the top quintile of earners—those making more than roughly $112,000 a year—have been big beneficiaries of the country’s growth. To make matters worse, this group of Americans engages in a variety of practices that don’t just help their families, but harm the other 80 percent of Americans.
.. if we are serious about narrowing the gap between ‘the rich’ and everybody else, we need a broader conception of what it means to be rich.
the upper-middle class has pulled away from the middle class and the poor on five dimensions:
- income and wealth,
- educational attainment,
- family structure,
- geography, and
- health and longevity
.. They dominate the country’s top colleges, sequester themselves in wealthy neighborhoods with excellent public schools and public services, and enjoy healthy bodies and long lives.
They then pass those advantages onto their children, with parents placing a “glass floor” under their kids.
- They ensure they grow up in nice zip codes,
- provide social connections that make a difference when entering the labor force,
- help with internships,
- aid with tuition and home-buying, and
- schmooze with college admissions officers.
All the while, they support policies and practices that protect their economic position and prevent poorer kids from climbing the income ladder:
- legacy admissions,
- the preferential tax treatment of investment income,
- 529 college savings plans,
- exclusionary zoning,
- occupational licensing, and
- restrictions on the immigration of white-collar professionals.
.. As a result, America is becoming a class-based society, more like fin-de-siècle England than most would care to admit, Reeves argues. Higher income kids stay up at the sticky top of the income distribution. Lower income kids stay down at the bottom. The one percent have well and truly trounced the 99 percent, but the 20 percent have done their part to immiserate the 80 percent, as well
Reeves offers a host of policy changes that might make a considerable difference:
- better access to contraception,
- increasing building in cities and suburbs,
- barring legacy admissions to colleges,
- curbing tax expenditures that benefit families with big homes and capital gains.
.. Expanding opportunity and improving fairness would require the upper-middle class to vote for higher taxes, to let others move in, and to share in the wealth.
.. Prying Harvard admission letters and the mortgage interest deductions out of the hands of bureaucrats in Bethesda, sales executives in Minnetonka, and lawyers in Louisville is not going to be easy.
Our Miserable 21st Century
From work to income to health to social mobility, the year 2000 marked the beginning of what has become a distressing era for the United States
the 2016 election was a sort of shock therapy for Americans living within what Charles Murray famously termed “the bubble” (the protective barrier of prosperity and self-selected associations that increasingly shield our best and brightest from contact with the rest of their society).
.. one recent New York Times business-section article cluelessly insisted before the inauguration, that “Mr. Trump will inherit an economy that is fundamentally solid.” But this is patent nonsense. By now it should be painfully obvious that the U.S. economy has been in the grip of deep dysfunction since the dawn of the new century.
.. We are witnessing an ominous and growing divergence between three trends that should ordinarily move in tandem: wealth, output, and employment.
Depending upon which of these three indicators you choose, America looks to be heading up, down, or more or less nowhere.
.. Between early 2000 and late 2016, the estimated net worth of American households and nonprofit institutions more than doubled, from $44 trillion to $90 trillion. (SEE FIGURE 1.)
.. for every unemployed American man between 25 and 55 years of age, there are another three who are neither working nor looking for work.
.. After World War II, work rates for prime women surged, and continued to rise—until the year 2000. Since then, they too have declined. Current work rates for prime-age women are back to where they were a generation ago, in the late 1980s.
.. In our era of no more than indifferent economic growth, 21st–century America has somehow managed to produce markedly more wealth for its wealthholders even as it provided markedly less work for its workers. And trends for paid hours of work look even worse than the work rates themselves.
.. On the nonmaterial front, it is likewise clear that many things in our society are going wrong and yet seem beyond our powers to correct.
.. Which “Cold War babies” among us would have predicted we’d live to see the day when life expectancy in East Germany was higher than in the United States, as is the case today?
.. Health has been deteriorating for a significant swath of white America in our new century, thanks in large part to drug and alcohol abuse. All this sounds a little too close for comfort to the story of modern Russia, with its devastating vodka- and drug-binging health setbacks.
.. journalist Sam Quinones notes in passing that “in one three-month period” just a few years ago, according to the Ohio Department of Health, “fully 11 percent of all Ohioans were prescribed opiates.”
.. nearly half of all prime working-age male labor-force dropouts—an army now totaling roughly 7 million men—currently take pain medication on a daily basis.
.. In our mind’s eye we can now picture many millions of un-working men in the prime of life, out of work and not looking for jobs, sitting in front of screens—stoned.
.. But how did so many millions of un-working men, whose incomes are limited, manage en masse to afford a constant supply of pain medication? Oxycontin is not cheap.
.. For a three-dollar Medicaid co-pay, therefore, addicts got pills priced at thousands of dollars, with the difference paid for by U.S. and state taxpayers. A user could turn around and sell those pills, obtained for that three-dollar co-pay, for as much as ten thousand dollars on the street.
.. (21 percent) of all civilian men between 25 and 55 years of age were Medicaid beneficiaries. For prime-age people not in the labor force, the share was over half (53 percent).
.. for un-working Anglos (non-Hispanic white men not in the labor force) of prime working age, the share enrolled in Medicaid was 48 percent.
Of the entire un-working prime-age male Anglo population ..
.. (57 percent) were reportedly collecting disability benefits from one or more government disability program in 2013.
.. researchers estimates that the cohort of current and former felons in America very nearly reached 20 million by the year 2010.
.. The funny thing is, people inside the bubble are forever talking about “economic inequality,” that wonderful seminar construct, and forever virtue-signaling about how personally opposed they are to it. By contrast, “economic insecurity” is akin to a phrase from an unknown language.
.. The abstraction of “inequality” doesn’t matter a lot to ordinary Americans. The reality of economic insecurity does.
Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’
“Now we were quite confident that gut bacteria regulate, and are even required for, the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.”
The scientists believe the bacteria are releasing chemicals that over-activate parts of the brain, leading to damage.
The bacteria can break down fibre into short-chain fatty acids. It is thought an imbalance in these chemicals triggers the immune cells in the brain to cause damage.
.. Dr Patrick Lewis, from the University of Reading, said: “This study really does reinforce the idea that examining what goes on in the stomach of people with Parkinson’s could provide really important insights into what happens in disease, and potentially a new area of biology to target in trying to slow down or halt the changes in the brain.”
Companies and insurers love fitness trackers. Should you?
Health analysts estimate that around 70 percent of the annual $2.6 trillion bill for health care costs in the U.S. are the consequence of potentially changeable human behavior. The avoidable price tag for complications from obesity and diabetes alone adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that lifestyle changes in diet and behavior resulting in the sustained loss of just 10–15 pounds can reduce the risk of getting diabetes by 58 percent.
.. A much-debated study published in Health Affairs in 2013 said the programs may actually “shift costs to workers who can least absorb them” because healthy workers end up getting discounts while sick workers pay the maximum premium.
.. The auto insurance industry has been leading the way on the integration of tracking and insurance for years. Almost every major auto insurance provider now offers discounts for drivers who allow their driving habits to be tracked.
.. Let your teenage son go joyriding in the bad part of town at midnight…. and maybe you lose your discount.
..
The data gathered on your driving habits, suggested Birnbaum, will be detailed enough to suggest whether you are the kind of person who wouldn’t blink if your premium was raised.
“Predictive analytics,” says Birnbaum, crunching the “big data” generated by telematics, will be able infer quite a bit about you from where and when and how you drive — whether, for example, you might be a good candidate for other products, like life insurance. Or whether you might be a bad risk, not because of how you drive, but because of where you live or what your income level is. And then, of course, there’s the inescapable flip side to getting a discount for participation. If you don’t participate, you are effectively paying a higher rate.
.. Peppet also has concerns about whether bottom line considerations will result in pressure from insurers and employers for ever greater levels of participation in these programs. What happens to privacy when “wellness” becomes a condition of your employment? After the drug test, here’s your tracker. Don’t take it off.