Instead they toiled in what the sociologist Sharon Hays calls “intensive mothering,” exhaustively enriching their children’s lives by virtually every measure, then advocating for them anxiously and sometimes ruthlessly in the linked high-stakes games of social jockeying and school admissions.
.. I was thunderstruck when I heard mention of a “bonus” over coffee. Later I overheard someone who didn’t work say she would buy a table at an event once her bonus was set. A woman with a business degree but no job mentioned waiting for her “year-end” to shop for clothing. Further probing revealed that the annual wife bonus was not an uncommon practice in this tribe.
A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a “good” school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.
What the Debate on Inequality Is Missing
Professor Stiglitz is particularly incensed by the Obama administration’s attempt to include investment pacts in trade agreements it is negotiating with Asia and Europe, which would allow multinationals to sue governments for compensation if regulation hurts their profits.
.. Perhaps it is true, Professor Hsu concedes, that inequality will grow relentlessly because the rate of return to the capital of the rich is higher than the rate of economic growth, as Mr. Piketty proposed.
Still, he notes, “Piketty, his supporters and his critics are all missing a hugepiece of the puzzle: the role of law in distributing wealth.” Subsidies, tax treatment, legal protection and other mechanisms conspire to aid the wealthy while often serving to damp economic gains.
William Julius Wilson: Social Decline Caused by Disappearance of Good Jobs
life expectancy among less educated whites has been falling at rates reminiscent of the collapse of life expectancy in post-Communist Russia.
.. The great sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago that widely-decried social changes among blacks, like the decline of traditional families, were actually caused by the disappearance of well-paying jobs in inner cities. His argument contained an implicit prediction: if other racial groups were to face a similar loss of job opportunity, their behavior would change in similar ways.
.. And it’s also disheartening to see commentators still purveying another debunked myth, that we’ve spent vast sums fighting poverty to no avail (because of values, you see.)
American Dream? Or Mirage?
However, when people were asked to explicitly state how high up the economic ladder they felt, after accounting for their actual economic standing, the reverse pattern emerged: The higher up people said they were, the more they overestimated the likelihood of upward mobility.