"Income Inequality: The Kids Are in Charge," part 4

In the previous posts I have spoken of “my generation,”  identifying this cohort as the kids who first went to school in 1950, give or take a year or two. To only a very small extent does this generation coincide with the Boomers (1946–1964). No one born in 1964 has enjoyed the opportunities — both for success and for failure — of those of us in the earlier demographic. Imagine a Bill Clinton, born not in 1946 but in 1964, raised by a single mother in a small town in Arkansas, proceeding to Georgetown University, Yale, a Rhodes scholarship, and finally to the presidency — no way. Bill Clinton went to school in 1952, not in 1966, and his success in life was a result of growing up in the 1950s.

We had been well trained in the virtues that President Carter asked the nation to draw upon in 1979: hard work, discipline, and patriotism in a common cause.  So, how did we react at the time of economic uncertainty? In the venerable and time-tested American method for achieving victory?

It might have been a renewed Sputnik moment for the U.S.  By 1979, after all, probably the most important positions that we occupied were not as lawyers or doctors or even the traditional wealth-producing sectors of the economy. By 1979 we were entrenched in fields that exercised enormous influence over public opinion: the universities, the media, including advertising, and entertainment. Expertise in these fields did not require exceptional competence in mathematics or science or even advanced business acumen. Their “product” was not the devices and goods produced in the economic sectors that made everyday American life increasingly convenient and pleasurable or that increased our longevity and our automobile performance, outcomes that “progressed” the economy. With our fine feeling for fashion and an ability to anticipate trends, my generation served as handmaidens to such industries, for instance, in advertising, entertainment, and public relations. A sign that we controlled the media was the amount of attention the media devoted to us: young urban professionals with a luxurious standard of living, the so-called Yuppies.

What we did not sell to the public in 1979 was confidence about America or about America’s future. Just the opposite.

President Carter had appealed in his speech to our common history, asserting that we were “heirs of great generations,” who had fought challenges greater than those we faced in 1979.

My generation was having none of that. If a decade earlier, the U.S. had put a man on the moon, the best and brightest were now bathing in a kind of after-the-fall-of-Rome skepticism. Carter’s ponderous presentation probably reminded us too much of our fathers, for instance, of Richard Nixon, who was definitely the face of fathers of the 1950s and whom we had dispatched with the Watergate hearings.

A sign of our contempt for our parents' values, for adult standards, could be seen in 1979 in the book review pages of publications like The New York Times. Skepticism, indeed even cynicism, pervaded the reviews. “Criticism” was a word in vogue, and it consisted of critiquing the writings of past authors, especially male ones, “deconstructing” them, which meant exposing the submerged ideology of power, racism, misogyny, repression, and so on that was hidden below the overt text of a novel. The unreadable philosophical skepticism underlying this criticism affirmed the superiority of the reviewer over the author and, indeed, over everyone else.

The Sixties generation had by 1979 transformed the rejection of our parents’ values into an ideology. The rejection had been professionalized and codified into a rejection of "patriarchy," of all fathers, including the Founding Fathers. Numerous books were churned out that, despite obscure language and nonsensical titles, supported what every adolescent feels to be the case about the world: that people with power can be unfair and mean. While adolescents invent things when presented with evidence of their failures, forty-five-year-olds with Ph.D.s were relativizing the evidence of reality itself. "Cost-benefit ratios"? Those were simply patriarchal constructs; ditto, traditional notions of hard work and success. At a moment of continuing economic crisis, when eighteen- to twenty-year-olds needed more than ever to equip themselves to succeed in an increasingly competitive work place, they were learning that everything that had made the U.S. successful was bogus.


To be continued.

"Income Inequality: The Kids Are in Charge," part 3

In my two previous posts I claimed that income inequality is the result of a collapse in American educational achievement and that this collapse began in 1973, the year that my cohort took over the reigns of the institutions from our fathers. On our watch we institutionalized the values of kids.

It is commonly thought that Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) were the privileged generation, but it was my cohort, the kids who began school in 1950, give or take a year or two, who have literally had it all. Having it all started with our education, a very democratic one. Aside from a small minority representing the traditional American elite classes, we all went to the same kinds of schools and learned to read, write, compute, and sit still for several hours at a time, all without Ritalin. We developed lots of inner starch in the 1950s. That inner starch came in handy for us girls, most of whom got through high school able to put the desires of the organism on hold. In other words, we postponed our sexual desires. There were exceptions of course, on the fringes of the social order, and many of my own classmates got married within weeks of graduation.

We were rewarded for our competence. By the early 1960s, as we graduated from high school, the American economy had taken off, thanks to the labors of our parents in the 1950s. Not only were we the first generation in American history to take good dental and dermatological care for granted, we were also the first to reap the benefits of American prosperity. We went out to work; some of us went on to the universities and to even better jobs. We had lots of choices. The summer after I graduated, I decided to go to work in order to save money for college in the fall. I went to a bank in downtown Louisville, where I was hired on the spot, with no more evidence of my skills than my high school diploma.

The American economy required our skills. If the U.S. was to produce all the goods its citizens demanded –– and, increasingly, the rest of the world –– all hands were required on board. This economic explosion, however, also offered us unprecedented opportunities for fun. It was amazing how well you could live on in an American university town in 1968 and still have money left over for booze and drugs. And don’t forget the sexual revolution, another benefit of American industry: the Pill, followed quickly by other birth control devices. Overnight, we were able to let go of all those youthful inhibitions concerning sex. Some of my cohort went off the deep end, but for the most part we did not throw everything overboard. After all, we had been raised in the cautious 1950s. As we emerged from the Sixties, especially those of us  of us who had experienced the decade to the hilt –– the rock concerts, the peace marches, the chanting, the summer of love, the days of rage, all the grooving and hanging out, the sex (no AIDS back then!), the binges, the balling, the grunge, the dope and acid and psilocybin –– after getting that out of our system, we moved on to new pastures.

Most of us got down to work, some of us even married and, outwardly anyway, assumed the forms and conventions of middle-class life: had children, or at least one, bought a house, mowed our lawns, paid property taxes. “Will you still love me when I’m sixty-four,” indeed. Within a decade we would in many ways replicate the lives of our parents, if with a better standard of living. We would enter the professions –– become lawyers, doctors, professors, especially the women in our cohort —  have careers or, at the least, good jobs, and further diversify and empower the economy. We were not radicals, despite the peculiar vocabulary that developed in the Sixties. Why demolish a system that rewarded us so well and that promised, as far as we could see, even more rewards in the future?

And, yet, we lacked spine: we were unable to pass on the standards with which we had been raised and that had made us successful in the first place: hard work, discipline, patriotism in a common cause. This was on view in our response to the oil crisis that began in 1973.

In retrospect, the oil shock certainly marked the end of the good times. The opportunities my generation had taken for granted, including jobs that simply fell into your lap, were a thing of the past. The U.S. economy had not reached its vast economic potential without being the world’s largest importer of oil, and, after the first Arab oil embargo in the fall of 1973, the price of fuel went from $3 to $12 a barrel. In a replay of 1944, Americans in 1973 were forced to line up to fill their gas tanks, and there was talk of fuel-rationing. Indeed, by the early 1970s, the enormous financial burden of the Vietnam War might have been a sign that we were living beyond our means. Still, the biggest jolt came after the oil shock and lasted for several years. And just when the worse seemed to be over, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 exploded, disrupting the oil fields of Iran. The GDP dropped, and “stagflation” entered the vocabulary of ordinary Americans, along with the reality of recession and unemployment.

The energy crisis was more than an economic blow. Despite our own vast energy reserves, we had allowed ourselves to become dependent on oil imports. The result was that hostile dictators now held the U.S. hostage: “our neck is stretched over a fence, and OPEC holds the knife.” So said President Jimmy Carter in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of July 1979, during which he spoke of sacrifice and encouraged the nation to unite in order to survive what he called a “fundamental threat” to our democracy. And, then, in November of that year came the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, after which fifty-two Americans were literally held hostage, for 444 days, by followers of the Iranian Revolution. For the U.S., the energy crisis was indeed an admonition: “You must change your life,” indeed.

How did my generation react? In the way encouraged by the president? Did we face up to the reconfiguration of the world order and respond in the venerable and time-tested American method for achieving victory: hard work, discipline, and patriotism in a common cause?

To be continued.

Image credit: Gavyn Davies; Kathy Lien

"The Kids Are in Charge: On Downward Mobility," part 2

Well-known economics expert Chris Rock

“Income inequality” is a term that has only recently come into vogue. It instantly turns up 20 million hits on Google, way ahead even of “anthropogenic climate change.” Before 2011, however, according to a May 2014 article on the website of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the term was infrequently mentioned in the news, at least not online. The New York Times began to lead the way in 2010, with 46 mentions. Did the Times’ coverage give birth to the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement? Somehow one feels there was symbiosis. By 2013, the term appeared in the Times 430 times, compared to 277 in the previous year. Even CNN.com was way behind: “income inequality” appeared only 79 times in 2013, compared to 25 times the previous year. Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has spectacularly profited from the phenomenon. A March 31, 2015, article entitled “Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think” in Scientific American by Nicholas Fitz, “a graduate student in neuroethics” at the University of British Columbia, shows that you don’t have to know anything about economics to opine on the subject. The article begins by quoting well-known economics expert Chris Rock. And now a book has appeared, The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon, reviewed in January in the New York Times by Eduardo Porter. The headline: “America’s Best Days May Be Behind It.” As is well known, the seemingly endless prosperity of the U.S. came to an abrupt end in the mid-1970s.

All these writers seek to pin inequality on economic factors. Left-wing writers, for instance, argue for income redistribution or massive taxation on the wealthy to solve the problem. Most Americans are aware, if not exactly consciously, that such "solutions" have been ongoing for years without much to show for them. After all, the U.S. has spent TRILLIONS since the 1970s in an attempt to address the problems of poverty. (The data for this comes from what is apparently a conservative website. I would like to have added here a link to the New York Times or the Washington Post, but Google turns up no references to articles in either paper concerning the costs of the Great Society programs. Go figure.)

As I suggested in my last post, income inequality is a result of the downward trend of educational achievement since the 1950s. Who wants to hire kids who graduate from high school with below-par reading and computational skills? The downward trend, I argue comes from having put kids in charge of education, which began to take place in 1973. I don’t mean, literally, kids, as in Americans under the age of 18. I mean the values of kids.

What is the value world of kids?

Foremost is getting what they want, which is the natural, indeed most rational, inclination of kids, especially in adolescence, when they are driven by new urgencies. Left to their own devices, kids will always seek their short-term interest, often to their detriment. Consider the risks that teenage boys and girls succumb to, if not kept on the straight and narrow by their parents. At the same time, as parents know, it is hard to "reason" with kids: without ever having heard of Jacques Derrida, kids are natural “deconstructors.” They instinctively feel that all adults are mean. They think all people over the age of 25 are old. Their interests do not include knowing the size of the national budget or about foreign affairs.

Now, if they come from a background in which their every need was met while growing up, and without any particular obstructions in their way, the "kid mentality" will continue into the age of adulthood. Many will continue to live with their parents and be dependent on them for their needs.

Short term describes our current national priorities. Adults are no longer in charge, and we have a nation of dependents.

The transition from adults being in charge to kids being in charge took place beginning in about 1973, which is when my generation began to take over the reigns of the institutions from our parents. We are the generation described in my previous post. It is we who have presided over the decline of American education and of American prosperity.

To be continued.

Picture credit: Time; Rolling Out

“The Kids Are in Charge: On Downward Mobility," part 1

A Clockwork Orange

Back in the 1950s America had plenty of rich people. I don’t mean the now-legendary individuals who were richer than Croesus and, like that king, had names with multiple vowels. I am talking about people who might have been our neighbors and whose wealth was within our comprehension: they didn’t marry movie stars or ski on the slopes of Switzerland. No: they were the first ones who could afford private phone lines and color TVs. In essentials, however, even the life style of the well-off did not diverge profoundly from that of ordinary folks. For instance, the bank manager might have been able to afford a Cadillac, but he didn’t set himself off by driving one. He and his family didn’t travel to Paris for their vacation. His kids went to the same school as the kids of workers.

Consider the situation in the new millennium: Not a single big city mayor or other politician, no prominent hedge-fund manager, attorney, or corporate executive, not to mention investment banker or actor, sends their kids to non-competitive public schools. High earners are no longer in sync with ordinary working folks, and this difference is reflected in the educational outcome of the mass of American children today: except in the richest districts of the country, the process by which schools produce successful children has been reversed since the 1950s.

Here is a comparison that brings the difference down to earth. Consider a boy who began school in 1950 and who, upon graduation from high school twelve years later, became a New York City bus driver or an employee of Con Edison. He and his wife––the one he married not long after high school–– now undoubtedly own at least a second car. (If she also worked after the kids started school, how would she get to her job otherwise?) If they have been sensible in their habits, they own their home, travel by air on vacation, perhaps to Paris if they are interested, and may even have sent their children to college. If seriously ill, they are treated in the same hospitals as wealthier citizens and have reached retirement without a diminution in their lifestyle. If they have been judicious in their spending and with his municipal pension, their children will have to deal with inheritance taxes after their deaths.

 Can the same be said about someone who becomes a New York City bus driver in the new millennium? Most Americans today do not think so.

The change in the educational landscape since 1950 has made all the difference. In the 1950s, kids mastered the three R’s, learned to write in a comprehensible hand, and absorbed the ability to sit quietly at their desks for several hours straight. They developed lots of inner starch and were ready to step into adult jobs on graduation from high school. By the millennium, in contrast, if you aren’t able to read at third-grade level after eight years in school, you move on to high school anyway. Parents  can no longer spank their own children, teachers can't fail them, and everyone agrees that competition is bad for the psyche. What prospects to such children have?

It is not the case that parents today are happy that their children receive a high school degree while possessing inadequate skills. They know, however, that their kids will be passed without doing their homework and even with a poor attendance record. It would take a lot of spine to discipline their kids and make them study when no one except the offspring of recent Asian immigrants is doing so. Kids always win if they scream loud enough. One only has to watch a screaming two-year-old to know this.

There is no way around it: kids are now in charge of the institutions. They determine public policy, including that of education. The result is that, year by year, the window of opportunity for success has narrowed — and it is not because mothers now work and are no longer de facto guardians of their neighborhoods.

To be continued.

Bible reading

Sointula Community Church

Whenever I spend time in a place, as I have now in Sointula, I take part to the extent possible in local activities. For instance, I am on the dragon boat crew here, which coincides with my great love of paddling. I also go sometimes to the local church services, in this case at the Sointula Community Church, which is affiliated with Evangelical Free Church of Canada. I was raised Catholic, and I had reached quite an advanced age before I ever entered a Protestant church, much less a Jewish synagogue (or, in Asia, Buddhist or Hindu temples). In fact, I think the first Protestant church I attended was the Congregational one in Cummington, Massachusetts back in the 1980s. I was at the time a resident at the Cummington Community of the Arts, an artists' colony that seems to have reestablished itself in a new incarnation. There was, as I recall, no communion during the service, but the pastor gave a pretty good sermon. Several of the residents of the CCA sang in the choir and liked to play basketball with the pastor.

Evangelicals are pretty much out of my ken, but they too like to sing. The preacher here, Ben, plays the guitar, and his wife, Anna, leads the singing. They don't use hymnals, but the music is projected on a screen at the front, and congregants sing along. Recently the songs reminded me of those that used to be sung in "vacation Bible school," which I actually attended as a child, when I spent summers with my grandmother in a small town in Central Ohio. The "school" wasn't held in any church, but in a huge tent in a field. There wasn't much to entertain a child back then, so Bible school was on the agenda, even though I was a Catholic. My father's sister used to pick me up every Sunday morning and take me to church at Saint Mary's. Afterward, we went back to the family home for lunch with my father's maiden aunts.

Catholics of the generation with which I grew up didn't sing in church. That was what the choir did. We listened.

Another difference: Protestants are much more Bible-literate than Catholics. Small portions of the Old and New Testaments are dished out during mass, but we never did Bible reading. At home, we had a huge Bible with red covers and gold-edged pages, but we did not spend evenings reading it. I was, however, inculcated at Catholic school with "Bible history," which principally concerned the Old Testament. The Catholic Church still seems to take the approach that the Bible has to mediated. I think I would agree. Unless you are a serious Bible-reader, you will pick and choose what appeals to you. And there are so many conflicting accounts.

I bring all this up because I noticed last Sunday that the woman in front of me at the Sointula Community Church was reading from a personal Bible that was very marked up. She clearly treats her Bible the way I treat books I am reading: underlining, notes in the margins, the like. So, she is a serious Bible reader.

I know that in the world that I inhabit, the very "liberal" Upper West Side of Manhattan, the sight of a woman annotating her Bible would provoke smirks. But is the woman's behavior really any different from that of people who read the New York Times, as it were, religiously? My husband used to speak of the Times for its faithful readers as offering "Emmes from Sinai": truth from Sinai. The Times is more than the leading journal of liberal opinion; people literally takes its opinion pages as Gospel truth. I have noticed from the few times that I take a copy into my hands these days that I will come across an article that will be quoted in the course of the day.

I think that my generation got into the habit of newspaper reading from growing up with parents who read the paper daily. When I joined my parents for breakfast as a child, they would be sitting quietly at the table, coffee beside them, with their heads bent over different sections of the Louisville Courier-Journal. My own breakfast — consisting of a glass of Welch's grape juice and a bowl of cereal with milk and heavily laced with sugar –– was accompanied by the comics page of the Courier-Journal, a page not solely devoted to "the funnies": although Dennis the Menace was annoying Mr. Wilson back then, and Nancy was also pounding Slugo, my two favorite features were "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" and an advice column called "Lemme Do It," which covered everything from local sewage problems to whether garbage trucks were allowed to drive in the opposite direction on one-way streets. So there we sat, each immersed in a portion of the newspaper, a harmony of independent souls, before we went off to our different daily pursuits, me to school, my parents to their jobs.

Even if we no longer eat at home, the adult customs of many members of my generation still reflect those early years: why else do so many of them still read the New York Times accompanied by eggs and coffee at a diner or with a muffin and latte at Starbucks? Some people read the Bible at the start of the day; others read the New York Times.