Photo Credit: Ruth Prieto for Show of Force
Nicholas Kristof is an op-ed columnist at The New York Times, where he writes about global humanitarian issues and social injustices. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes and written three bestselling books, most recently co-authoring “A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity” with his wife Sheryl WuDunn.
What do you consider your responsibility as a journalist to be?
I like to think that I’m in the lighting business. My job is to shine a spotlight on issues, and you get more impact if you’re shining on issues that are neglected and not illuminated. I hope that sometimes my columns will shake people up — to some degree, awaken them to issues of which they are unaware. One of the challenges is that I want to suck in readers who don’t start off agreeing with me, so I want to be careful not to antagonize them at the start, and often the arguments that are most persuasive for people on the fence are different from those for people who are already in my camp. So I try to balance expressing my outrage at something, but not in ways that are going to antagonize people at the start and keep them away from my column. It’s a constant tradeoff.
Why do you think you’re a good person for that job?
A lot of people are good at this, but it helps that I’ve come from a bit of an unusual background, especially for a liberal. I grew up in a rural farming community where everybody had guns and faith was very much a part of the community. It’s not a typical background for a liberal columnist and maybe it helps me build bridges.
You write a lot about opportunity gaps. What do opportunity gaps in the United States look like, and how do they affect society as a whole?
There was one study that found that a low-performing, high-income eighth-grade-kid is more likely to go to college than a high-performing, low-income kid. And that’s if they get to eighth grade. There are a lot of low-income kids that just have everything against them from the start; they suffer lead poisoning because their houses have lead chips; they suffer toxic stress because of a chaotic household; they suffer ear infections because they don’t have ready access to health care. Then they don’t go to a good preschool. Maybe English isn’t spoken at home. They are often spoken to less at home, and maybe there’s only one parent there to speak to them. So by age four, a child on welfare has heard about 30 million fewer words than a child of professionals, and that’s a real disadvantage. It’s obviously unfair to those who, by the accident of birth, have had fewer opportunities. When you have a society that is inequitable in that way, it also means that talents are not deployed to their greatest advantage. You have kids of extraordinary capacity who aren’t able to flower. That’s not good for anybody. They don’t flourish, and society doesn’t get their talents.
Are we closing opportunity gaps in the United States, or are they getting worse?
Globally, there’s no doubt that we are closing the gaps. You can see that in terms of literacy. Until about 1950, half of the world’s adults were illiterate. Today, it’s fewer than 10 percent. It’s much less likely that a kid born somewhere in the world will get no education or die of measles or starvation. Globally, we’re making progress. Domestically, the data suggest we’re making some progress on reducing race gaps, though it’s slow, but we’re losing ground on class gaps. The challenge of rising from a working-class household and making it is greater than it has been in the past. Although the data is incomplete, there’s some data on economic mobility that show that there is less mobility in the United States now than in a number of other countries. The time theories comparing economic mobility now to 50 years ago are less clear and harder to draw firm conclusions on.
Is there a 2016 presidential candidate whose election would make you optimistic about the future?
I just don’t know. Ultimately, I think that leaders can help on these issues, and the Affordable Care Act did reduce health inequities and helps create opportunities in that sense. But these are social challenges. They require a greater change of attitude in the public. One of the problems is that our education system is structured so that rich, white kids in the suburbs get a terrific public education and inner-city kids of color often get a quite weak education. That’s not true in other developed countries. In other industrialized countries, education is an equalizer. In the United States it seems to be, maybe not an intensifier, but at least not an equalizer, and that’s largely because of how the public school system is funded through local property taxes. The suburbs spend a lot on kids and do quite well. The inner cities, poor rural areas — they don’t do well.
Do you notice any sort of apathy toward politics or activism in the younger generations?
It’s sort of mandatory for middle-aged people to complain about young people, but I don’t feel that at all. I’m an admirer of the enthusiasm of young people for making a difference and addressing these opportunity gaps. So many students really want to address social problems in some form. There are plenty of students who want to become investment bankers or consultants, but there are also an awful lot of students who want to go work for a pittance in South Sudan and live in a tent or join Teach for America. I think there’s more enthusiasm for social entrepreneurship and creating social change than there was when my generation was in school. There’s also more emphasis on evidence and effectiveness today than when my generation was in school. I’m a fan of your generation, and I hope that Brown students will fix some of the problems that my generation helped create.