back in the groove....

hello everyone,
I'm back in Cambridge, and (unfortunately) classes started again today. That means 9 hours a day for six days of corporate strategy, finance, and a whole lotta other stuff I'm not particularly interested in sitting through. It also means it's time to hand in all the assignments we've all been slaving over during 'the break'. But, worry not, nothing could keep me from reading (and commenting on) the Economist.

A quick mention on the January 1st edition: the article "Ever higher society, ever harder to ascend" (With a cool rock-climbing picture if I may add).
subtitle: "Whatever happened to the belief that any American could get to the top?" It's a long article, so i'm cutting a lot out, but you'll get the picture.

"The United States likes to think of itself as the very embodiment of meritocracy: a country where people are judged on their individual abilites rather than their family connections. (...) Americans believed that equality of opportunity gave them an edge over the Old World, freeing them from debilitatin snobberies and at the same time enabling everyone to benefit form the abilites of the entire population. They still do. (...)
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 socal heap.
Between 1979 and 2000 the real income of households in the lowest fifth grew by 6.4%, while that of households in the top fifth grew by 70%. The family inocme of the top 1% grew by 184% - and that of the top 0.1% and 0.01% grew even faster.
Thirty years ago the average real annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives was 39 times the pay of the average worker. Today it is 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 plent 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. (...) Al Gore was the son of a senator. Howard Brush Dean was also the product of the same blue-blooded world of private schools [as Kerry and Gore and the Bushes].

"legacy preferences", a programme for the children of alumni. 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 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 played in promoting meritocracy in the first half of the 20th century (cf. James Conant's reforms, Harvard president 1933-53, to prevent American from producing an aristocracy).

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 (...): in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge, MA - 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.