|
Home Page |
 |
|
 |
Our Info
Contact Us Join Us Our Newsletter Hit Report |
|
|
|
|
|
Interactive Areas
Calendar Discussion Area Member Pages |
|
|
|
|
|
Our Pages
Improving Dialogue Meaning of Dialogue continued from bellaciao.org--from Discussion Page "Let's Talk America" further information Motivator |
|
|
|
|
|
Find Answers in Our FAQ |
|
|
Conversation Cafe Discussions The Death of Horatio Alger 12-27-2003 article | Posted December 18, 2003 The Death of Horatio Alger by Paul Krugman The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago. The name of the leftist rag? Business Week, which published an article titled ''Waking Up From the American Dream.'' The article summarizes recent research showing that social mobility in the United States (which was never as high as legend had it) has declined considerably over the past few decades. If you put that research together with other research that shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion: America looks more and more like a class-ridden society. And guess what? Our political leaders are doing everything they can to fortify class inequality, while denouncing anyone who complains--or even points out what is happening--as a practitioner of ''class warfare.'' Let's talk first about the facts on income distribution. Thirty years ago we were a relatively middle-class nation. It had not always been thus: Gilded Age America was a highly unequal society, and it stayed that way through the 1920s. During the 1930s and '40s, however, America experienced what the economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have dubbed the Great Compression: a drastic narrowing of income gaps, probably as a result of New Deal policies. And the new economic order persisted for more than a generation: Strong unions; taxes on inherited wealth, corporate profits and high incomes; close public scrutiny of corporate management--all helped to keep income gaps relatively small. The economy was hardly egalitarian, but a generation ago the gross inequalities of the 1920s seemed very distant. Now they're back. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez--confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office--between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they're not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality. Never mind, say the apologists, who churn out papers with titles like that of a 2001 Heritage Foundation piece, ''Income Mobility and the Fallacy of Class-Warfare Arguments.'' America, they say, isn't a caste society--people with high incomes this year may have low incomes next year and vice versa, and the route to wealth is open to all. That's where those commies at Business Week come in: As they point out (and as economists and sociologists have been pointing out for some time), America actually is more of a caste society than we like to think. And the caste lines have lately become a lot more rigid. The myth of income mobility has always exceeded the reality: As a general rule, once they've reached their 30s, people don't move up and down the income ladder very much. (continued on the web site: http://www.thenation.com) about Paul Krugman Paul Krugman, an economics professor at Princeton and a columnist at the New York Times, is the author, most recently, of The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (Norton). -By Posted by John Hartmann 12/27/03, johnhartmann@iglou.com |
|
Neighborhood Link Terms of Use
© 1997 - 2006 Neighborhood Link, Inc.