Has the land of opportunity be rezoned, poor need not apply?

Parent Cafe
21

<p>sjmom, I believe what you say about upward mobility in the past (what barrons says about it, too.) My wife and I were also able to work our way through college with little (on my behalf) and no (on hers) financial help from our parents, graduating from one of the top Universities in the nation - including a law degree for me - almost debt free and poised to enjoy a financially comfortable life.</p>

<p>But that has changed over the past 25 years. Please follow dstark’s link to Reich’s talk (skip the first 6 and last 20 minutes - note in particular the charts during the first 20 minutes or so.) The things which allowed us to work our way up that ladder don’t apply today the way they did back in our day (and our parent’s day.) Not only is the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the middle class and poor growing, the separation is becoming “stickier” - that is, social and economic mobility is declining. The children of the poor are far likelier to stay poor than in the past; the children of the rich are almost guaranteed to become even wealthier. It’s not a matter of lack of initiative or personal moral fiber as barrons seems to think - the road up is actually a lot steeper than it used to be.</p>

22

<p>There is no question that some people have made it through the gauntlet, my experience like yours is not recent, so I am hesitant to say how it might apply today. We expect some people will continue to be upwardly mobile, and that there would be a greater chance of running into them in a site designed for parents and students interested in accessing higher education. The question isn’t does it happen, but why doesn’t it happen more often and what are the barriers that could be removed or reduced. I still like the concept of lavishly funding public schools. </p>

<p>Barrons, I don’t think my anecdote is real, (I think I heard it on Ed Sullivan) but I am sure some of yours are, and I wouldn’t be surprised if all of them were. Most of the misplaced gifted and talented students I have met were there at parents insistence, not teacher recommendation. I have also worked in a variety of settings where the new employees kept their head low around certain bosses, so it doesn’t surprise me that it can happen in a school. (It is the standing nail that gets hammered!) It does dissapoint me.</p>

<p>In California, it is common for students to leave on extended Christmas breaks to visit family in Mexico, and I have a restraining order against a parent who through me against a car after I asked her to please drive slower in the school parking lot. I have my share of idiot parent stories. I have also reported families to social services resulting in kids being placed in foster homes while the parents anger and violence was addressed . </p>

<p>The extreme situations mentioned are not the norms, but they are indicative of the extraordinary problems that teachers are face in addition to planning, teaching and assessing. Furthermore, they do reflect a lack of understanding and value of education, just as the failure to adequately fund education does.</p>

23

<p>Mobility is still there.
Yup, my stories are very real. I started doing my parent’s taxes when I was around 11 because I was more comfortable with numbers and English than they were so I knew what our income was more than most kids. And I still remember the pungent oder of hot tar. You learn to wear the same clothes every day because that smell does not go away easily and the stains are there for life. You get to meet some “interesting” people in those jobs. It makes you double sure about going to college and graduating. I will say that I was lucky to have a stable two parent home that valued education pretty highly despite having relatively limited educations themselves. We did not miss school unless a doctor was involved.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/walterwilliams/2006/01/04/180969.html[/url]”>http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/walterwilliams/2006/01/04/180969.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

24

<p>“There is no question that some people have made it through the gauntlet, my experience like yours is not recent, so I am hesitant to say how it might apply today.”</p>

<p>There is actually excellent data on social mobility from GA etc., most of it summarized in the new book “Class Matters” by Betsy Leondar-Wright. In a nutshell, there is less social/economic mobility in the U.S. now than at any time in the past 40 years, and well less than most of Europe.</p>

25

<p>Ah, I’d wondered what old Betsy the “economic justice activist” was up to. Wonder what her CC screen name is. She’s gotta be here. I’d also be interested in learning how old Europe, with its flat economic growth, low productivity, and high unemployment provides greater social/economic mobility than the US–perhaps Betsy explains this in one of her famous cartoons. Certainly my French immigrant cousins would disagree with the premise.</p>

<p>

<a href=“Its not us, it's you”>Its not us, it's you;

26

<p>Three kids shot in my school district this Christmas break, youngest 11. Do you want to blame them for not ducking?</p>

27

<p>Walter Williams had an article this week related to social mobility:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/walterwilliams/2006/01/04/180969.html[/url]”>http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/walterwilliams/2006/01/04/180969.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

28

<p>

The author has confused people making more money as they get older with social mobility.</p>

29

<p>The argument is that groups of people are not moving up. As most such moving up occurs as we age and make more money it is accurate to consider it. Are you making the same now as when you were 23? I know I am making 15-20 times what my first professional job paid. In most models economic mobility=social mobility.</p>

30

<p>My grandfather was a factory worker and my grandmother was a secretary. Neither had anything beyond a high school degree, but all four of their children attended college and are reasonably well-off now. Social mobility definitely exists, but the “how much” can be debated.</p>

<p>I thought this site was kind of interesting: <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_01.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_01.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>barrons, I understand what you are saying and it is true. The only problem is that it wildly distorts the data if you incorporate it the way these economists do :slight_smile: . If you look further into the study, it turns out that they use individuals instead of households (which is radically unorthodox, to say the least) and set the lower age limit at 16, which is very low. There is probably a fair number of dog walkers, babysitters, and college students working part-time who are classified as very poor, including those who come from well-to-do households. Even the children of the superrich probably aren’t going to earn megabucks executive positions as their very first jobs, yet some very likely are included in the “rags-to-riches” trend.</p>

31

<p>Here’s a link to an article (with graphs!) which goes over the PSID statistical data from the late 60’s theough 1998:
<a href=“http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/nerr/rr2002/q4/issues.pdf[/url]”>http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/nerr/rr2002/q4/issues.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The data is interesting. To sum up, this is what they found:

I’ll try not to be too redundant:<br>
(1) Some apparent “mobility” arising from analyzing people’s incomes at different stages of their life will always be present in the data - this is “noise”, not significant information.
(2) All the anecdotal sories about social and financial mobility (my own included) are based in the past. I’m sure there are some being created today as well, but the question is: how many? The data (and the higher barriers that now exist) suggests that the percentage of people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps is lower than before. Because it’s harder. In my opinion, that’s a bad thing.</p>

32

<p>Of course the poorest element will always be poor almost by definition. The story is that these are not the same people that were poor 20 years prior. That is important. Yes the top 2% is higher than even in income but what does that really matter to the other 98%? I never aspired to Rockefeller type wealth anyway–that’s unrealistic and not that important anyway.<br>
All I know for sure is that my office hired 4 kids fresh out of college and within a few years all are making six figures well before 30. None of them came from Ivy colleges or rich families. They just work hard. Maybe you have to look a little harder these days bit there are great jobs out there.</p>

33

<p>But they are the same people, Barrons. The study which claimed that 95% of the “poor” moved out of that category over a 15 year period of time used a “low-income” category consisting of

It included me - and I suspect you as well, Barrons. I wasn’t poor, or by any stretch of the imagination destined for poverty - were you? Yet we are the “poor” who “moved out of poverty.” </p>

<p>When you talk about the actual poor, over a 10 year period ending in 1998 over half of the families which started in the lowest quintile remained there. 79% remain in the bottom 2 quintiles - and the average family income of the second quintile is only $25,000 per year - still poor in my book. If you factor out the natural tendency for a family to have somewhat more income as the heads of the family grow older, it appears that there is very little economic mobility at all. </p>

<p>And I disagree that it is unimportant that income and wealth concentration in the wealthiest of the wealthy has become disconnected from the income and wealth growth of the rest of society. Stratified (and ossified) wealth leads to rigid social classes and social disfunction. I don’t aspire to Gatesian wealth either - I just think it’s bad for society for the rich to be that much richer than everyone else. Historically, that has been the case. It will be my kids’ problem, not mine - and as a Dad that is what concerns me.</p>

34

<p>The study mentioned by Kluge includes in the definition of “families” one-person families, but excludes those who have no members below retirement age. This seems pretty ARBITRARY to me. Why is this the best way, or even a reasonable way to analyze the data? If I were to analyze the data for mobility, I would be most interested in what happened to a two-parent family with children (I would suspect that this describes most of the CCers). I would also be interested in other categories of families, but I think they should each be analyzed separately. What has happened to the income “mobility” of a two-parent family? What about a one-parent family? What about a never-married, one-parent family?</p>

<p>If my wife and I were divorced or had never married, we would be TWO families who would each have half as much income (at least for this study, not for FAFSA!). Therefore we would both move down a quintile. In my opinion, this change would have simply been the result of personal CHOICES, not any reasonable measure of the equity or mobility of the US economy. </p>

<p>I would not be surprised if the “mobility” results of this study have more to do with SOCIAL TRENDS than with any valid measure of the US economy. Certainly one of the tragic (at least in my opinion) aspects of poorer families in more recent years is the dramatic increase in the number of unwed mothers. This naturally leads to fewer educational opportunities, lower incomes, etc. At the other end of the income spectrum, another trend is that of more two-income families, and particularly of two-professional-income families. There has been a significant increase in women’s success in the workforce in the past 30 years, which would affect the data. </p>

<p>Could it be that certain CHOICES and BEHAVIORS (such as having children without marriage) are highly correlated with poverty while other CHOICES and BEHAVIORS (such as having two incomes from hard-working professionals) are correlated with achieving high incomes? Thus the “rich getting richer and poor getting poorer” may alternatively be explained by “more people doing what rich people do AND more people doing what poor people do.” The two extremes are both increasing.</p>

<p>While it would likely be difficult for a poor child from a bad neighborhood to obtain an excellent education or to get a good first job out of high school, it is NOT especially difficult for such a child to avoid becoming a parent before marriage (There is a free, simple, available method for guaranteeing this that has been known for thousands of years, and amazingly it works for people in all income quintiles!).</p>

<p>I would not be shocked to discover that poor, unwed mothers have very bleak futures. I am certainly saddened for them, but I think that politicians or others do not do anyone a favor by trying to blame the government for the situation. My advice for young, single people in the lowest quintile who want to become upwardly mobile financially would be as follows: (1) wait until marriage to have children; and (2) stay married.</p>

<p>In my experience, this country still allows dependable, hard-working, conscientious workers and students to achieve almost anything. For example, someone can even make a decent living making completely useless and irrelevant charts that inadequately analyze the US economy.</p>

35

<p>If a person was making $1.25 an hour in 1965 have they really moved up if they are making $10 or so an hour today. If a couple bought a house in 1970 for $50,000 but now the house is worth over $200,000 have they moved up? If you look at who is getting into upper division colleges that doesn’t seem to be reflecting an upward trend for much more than a few individuals. The wealthy on the other hand seem to be doing quite well getting more for themselves.</p>

36

<p>my husbands grandparents had enough to retire and travel despite lack of education.
My husbands parents have enough to retire and travel despite only a high school education.
However will we be able to retire and travel, despite only a high school education? not likely- we are anticipating never being able to retire- because of lack of funding of public schools, we have paid for private and for tutoring to supplant public education.( not like the inlaws or my mother do it anyway- staying in hotels and going on cruises- I am planning on gettin more of a medical background and joining the peace corps- H isn’t too interested- oh well been nice knowing ya :wink: )
We pay more for health care than my parents did, as well as a bigger portion of our income for housing costs, despite living in a smaller older home.
We limited ourselves to 2 kids, instead of 3 or more that many families consisted of 30 years ago, and still times are tough.
We wouldnt’ count as poor though, when looking at Pell grant recipients. We are above the income for free reduced lunch, and above the average median income- still however- D is eligible for need based grants, something that apparently irks some on the boards who feel that grants should be available to all who apply.
Still I wouldn’t go back to teh 50s or 60s heaven forbid- Ithink the information age has made many things available to families who would not have even dreamed about them 30 years ago.</p>

37

<p>Our family of five income in 1970 was around $10,000 gross. That was with two working adults. I don’t know what that means today but it was just enough to get by back then. Today each child has a family income over $150K. I think we moved up a couple of rungs.</p>

38

<p>PAFather, it’s certainly true that individual behaviors are a big factor in the social and economic status of individuals. And we’ll always have people who make bad choices, and suffer as a result. However, I don’t think that there’s been a change in the overall nature of the hundreds of millions of Americans as a whole, for good or bad, which explains why the wealthy have been getting a bigger and bigger piece of the pie over the past 25 years, and why economic mobility has lessened. (I would note that the biggest change is the dramatic increase in the income and wealth of the top 1% - with average incomes of close to a million bucks a year. Marital status is not a big factor in their economic fate.) It’s easy to fixate on one social trend (e.g. increased percentage of out of wedlock births) if you want to come up with an explanation that assigns the responsibility for the trend to individual behaviors, but then you really have to take into consideration countervailing trends (e.g. decreasing percentage of births to teens) and factors which distort the apparent trends you see (e.g. the lower rate of in-wedlock births exagerrates the percentage of out-of wedlock births). Ultimately you’re just guessing, because you can never analyze all of the social factors which impact on society. </p>

<p>So, while individual experiences correlate with individual choices, when you’re talking about millions of people, the individual choices tend to balance out, and yeah, we’re talking about policies and decisions which steer society as a whole in a given direction as being the root cause. So while it may not be “politically correct” in the current sense of the term to “blame government”, it probably is a result of governmental policies that we’re seeing a widening of the income spectrum and a lowering of economic mobility. That may not make a difference to one individual family, but it probably explains trends affecting millions of families.</p>

39

<p>One could perform a statistical study and look at how much migration there is between a few particular states. For example, for people who live in New Jersey in 1970, how many of them live in Pennsylvania 10 years later? You could obviously perform similar calculations for those originally living in Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and other states. Your calculations might show different trends in “mobility” between the states, but they would not demonstrate ANYTHING about HOW DIFFICULT it is to move from one state to another.</p>

<p>Similarly, in these various economic “mobility” studies (which I think are flawed with their definitions of families as well as having other limitations), even if they show that people tend to stay in the same quintiles, this does not demonstrate that it is DIFFICULT to change quintiles. Only that people do not do it that frequently.</p>

<p>For any individual family (particularly one in the lowest quintile), if they have talent, diligence, and patience, they can move into the upper quintiles more easily in the US than in any other country. Essentially any child in the US can borrow books from a public library and read voraciously. SATs do not require any advanced math at all. Even the worst high schools in the country cover enough math material such that, if a student mastered it, he could obtain an 800 on the SAT-I math. A financially poor student who is dependable, hard-working and bright can obtain good grades and test scores such that he can graduate with an undergraduate degree from an Ivy League school with essentially no debt, and it will not cost his family anything. To me, the American Dream is that one’s lot in life is only limited by talent and hard work. Not that everyone ends up with the same income or that everyone experiences all five quintiles within his lifetime.</p>

<p>For all those who say that there is not enough mobility, what would be an IDEAL economy? One in which your quintile ten years later is statistically unrelated to your initial quintile. To me, that would be a NIGHTMARE! In such a situation, you could not provide for yourself, much less for your children. It would be like a bad dream, completely ARBITRARY.</p>

40

<p>kluge:</p>

<p>“when you’re talking about millions of people, the individual choices tend to balance out”</p>

<p>I completely disagree with this statement. You are assuming that individual choices that affect income are independent of one’s initial quintile. I do not assume this. Please provide data that prove your assumption.</p>