Many conservatives argue that the order in which a person achieves certain life milestones is key to their financial security. The point of the argument is to blame individuals for their poverty.
At Vox, Rachel Cohen has a piece about a new trend sweeping through conservative state houses to mandate the teaching of the “success sequence” in public schools. I’m quoted in the piece:
Matt Bruenig of the left-wing People’s Policy Project think tank has been pointing out methodological problems with the sequence for the last decade. At its heart, he argues, the formulation is about deflecting attention from how policy choices produce poverty. “It’s always been a way to undermine efforts to improve the welfare state,” he told Vox. “That’s why the right likes it and why they want to teach it to students.”
For most people, the success sequence sounds like harmless and practical life advice. But its deeper appeal, Bruenig argued, is that it offers lawmakers a palatable way to frame poverty as a matter of personal failure rather than systemic design.
The last time I wrote at length about the success sequence was in 2021. That piece holds up well and I’d recommend reading it for a fairly comprehensive account of the idea’s many flaws.
However, there is another problem with the success sequence that is not in that 2021 piece nor in my decade of writing about it. The problem is that success sequence followers do not themselves follow the success sequence, at least not consistently.
Given the way that the success sequence is pitched, this critique may initially sound nonsensical. Proponents of the success sequence tell us that, in order to follow it, all one has to do is graduate from high…
Auteur: Matt Bruenig
