Two Cheers for Tom Lantos
He’d get three if he’d said it three years ago, and four if he offered a few more specifics, but Tom Lantos (D, Cal.) sounds at least as tough here as Jim Leach (R, Ia.) might have:
The Bush administration’s policy toward North Korea has failed and a new approach must be tried, including punishing the North’s leaders and sending a U.S. envoy to Pyongyang for talks, a key Democrat said on Wednesday.
Rep. Tom Lantos of California, who is expected to head the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee when Democrats take over Congress in January, said North Korean leaders, through sanctions, “must feel personal pain” for testing a nuclear weapon last month.
But tough steps against North Korea are not a substitute for an effective new approach toward Pyongyang and heightened diplomacy, including new bilateral overtures must be part of a new bold approach, he told a hearing.
Lantos also said that U.S. envoy Chris Hill must be dispatched to the next round of six-country talks “with the authority to negotiate a comprehensive and verifiable deal” and should stop over in Pyongyang “to demonstrate our peaceful interests.”
My first thought was that we could simultaneously send an envoy and inflict personal anguish on Kim Jong Il by sending Ted Turner back there.
My second thought was that this is a perfect illustration of why the messenger is such an important part of the message. Terms like “comprehensive approach” and “bilateral overtures” would scare the hell out of me if they came from a man made of squishier stuff than Tom Lantos. That’s how I’d assess a good share of the next Senate Foreign Relations Committee, by the way: Biden, Kennedy, Cardin, Kerry, Lugar, and Dodd, to name a few. Adding their names to the goulash means you tend to taste less paprika.
But Lantos, a co-sponsor of the North Korean Human Rights Act and the ADVANCE Democracy Act, quacks like a classically liberal Scoop Jackson Democrat. He is the single individual most responsible for getting all of the House Dems to either vote in favor of the NKHRA, or at least not vote against it. As a direct consequence, the bill passed unanimously. If the Tom Lantos policy would back its velvet glove with an iron fist, I really don’t care if we talk bilaterally (read: stab South Korea and China in the back; it’s not as if they don’t do the same to us at every opportunity, defy two U.N. resolutions, and then have the balls to call us unilateralists). As long as bilateral talks don’t turn into a euphemism for America paying up while everyone else squirms away, they’d be fine. Unfortunately, I’m not sure even Tom Lantos could prevent bilateral talks from becoming just that. Would the Lantos policy mean that we forget human rights? Had identical words come from the insufferable, sonorous maw of John Feckless Kerry, I’d say yes. From Tom Lantos, I think not.
(I was less impressed with Lantos in September, when he spoke in forceful opposition to reimposing trade sanctions. As Amb. Chris Hill reminded him, we had lifted those sanctions to thank the North for its missile moratorium — the one it violated last July.)
As with Iraq, if the Dems ever specify exactly what pressures, incentives, and conditions they’d add or subtract from the current policy, I reckon we’d see some interesting policy differences among Democrats in the House and in the Senate. “Comprehensive approach?” I guess that depends on just how comprehensive we’re all willing to be, doesn’t it? It could pave the road to Dane Geld, and then again, it could also be a death trap for the North Koreans. They’re never shy about adding new demands, so why not add a few of our own? A few come to mind: the elimination of chemical and biological weapons, conventional forces reduction, Red Cross inspections at the concentration camps, food and medical care for those who truly need it. For those intaglio printing presses and their entire supply of cotton-linen paper, we could relax financial measures. For real progress on human rights, they could get trade. For transparency and monitoring, they’d get food aid. The key is, it all has to be transparent, verifiable, and reciprocal. We have to be serious enough about reciprocity and verification to go back in and clamp down hard if the North Koreans cheat (since they always do). We’d have to be hard-headed enough to know when we were being jerked around (which we should have known by 1992). Hey, we might even see fit to withdraw U.S. ground forces from South Korea if the North Koreans would cut up a few thousand artillery tubes (I wonder if the South Koreans would call an offer like that … unilateralist?).
As great as this whole reciprocity thing sounds, of course, none of it gets beyond a wispy diplomatic hypothesis if the North Koreans aren’t serious about making any concessions. And they aren’t.
I have a couple of other gripes: (1) I wish Lantos had said this in 2003, when the Bush administration was a year into a prolonged factional paralysis, and (2) too few of Lantos’s co-partisans have the spine to scare the North Koreans into negotiating in good faith. As for the first concern, the Bush administration’s paralysis appears to have finally given way to something leading in a meaningful direction in August 2005, with the Smoking Dragon arrests, the Banco Delta sanctions that followed, and further efforts by Treasury to pursue North Korea’s illicit funds. Those sanctions seem to be biting hard now, meaning that our diplomacy is finally backed with some steel. Even the six-party format — of which I’ve been skeptical — seems to have paid off: would China and Russia have voted for U.N. Resolutions 1695 and 1718 if they hadn’t been shackled next to North Korea’s obnoxious excuse for diplomacy? I doubt it. Lantos isn’t suggesting that we abandon multilateralism (right?), but adding bilateral talks takes a lot of the relevance out of multilateral talks. He’s saying that we need to make Kim Jong Il feel personal pain, but that’s one area where the Bush Administration can finally claim some success. What other pain would Lantos add to this?
Take for granted that Lantos is doing what all politicians do — score some points against the other team. They all do that. What, specifically, is the part of Bush’s policy that has failed? Answer: the part I wish Lantos had complained about when Bush’s policy really was adrift (and when Clinton’s policy, for that matter, did far worse). It’s harder to guess what Lantos would do differently, since he has told us so little. In reality, I’m not sure what specific changes he could or would make. Still, at least the rhetoric, in contrast to the Clinton Administration’s history, doesn’t give Kim Jong Il reason to think he’ll get a better deal from the Dems. That is a good thing by itself.
of course he sounded tough he just got elected
the dems will probably head back towards talking and dealing with NK and after 6-7 years they will still be the same lunatic led bucnh we are used to right now
clinton’s policy failed miserably
This Democrat thinks that its fairly pointless to negotiate with the North Koreans about anything and that they will just do what they want to do no matter what. So we should do what we want to do which IMO, should not be military attacks, BUT we should do everything in our power to crack open the information blockade peacefully, with knowledge of the outside, which is hard for the South Koreans or Chinese to attack in a propaganda sense. Ideally, whatever we do should be things that are actually helpful to individual North Koreans showing the lie to the whole government smear campaign about the West. The chances of something like this being successful are much higher than anything else.
Seriously.. You notice how the first ‘favor’ the North Koreans have asked for several times recently was an end to the billboards blaring South Korean news over the border.. (it made it so they couldn’t use those miles that were in earshot..) etc..
I have thought again and again about Josh’s great idea of several years ago of simply buying a bunch of children’s souvenir balloons with pictures (photographs) of Seoul printed on them and poking one or two pinholes in them and sending them across the border when the wind was right, in massive quantities.
Things like that, which seem so simple to us, make life difficult for the KJI regime because they put the lie to the entire pack of crap that he and his father have been feeding North Koreans for 60 years..
By the way, a move is underoot to institute things in the US that strongly resemble historical elements of NK’s ‘policies’
Read the information at
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004980.php
and let me know what you think of that. BTW, its one of the very first things that Kim Il Sung did after seizing power in the North.. Stalin and Mao did it too. Those who travel are suspects to all totalitarian regimes. They fear outside information.
Chris, Amen!
At this point, we’ve shown that all sorts of different sticks and carrots don’t work with DPRK. There is only one stick left. I mean, a simple shortwave radio cost about $30 dollars here in the US. You figure the manufacturing cost for a real simple crappy one would be what? $10 bucks? But assuming that it is $20 bucks. multimply that by one million, we get $20,000,000 dollars. You make this thing and you use a very North Korean tactic of fixing the tune signal so it cannot get chinese or russian signals. You do this so that the North Koreans don’t resell it in the international market. For funness sake, you put a picuture of Kim Jong Il, put the words “Songgun Radio” put a DPRK flag on it. Make sure it has a nice handcrank so no batteries are neccessary. Send a batch to China and float it down the river on rafts. Voila~ You don’t even need balloons. Chinese officials will probably try to stop you so the distribution cost will be a lot higher, needing to bribe the proper people. The total cost? Who knows, but it can’t be more than $100 million dollars. That would be chump change to someone like George Soros (who is of course a democrat) and who is very much into refugee issues and open society initiative stuff.
Even assuming half the shipments get intercepted by nefarious forces or half remain in inventory, that’s still half a billion radios in DPRK. Not too shabby for a mere .1 billion dollar investment. And it will certainly do a heck of a lot more than a .1 billion dollar investment in Gaesung or in buying laser guided munitions.
Not a believer of the “golden age of radio”? You can probably manufacture a small simple VCD player for $20 bucks. Do the same. Fiddle around with it to make it chinese unfriendly. send it down the barge. You get the picture.
It’s not too hard. It should really happen. Human rights has to include free access to information. For goodness sake, we all talk about starving people, but I feel even bad for the people who are eating and have to watch those godawful north korean films and tv dramas.
woops my math is horrible.
i wrote, ” that’s still half a billion radios in DPRK. ” i meant, half a million.
I am sure that the cost for solar powered radios that could receive international broadcass could be under $5 if mass produced.. hell, people could buy up odd lots of am radios and convert them so that they could use external wire antennas.. anyway, the point is that information is all around them and us and that their millieu control would be prohibitively expensive to maintain if we just pushed the envelope for them a little bit, in a friendly way.. To illustrate the real situation to everybody. the North Koreans would thank us for it.
I think the ‘costs’ of unification are being deliberately exxagerated by people who want the killing to continue.. people (not killing) on all sides..
The North koreans don’t need years of welfare, they do need safety and the ability to band together to help each other make it. The destination does not need to be South Korea. With the depopulation of so many Western countries, there must be places that need them.. the alternative being perfectly good places going completely to waste because nobody lives there anymore..
Shit, if the Japanese could get over the RACISM they could give many North Koreans homes and make up in no small way for the terrible way they treated Koreans in the past.. *sigh* not much of a chance of that happening, though..
What about the part of Russia that is near Korea? Perhaps it is too close for comfort..
BTW, Tom Lantos is a saint in my book.. one of the best friends this issue has in Washington.
He knows the evils of totalitarianism firsthand..
Well, there are two main reasons why our diplomacy with North Korea hasn’t worked. First, the North Koreans lie and cheat, and there isn’t much we can do about that fundamental attitude. Second, the North Koreans don’t fear us, because we didn’t understand that diplomacy with people like these has to be backed by credible threats. I think the effects of sanctions have changed that. So, I think an agreement might be possible, but you will always have the problem of compliance.
So why negotiate? Cosmetic value, mostly. We need to have a policy that’s actually leading somewhere in the background. Severe, regime-threatening pressure is that kind of policy. I hear Lantos threatening to impose that kind of pressure, albeit after Bush has finally gotten around to doing so first. At least that’s some basis to find common ground.
By the way, I like the way you guys think.
There is another thing we could do, which could be a lot cheaper. You buy up a whole bunch of South Korean used newspapers, magazines, and books–the ones basically in the dumpster/used book stores. Then you disseminate them all over the border between China and North Korea around the time of say, 2008 Beijing Olympics so the angry Chinese don’t do too much about it. Some of these books/magazinese/comic books are going to filter into DPRK. This might be better, these things appear more innocuous. It might even be more effective since a picture is more powerful than words. I’ll probably offend a lot of people for saying this, but I’ll say it. If we spread these kind of stuff along with pr0n, then DPRK won’t be able to stop it. DPRK border guards will probably be more than willing to look the other way when we give them issues of huslter. I guess christian groups will have problems with this though.
virtual wonderer said..
>You buy up a whole bunch of South Korean used newspapers, magazines, and books–the ones basically in the dumpster/used book stores….
I personally have a number of objections to this idea and basically they center around the depressing fact that South Korea is not someplace I really hold in such high regard these days, because I think that it is a society under tremendous stress, for different reasons than North Korea. Basically, its an example of what happens when you let capitalism run completely over people’s rights. Now may of you might think that I am some kind of subversive for suggesting this, but I think that the leadership of South Korea has a huge responsibility to improve the living standards of their people now that South Korea, such a small country has the sixth largest economy in the world. But instead, they are letting the country become incredibly stratified. I fear that the same thing is happening in the US and that a lot of people are being pushed to the brink, economically. And thats wrong. Not as life threatening as the situations in North Korea – yet, but the future doesn’t look bright without some kinds of global realizations and changes, for either of us. These huge corporations and interests that care only for making money need to be reigned in. There and here, for all of our common good.
For example, I read a series of stories in the San Francisco media recently about how many young Korean girls who were in serios debt to credit card companies (and evidently, there, debt is held by families, so a girl’s debt can make her FAMILY lose their home..) have been sold into sex slavery and sent to brothels in the US to work off ‘their debt’. They profiled the sex industry in South Korea, which apparently is huge, and interviewed a lot of people there as well as here.. (where some of the gorls end up) The picture was of a place where people’s survival is very tenuous.. and the pressure to consume is also very high.. making those who don’t have money feel very alone.. This kind of situation is dangerous.. ultimately, leading to a lot of problems.. We don’t want that to happen here.. South Korea is not a free market paradise to be emulated.. Out of respect to the still-somewhat-innocent-and-unomplicated side of many North Koreans I would prefer that we not rub their faces in that side of their now ‘affluent’ neighbor..
OTOH, there is no denying that the South Korean model does work much better than the North Korean one, there is no comparison.. But its also a brutal economic environment for the unprepared..as China is, if not worse..
Chris, I don’t think you’ve been to South Korea, have you? If you went, I don’t think you’d find it to me much more stratified than most other industrialized nations.
Ironically, the most stratified society I’ve ever seen was Vietnam, where the poor live in shantytowns built over polluted rivers or grass shacks, and where the rich live in gigantic new mansions.
There is no such thing as a society where wealth is distributed equally. There are only societies that allow people to accumulate wealth with a relatively lesser fear that the state will confiscate it.
Chris, We’ve both been there. I’m thankful that I was able to climb out of that because our state’s confiscatory policies weren’t nearly as stultifying as in other economies, where poverty is much harder to escape, and where confiscated wealth inevitably tends to enrich civil servants the most.
The problems you cite above could all be solved by the marketplace: people can switch to cheaper phone service, look for jobs with better health benefits, or seek out cheaper HMO’s. The article, without specifically saying so, plaintively pleads for confiscation and redistribution, which has never worked anywhere, ever.
In this society, it’s possible for the poorest to rise to the top. That’s also possible in Sweden, France, and the Netherlands, but far less likely. What’s more, those countries all have their own underclasses, too (recall the riots among African and Arab youths in France last year). The sad fact is that some people are poor because they make bad decisions, lack impulse control, or have more fundamental flaws of character. Some people will be poor in any economy. Society should focus on helping those who are physically or mentally handicapped, and particularly on removing impediments that hold back those who have the talent and potential to rise out of poverty and enrich everyone else.
Europe had taken the incentive out of creativity and hard work; hence, they have a terrible brain drain. Their smartest, most productive people are coming to America.
Josh,
I wish you were right, but unfortunately, social mobility in the US as defined by the ability of poor people to pull themselves out of their poverty by hard work is lower than at any time since the pre WWII era. Many many studies have examned this phenomena and the consensus is that upward mobility in the US, especially for non-immigrants, has frozen. Many studies actually indicate social mobility is now worstening and is now actually worse than many other developed nations, including many in Western Europe.
There is a good summary of quite a few of these studies in the Economist article “Meritocracy in America Ever higher society, ever harder to ascend”
Dec 29th 2004 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
at http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3518560
Here is a (50% size) computer-generated summarization (condensation) of that article – (I’d read the original article if you have time, this summary was generated by a machine)
___cut here_____
“Whatever
happened to the belief that any American could get to the top?”
“To be sure, America has often betrayed its fine ideals. The Founding Fathers did not admit women or blacks to their meritocratic republic. The country’s elites have repeatedly flirted with the aristocratic principle, whether among the brahmins of Boston or, more flagrantly, the rural ruling class in the South. Yet America has repeatedly succeeded in living up to its best self, and today most Americans believe that their country still does a reasonable job of providing opportunities for everybody, including blacks and women. In Europe, majorities of people in every country except Britain, the Czech Republic and Slovakia believe that forces beyond their personal control determine their success. In America only 32% take such a fatalistic view.
But are they right? A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s.
But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace: would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap. The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.
The past couple of decades have seen a huge increase in inequality in America. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank, argues that between 1979 and 2000 the real income of households in the lowest fifth (the bottom 20% of earners) grew by 6.4%, while that of households in the top fifth grew by 70%. The family income of the top 1% grew by 184%—and that of the top 0.1% or 0.01% grew even faster. Back in 1979 the average income of the top 1% was 133 times that of the bottom 20%; by 2000 the income of the top 1% had risen to 189 times that of the bottom fifth.
Thirty years ago the average real annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives was $1.3m: 39 times the pay of the average worker. Today it is $37.5m: over 1,000 times the pay of the average worker. In 2001 the top 1% of households earned 20% of all income and held 33.4% of all net worth. Not since pre-Depression days has the top 1% taken such a big whack.
Most Americans see nothing wrong with inequality of income so long as it comes with plenty of social mobility: it is simply the price paid for a dynamic economy. But the new rise in inequality does not seem to have come with a commensurate rise in mobility. There may even have been a fall.
The most vivid evidence of social sclerosis comes from politics. A country where every child is supposed to be able to dream of becoming president is beginning to produce a self-perpetuating political elite. George Bush is the son of a president, the grandson of a senator, and the sprig of America’s business aristocracy. John Kerry, thanks to a rich wife, is the richest man in a Senate full of plutocrats. He is also a Boston brahmin, educated at St Paul’s, a posh private school, and Yale—where, like the Bushes, he belonged to the ultra-select Skull and Bones society.
Mr Kerry’s predecessor as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, Al Gore, was the son of a senator. Mr Gore, too, was educated at a posh private school, St Albans, and then at Harvard. And Mr Kerry’s main challenger from the left of his party? Howard Brush Dean was the product of the same blue-blooded world of private schools and unchanging middle names as Mr Bush (one of Mr Bush’s grandmothers was even a bridesmaid to one of Mr Dean’s). Mr Dean grew up in the Hamptons and on New York’s Park Avenue.
The most remarkable feature of the continuing power of America’s elite—and its growing grip on the political system—is how little comment it arouses. Britain would be in high dudgeon if its party leaders all came from Eton and Harrow. Perhaps one reason why the rise of caste politics raises so little comment is that something similar is happening throughout American society. Everywhere you look in modern America—in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts—you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain, with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening and a gap widening between the people who make the decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of ordinary working stiffs.
All this may sound a bit impressionistic. But more and more evidence from social scientists suggests that American society is much “stickier†than most Americans assume. Some researchers claim that social mobility is actually declining. A classic social survey in 1978 found that 23% of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population (as ranked by social and economic status) had made it into the top fifth. Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues recently decided to update the study. They compared the incomes of 2,749 father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998 and found that few sons had moved up the class ladder. Nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers in 1979. The biggest increase in mobility had been at the top of society, with affluent sons moving upwards more often than their fathers had. They found that only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter had made it to the top quarter.
The Economic Policy Institute also argues that social mobility has declined since the 1970s. In the 1990s 36% of those who started in the second-poorest 20% stayed put, compared with 28% in the 1970s and 32% in the 1980s. In the 1970s 12% of the population moved from the bottom fifth to either the fourth or the top fifth. In the 1980s and 1990s the figures shrank to below 11% for both decades. The figure for those who stayed in the top fifth increased slightly but steadily over the three decades, reinforcing the sense of diminished social mobility.
Not all social scientists accept the conclusion that mobility is declining. Gary Solon, of the University of Michigan, argues that there is no evidence of any change in social-mobility rates, down or up. But, at the least, most people agree that the dramatic increase in income inequality over the past two decades has not been accompanied by an equally dramatic increase in social mobility.
Take the study carried out by Thomas Hertz, an economist at American University in Washington, DC, who studied a representative sample of 6,273 American families (both black and white) over 32 years or two generations. He found that 42% of those born into the poorest fifth ended up where they started—at the bottom. Another 24% moved up slightly to the next-to-bottom group. Only 6% made it to the top fifth. Upward mobility was particularly low for black families. On the other hand, 37% of those born into the top fifth remained there, whereas barely 7% of those born into the top 20% ended up in the bottom fifth. A person born into the top fifth is over five times as likely to end up at the top as a person born into the bottom fifth.
Jonathan Fisher and David Johnson, two economists at the Bureau of Labour Statistics, looked at inequality and social mobility using measures of both income and consumption. They found that mobility “slightly decreased†in the 1990s. In 1984-90, 56% and 54% of households changed their rankings in terms of income and consumption respectively. In 1994-99, only 52% and 49% changed their rankings.
Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysed family incomes over three decades. They found that 40% of families remained stuck in the same income bracket in the 1990s, compared with 37% of families in the 1980s and 36% in the 1970s. Aaron Bernstein of Business Week points out that, even though the 1990s boom lifted pay rates for low-earners, it did not help them to get better jobs.
There is also growing evidence that America is less socially mobile than many other rich countries. Mr Solon finds that the correlation between the incomes of fathers and sons is higher in the United States than in Germany, Sweden, Finland or Canada. Such cross-national comparisons are rife with problems: different studies use different methods and different definitions of social status. But Americans are clearly mistaken if they believe they live in the world’s most mobile society.
This is not the first time that America has looked as if it was about to succumb to what might be termed the British temptation. America witnessed a similar widening of the income gap in the Gilded Age. It also witnessed the formation of a British-style ruling class. The robber barons of the late 19th century sent their children to private boarding schools and made sure that they married the daughters of the old elite, preferably from across the Atlantic. Politics fell into the hands of the members of a limited circle—so much so that the Senate was known as the millionaires’ club.
Yet the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a concerted attempt to prevent America from degenerating into a class-based society. Progressive politicians improved state education. Philanthropists—many of them the robber barons reborn in new guise—tried to provide ladders to help the lads-o’-parts (Andrew Carnegie poured millions into free libraries). Such reforms were motivated partly out of a desire to do good works and partly out of a real fear of the implications of class-based society. Teddy Roosevelt advocated an inheritance tax because he thought that huge inherited fortunes would ruin the character of the republic. James Conant, the president of Harvard in 1933-53, advocated radical educational reform—particularly the transformation of his own university into a meritocracy—in order to prevent America from producing an aristocracy.
The evils that Roosevelt and Conant worried about are clearly beginning to reappear. But so far there are few signs of a reform movement. Why not?
The main reason may be a paradoxical one: because the meritocratic revolution of the first half of the 20th century has been at least half successful. Members of the American elite live in an intensely competitive universe. As children, they are ferried from piano lessons to ballet lessons to early-reading classes. As adolescents, they cram in as much after-school coaching as possible. As students, they compete to get into the best graduate schools. As young professionals, they burn the midnight oil for their employers. And, as parents, they agonise about getting their children into the best universities. It is hard for such people to imagine that America is anything but a meritocracy: their lives are a perpetual competition. Yet it is a competition among people very much like themselves—the offspring of a tiny slither of society—rather than among the full range of talents that the country has to offer.
The second reason is that America’s engines of upward mobility are no longer working as effectively as they once were. The most obvious example lies in the education system. Upward mobility is increasingly determined by education. The income of people with just a high-school diploma was flat in 1975-99, whereas that of people with a bachelor’s degree rose substantially, and that of people with advanced degrees rocketed.
The education system is increasingly stratified by social class, and poor children have a double disadvantage. They attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries (school finances are largely determined by local property taxes). And they have to deal with the legacy of what Michael Barone, a conservative commentator, has labelled “soft Americaâ€. Soft America is allergic to introducing accountability and measurement in education, particularly if it takes the form of merit pay for successful teachers or rewards for outstanding pupils. Dumbed-down schools are particularly harmful to poor children, who are unlikely to be able to compensate for them at home.
America’s great universities are increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities. Poorer students are at a huge disadvantage, both when they try to get in and, if they are successful, in their ability to make the most of what is on offer. This disadvantage is most marked in the elite colleges that hold the keys to the best jobs. Three-quarters of the students at the country’s top 146 colleges come from the richest socio-economic fourth, compared with just 3% who come from the poorest fourth (the median family income at Harvard, for example, is $150,000). This means that, at an elite university, you are 25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor one.
One reason for this is government money. The main federal programme supporting poorer students is the Pell grant: 90% of such grants go to families with incomes below $41,000. But the federal government has been shifting resources from Pell grants to other forms of aid to higher education. Student loans are unrelated to family resources. Federal tax breaks for higher education benefit the rich. State subsidies for higher education benefit rich and poor alike. At the same time, colleges are increasingly using financial aid to attract talented students away from competitors rather than to help the poor.
Another reason may be “affirmative actionâ€â€”programmes designed to help members of racial minorities. These are increasingly used by elite universities, in the belief that race is a reasonable proxy for social disadvantage, which it may not be. Flawed as it may be, however, this kind of affirmative action is much less pernicious than another practised by many universities: “legacy preferencesâ€, a programme for the children of alumni—as if privileged children were not already doing well enough out of the education system.
In most Ivy League institutions, the eight supposedly most select universities of the north-east, “legacies†make up between 10% and 15% of every class. At Harvard they are over three times more likely to be admitted than others. The students in America’s places of higher education are increasingly becoming an oligarchy tempered by racial preferences. This is sad in itself, but even sadder when you consider the extraordinary role that the same universities—particularly Conant’s Harvard—played in promoting meritocracy in the first half of the 20th century.
America’s great companies are also becoming less successful agents of upward mobility. The years from 1880 to 1960 were a period of great corporate behemoths. These produced a new class of Americans—professional managers. They built elaborate internal hierarchies, and also accepted their responsibilities to both their workers and their local communities. But since the 1970s the pressure of competition has forced these behemoths to become much leaner—to reduce their layers, contract out some activities, and shift from full-time to part-time employees. It has became harder for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchy by dint of hard work and self-improvement. And it has also become harder for managers to keep their jobs in a single company.
There are a few shafts of sun on the horizon. George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act tries to use a mixture of tests and punishments for lousy schools to improve the performance of minority children. Senator Edward Kennedy bangs the drum against legacy preferences. But the bad news outdoes the good. The Republicans, by getting rid of inheritance tax, seem hell-bent on ignoring Teddy Roosevelt’s warnings about the dangers of a hereditary aristocracy. The Democrats are more interested in preferment for minorities than building ladders of opportunity for all.
In his classic “The Promise of American Lifeâ€, Herbert Croly noted that “a democracy, not less than a monarchy or an aristocracy, must recognise political, economic, and social distinctions, but it must also withdraw its consent whenever these discriminations show any tendency to excessive endurance.†So far Americans have been fairly tolerant of economic distinctions. But that tolerance may not last for ever, if the current trend towards “excessive endurance†is not reversed.”
OK, but would you mind please simply pasting in links instead of entire articles? You’re gonna get me sued! 🙂
I’m sorry Josh – Please please delete the article text – I’m really sorry!
The article is a good one though.
And The Economist is not exactly a left wing magazine..
I meant the content after the URL, thank you!