Americans are pie in the sky regarding economic and social mobility

Based surveys by the Brookings Institute, Americans fervently want to believe that hard work pays off in America. They believe that you are not locked into a particular strata of social and economic mobility by the lot of your parents. Yet the evidence doesn't bear this out.

While cross-country comparisons of relative mobility rely on data and methodologies that are far from perfect, a growing number of economic studies have found that the United States stands out as having less, not more, inter-generational mobility than do Canada and several European countries. American children are more likely than other children to end up in the same place on the income distribution as their parents. Moreover, there is emerging evidence that mobility is particularly low for Americans born into families at the bottom of the earnings or income distribution.
The truth is that the United States is a low-mobility country:
In the United States and the United Kingdom, about half (50 percent) of parental earnings advantages are passed onto sons. If trends hold consistent, it would take an average of six generations for family economic advantage to disappear in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Paul Krugman sums it up: "[T]he right is winning economic debates because people believe, wrongly, that there’s something inherently moral about free-market outcomes." We Americans are dreamers, even when it blinds us to the need for real change. "American children are more likely than other children to end up in the same place on the income distribution as their parents." The real numbers contained in the linked report are real eye-openers. All of this was predictable. The Economist wonders where the anger is:
It's striking how little inchoate public rage has actually boiled to the surface in the rich world. Rising inequality, especially at the top end, combined with stagnating middle class incomes, has been a feature of the world for at least the past ten years. It's been two years since the biggest bail-outs and the rise toward double-digit unemployment. And the anger is...where? Europeans are demonstrating against budget cuts, but these are rarely explicitly directed at national plutocrats. In America, the language of the angriest is very similar to that of the plutocrats themselves. Indeed, the complaint that today's elite lack the noblesse oblige of the aristocrats of old, and are therefore risking public anger, seems to badly misread American public opinion. The middle class doesn't want hand-outs from condescending rich people. They want moralistic language and complaints about deficits.

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Welcome back to the United States. Give me your laptop and your passwords.

Glenn Greenwald has written about the federal government's common practice of seizing laptops and smartphones of American citizens who are re-entering the United States and reviewing their private data. Amazingly, our government is seizing this personal data without probable cause and even without reasonable suspicion:

When you really think about it, it's simply inconceivable that the U.S. Government gets away with doing this. Seizing someone's laptop, digging through it, recording it all, storing the data somewhere, and then distributing it to various agencies is about the most invasive, privacy-destroying measure imaginable. A laptop and its equivalents reveal whom you talk to, what you say, what you read, what you write, what you view, what you think, and virtually everything else about your life. It can -- and often does -- contain not only the most private and intimate information about you, but also information which the government is legally barred from accessing (attorney/client or clergy/penitent communications, private medical and psychiatric information and the like). But these border seizures result in all of that being limitlessly invaded. This is infinitely more invasive than the TSA patdowns that caused so much controversy just two months ago.
But how often are these e-strip searches occurring?
[T]his is happening to far more than people associated with WikiLeaks. As a result of writing about this, I've spoken with several writers, filmmakers, and activists who are critics of the government and who have been subjected to similar seizures -- some every time they re-enter the country.
But this is the tip of the iceberg:
A FOIA request from the ACLU revealed that in the 18-month period beginning October 1, 2008, more than 6,600 people -- roughly half of whom are American citizens -- were subjected to electronic device searches at the border by DHS, all without a search warrant.
I highly recommend reading Greenwald's detailed article for the reaction to this practice by a smattering of members of Congress and by a few court decisions. The sad bottom line is that there is no political momentum to condemn and bar this practice, even in the context of ubiquitous rhetoric regarding the need to limit the power of the federal government.

Continue ReadingWelcome back to the United States. Give me your laptop and your passwords.

Taking Cues

In the last post, I opined about the atmosphere in the country generated by overheated rhetoric and the irrationality that has resulted from seemingly intransigent positions. Some of the responses I received to that were of the “well, both sides do it” variety (which is true to an extent, but I think beside the point) and the “you can’t legislate civility or impose censorship” stripe. As it is developing, the young man who attempted to murder Representative Gifford—and succeeded in killing six others—appears to be not of sound mind. We’re getting a picture of a loner who made no friends and indulged in a distorted worldview tending toward the paranoid. How much of his actions can be laid on politics and how much on his own obsessions is debatable. Many commentators very quickly tried to label him a right-winger, based largely on the political climate in Arizona and that he targeted a moderate, “blue dog” Democrat. This in the context of years of shrill right-wing political rhetoric that fully employs a take-no-prisoner ethic, including comments from some Tea Party candidates about so-called Second Amendment solutions. It’s looking like trying to label this man’s politics will be next to impossible and, as I say, if he is mentally unbalanced, what real difference does that make? (Although to see some people say “Look, he’s a Lefty, one of his favorite books is Mein Kampf ” is in itself bizarre—how does anyone figure Mein Kampf indicates leftist political leanings? Because the Nazis were “National Socialists”? Please.) Whatever the determination of Mr. Loughner’s motives may turn out to be, his actions have forced the topic of political stupidity and slipshod rhetoric to the forefront, at least until Gabrielle Gifford is out of danger of dying. Regardless of his influences, in this instance he has served as the trigger for a debate we have been needing to have for decades. This time, hopefully, it won’t be shoved aside after a few well-meaning sound-bites from politicians wanting to appear sensitive and concerned, only to have everyone go right back to beating each other bloody with nouns and verbs. But while it may be fair to say that Mr. Loughner is unbalanced and might have gone off and shot anyone, the fact is he shot a politician, one who had been targeted by the Right. Perhaps the heated rhetoric did not make Mr. Loughner prone to violence, but what about his choice of victims? [More . . . ]

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Our JFK Moment?

We finally have our Kennedy Moment in the current political climate. Saturday, January 8th, 2011, is likely to go down as exactly that in the “Where were you when?” canon.  On that day, Jared Lee Loughner, age 22, went on a shooting rampage at a supermarket parking lot in Tucson,…

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The end of the American Dream

Here's how the German magazine/website Spiegel sees the decline of America:

The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred. And so is Dinesh D'Souza. Indeed, the United States of 2010 is a hate-filled country . . . This is the climate in the country leading up to the Congressional elections on Nov. 2. It isn't shaped by logic or an interest in rational debate. The United States of 2010 is a country that has become paralyzed and inhibited by allowing itself to be distracted by things that are, in reality, not a threat: homosexuality, Mexicans, Democratic Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, health care reform and Obama. Large segments of the country are not even talking about the issues that are serious and complex, like debt, unemployment and serious educational deficits. Is it because this is all too threatening?
Beware of the graphics accompanying the article. These statistics on the United States economy are not for the faint of heart.

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