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I see that Arthur has already posted something from this series. There are some interesting interactive
graphics and other data at the links below. New York Time series Class
Matters Overview: Shadowy lines that still divide http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2005/05/15/national/class/
Status Markers Timeline http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2005/05/29/national/class/ Editorial: Class and the
American Dream Is the American dream that people can rise from rags to riches
with a little grit and imagination - or fall from the top rungs to lesser
positions if they can't cut it - mostly a myth? A series in The Times called
"Class Matters" has found that there is far less mobility up and down
the economic ladder than economists once thought or than most Americans
believe. Class based on economic and social differences remains a powerful
force in American life and has come to play a greater, not lesser, role over
the last three decades. A parallel series in The Wall Street Journal found that as the gap
between rich and poor has widened in America, the odds that a child will climb
from poverty to wealth, or fall from wealth to the middle class, have remained
stuck, leaving Americans no more likely to rise or fall from their parents'
economic class than they were 35 years ago. What fools many Americans is the sight of high achievers vaulting from
poor or obscure backgrounds to positions of power and wealth. Witness Bill
Clinton, who rose from a humble background to the presidency, or Bill Gates,
who rose from the upper middle class to become the world's richest person.
Witness all the self-made billionaires and corporate titans. But beneath this
veneer of super-achievers, recent scholarship shows, many Americans find themselves
mired in the same place as their parents, with profound implications for their
health and education, as well as other aspects of their lives. Those in the
upper middle classes enjoy better health and live longer than those in the
middle classes, who live longer and better than those at the bottom. That's
partly because money, good jobs and connections help the better-off get the
best medical care. Education, supposedly the key to advancement in a
meritocratic society, is also heavily dependent on wealth and class. It is thus
extremely disheartening to learn that at 250 of the most selective colleges,
the proportion of students from upper-income families has actually grown over
the past two decades, despite financial aid programs. There is no sure-fire way to mitigate the deep-seated, multifaceted
impact of class. Stronger affirmative-action programs to bring low-income
students into colleges would surely help. So, too, would stronger anti-poverty
and early-education programs. Tax cuts would be better targeted at the middle
class and below, not at the wealthy who already have more than enough
advantages. The goal should be a truly merit-based society where class finally
fades from importance. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/opinion/30mon3.html Karl's
New Manifesto
Commentary by David Brooks, May 29, 2005 I was in the library reading
room when suddenly a strange specter of a man appeared above me. He was a
ragged fellow with a bushy beard, dressed in the clothes of another century. He
clutched news clippings on class in America, and atop the pile was a manifesto
in his own hand. He was gone in an instant, but Karl's manifesto on modern
America remained. This is what it said: The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave,
lord and serf, capitalist and proletariat, in a word oppressor and oppressed,
stand in opposition to each other and carry on a constant fight. In the
information age, in which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is
fought between the educated elite and the undereducated masses. The information age elite
exercises artful dominion of the means of production, the education system. The
median family income of a Harvard student is $150,000. According to the
Educational Testing Service, only 3 percent of freshmen at the top 146 colleges
come from the poorest quarter of the population. The educated class
ostentatiously offers financial aid to poor students who attend these colleges
and then rigs the admission criteria to ensure that only a small, co-optable
portion of them can get in. The educated class
reaps the benefits of the modern economy - seizing for itself most of the
income gains of the past decades - and then ruthlessly exploits its position to
ensure the continued dominance of its class. The educated class has
torn away from the family its sentimental veil and reduced it to a mere factory
for the production of little meritocrats. Members of the educated elites are
more and more likely to marry each other, which the experts call assortative
mating, but which is really a ceaseless effort to refortify class solidarity
and magnify social isolation. Children are turned into workaholic knowledge
workers - trained, tutored, tested and prepped to strengthen class dominance. The educated elites
are the first elites in all of history to work longer hours per year than the
exploited masses, so voracious is their greed for second homes. They congregate
in exclusive communities walled in by the invisible fence of real estate
prices, then congratulate themselves for sending their children to public
schools. They parade their enlightened racial attitudes by supporting
immigration policies that guarantee inexpensive lawn care. They send their
children off to Penn, Wisconsin and Berkeley, bastions of privilege for the
children of the professional class, where they are given the social and other
skills to extend class hegemony. The information
society is the only society in which false consciousness is at the top. For it
is an iron rule of any university that the higher the tuition and more
exclusive the admissions, the more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity
with the oppressed. The more they objectively serve the right, the more they
articulate the views of the left. Periodically members
of this oppressor class hold mock elections. The Yale-educated scion of the
Bush family may face the Yale-educated scion of the Winthrop family. They
divide into Republicans and Democrats and argue over everything except the
source of their power: the intellectual stratification of society achieved
through the means of education. More than the Roman
emperors, more than the industrial robber barons, the malefactors of the
educated class seek not only to dominate the working class, but to decimate it.
For 30 years they have presided over failing schools without fundamentally
transforming them. They have imposed a public morality that affords maximum
sexual opportunity for themselves and guarantees maximum domestic chaos for
those lower down. In 1960 there were not
big structural differences between rich and poor families. In 1960, three-quarters
of poor families were headed by married couples. Now only a third are. While
the rates of single parenting have barely changed for the educated elite,
family structures have disintegrated for the oppressed masses. Poor children are less
likely to live with both biological parents, hence, less likely to graduate
from high school, get a job and be in a position to challenge the hegemony of
the privileged class. Family inequality produces income inequality from
generation to generation. Undereducated workers
of the world, unite! Let the ruling educated class tremble! You have nothing to
lose but your chains. You have a world to win! I don't agree with
everything in Karl's manifesto, because I don't believe in incessant class
struggle, but you have to admit, he makes some good points. |
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