Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited. ...Paul Krugman
("Aw, c'mon Krugman. America offers great opportunities to all, especially for a decent education.")
... A body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects. ...NYT
("People who work hard -- and make a lot of money -- instill greater moral values in their children. Those children simply work harder in school than the children of welfare queens.")
The New York Times reports this morning on a new series of studies on income inequality and education, confirming what most of us know and what conservatives would like to avoid knowing. As Paul Krugman points out in a column in the same paper, conservatives are trying to convince us that the real issue is not equality or education but a moral gap between rich and poor, in which the rich have the morals -- "family values" -- and the rest of us don't.
Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.
Most of the numbers you see about income trends in America focus on households rather than individuals, which makes sense for some purposes. But when you see a modest rise in incomes for the lower tiers of the income distribution, you have to realize that all — yes, all — of this rise comes from the women, both because more women are in the paid labor force and because women’s wages aren’t as much below male wages as they used to be.
For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent. ...Paul Krugman
The studies showing the hard truths -- numbers too many Americans would like to hide behind a curtain of moralizing -- are becoming more and more obvious. A society with increasing income inequality is a sick society. It's not about "parenting." Low-income parents, both of whom are employed in low-paying jobs for 60 to 70 hours a week, are simply not available for the kind of parenting and schooling children need. Children born into economically comfortable families are exposed to many more educational activities and opportunities as a regular part of family life.
A study by Sabino Kornrich, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, and Frank F. Furstenberg, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography this year, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by 20 percent.
“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study, by Susan M. Dynarski and Martha J. Bailey, looked at two generations of students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from 1979 to 1982. By 1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5 percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989. ...NYT
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A few days ago a report, also in the Times, contained news that must come as a considerable surprise to many of us.
In 1987, on the Constitution’s bicentennial, Time magazine calculated that “of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version.” ...NYT
That was then; this is now. New research shows that fewer and fewer countries are adapting our constitution for their use. The drop in respect for the American constitution, which had been high during and in the aftermath of World War II, was notable during the Reagan administration and dropped sharply during George W. Bush's presidency.
I'm zeroing in on those two presidencies because they were also times when the rest of the world lost a good deal of respect for America in general. America had turned right.
The American constitution is an outline, not a full iteration of guaranteed rights. Add to that the sad truth that our laws have been subject to far more radical conservative interpretation during the past three decades resulting in diminishing respect for the individual and greater privilege guaranteed to corporations.
Most important, our constitution simply does not guarantee the rights modern democratic societies expect.
“Among the world’s democracies,” Professors Law and Versteeg concluded, “constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall. Over the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more similar to the U.S. Constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s and 1990s.”
“The turn of the twenty-first century, however, saw the beginning of a steep plunge that continues through the most recent years for which we have data, to the point that the constitutions of the world’s democracies are, on average, less similar to the U.S. Constitution now than they were at the end of World War II.”
There are lots of possible reasons. The United States Constitution is terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights. The commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century may send the signal that it is of little current use to, say, a new African nation. And the Constitution’s waning influence may be part of a general decline in American power and prestige. ...NYT
There is even agreement on this within the Supreme Court itself.
In a television interview during a visit to Egypt last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court seemed to agree. “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights. ...NYT
And in the legal community.
The rights guaranteed by the American Constitution are parsimonious by international standards, and they are frozen in amber. As Sanford Levinson wrote in 2006 in “Our Undemocratic Constitution,” “the U.S. Constitution is the most difficult to amend of any constitution currently existing in the world today.” (Yugoslavia used to hold that title, but Yugoslavia did not work out.) ...NYT
Whereas legal scholars and judges in the US tend now to look at and quote from legal opinions in other nations, nations* rely on our constitution as a model document.
Meanwhile, we have allowed ourselves to sanctify a document that is increasingly irrelevant, as at least one "founder" recognized.
Other nations routinely trade in their constitutions wholesale, replacing them on average every 19 years. By odd coincidence, Thomas Jefferson, in a 1789 letter to James Madison, once said that every constitution “naturally expires at the end of 19 years” because “the earth belongs always to the living generation.” ...NYT
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*NB (2/12/12): That should read "fewer nations rely..."
