Jackson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Manifesto for a Dream: Inequality, Constraint, and Radical Reform, and reported the following:In Manifesto for a Dream, I pose a question: What, exactly, would it would take for the United States to deliver on its promise of equal opportunity? The answer is that it would take nothing short of a radical overhaul of our most fundamental institutions. Minor interventions are inadequate to the task. Social scientists have devoted too much energy to incremental policy, and too little energy to designing more radical reforms needed to truly guarantee opportunity to all. This book makes the case for developing a social science of radical reform.Visit Michelle Jackson's website.
A reader opening the book to page ninety-nine would be thrown into a discussion of how the law could be used as a radical tool for eliminating inequality of opportunity. I describe two broad types of legal reform that are available to us: changes to the law that promote equality of opportunity, and changes that outlaw inequality of opportunity. In the former category, we might imagine introducing laws that guarantee a certain set of economic rights to all Americans, such as the rights to food, housing, education, and so on. In the latter category are instruments such as antidiscrimination law, which could be used to outlaw discrimination and unequal treatment on the basis of socioeconomic characteristics. Either type of legal reform would have profound effects.
The discussion of legal mechanisms to reduce inequality of opportunity comes near the end of Chapter 4 (“Grasp by the Root”). In the previous chapters, I ask whether the American Dream could ever be achieved in a society in which individuals face substantially different constraints on opportunity by virtue of their socioeconomic position. I describe how social institutions – such as schools, hospitals, and the police – are implicated in producing inequality of opportunity, and argue that we will only make progress towards eliminating inequality of opportunity if we rebuild these inequality-producing institutions under a new vision. While the first part of the book largely focuses on what has gone wrong with our inequality policy, the second part strikes a more optimistic tone, and Chapter 4 fully embraces the “can-do” ethos. Alongside legal mechanisms, I discuss policies from other countries that could be applied to good effect in the United States, such as universal healthcare, randomization of educational opportunities, and technological reforms.
Does the page ninety-nine test work for my book? Not perfectly. But it works reasonably well. A reader encountering the material on page ninety-nine would be hard-pressed to argue that this is a business-as-usual inequality book. To be sure, many features of the argument would be lost, and the discussion of legal reform is somewhat drier than the discussions of other radical policies. But it would be clear that the aim of the book is to consider policies that are usually written-off as “outlandish” or “beyond the pale”. In the current moment, when many are coping with the fallout of an economic and health crisis, there is a special obligation to ask whether our inequality policy is fit for its intended purpose.
--Marshal Zeringue
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