OT: About America in this NG

Most Americans think that America is the land of opportunity. This is no longer true - social mobility is now higher in the advanced industrial countries of Western Europe - but the myth is firmly anchored in the stuff that American children at taught at school, and the tales that they tell one another as grown-ups..

Their self-interest needs to be better enlightened. US education is expensive and - at least for higher education - much of the cost is paid for by the students. This bars a significant proportion of the less-well-off from higher education, which is why America now scores below the best on social mobility, and isn't graduating as many tertiary trained specialists as it needs.

The current level of income inequality is consequently damaging even the people with the highest incomes, who can't hire the trained help they need to make even more money.

In times past the US could import it's tertiary trained specialists, but that's getting to be more difficult - people don't want their kids growing up and being educated in the US, inpart because health care an education are so expensive there.

Keynesian deficit-funded stimulus spending does create jobs. and it's creating jobs in the US right now. It would create more if the Tea Party hadn't fiddled with the economy to make sure that only their financial backers do well out of the economic growth - from 2010 to

2011 the incomes of the lower 95% of the US income distribution went down are stayed still, while the top 5% got 5% more money.

Since that group is the one least likely to spend all the extra that they get, the stimulus money wasn't going where it would do the most good to the economy, though no doubt it helped fund a lot of TV Party party political broadcasts.

Probably not true.

But not on the same scale, and mostly from ignorance. Minamata was horrible, but it was only one city

Anthropogenic global warming is global and we already know more than enough to know we need to put a brake on it.

There is, even if the majority doesn't want to recognise it.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

It is very true. I know far too many immigrants to think otherwise.

Europe is no picnic, either. It's easy enough to get to a dull normal place in your career there, but it's much harder to do meaningful work.

No. State schools subsidize it quite liberally. Sure, you can got to expensive schools, but there's rarely a compelling reason to. If you're bright enough, you'll get a free ride in the honors dorms and all.

"Tertiary trained specialists" are an artifact of the aforementioned Galbraithian monolithic state we don't have any more.

I know at least one PhD track student who basically chucked the whole thing because there was absolutely no point in continuing past a masters. Actually, I know several of them as it turns out. The people who *did* go on to get the PhD are still looking for work...

Nobody can make any case whatsoever that income inequality causes any problems at all. Ever.

... because they're subsidized.

No, not really. And not now. Outside of CCC direct employment, the only thing that lifted the US out of the Great Depression ( because of the gold standard ) was WWII.

But it isn't.

not only do the Tea Party not understand the economy, their backers aren't doing all that well either.

That's all but completely irrelevant. You're simply not gonna get a shop-floor job that pays enough to buy a house and get married these days. Some do, but it is - again - the decline of Galbraith's large monolithic firm due to information inefficiency.

The vast majority of the stimulus never saw the light of day. That which did went into duds like Solyndra. The stakes for a firm these days are far too high

Sadly, probably *true*, I fear. It has been true in intervals in the past, when the bottleneck was capital flows, but not now.

Bummer, man. I suppose we should bring back a plague so that this sort of thing doesn't look so bad?

You first :) The political economy of global warming means were doing it about as well as can be expected.

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Les Cargill

But you don't know the even more numerous immigrants in Europe who are doing even better.

I had a lot of fun in the U.K. I was fifty by the time I moved to the Netherlands, and while the Dutch don't go in for lot's of prejudices, they are really enthusiastic about ageism.

But not by international standards.

It's easier to be recognised as bright if your parents are loaded and/ or educated.

Twaddle. anybody who is doing anything complicated can use highly trained specialists. The economic organisation doesn't make any difference to that.

I subscribe to the "obstacle course" view of the Ph.D. If you can keep your nose to the grindstone for three or four years, you've proved that your are a superior person - more persistent and enterprising than most - and employers will throw you at more complicated an interesting problems. Nobody I know made their Ph.D. project their career.

Dream on. Sociologists have absolutely no difficulty demonstrating that high levels of income inequality have all sorts of nasty side- effects. The US is crawling with them.

Nowhere near enough. US health care is half as much again dearer than the comparable - if universal - systems in France and Germany, and most of the extra money seems to be wasted on extravagantly complicated administration.

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nt.

You seem to have been reading the same kind of deceitful twaddle that was used to program James Arthur with the nonsensical propagand he keeps peddling here.

It's a lagging indicator, so it peaked early in 2009 and has been declining ever since.

Rubbish.

You are out of your mind. Solyndra was a tiny proportion of the stimulus spending.

to

ast

One of the side effects of anthropogenic global warming is that we doing pretty much exactly that. Formerly tropical diseases are doing well further away from the equator than they used to.

The rational man accepts the world as it is, thus all progress depends on the irrational man. Of course James Arthur is the wrong kind of irrational man to generate progress

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 Bill Sloman, Sydney

I don't know about "better". It's a different set of trades. I prefer the American version, not least because I am here.

And it could be that Canada shames us both :)

The more ambitious seem to find America better. YMMV.

Well, it's not zero tuition if that's what you mean. US education is still an export product, especially at the graduate level.

Possibly. But not necessarily.

*If* they're the right specialty, and they have the means to employ them.

The point I am trying to make is that there is at least the perception that a PhD can be an impediment to employment - even in STEM.

The US is crawling with all manner of ills, but income inequality can not be shown to be a root cause of ... I'll go ahead and say "any of them."

Anyone who has a high income now is doing something that most likely didn't exist a few years ago. Say 20 or so.

A friend of mine's Dad was a stockbroker. he made a comfortable living, but nothing like what financial engineers make. That's a *new thing*, so it can't exactly drive out value that would otherwise go to other people.

The only problem this creates is when plant closings happen a little too quickly, but that's a matter of time.

I wouldn't disagree that it's too expensive. If you scale it to GDP, it's not that far off. The administrative complexity is a huge problem.

The British NHS or the French system have been in place longer, so the comparisons seem more stark - although grumblings about those certainly happen.

The scare resource in health care will always be talent, and rearranging the financial furniture doesn't help there.

Suit yourself.

Have you lived on this planet over the last... thirty years???

*LIKE* Solyndra. It just won't create that many jobs.

yeah, I've read.

James seems like a genuinely good guy, so we'll have to disagree there.

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Les Cargill

In as far as the stock market joins those who have money with those who have productive ideas, it's a good thing, but these days stock brokers, or whatever you choose to call them, are *parasites*. They do not create anything; They live off value created by others!

Jeroen Belleman

I agree. The stock market has become essentially a casino, where people come to gamble on the pseudo-random rise and fall of stock prices, based more on emotion than logic, and it has not much to do with the merits of the companies. It is legalized gambling, not a valuable source of capital for struggling companies. Having a "stock exchange" is an anachronism like the electoral college, from olden times where one's presence was needed to conduct business. There are more effective modern electronic means to present investment opportunities to those with money. The present system

encourages speculation and manipulation, and the fact that having inside

information, enabling an investor to make a wise choice, is considered cheating and is a criminal act. But the real criminality is that gains and losses depend on luck and strategy more akin to horse racing than supporting the healthy startup and growth of promising and productive businesses.

Paul

"Krueger estimates that "the persistence in the advantages and disadvantages of income passed from parents to the children" will "rise by about a quarter for the next generation as a result of the rise in inequality that the U.S. has seen in the last 25 years."[24]"

So much for the land of opportunity.

But he just told me that unemployment didn't start rising during the Great Depression, only after FDR started spending stimulus money. This disagrees with my impression, and wikipedia

The 1930's stuff is all estimated, so presumably James has found an estimate that he likes better. even if it is totally implausible.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

He can estimate all he wants to; there's barely any correlation there, much less cause and effect.

The thing people talk about in invoking class in today's economy is the loss of shop-floor union style jobs, and that's due to a big structural shift in the economy.

If a kid takes it upon himself to get the proper education at even a modest university ( not the deVry or ITT tech schools ) that kid can probably find work.

There was a second recession after the 1937 monetary tightening. Remember, I don't hold that fiscal policy is likely to affect unemployment much.

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Les Cargill

The cause and effect is obvious enough. Rich kids get better education, more focused tutoring and can afford to go to the best and most expensive universities. At every level they have an advantage over the kids from less well-endowed families. There's also the "who- you-know" effect - by paying to get into the best (and most expensive) universities they rub shoulders with the next generation of movers and shakers as they go through the education system. This effect is very obvious in the U.K. where the best students vie to get into Oxford and Cambridge, and graduate to get the best jobs the U.K. has to offer (if they aren't all that ambitious).

Because you've got an interaction between natural talent, personality and social skills, the correlations aren't dramatic enough to establish cause and effect on their own, but the cause and effect is perfectly obvious if you just look at what goes on, and quite obviously explains the correlations that we can see in the statistics.

Your task, if you want to argue with this hypothesis, is to find an equally plausible explanation that also fits the statistics. The obvious one - that the children of rich kids are cleverer - as they are - doesn't cut the mustard. If you control for cleverness, you don't explain very much of the difference, and nowhere near enough to cover the correlations.

Check out "Inequality by Design"

Myth

But if their well-off parents take it on themselves to help, the kid of a well-off parent can get into a better university than the less well-endowed competitor, and stay there longer (if they want to) and be in a better position to compete for more attractive work.

.

They cut back on the stimulus spending sooner and harder than they should have done, and had to back-track. There's a lesson there that even James Arthur ought to be able to recognise, but since he refuses to recognise that stimulus spending works he's found another explanation that he considers adequate, in the best tradition of pseudo-scholarship.

t much.

And - if James Arthur were somebody you found admirable enough to emulate - you'd ignore all the evidence that pointed the other way.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

*possibly*. A lot of homeschool kids end up doing better than prep school kids.

That, I'll buy. And you can't fix that *period* without some sort of clever social arrangement, and people won't buy it because the game theory doesn't hold up.

Exactly...

So you make up your own narrative-based model which explains it without resorting to empirical work.... and then reinforce the biases inherent in the narrative...

It's a big ole bootstrap.

That's nearly irrelevant because they're talking about *social* inequality, not *income* inequality. It's a fine work, but it also really doesn't unhorse Herrnstein/Murray completely because there are outliers in all the -tiles they talk about.

besides, Herrnstein/Murray isn't the *whole* story, but it's *a* story.

And I am saying that this very nearly doesn't matter, unless the kid is extremely targeted at a very narrow speciality where the network in the school is that much better.

No. This had nothing to do with fiscal policy. Monetary policy went wrong, because they didn't know what measures to use to steer monetary policy.

n

There aren't many homeschool kids to start with, and the ultimate rich- kid educations is homeschooling with good tutors - which one of my grandmothers had (because her mother was very rich - though less so after WW1).

Who'd want to? There's an argument for making access to the top universities even more merit-based than it is, but our techniques for assessing "merit" aren't all that reliable, and rich kids do make - marginally - better use of the advantages they get by attending top universities simply because they are the children of this generation of movers and shakers. This is one feature that isn't broke enough to need extensive fixing.

No, it's the scientific method. Concoct a hypothesis that explains the results and test it against the results and as many others as you can find. The most robust hypothesis is valid until falsified.

In fact the core of their argument was that financial inequality was only a part of social inequality. The problem with the current US situation is that financial inequalities are becoming so large that they dominate and feed the other sources of social inequality - education, achievement, intellectual distinction etc.

Herrnstein-Murray claimed that IQ was the dominant determinant of success, and they did it by incompetent statistical analysis - by concocting a single "social status" strawman determinant, which was mostly parental income, which didn't predict success as well as IQ.

IIRR what "Inequality by Design" pointed out was that sociologists knew - and had known for years - was that social status had to be factored into several quasi-independent factors, of which parental income was only one, neighbourhood environment another and education a third - and that these three factors, when taken together, predicted success rather better than IQ.

There is also a lot of evidence that IQ doesn't correlate with post- university success even amongst academics, and our merit-testing should also be looking at things like creativity and the capacity to defer gratification, but Murray doesn't seem to have found a way to package that insight in way that will allow him to sell a lot of books to rich Republicans.

You wouldn't be saying that if you'd been though the system. My academic career wasn't helped by the fact that the Chemistry School at Melbourne University thought itself the best in Australia - which may well have been true at the time - so it's students weren't encouraged to interact with other research groups, which was very bad mistake. I ended up much less publication conscious than I should have been, a defect that took years to correct, and I'd given up on an academic career by the time I'd acquired the skills I'd have needed to pursue one.

re.

s

This doesn't make sense. The 1937 cutting back of the stimulus spending was fiscal policy. The people who did it didn't know what they were doing, any more than James Arthur's fiscal conservatives know what they are doing. Calling it "monetary policy" suggests you subscribe to one of those sets of flat earth economic theories that include the ones that James Arthur takes seriously, which have got zero predictive power but justify policies that rich reactionaries find desperately attractive.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Don't buy that premise. The best universities go to a lot of effort to get the best and brightest. Universities as Princeton and Harvard do not consider finances when determining who get accepted. And children whose families make less than something like $80k per year do not pay zip to attend.

Even fifty years ago one third of the students at Harvard were on scholarship, meaning that parents wealth really did not matter as far as going to the best universities.

What causes the change in levels of income is the computer. It has decreased the demand for white collar jobs. Still the demand for really bright people , but not much demand for graduates of second tier universities. So the pay for those really bright goes up and the pay for ordinary universities graduates stagnates.

Dan

Not that i respect DeVry or ITT Tech all that much, but they do seem to be able to get and sustain employment after graduating. I have worked with a few and every one seems to be able to do fairly ordinary work just fine. I have not had so fortunate an experience with normal BSEEs. And i have met MSEEs that cannot do Ohms Law nor show up for work reliably.

?-)

) d

That's not the interesting point. What we are interested in is the advantage gained by people who aren't the best and brightest, but still get in Harvard - like Dubbya - because there was money in the family, and the advantage lost by somebody who was almost the best and brightest, but not bright enough to persuade Harvard to skip accommodating Dubbya and rather give the space to somebody who was a bit brighter. Not that Dubbya was actively dumb when he went to Harvard, but he wasn't actively brilliant either.

It didn't matter to the kids who were bright enough to get scholarships. It made a lot of difference to the remaining two thirds, and part of the advantage they got was associating with the really clever scholarship kids. It's not only the staff who teach you when you are at university, but your fellow students as well. I did my share of helping my friends.

It changed the nature of white collar jobs. There are still just as many of them, but the tasks aren't quite the same.

That certainly describes the changes in the US job market over the last thirty years, but that reflects the results of lots of people accepting jobs at relatively low wages.

The US has never taken to the idea of collective bargaining, and as soon as it gets to be fairly easy to find people with similar skills to fill a particular class of job, employers use all their considerable bargaining power hold down salaries for those sorts of jobs. In Europe the trade unions have done better, which is one of the reasons that Germany has a Gini index of 28% where the US at 40.8% is worse than Russia at 40.1%.

Sweden and Denmark do better at 25%. These countries aren't being impoverished by paying their middle and working classes respectable salaries - in fact they are doing very well.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

"who-

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and

Barely even partially true. Wealthy parents got their children into Harvard &c., even if they were C students. Those that got free rides (one third) were all A and A+ students.

Not all the really bright students get high grades, they are often too disruptive.

YMMV

?-)

So I wonder now how Obama got into Harvard. Couldn't have been money, but then he is also shy to disclose his academic record.

(one

Maybe he out-performed to the point that he figured that there was a large risk that Karl Rove would have accused him of cheating? After the birthers, it's hard to believe that there's anything that right- wing nitwits wouldn't go for.

You'll just have to content yourself with fact-free speculation, not that we need any more of that.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Or maybe he was the beneficiary of affirmative action and being the son of a former Harvard man that's good for schmoozing with the faculty. As to his academic record, the following link can be instructive about how much it might be worth in any case:

I suspect grade inflation hasn't started in 2008. There is nothing in his public record that shows him very smart beyond being able to fire up a crowd of Cool Aid drinkers and use teleprompters effectively.

And having worked out how to use the internet to raise more election funding than the Republicans could manage, and getting to be the Democratic presidential candidate. That shows unusual ability, if you are minded to notice it.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney