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Women’s History Month: A Major Women’s Anniversary Approaches
In not quite two
weeks, on April 2nd, we will commemorate the 100th
Anniversary of the swearing in of the first woman to serve in the U.S.
Congress, Jeannette Rankin. This is clearly
a major event in American history.
I shared this fact
with two different friends in entirely unrelated conversations last week, and they
had exactly the same reactions: they
immediately blurted out, “she was in Congress before she could even
vote?!” Well, no, it didn’t work that
way, and how it did work is part of Jeannette Rankin’s story.
Jeannette Rankin
was born in Missoula, Montana on June 11, 1880.
Her father was a rancher and her mother a schoolteacher. She was the eldest of six children: five
daughters and one son. Besides helping
with her younger siblings, Jeannette did her daily outdoor work and farm chores
while helping to maintain the machinery at the ranch. Once, she built a wooden sidewalk for one of
her father’s buildings all by herself. Years
later, she said that as a child she had observed that women worked side by side
with men as equals in the 1890s western frontier, but they did not have an
equal political voice and were denied legal voting rights.
After high school,
Jeannette attended the University of Montana.
She worked as a seamstress and a teacher and also tried social
work. Her social work experience was of
sufficient interest that she furthered her studies at the New York School of
Philanthropy, which later became the Columbia University School of Social Work. She also attended the University of
Washington in Seattle. At this last,
Jeannette became active in the women’s suffrage movement. Further, in 1910, one of her associates in
this work, Denver news reporter and women’s rights activist Minnie J. Reynolds,
persuaded Rankin that pacifism was an inherent part of feminism. “The women
produce the boys and the men take them off and kill them in war,” Reynolds
argued. Rankin’s reading of Benjamin
Kidd’s 1918 book, The Science of Power, solidified her commitment
to Reynold’s feminist-pacifist ideology. Kidd found in men a natural
inclination to battle while he found in women a preference for peaceful
settling of disputes.
Jeannette had been
active in the efforts in Washington State to grant voting rights to women, and
those efforts succeeded in 1910, as Washington became the fifth state to allow
women to vote. She then moved home to
Montana, where she started working toward similar rights there. Her efforts were instrumental in achieving that
goal in 1914, and Montana became the tenth state where women could vote. Then Jeannette decided to try running for
Congress. Her brother, a lawyer and
active in state Republican politics, helped finance and manage her campaign. Montana had two Representatives who served a
single state-wide “at-large” district.
In the election on November 7, 1916, of six candidates, Jeannette
received the second highest vote total, 76,932, and 7,567 fewer than the
front-runner. She got 9,958 more than
the third highest vote-getter, so her performance was quite respectable. The following April 2, 1917, when the 65th
Congress convened, she was greeted with enthusiastic applause as she took her
seat in the House.
This was all in the
midst of World War I. In the opening
days of April, newly elected President Woodrow Wilson asked for a Declaration
of War. This was granted on April 6; the
vote in the House was 373 to 50. Ms.
Rankin was among the 50 “no” votes. Because she was the only woman, her vote was
all got considerable attention, not all of it complimentary. Her other distinction in her one term in the
House in that era was to initiate the legislation and help lead the push for
passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which would give
women the right to vote everywhere in the country. The House passed this amendment twice during
1918, but each time the Senate narrowly voted it down. It finally passed both Houses of Congress in
1919, after Rankin had left the House, and was ratified in late August 1920.
Jeannette Rankin
ran for Senate in 1918, but lost in the Republican primary. She then bought a small farm in Georgia and
became a public speaker and lobbyist on behalf of peace and the prevention of
war. During that time, of course, World
War II developed, and she returned to Montana to run for the House again in 1940,
at age 60. Pearl Harbor happened on
December 7, 1941, and the vote in Congress to declare war Japan took place on
December 8. The vote in the Senate was
unanimous and in the House, it was 388 to 1.
Asked to change her vote – actually by then-Representative Everett
Dirksen – Ms. Rankin said, “As a woman, I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send
anyone else.” Reaction to her NO vote
was so disruptive that she had to take shelter in a phonebooth in the Capitol Building
until security officers could escort her out. This ended her political
career.
She did consider
running again, however, in 1972, when she was 92, in order to argue against
Viet Nam involvement, but her health would not permit. She died in Carmel, California, on May 18,
1973. While her pacifist sentiments had
brought the most publicity in later years, she said in 1972 the she hoped she
would be remembered most for being “the only woman who ever voted to give women
the right to vote."
* * * * *
I composed this narrative for an event on
March 19 at my home parish, St. Ann & the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn,
NY. Called “Unsung Heroines”, this is
becoming an annual Women’s History Month commemoration, celebrating notable
women who receive relatively little recognition. Among the other women lauded in parishioner
presentations were Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first woman ordained in the Anglican
Communion and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a gospel singer precursor to Chuck Berry
and other rock-‘n-roll stars.
Presentations this year also included a couple of other suffragettes.
Obviously, Ms. Rankin and her accomplishments have
often been “sung”. But the proximity of
the anniversary gave ample justification for including her in a celebration of
Unsung Heroines.
Labels: American Society, Government Policies, People
Trump's Election and the Health of Middle-Aged White Workers
Back in June, soon after it became evident that Donald Trump
would be the Republican nominee for President, we wrote an article discussing
one significant aspect of his candidacy: his possible appeal to working class
voters who are exasperated by stagnant wages and income inequality. We didn’t advocate for him, but we did see
how he would appeal to those workers, which put his candidacy in a realistic
light. See the piece here: http://ways-of-the-world.blogspot.com/2016/06/why-workers-might-favor-businessman-for.html.
This general notion indeed played out in the actual election
results. Exit poll results showed that
Mr. Trump had relatively strong support from low-income voters, middle-aged and
older voters, and those with less education.[1] He received a larger percentage than Mitt
Romney did in 2012 of votes cast by people 45-64 years old, of people with
incomes under $30,000, of people with high school or less and college less than
bachelor’s degrees, and in particular, white people with no college degree. In fact, Trump scored 67% of those votes compared
with just 42% for Romney. Thus, Trump’s
mantra about bringing jobs back to this country would speak to this group, who would
be looking for consistent employment opportunities in production, construction
and mining especially, sectors which have been experiencing major disruptions that
Trump hopes to mitigate.
This situation of uncertainty for middle-aged people in
particular has another, deeply serious component. In a Wall Street Journal discussion of
the election result on November 10 [2], Arthur Brooks, president of the
American Enterprise Institute, expresses concern for middle-aged workers,
especially men and for white, middle-aged people. He calls our attention in turn to a paper
published last December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences in which Angus Deaton, the Nobel Laureate in economics in 2015
and professor at Princeton, and Anne Case, also at Princeton, describe the
astounding development that the mortality rate of white 45-54 year-olds in this
country actually rose from 1999 to 2013.
This is in clear contrast to the mortality rates for all other age
groups, which declined, an obvious result of advances in medicine.[3]
What happened to those middle-aged white people is
dramatic. Mortality rates for diseases
in that age range did decline. But rates
for externally caused deaths went up: suicide, drug poisoning and alcohol
abuse. Those specific rates went up for
other age groups too, but for the 45-54 year-olds, the increases were so large
that the pushed overall mortality higher.
Subsequent release of data by the U.S. Center for Disease Control for
2014 show the overall uptrend continued that year as well. In addition, Deaton and Case discuss
“morbidity”: the proportion of the
population reporting good health and the proportion reporting poor health, including
various symptoms of pain and the frequency of difficulty performing simple
“activities of daily living” (ADLs). For
this population group between 1997-99 and 2011-13, government data show a
smaller proportion reported good health, a larger proportion poor health. More people had trouble with various ADLs and
more people consumed excessive amounts of
alcohol. There was a significant
increase in the share of these middle-aged white persons who were unable to
work, which, Deaton and Case point out, may correspond to the unusual decline
in labor force participation rates, a phenomenon we have discussed here before.
Deaton and Case suggest that economic insecurity might play
into 45-54-year-olds’ increased use of drugs, dependence on alcohol and
suicides. They mention the same economic
factors we have been talking about: tepid movement of median wages and income
inequality. They point out that these
are especially important for people with just a high-school education. In addition, they discuss the shift in many
employers’ pension arrangements from defined benefit plans to defined
contribution plans. So now it’s up to many
employees to see to the adequacy of their own retirement savings, since there’s
no guarantee of a specific payout during their elder years, as would be the
case with defined benefit plans. The
pressure on these people is thus increased.
They have another reason to be concerned: will they have a steady income
through consistent employment and will the economy grow so that their financial
assets can grow?
This economic pressure on middle-aged white Americans is obviously
not the only reason Donald Trump won and Hillary Clinton did not. There is a general unease with governments
and bureaucracies. We saw it earlier
this year in the U.K., where, also, ordinary people surprised their government
leaders as they voted that that nation should withdraw from the European Union,
the development known as “Brexit”. The
work to do so is in process now. The
factor of importance in that issue is similar to what Mr. Trump advocates, the
reduction in regulation of business and other government intrusion into
everyday life. Brexit highlights
people’s frustration with the bureaucratic nature of the EU organization. In the U.S., Trump is concerned that
regulation of business, along with the relatively high U.S. business tax rates,
contributes to companies’ moving their headquarters and some operations to
other countries, even as they continue to sell their products here. He wants to change the government setting for
business so those companies will stay here and keep jobs here. It’s a good idea, if it can be implemented in
a prompt and orderly way. That’s a big
“if”. Further, it will go the wrong way
if there are trade wars and too much anti-immigration push. Tough questions.
Overall, the numbers we have discussed here describe
considerable unease among a core group of Americans, a population group that
rarely gets much attention. But this
election has made us look at them.
Perhaps there’s no genuine link between the pressure they feel and the
election of Mr. Trump, but it seems there might well be.
In church yesterday during the Intercessory Prayer, I heard
myself offer petitions for “all those who are afraid in the wake of the
Election” and for “the new President, that he might govern carefully and
wisely”. We indeed hope Mr. Trump rises
to the occasion and we hope our many friends and acquaintances who are upset
and distressed will find there is reason they can relax.
--------------
[1] “Election 2016: Exit Poll Results.” The New York Times. November 8, 2016 and subsequent updates. The Exit Poll is conducted by Edison
Research and is sponsored by a consortium of ABC News, The Associated Press, CBSNews,
CNN, Fox News and NBC News. The data
were collected from 24,537 voters
leaving 350 voting places throughout the United States on Election Day
including 4,398 telephone interviews with early and absentee voters. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html.
[3] Anne Case and Angus Deaton. “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife
among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century,” Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, December 8, 2015. Pages 15078-15083. http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15078
. You may have seen this referenced in
The New York Times as well. A number of
professional health policy publications also contain references.
Labels: American Society, Economy, Government Policies, People
Praying about the Election
What an Election season!
It’s almost over. However it
comes out, we’ll all feel some relief, won’t we? Meantime, during this coming week, we can do
something important. Pray.
A few weeks ago, my Bishop, the Right Rev. Lawrence
Provenzano of Long Island, issued a formal statement requesting all members of
this Diocese to offer daily prayer during the “octave” between November 1 and
November 8. His solemn letter, published
on October 10, calls for “those who are able in each parish to use this time
for fasting, abstinence and deliberate prayer, and to make use of all the
resources our faith provides us to refocus on God's will and purpose.”
Then, last week, on October 26, all of the Bishops in
Indiana issued a relevant and helpful press release. These bishops include the current Bishop of
Northern Indiana, two retired Bishops of Northern Indiana, the current Bishop
of Indianapolis, and the Lutheran Bishop of Indiana and Kentucky, ELCA. Their joint press release also urges us to pray,
and they quote the Prayer for Sound Government from the Book of Common Prayer
1979 and the Prayer for Responsible Citizenship from Evangelical Lutheran Worship
2006, which follow here:
O Lord our Governor, bless the
leaders of our land, that we may be a people at peace among ourselves and a
blessing to other nations of the earth.
To the President and members of
the Cabinet, to Governors of States, Mayors of Cities, and to all in
administrative authority, grant wisdom and grace in the exercise of their
duties.
To Senators and Representatives,
and those who make our laws in States, Cities, and Towns, give courage, wisdom,
and foresight to provide for the needs of all our people, and to fulfill our
obligations in the community of nations.
To the Judges and officers of our
Courts give understanding and integrity, that human rights may be safeguarded
and justice served.
And finally, teach our people to
rely on your strength and to accept their responsibilities to their fellow
citizens, that they may elect trustworthy leaders and make wise decisions for
the well-being of our society; that we may serve you faithfully in our
generation and honor your holy Name. Amen.
The
Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 821
Lord, God, you call your people
to honor those in authority. Help us elect trustworthy leaders, participate in
wise decisions for our common life, and serve our neighbors in local
communities. Bless the leaders of our land, that we may be at peace among
ourselves and a blessing to other nations of the earth. Amen.
Evangelical Lutheran
Worship 2006, page 77
Almighty God, to whom we must
account for all our powers and privileges: Guide the people of the United
States in the election of officials and representatives; that, by faithful
administration and wise laws, the rights of all may be protected and our nation
be enabled to fulfill your purposes; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Finally, perhaps an obvious statement. It’s always important to vote. But it seems more crucial than ever this
time. People are skeptical of the
candidates, both of them, regardless of which side they are on. Thus, we need to do our civic duty with more
attention than ever. Please do vote –
and pray.
May God Bless the United States of America . . . . .
Labels: American Society, Episcopal Church, Government Policies
What the _______ Just Happened Between the U.K. and the EU?
The people of the U.K. voted in a referendum on June 23 that
tells their own government they want to disaffiliate from the EU. This outcome was clearly a major
surprise. Even though, as we pointed out
a couple of weeks ago, results of opinion polls had gone back and forth in the
months running up to the vote, no one really expected the Leaves to come out
ahead. But they did, 51.9% to 48.1%.
First, why did this happen?
Second, what happens next? Third,
do we know what it all means? What follows is hardly complete, but we’ll try to
make some response to these questions.
First, why did
people want to leave the EU?
There seem to be two main proximate causes: discomfort with immigration
and impatience with EU bureaucracy. In
our commentary on June 20, we noted that many people in the U.K. are concerned
about immigration, and we drew a parallel to the interest in Donald Trump in
the U.S. elections. We’re hardly the
only observers making this comparison. Citizens
of an EU member country can live anywhere in the EU they want at any given time,
and these days, among other implications, this causes nervousness about terror
threats. Notably, however, the U.K. does
not have the most liberal border policy it might have; it is not an adherent to
the EU’s so-called “Schengen Agreement,” which allows totally free travel,
basically passport-less, among almost all the other EU countries. But EU citizens can move into the U.K. without
undergoing any approval process.
In addition, a country’s membership in the EU means that it
participates in the EU’s joint regulatory system, which amounts to a huge
bureaucracy. The EU administration
consists of seven different bodies, most of which are headquartered in
Brussels. These include the European
Council, which is the summit of the heads of each member nation; the EU
Parliament & Council of Ministers, which together constitute the
legislative body; the European Commission, which is the executive branch; the
Court of Justice; the European Court of Auditors; and the European Central
Bank. Since the U.K. has its own
currency, it does not participate in the Central Bank.
The functions of each of these institutions are classified
by “competences”, some of which are “exclusive” to the EU, some “shared” with
member nations’ governments and some “supportive” of member governments. A few examples might give some sense of the
reach of the EU into each member’s internal affairs. Clearly, since the EU is a free-trade zone,
customs regulations are “exclusive” to the joint organization, and many
international agreements are also reserved for the joint system. Much commercial policy, including antitrust
laws, is managed by the European Commission, which has just brought new charges
against Google, for instance.
Much of the “shared competence” work also involves
businesses, such as consumer protection, energy and the environment and
agriculture. Social policies and public
health matters are also managed by the Commission. Among the “supportive” competences, the
Commission helps members with disaster response, tourism and education, among
other functions.
Thus, there is a lot of bureaucracy – the Commission itself
has 32,900 employees – and many kinds of business decisions are governed or
influenced by policies, not made in London, Paris or Madrid, but in Brussels by
people who may not be directly associated with the specific country having a
particular need.
Again, then, we see the parallel to the Trump model in the
U.S. Many people in the U.K. – more
than had been understood – want to “take their country back,” to bring
decision-making powers back home.
All this is no small matter.
As you might imagine, trade is very important to the U.K. economy. Total exports of goods and services were 27%
of GDP last year, compared to 13% in the U.S.
Imports of goods and services were 29% of GDP, compared to 16% in the
U.S. Of goods exports, 55% go to the EU,
and 47% of imports come from the EU. If
they lose export market share and also have to pay duties on imports that now
enter without such fees, that will be costly in several ways. Of course, one of the goals is to help
domestic production by making imports more expensive. So there are potential offsets.
Further, some private economists estimate that 3 million
jobs are presently associated with EU trade, constituting about 10% of total
employment. The stakes are high.
Second, what
happens now?
The referendum vote on June 23 was not the enactment of a
law, but the expression of a viewpoint.
Now the U.K. Parliament must pass legislation instructing its government
to invoke an article of the EU organizing document, Article 50 of the Treaty of
Lisbon of 2007. This will set in motion
specific negotiations for the withdrawal of the U.K.; these negotiations could
well last for two years and that may be extended. Even before Parliament acts, however, the
U.K. government will need to outline its needs, surely in consultation with a
variety of business and other private institutions. Prime Minister David Cameron has said he will
resign to permit new government leadership to execute these very fundamental
changes. Two candidates have emerged in
preliminary Conservative Party voting; a final choice will be made in
September.
Thus, nothing structural will happen right away. Surely there has been an immediate and
dramatic reaction in financial markets as a result of the shock of the unexpected
vote result. However, where market
valuations move from here depends on many factors currently unknown. Some of the dust has settled, and the
best-known stock index, the FTSE 100, is now running slightly higher than prior
to the announcement of the vote result. In
contrast, the foreign exchange value of the pound fell immediately, and it has
not recovered; it presently down 13%, to about $1.29 from $1.50 on June 23. These differing market reactions highlight
the overall uncertainty. This exchange
rate movement already means the U.K. exports have become cheaper. The Motley Fool website points out that a
trip there for U.S. tourists and business travelers is now already cheaper. However, it just got much more expensive for
U.K. residents to go anywhere else.
Third, do we know what
this all means?
Not really. There is
no explicit timeframe for concrete actions, although we note with great
interest that the Conservative Party is moving promptly with its election
process. And while the Article 50
authorization for the U.K. to leave the EU supposedly has a two-year time
limit, associated negotiations on accompanying trade policies could drag out
far longer than that.
Such basic questions mean economic growth, already sluggish,
of course, is well likely to be restrained further. Forecasts range widely, from a roughly 1% hit
to growth in the near-term to 3 or 4%.
The effects on specific businesses are also uncertain. Some analysts believe that international
banks might leave London to better concentrate their work in Europe
itself. But other analysts point out
that Parliament might take advantage of newfound flexibility to effect tax
reductions, making the U.K. more attractive to businesses than locations on the
Continent.
These notions apply broadly – even to the Arts. We were startled to find a commentary in the
weekly email from New York’s classical radio station, WQXR, titled “How ‘Brexit’
Affects Opera and the Arts.” The drop in
the U.K. exchange rate has already had a major impact on the value of European
singers’ salaries when they perform at the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, for
instance. British conservatories also
have two scales for their tuition fees, EU and non-EU, the latter as much as
twice the former. What will happen to
those fees when the actual “Leave” takes place and will European students still
come to study there?
People from other EU countries who currently live and work
in the U.K. face uncertainty. They will
no longer have automatic authorization to live there. Some of them have already applied to the U.K.
Home Office for permanent residency or outright citizenship. Some may have to leave.
Another issue is that Scotland voted heavily to Remain in
the EU, and its government is already trying to figure out if there is a way to
handle that. The “United Kingdom” might
then be less “united” if Scotland remains while Great Britain leaves.
Prayer for Healing
The distress over the vote and the nasty campaign ahead of
it, marked by the tragic murder of MP Jo Cox, has brought a response from
Church leaders. As we in the U.S.
struggle with our own political divisions, we might take note of the following
selection from a Church of England litany for these days:
Guide
our nation in the days and months ahead
to walk the paths of peace and reconciliation.
Hear us, Lord of life.
Lord, graciously hear us.
Give
to our leaders wisdom and sensitivity
to work for unity and the common good.
Hear us, Lord of life.
Lord, graciously hear us.
Mend
broken relationships
and restore to wholeness whatever has been damaged by heated debate.
Hear us, Lord of life.
Lord, graciously hear us.
Sustain
and support the anxious and fearful
and lift up all who are dejected.
Hear us, Lord of life.
Lord, graciously hear us.
+
+ + + +
Various issues of The
Wall Street Journal and associated website www.wsj.com
U.K. economic data from the Office of
National Statistics. Sourced from Haver
Analytics, Inc., databases.
Dominic Webb and Matthew Keep. In
brief: UK-EU economic relations.
U.K. Parliament: House of Commons
Library. Briefing Paper number 06091, 13
June 2016. www.parliament.uk/commons-library.
Sean Williams. “8 Ways Brexit could directly affect you and
your money.” June 27, 2016. http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/27/8-ways-brexit-could-directly-affect-you-and-your-m.aspx. Some of Williams other ideas besides cheap
trips to the U.K. also include the fact that anticipated sluggish economic
performance will keep interest rates low, making mortgages cheap and keeping
credit card rates from rising. However,
the sluggish economies could also keep house prices under pressure.
Fred Plotkin. “Operavore: How ‘Brexit’ Affects Opera and
the Arts.” www.wqxr.org/#!/ July 1, 2016.
Labels: Economy, Government Policies, World
Why Workers Might Favor a Businessman for U.S. President
Back at the beginning of the Presidential primary elections,
a friend sidled up to me and growled, “Can you explain Donald Trump to
me?” The gentleman thought that I, as a
political conservative, might have some insight into this unusual candidate for
high public office.
I think I might have some modest insight about this, but
it’s my penchant for economic data, not my political views that might help us
out. Indeed, there's nothing politically motivated in what follows.
Many voters are frustrated in the lack of economic progress
in recent years. We hear all the time
that incomes have stagnated and inequality has worsened. Our latest wanderings around the website of
the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) yield some interesting information on how
pervasive these conditions are. We can
thus understand better Trump’s appeal to working-class people who think this
outspoken businessman might have some ideas for helping these conditions, for
“making America great again.”
Many comments about income inequality refer to total income,
which, of course, includes dividends and investment capital gains, flows that
favor the high-end. Or comments about
wages just talk about CEOs’ oversized compensation as a huge multiple of
average workers’ wages. There’s little
mystery in these as causes of frustration among hard-working laborers.
Wage Stagnation and Inequality Pervade Labor Market
But what we found goes deeper. First, workers’ compensation has indeed been
stagnant overall. Average wages and
benefits were $21.50 an hour in 2014, down from $21.91 in 2007, just before the
Great Recession started.[1] This overall
result comes from an annual survey of companies’ pay in some 800 different
occupations, summarized in 19 “groups”, from management at the top ($59.93/hour
in 2014) to food preparers and servers at the bottom ($8.88/hour). Some groups near the middle include
construction workers at $24.67/hour, production workers at $21.31 and office
and administrative at $20.53. Over the
last seven years, averages increased for nine of the 19 groups, but they
declined in ten of them. Among the
declines are ones you’d think: office workers, transportation workers and
installation and repair people. But
hourly compensation also declined for higher-skilled occupations, including
computer scientists, scientists and even a bit for healthcare professionals –
really.[2] So it’s hard to generalize,
to make a simple statement about wage stagnation.
Further, and in some ways more irritating, inequality
measures increased, even within these narrow pay categories. While the overall 50% median compensation
number went down 41 cents an hour over the seven-year period, the 90% level
increased; so the top 10% of workers made $56.73 in 2014, up from $54.31 in
2007. And seeming to add insult to
injury, the degree of inequality went up within individual occupational groups:
in eight occupations where the average went down, an inequality measure went
up. Thus, high-end positions in those
eight occupations, including computer techs, healthcare professionals, social service workers, installers & repairers and transport workers continued to rise even as middle and low-end salaries struggled. Workers may not see our data, of course, but
they surely have a sense of the awkward pay relationships among their own colleagues.
Workers in all kinds of jobs have reason to feel exasperated.
Possible Remedies: Reorient Education, Encourage Business
I don’t know a simple answer to these compensation
issues. The economist in me says, let’s
encourage business investment and better skill-training so workers can do their jobs more easily. As you can see from the
variety of occupations we’ve mentioned, “skill training” is probably a better
term than “education”. Kids can learn
coding for computer apps or they can become truck mechanics rather than heading
for college to get a broader, but possibly less practical cultural
background. In fact, one brand-new book,
Reskilling
America, by sociologists Katherine Newman and Hella Winston[3], argues
for renewed emphasis on vocational education over the recent “college for
everyone” approach that often leaves graduates without a well-defined, real-world
expertise, but plenty of debt.
Some of you might think greater government regulation is
necessary to realign workers’ pay. But
that may well have the opposite effect of diluting business’ incentives to do
better, thus worsening productivity, to say nothing of the cost of designing
jobs to match government specifications.
It’s a very important economy question of the 2010’s. In fact, the National Federation of
Independent Business, a trade association representing small businesses, says
that government regulation already adds to the cost of hiring workers, such
that businesses are tending to favor temporary employees now rather than
permanent ones.[4] This adds emphasis to our
main immediate point about how frustrated workers might indeed want a new kind
of leader in Washington who better understands the business world.
Further, the Dean of the Harvard Business School says in a
recent Wall Street Journal [5], “solutions to problems like inequality
and the lack of employment opportunities or wage growth aren’t going to come
from government alone. They’re also going to require imaginative businesses
that find new ways to employ people and create real value.”
Other Economic Policy Questions Add to the Quandary
We see that what we have here is a can of worms. And this is just one issue, frustration over
inadequate pay and lack of progress. We
have to mix this with all the other issues of the day. An important Trump theme is immigration, for
instance. We thought to discuss this
here, but it’s really a whole separate article on some recent information about
the motivations of immigrants; these facts differ markedly from Mr. Trump’s usual
arguments. But it’s still an issue that
middle-class workers of today care about.
Other issues that might give them headaches include national security
and the protracted wars in the Middle East.
And while gasoline prices have at least come off their highest levels
with the drop in oil prices, workers in North and South Dakota and Texas are
being laid off as some oil production becomes unprofitable at the lower
prices. Apparently, we also have figure
out how to deal with coal miners; coal is clearly an important climate-change
issue, but the economies of West Virginia and other Appalachian regions depend
on it. We can’t just leave all those
people out in cold – so to speak. And on
and on.
---------------
2. Ibid.
Note that while average pay for healthcare professionals decreased
somewhat, the number of those workers, including doctors and nurses, rose
markedly. We still were startled that
median pay and benefits in that profession did not go up.
3. Katherine S.
Newman and Hella Winston. Reskilling
America: Learning to Labor in the Twenty-First Century. New York:
Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Company). 2016.
Labels: American Society, Economy, Government Policies
The FBI versus Apple: A Catch-22
We knew this would probably happen sometime – a court fight
over smartphone security issues. Sure
enough, the FBI is hard at it with Apple.
The terrorists in San Bernardino, California, back in December were
using an iPhone. The FBI wants Apple to
hack the phone and Apple is saying no.
That would compromise one of the main features of those phones and set a
most unfortunate precedent. However, law
enforcement officials of all kinds are anxious for resolution because all kinds
of criminals use smartphones, which at present can be “tapped” only with great
legal and technical difficulty.
We do think this issue is worthy of discussion. It’s obviously controversial for Apple to
even have objected at this point in time, since the immediate cause is a
domestic terrorist attack in which 14 people were killed. And it’s easy to say, “but of course Apple
should provide the mechanism for opening the phone’s contents.” But Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, does have a
point that this is precedent-setting and the way to deal with it should be
discussed openly.
6 Weeks' Worth of Data Locked in the Phone
This San Bernardino event is a great test-case. iPhones are secure to the owner/user. They can be backed up to a storage area on a
“cloud”. Data that are transferred to
the cloud can be obtained by investigators, and indeed, the FBI has already
obtained those data from terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook’s account. However, the attack took place on December 2,
and Farook had not backed up the phone since October 19. So plenty of fresh and helpful information
was likely recorded on the phone during the last six weeks just before the
attack: who Farook’s associates and ISIS connections might be, whether other
projects similar to his are being planned, and so on. The phone itself is owned by San Bernardino
County, which employed Farook; those officials, the owners, think it’s fine for
the FBI to inspect the phone’s contents.
But Apple Worries about Construction of a "Backdoor"
Apple, through a public statement by its Chairman Tim Cook
and also in an official court filing, is objecting to unlocking the phone. The company argues that the work it would do
to enable decryption of the contents of an iPhone could be applied to any
iPhone, thereby potentially eroding the extraordinary security provisions on
all iPhones. As it stands, the data on
any given iPhone are associated with the owner’s “Unique ID”. The FBI is wanting Apple to devise a
workaround to get to the data without the ID.
This is known in the jargon as a “backdoor”. Apple is, quite logically, very concerned
about creating such a backdoor technology.
Conceivably, then, any iPhone a thief or other criminal got hold of
could be hacked.
We were watching a Fox News program late last week in which
a retired Army colonel was being interviewed on this issue. The colonel said something like, “this is a
national security issue and of course Apple needs to develop this decryption
software!” The news anchor conducting
the interview instantly blurted out, “but that’s why I have an iPhone –
precisely because it can’t be
decrypted by anyone else.”
FBI Does See the Importance of the Phone's Security
FBI Director James Comey initially sounded impatient with Apple,
claiming that Apple’s defense, spontaneously described by the anchor in that
newscast, is based on marketing and reputation, not on the technology. Apple and many of its customers would not
agree; the security of the phone is a basic characteristic of the product. Given that there are in fact some 825 million iPhones around the world, their interests would seem a worthy consideration. And evidently, Mr. Comey himself
has come to a deeper understanding of what he was asking of Apple. Later, on February 25, he testified before
the House Intelligence Committee that this encryption issue is “the hardest
question I’ve seen in government.”[1]
Addressing the Law Enforcement Need Now
There is legal precedent, of course, for telecommunications
companies to provide call data to law enforcement agencies. In 1994, Congress passed the Communications
Assistance for Law Enforcement Act which requires carriers to build
surveillance capability into their networks.[2]
So AT&T and Verizon automatically provide whatever such “wiretap”
access is called for in court orders; in the last half of 2015, there were more
than a quarter million such requests from all kinds of law enforcement agencies
in both criminal and civil proceedings.
In the first half of last year, 998 requests came specifically for
national security purposes. Sprint also
has had many thousands of such data requests.
Apple in fact does address these requests too. It reports that it had 971 law enforcement
requests for “account data” stored on iCloud or iTunes accounts in the first
half of last year, and it responded to 81% of them. In addition, it had 499 requests based on
national security needs.
The difference is evidently that the information the
carriers provide is only phone numbers and text message connections. According to The Wall Street Journal, it
“can’t provide access to . . . message content or calls made over mobile apps
such as WhatsApp, Skype or the blue iMessages sent between two iPhones.[3]
Formal Legislation Likely Needed
Regardless of the specific outcome of the San Bernardino
case itself, it is likely to add to already building momentum for formal
legislation on this situation; that is, there should be some general rules so
people who own phones can know what to expect, and representatives of the
people should make those rules. Indeed,
the Chairman of AT&T Randall Stephenson this week noted, “The rapid pace of
technological innovation is challenging laws crafted in a very different era
for totally different, and much less complex situations. Recent developments, in particular, bring
home the need for legal clarity.” And
the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee is working on a bill that would
create criminal penalties for companies that don’t comply with court orders to
decipher encrypted communications. It
remains to be seen what the specific language of such a law might require.[4]
So, most immediately, the dilemma remains. More, in the San Bernardino situation, there
is considerable irony. We noted that the
county government owns the phone; Farook was only the user of that phone. That government is in possession of software called
“mobile device management” that would have enabled the county to make provision
for the FBI to open the phone. But Farook’s
department did not sign up for it to be installed on their inspectors’ phones.[5] Another irony is that, even as the federal
government is fighting for the right to get Farook’s phone decrypted, the
federal government provides grants to tech developers to create more encryption
software.[6]
A clear summation of this Catch-22 was given last spring by
a former CEO of Sprint at a cybersecurity conference: “Which CEO is more
patriotic, the one who provides all the information the government requests to
help catch a criminal or prevent a terrorist attack? Or the CEO whose company creates tools that
make it difficult for law enforcement . . .
to acquire a customer’s information, believing that protecting civil
liberties is a higher calling?”[7]
+ + + + + +
We don’t cite all the general
sources about this story, which are plentiful; most of our material is from
various articles in The Wall Street Journal, beginning right after the federal
court order to Apple was made public on February 16. We also sourced The Economist magazine and www.foxnews.com, as well as Apple CEO Chairman Tim Cook's "A Message to Our Customers", a letter dated February 16 and found on Apple's homepage at www.apple.com.
The footnotes cover specific
aspects and quotes.
[7] Ryan Knutson. Op. cit.
Labels: American Society, Government Policies, Science and Evolution
Businesses, Religion and the Law
Religious
freedom. We've learned during the last
ten days or so just how complex that notion can be. Enactment of a version of the Religious
Freedom Restoration Act – RFRA – in Indiana didn't bring praise from Indiana
churches, but instead outcries from the gay rights community that the law would
evoke discrimination of them in the Hoosier State. Elsewhere, on March 27, a woman in Richland,
Washington, had a summary judgment imposed on her by the State of Washington
because she would not, according to her Southern Baptist beliefs and practices,
furnish the flowers for the wedding of two men.
There are other examples and the whole controversy feels totally ironic
in this Easter Season. We want to go
through some of the history of the broader issues to understand them better; as
you know, I'm an economist, not a lawyer or historian, so I hope what follows
is as accurate as possible.
Pilgrims
came to this land 395 years ago because they wanted to worship differently and
live by different rubrics than those required at that time by the Church of
England. One hundred and seventy-one
years later, in 1791, the concept that the people of the United States could
worship as they choose was written down officially in the Constitution's First
Amendment. Congress cannot
"establish" an official religion, nor can it "[prohibit] the
free exercise thereof". Indeed,
this is the first item in the First Amendment, ahead of freedoms of speech, of
the press, of association and petitioning the government.
In 1947, a
Supreme Court ruling extended the First Amendment applications of the
"establishment clause" from just federal government relations with
religions to those of state governments.[1]
In that ruling, the State of New Jersey was allowed to pay for
transportation of children to parochial schools, under the logic that everyone
benefited when children could get to a school.
The payments from the state did not violate the
"establishment" provision of the Amendment; they were seen as
supporting the children, not the religion itself.
Then, in
1990, the State of Oregon refused to give unemployment benefits to two Native
Americans because they had been fired for cause from their jobs at a drug
treatment center: they had smoked peyote in a religious ceremony.[2] The Supreme Court agreed with Oregon, that
the use of the hallucinogenic drug was absolutely prohibited by state law. This case elicited an offsetting response
from the U.S. Congress in 1993, as it enacted the federal government's
"Religious Freedom Restoration Act" – RFRA.[3] However, in 1997, after yet another Supreme
Court test[4], it was found that this law applied only to the federal
government, not to states. So state
legislatures began enacting their owns RFRAs; before the latest controversies,
19 states had these laws. The need for
such state laws apparently became more acute after the Hobby Lobby ruling in 2014; this said that closely held
corporations as well as individuals, can assert religious rights. It, of course, pertained to the contraception
provisions in the Affordable Care Act.
Other small businesses now are relying on the federal RFRA as they argue
that their religious views mean they shouldn't provide goods and services for
same-sex weddings, but these and other religious practices may actually depend
on the existence of state-level RFRAs, which prompted Indiana and Arkansas to
want to pass them.[5]
Howard
Friedman, writing in the Washington Post
last week[6], indicates that the surge of gay rights and rapidly spreading
legalization of gay marriage in particular in recent years has contributed to
the brouhaha over these two latest states' laws. Some states, including Washington, have
anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBT persons that may trump the assertion
of religious rights. Indiana has limited
versions of anti-discrimination laws, while it appears that Arkansas has
none.[7]
The commotion
over the Indiana and Arkansas laws, while unexpected, has in fact helped
improve the legislation and those legislatures have quickly passed statements
that try to make clear that their RFRA laws do not constitute license for
people and businesses to shunt aside associations and transactions with LGBT
individuals.
All this
seems to leave some business owners in a quandary. And me, too, actually. Let's go back to the florist in Richland,
Washington, Barronelle Stutzman of Arlene's Flowers. She seems stuck. The Washington State anti-discrimination law
is evidently quite clear that businesses engaged in "public
accommodation" cannot "[c]harge a different rate or offer different
terms and conditions of service" to groups of people designated in the
law, which include "sexual orientation or gender identity".[8] But the Southern Baptist Convention, to which
Ms. Stutzman belongs, is one religious group that continues to oppose gay
marriage, along with the United Methodist Church, many American Baptist
churches, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the Mormons and the Roman
Catholic Church, among others.[9] Her
immediate response has been to stop providing flowers for all weddings, and
that would appear to satisfy the law's requirements of treating all customers
the same way. Otherwise, it would seem
that in order to follow strictly her belief in her own church's position, she
would even have to close or to move to a state where gay marriage is not [yet]
acceptable. Indeed, the hoopla in
Indiana over the pizzeria whose owner responded to a newspaper survey that it could
not furnish food for a gay wedding reception did cause it to close, although it
was set to reopen today and wound up being supported by huge donations to a totally
independent crowdfunding site – at least one of which donations came from a gay
woman who operates her own small business.[10]
So religious
freedom is complex. It is impossible for
specific pieces of legislation to allow for all the divergent possibilities,
which, as we see, involve different Christian groups with different
interpretations of Scripture along with other religions' practices, amid the
shifting structures of secular society.
"Freedom of religion means freedom to hold an opinion or belief,
but not to take action in violation of social duties or subversive to good
order."[11] "Thus, the right
to have religious beliefs is absolute, but the freedom to act on such beliefs
is not absolute."[12] At least in
the United States of America, though, we do strive to do it right and to
encompass everyone's beliefs.
--------------------
[4] City of Boerne v. Flores (1997) Cited in
Ashby Jones, op. cit.
[6]
Friedman, op. cit.
[9] Pew
Research Center, "Where Christian churches, other religions stand on gay
marriage," March 18, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/03/18/where-christian-churches-stand-on-gay-marriage/. For other background, also see http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/03/25/how-the-u-s-compares-with-the-rest-of-the-world-on-religious-restrictions/,
March 25, and http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/03/30/businesses-serving-same-sex-couples/,
March 30. All accessed April 7,
2015. The last item, survey results on
what people believe about whether business should be required to serve gay
couples shows a break in public sentiment of 49% for requiring them to do so
and 47% that businesses should be allowed to refuse such services. The text mentions two court cases, a baker in
Oregon and a photographer in New Mexico.
The text also shows a demographic breakdown of the survey results.
[11] Reynolds v. United States (1878). Cited in the Wikipedia article on the First
Amendment. See footnote 1 above.
[12]
Wikipedia article on the First Amendment.
See footnote 1 above.
--------------------
Labels: American Society, Christianity, Government Policies
Links for Helping with the Immigration Crisis in South Texas
Not your usual Ways of the World essay.
We are – as
many of you are, too, probably –
very concerned about the throngs of Central American children coming across the
Texas border. Yesterday, July 10, the Presiding
Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, called our attention
to the work on this crisis issue by various bodies of the Church. Her specific emphasis was on advocacy and
policy. She also certainly feels compassion for the kids themselves, and she urges us to pray and give
as well.
As we read her
published statement in a daily email from Episcopal News Service, we were
moved to check on the website of Episcopal Relief & Development for possible
news of actual relief efforts. As many
of you know, the Geranium Farm are long-time supporters of ER-D's work. Sure enough, they are helping get resources
to the relief center being run in McAllen, Texas, right on the border across
the Rio Grande from Reynosa, Mexico, and between Brownsville and Laredo. St. John's Episcopal Church is pitching in at
the center, which is located at Sacred Heart Catholic Church and being managed
by Catholic Charities. At least one of
the local Baptist churches is also participating and possibly other churches.
If you want to send supplies directly to the center, here is
information from Sacred Heart Church: http://sacredheartchurch-mcallen.org/immigrant-assistance/
. This includes the address of the
drop-off center and an itemized list of what they need; it's pretty basic daily-living
stuff for adults and little kids.
Here is a link to the Diocese of
West Texas, which has posted pictures of the work and in-kind donations
that are being provided.
Finally, today's New York Times ran a strongly
worded op-ed by an unlikely group of immigration reform advocates: Sheldon
Adelson, CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, Warren Buffet, CEO of
Berkshire Hathaway, and Bill Gates, Chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation and a founder of Microsoft.
These three, who begin with the disclaimer that they don't have common
political perspectives, strongly urge the Congress to get its act together on
immigration reform legislation. This
presently appears unlikely to happen before the November election as everyone
wants to run away from the hot-button issue before constituents vote. But those little kids down there in Texas and
the adults who sent them need some clarity.
So too, as Adelson, Buffett and Gates argue, do the graduate students
from abroad working hard at our universities, and others anxious to come here
legally or to regularize their current status as residents of our country. Contact your Representatives. While the Church's advocacy work helps,
constituent contact will count too.
Please respond somehow.
Labels: American Society, Episcopal Church, Government Policies
Economic Mobility: Steady Through Time, But Different by City
Income inequality is in the news again these days, in
particular as President Obama has made it one of his policy concerns for this
year and as New York City's new mayor ran on a platform that included actions
to correct it. The gap between rich and
poor has indeed widened, and pretty consistently so, extending back as far as
35 years. In the US income distribution
in 2012 (latest available information), the average household income of those
at the 90% level, $146,000, was almost 12 times the income of those at the 10%
level, $12,236; back in 1975, this
multiple had been "just" 8-1/2.
Too, these income measures – both low and high – have decreased since a peak in 2006, adding to
concerns.[1] Does the US still offer
hope for gains, especially for low income people? Are we still a "land of
opportunity"?
Indeed, taken at face value, developments like the increase
in the rich/poor income ratio might suggest that something is fundamentally
wrong and requires any number of redistribution tactics to be taken as
correctives.
Ah, well. As with
many issues we meet here at Ways of the World, the "face
value" of this trend in a set of numbers turns out to tell only part of
the story. Two brand new reports from
well-known economist scholars of the inequality situation bring out two very
significant aspects that cast all this in a different light for the United
States.
People's Probabilities for Moving Up Have
Been Remarkably Steady
These reports are produced by The Equality of Opportunity
Project, headquartered at Harvard University and including scholars from there
and the University of California at Berkeley; see its website here: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org. The scholars, Raj Chetty of Harvard, Emmanuel
Saez of Cal Berkeley, three other senior scholars and a research staff[2], have
conducted massive analyses of IRS income tax data, using millions of individual
returns, which have been "de-identified". They are coded in such a way that a specific
person's history can be followed through a lengthy span of years, beginning as
a child-dependent of their parents and extending through their ultimate career situation
at, say, age 30 or 40. These authors can
thus make the statement that if someone grew up during the 1970s as a child in
a family in the lowest 20% of income earners, that person has an 8.4% chance of
reaching the top 20% in their own adulthood.
The point Chetty, Saez and associates make in the first of
their studies is that this probability did not change noticeably for kids born
in the 1980s who are now in their late 20s.
Moreover, other writers who've analyzed earlier periods, covering kids
born back as far as 1950, also find the same general probability
relationship. People's chances of moving
up in the world have not measurably changed despite the fact that the top has
gotten higher. Here are two pictures from the
Equality of Opportunity website: the rungs of the ladder are now farther apart,
but the analytical work shows that our ability to climb the ladder is just as strong
as when the ladder was shorter.
So, in one sense, this is a great statement about
opportunity in America. We have farther
to move to catch up to the high-income group, but Chetty, Saez and their
associates show that we still have as much expectation of being able to do that
as older people did, and other authors carry this back even to our own parents' generation.
Other Countries Do Better at Lifting People
Upward
Some argue – perhaps some of you – that other countries do a
better job of lifting people up than the US does. In international comparisons compiled by the
OECD, the correlation of income brackets between generations is closer in the
US than in most western European countries, Canada and Australia: that is, whatever level your parents are in,
you are more likely to be stuck there in the US than in nine of 11 other
countries. The correlation measures are
in fact about three times lower in Denmark, Norway, Australia and Finland. So children seem to have far better chances
of moving ahead of their parents' economic position there than in the United
States.[3]
But Some US Cities Are as Effective as Denmark
Chetty and Saez have a response to this seeming indictment
of the US in their second study, "Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility
in the US".[4] The US is, of
course, a huge country with widely varying climates and cultures in its
regions. Because Chetty and Saez have
examined millions of tax returns, they can break out their information by
cities as well as for the nation as a whole.
In some pioneering work on these topics, they find great differences in
mobility for people who grew up in the different cities: Salt Lake City and San
Jose have populations as economically mobile as those of Denmark and its
neighbors, while mobility is far lower in other places, including some in the
South and the upper Midwest, lower even than in any developed nation for which
such figures have been published. New
York and Boston rank sixth in rankings of the 50 largest metropolitan areas
while Charlotte, NC, ranks 50th.
These differences immediately beg the question: what on
earth accounts for these positions? Aren't
New York and Boston places where classes are really well defined? and the
opposite for Midwest and Southern locales?
So Chetty and Saez and their associates looked at some characteristics
of the cities that might help explain.
Social Structures, Not Economic Ones Make
the Main Differences
Surprisingly, at least to us, a city's economy has had
little to do with the economic mobility of its residents. The mix of industries and the concentration
of managerial and professional occupations had such weak relationships with
mobility measures that the authors didn't even bother listing any numbers about
them. There are just loose correlations
with overall labor force participation and the role of manufacturing. Two economic items do have noticeable
effects, existing income inequality and the teen-age labor force. The existing income distribution seems
logical as a force for or against mobility.
We'll comment further below on the teen-age workforce.
Otherwise, the really significant forces pushing on mobility
are social ones. And they come into play
early in people's lives, not just when they are graduating school and doing
entry-level career planning.
1.
Race. Areas with large shares
of African-Americans have weaker mobility.
Please note that this is a numerical fact, not a subjective comment. Also, it reflects more than skin color, since
whites in those regions also have weaker mobility than in other areas. Greater degrees of segregation of races and
of groupings of affluent and impoverished populations also exacerbate mobility.
2.
K-12 school systems.
Elementary school test scores and the high school drop-out rate are
highly significant. Teacher-student
ratios and spending per student in a city have only a mild impact. The point this suggests is that it's the
results of primary education, not just inputs to education that are
important. Also, while college
attendance has an obvious and structural influence, the presence of colleges
right in a given city doesn't noticeably help or hinder mobility in that city.
3.
Social capital. This jargony
term calls attention to people's participation in society besides their jobs. Do they vote?
Do they return Census forms? Do
they belong to local civic associations?
These items constitute a social capital index. Important separately in its own right, do
people belong to religious groups?
4.
Family structure. The factor
with the closest relationship to economic mobility is family structure. Specifically, children born to single mothers
face the biggest odds against moving ahead later in their own lives. In general, on the contrasting side, cities
with the largest proportions of parents who are married and with the lowest
divorce rates provide more support to children moving ahead.
These social factors, education, socialization and family
structure, all impact young people. Again,
that's "young" people, in childhood and the teen years. As we noted above, teen-age labor force
participation is also important in helping set people up to move ahead into and
through adulthood. Learning work skills,
routines and disciplines gives a measurable boost toward a better future as
well as an introduction to financial responsibility. There is an additional aspect to the
segregation issue, and that is commuting distance to work. Cities with a preponderance of short commutes
are more supportive of mobility. A
concentration of corporate parks in suburbs or the need to take a train and a
bus to work put added barriers in the way of lower income families.
Ideas about Policies That Might Help
The factors that show as most closely related to mobility
point to some public policies that might be more supportive. Working with single mothers and encouragement
of marriage would help. The need for
strong public education comes up time and time again, and the statistical
results we cite here add to that emphasis; in particular, "teaching to the
test" would seem to be effective as well as encouraging teen-agers to stay
in school and also to get jobs. Perhaps
many city governments have policies that might shorten commutes by encouraging businesses
to install facilities in low-income neighborhoods, but more could clearly be
done. Making commuting easier also
argues for upgrading transportation systems and city infrastructure.
We knew there was no simple answer to inequality issues, but
some of the inputs we learned about here are not necessarily the ones we'd have
thought of first. Supposedly simple
approaches, such as raising taxes on the rich may help on the surface, but
those funds shouldn't automatically just be distributed through low-income
family welfare programs. Instead, more structural qualitative policies
and attitudes are needed for the long-run changes and real shifts in inequality
relationships that are desired. Not all
of this comes from governments. Even, we
see, churches have an identifiable role as they support the dignity of every
human being, promote community participation by low-income people and mix low,
middle and upper income people in common settings and organizations.
_____________________
[2] Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, Emmanuel
Saez and Nicholas Turner. "Is the
United States Still a Land of Opportunity?
Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility". National Bureau of Economic Research Working
Paper 19844, January 2014. Available
without cost on http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org.
[4] Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline and
Emmanuel Saez. "Where Is the Land
of Opportunity? The Geography of
Intergenerational Mobility in the US".
National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 19843, January
2014. Available without cost on http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org. Ratios and numerical factors for the cities covered
in this study are available for download without charge from the website, as
the authors encourage further analysis by anyone interested in these issues.
Other recent discussions of this material:
and
Labels: American Society, Economy, Government Policies
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