General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWinner-take-all economy enriched those at the very top, & lightened their tax burden.
"Historically, the United States has enjoyed higher social mobility than Europe, and both left and right have identified this economic openness as an essential source of the nations economic vigor. But several recent studies have shown that in America today it is harder to escape the social class of your birth than it is in Europe. The Canadian economist Miles Corak has found that as income inequality increases, social mobility falls a phenomenon Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has called the Great Gatsby Curve.
Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new Serrata. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enrolled their daughters in an exclusive private school; Ive done the same with mine.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, I interviewed Ruth Simmons, then the president of Brown. She was the first African-American to lead an Ivy League university and has served on the board of Goldman Sachs. Dr. Simmons, a Harvard-trained literature scholar, worked hard to make Brown more accessible to poor students, but when I asked whether it was time to abolish legacy admissions, the Ivy Leagues own Book of Gold, she shrugged me off with a laugh: No, I have a granddaughter. Its not time yet.
Americas Serrata also takes a more explicit form: the tilting of the economic rules in favor of those at the top. The crony capitalism of todays oligarchs is far subtler than Venices. It works in two main ways."
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/opinion/sunday/the-self-destruction-of-the-1-percent.html?pagewanted=all
Many of the 99% are experiencing the Great Gatsby curve...
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(12,769 posts)midnight
(26,624 posts)Live and Learn
(12,769 posts)Last edited Fri Oct 19, 2012, 06:08 PM - Edit history (1)
But when I learned that Bush had a degree from both Yale and Harvard, they lost my respecy completely. Ivy league degrees mean very little in my eyes at least.