"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.