.
Democratic governments are the quintessential example of systems which are both highly exposed and highly secure. They are exposed because they are the arena in which all major social conflicts are fought. At every point, every actor has some incentive to subvert the rules of the arena in the name of winning the conflict. If any party does this successfully enough on enough occasions, the arena ceases to matter, and conflict is replaced by the brute domination of the weak by the strong. The norms and procedures of democracy offer security from these efforts by providing a means of processing conflict into consensual government. When it’s possible to lose the fight without losing your head, you can tolerate the possibility of letting the other side win.
American democracy has always been somewhat insecure. Gerrymandering, the electoral college, voting restrictions, a first past the post voting system, divided government, and veto points in the form of a powerful upper house and the filibuster, all jeopardise the people’s capacity to process conflict into governance. However, certain conditions held until recently which ensured that the system was rarely exposed to actors who wanted to deliberately undermine the system. Specifically, the longstanding presence of conservative Democrats from the South made bipartisan legislative efforts appealing enough to be worth trying. The resulting system was not just – it produced compromises like Joe Biden’s infamous 1994 crime bill, which tied funding for domestic violence shelters to an expansion of America’s enormous prison system – but it was stable, with every relevant actor keeping some skin in the game.
But as conservative Democrats began to die off or switch parties, Republicans, who benefit from the system’s distortions, saw less and less reason to observe the norms of co-operation which sheltered U.S. democracy from attack. In the final years of the Obama presidency, Mitch McConnell subjected Congress to a government shutdown, a debt ceiling crisis, and a long deadlock over a supreme court vacancy.
But it’s one thing to not care about democracy, and another to be actively opposed to it. Donald Trump’s entire electoral campaign was based on the premise that the Democratic Party is an illegitimate political actor. In a political system uniquely premised on compromise, such delegitimization was to have stultifying effects. By the time the pandemic hit, Republicans could no more compromise with the Democrats on COVID relief than they could compromise with the Taliban on peace in the Middle East. Donald Trump, who owed his presidency to a distortion in the American political system which occasionally allows the party with fewer votes to win the election, had removed the security of the democratic consensus which made the system functional.
Republican refusal to compromise on COVID relief for vulnerable Americans like Nellie Riether must be understood not only as a failure of American democracy, but also as a symptom of its decline. For Republicans to compromise on such legislation would have been to compromise on the one remaining principle of their party – that the legitimation of the Democratic party is too high a price to pay for democratic governance.
It’s easy to see how this process could compound itself. Without the security of consensus, American democracy will be increasingly vulnerable to those who want to undermine it. Republican candidates who favour compromise will go the way of the Mitt Romneys of the world, increasingly marginalized by the party they once led. The more authoritarian Republicans who do get elected will accelerate the restrictions on voting rights which have returned in recent years, and the vulnerability spiral of American democracy will continue.
But remember, it’s possible to move up the vulnerability staircase as well as down. Last November, America showed the world that democracy could still do its job, punishing Republicans for their complacency during the pandemic and handing both Presidency and Congress over to the Democratic Party. Republican attacks on democracy would continue to shock the system in the months after Joe Biden’s election, but half a year after NPR ran itspiece on Nellie Riether, razor thin Democratic majorities finally gave Congress the security it needed to pass meaningful COVID relief.
This burst of popular legislation should give Democrats the security to pass meaningful democracy reform, reversing the trend of recent years. If the Democrats abolish the filibuster, thus allowing themselves to pass new legislation with majorities of 51% rather than the current 61%, that could pave the way for further action to improve the security of American democracy. The activist group 51 for 51 has been campaigning for filibuster reform as a means of securing statehood for Washington D.C., a diverse city of nearly 700,000 people whose citizens do not have the right to vote in U.S. elections. If the same principle was applied to Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory of 3,000,000 people without political representation, this could go some way towards counteracting the Republican skew of the senate, which appoints two senators to every state regardless of population, making each vote in urban California matter 70 times less than those rural Wyoming. From here, the vulnerability spiral can reverse direction, as the possibilities for electoral reform, enfranchisement, and a genuine progressive agenda all open up ahead.
As it is with American democracy, so too is it with the other systems that govern our lives. If this pandemic teaches us anything, let it be that the equilibria of our lives are not as stable as they seem. What systems are at risk of collapse when the next shock comes? Where could we kickstart the dynamo of prosperity if only we were willing to offer a little more security? I’ve had much to say in this essay about the risks of shock, but I’ll leave you to think about the potential of opportunity.
That said, let me conclude with one more lesson from America, which is that no cascade of events, be it of fortune or misfortune, is inevitable or irreversable. Just as the vast majority of people are neither uber-rich nor desperately poor, the fate of American democracy is likely to be similarly ambiguous. The Democrats have shown us that they are still capable of gaining power, but also of squandering that power while they have it. Centrist democrats have thus far refused to make moves towards filibuster abolition, a necessary prerequisite for further progress. But hope remains. Joe Biden’s various stimulus packages have brought GDP back above pre-pandemic levels and restored employment opportunities for millions, and that much matters on its own terms. Nellie Riether’s LinkedIn page reports that she has been working as a senior designer at a furniture company for the last three months.
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Further Reading
You can read the full article which includes Nellie Riether’s story here.
The first half of this essay is the product of a month I spent obsessively analysing Evicted: Poverty and Profit in an American City by Matthew Desmond. You can buy that book here or read my extensive notes on it here.
For more on shocks and insecurity, see The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, which you can by here.
As always, the best text on understanding the dysfunction of the U.S. government is Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein, which you can buy here.
For a discussion of the Republicans’ refusal to renew the stimulus, see this podcast episode.
You may be wondering how my employment of the concept of vulnerability in this essay corresponds to my use of it in an earlier essay in this same series. I’ll be clarifying that in another piece, which will hopefully come out this Friday.
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References
For the stats on the liabilities of womanhood, see Everyday Sexismby Laura Bates
Stats on Irish family composition and outcomes
Stats on unmarried parents in America
Welfare reform and single parents
The miraculous U.S. economic recovery
At the time of the piece’s publication