Khan Academy: The future of education? [60-Minutes]

Many of you know my view is that more effective, universal education must form the core of any effort by America to address her future and challenges successfully (followed closely by universal preventative and basic healthcare). I have followed closely new education ideas and innovations at the margin, but such incrementalism has produced little improvement. In fact, America continues to fall further behind.

Now comes the young, brilliant and undaunted Mr. Kahn and his "Kahn Academy." The former hedge fund analyst hasn't paid much attention to what people say can't be done. He's just doing what he thinks can be done, done better, and at very modest cost. And he's doing it very well. His approach has turned traditional notions of education and teaching on their head, "flipping" the education model, as it has been described. It has taken elementary education by storm, and promises as much for high school and higher education, as well. So promising is it that Bill Gates and others have taken out their check books to fund major expansion of Kahn's work. If you missed the piece on "60-Minutes," if you think this is important, you might consider viewing it here--or viewing it again. (Just click on the highlighted text or the link below.)

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7401696n&tag=contentMain;contentAux

"Socialist": A Black Guy with Power (Doonesbury)

Yes, bending or reshaping definitions to meet one's purpose or view--especially one's political purpose or view--is what we are talking about. Too often, it just seems like that's what it's all about these days. Too often it's all just too cynical--and worse. And sometimes--like Sunday's strip--Doonesbury just nails it.

Greg

       

• Mar 11, 2012    

NBC/WSJ Poll: Primaries Take "Corrosive" Toll on GOP, Candidates

From a recent NBC/msnbc article:

[A] new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that the combative and heavily scrutinized Republican primary season so far has damaged the party and its candidates. Four in 10 of all adults say the GOP nominating process has given them a less favorable impression of the Republican Party, versus just slightly more than one in 10 with a more favorable opinion. 

Additionally, when asked to describe the GOP nominating battle in a word or phrase, nearly 70 percent of respondents – including six in 10 independents and even more than half of Republicans – answered with a negative comment. Some examples of these negative comments from Republicans: "Unenthusiastic," "discouraged," "lesser of two evils," "painful," "disappointed," "poor choices," "concerned," "underwhelmed," "uninspiring" and "depressed." 

And perhaps most significantly, the GOP primary process has taken a toll on the Republican presidential candidates, including front-runner Mitt Romney, who is seen more unfavorably and whose standing with independents remains underwater. "The primaries have not raised the stature of the party, nor enhanced the appeal of the candidates," says Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "The word you'd have to use at this stage is: 'Corrosive,'" McInturff adds. 

[...] In January's NBC/WSJ poll, Romney's favorable/unfavorable rating stood at 31 percent to 36 percent among all respondents (and 22/42 percent among independents). But in this latest survey, it's now 28 percent favorable and 39 percent unfavorable (and 22/38 percent among independents). 

In fact, Romney's image right now is worse than almost all other recent candidates who went on to win their party's presidential nomination: Obama's favorable/unfavorable ratio was 51/28 percent and John McCain's was 47/27, in the March 2008 NBC/WSJ poll; John Kerry was at 42/30 at this point in 2004; George W. Bush was 43/32 in 2000; and Bob Dole was 35/39 in March 1996. (The one exception: Bill Clinton, in April 1992, was at 32/43 percent.) 

[...] The damage from the Republican primary season – in addition to a rising job-approval rating for President Obama and more optimism about the U.S. economy – has given Democrats an early advantage for November's general election. Indeed, the president's job-approval rating now stands at 50 percent; Obama leads Romney in a hypothetical general-election match up by six points; and Democrats hold a five-point edge on the generic congressional ballot. When it comes to President Obama, the poll contains mostly good news.  

---"NBC/WSJ poll: Primary season takes 'corrosive' toll on GOP and its candidates," By Mark Murray, NBC News Senior Political Editor, msnbc.msn.com (3.4.12) 

There can be little doubt about it. We're seeing the Republican Party for what it has now become. Its limited political spectrum represents the most conservative, often extreme and irresponsible expressions of laissez faire economics, anti-government and anti-tax ideology, intolerant religious traditions, and resentment of immigration and today's realities. And the candidates' range of general appeal runs from marginal to disappointing within the GOP, to unattractive and unacceptable among independents and Democrats.

It isn't a pretty picture. And there can also be little doubt that, to most of the electorate, President Obama is looking like a more knowledgeable, wiser, and more balanced leader of 21st-century America than any among the GOP candidates can even pretend to be.

Jeremy Grantham, Mary Oliver: The Unaccountability, the Threat, of Poorly Regulated Market Capitalism and Human Nature

From Mary Oliver, a poet ever sensitive to such things:

                            Of the Empire 

        We will be known as a culture that feared death

        and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity

        for the few and cared little for the penury of the

        many. We will be known as a culture that taught

        and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke

        little if at all about the quality of life for

        people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All

        the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a

        commodity. And they will say that this structure

        was held together politically, which it was, and

        they will say also that our politics was no more

        than an apparatus to accomodate the feelings of

        the heart, and that the heart, in those days,

        was small, and hard, and full of meanness. 

        --From  Red Bird (2008)

I have long worried about the finite limitations for growth and profits in market capitalism, limitations made clear by basic mathematical projections reflecting global population growth, consumption growth, and the limitations of finite global resources consumed at increasing rates. But no one talks much about it, least of all self-interested corporations and political apologists for them. But it's a simple matter of growth in markets, profits and consumption versus sustainability of resources. And science is now treated as just another voice in the marketplace to be denied or undermined or re-spun when it's message is too inconvenient for threatened financial or political interests. So then, when finite resources are depleted, who will stand accountable?

In a recent post to his blog, AMERICAN FUTURE, friend and former Wall Street analyst, Marc Schulman quoted liberally from Jeremy Grantham on these issues and much more related to them. Marc's piece is titled, "Time and Capitalism," and after a short anecdote, introduces Mr.Grantham and his clear, prescient and compelling essay addressing these issue.

All of this is by way of introduction to a recent essay written by Jeremy Grantham, co-founder and chief investment strategist of the Boston-based money management firm GMO (Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo, LLC). The essay, titled "Your Grand Children Have No Value (And Other Deficiencies of Capitalism)" is part of his latest quarterly letter. 

It's not often that a card-carrying capitalist writes about capitalism's shortcomings. His words are thought-provoking, to say the least. That's why I'm posting an extensive excerpt. Here it is: 

Capitalism has gone through a Darwinistic series of trials and errors, which still continues. For the time being, capitalism has tuned itself to rapid growth at almost any cost. Circumstances such as the hydrocarbon revolution and the ensuing population explosion have allowed for both high growth and high profit margins to sustain the growth. Sustained high margins have in turn trained capitalists – or corporate executives if you prefer – to set high hurdles for all investments. The 14% hurdle for discount rates that was considered a minimum in the late 1990s, for example, halves the future value of a dollar every 5 years, so that in 10 years today's dollar is worth 25¢; in 20 years 6¢; and in 50 years one tenth of one cent! It is hardly surprising that any event out that far is ignored. 

For example, let us say that a firm's current actions are going to cost society at large a billion dollars' worth of harm in 50 years. Further, let us agree that all of the costs will definitely be imposed on the company. The company would feel that pain today as equivalent to only a mere $1 million hit to earnings. Why should they care? 

In contrast, the income of typical individuals is likely to compound at most at 1.5% a year, their risk-free investments at an imputed zero % (today's 30-year bond minus inflation), and an equity investment at perhaps 4%, net of inflation and tax. To take the highest of these three rates, the billion dollar pain at a 4% discount rate is going to feel to the average citizen, who faces the bill in 50 years, not like $1 million, but like $100 million. And for some societal purposes, 4% real is far too high. Surely, for example, shouldn't the value, and hence cost, of a child's life in 50 years be identical to the value and cost today? The reader can easily see how a corporation's outlook on potential future damage might be a painful mismatch with that of ordinary individuals and society at large. The consequences of this not only can be disastrous but probably will be. A few painstaking readers might remember my "Farmer and The Devil" story of last July. In it I showed how a good capitalist farmer had to sign a contract in which the Devil guaranteed a quadrupling of the farmer's income through very aggressive farming practices at the hidden cost of 1% a year of his soil. The farmer would enormously profit and eagerly re-up through the first several 20-year contracts only to end up with no soil, no food, and no people at about 100 years out. Yet each time the farmer re-upped, he did the sensible capitalist thing. In this case, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" failed, and fatally so. 

Damage to the "commons," known as "externalities" has been discussed for decades, although the most threatening one – loss of our collective ability to feed ourselves, through erosion and fertilizer depletion – has received little or no attention. There have been no useful tricks proposed, however, for how we will collectively impose sensible, survivable, long-term policies over problems of the "commons." To leave it to capitalism to get us out of this fix by maximizing its short-term profits is dangerously naïve and misses the point: capitalism and corporations have absolutely no mechanism for dealing with these problems, and seen through a corporate discount rate lens, our grandchildren really do have no value. 

To move from the problem of long time horizons to the short-term common good, it is quickly apparent that capitalism in general has no sense of ethics or conscience. Whatever the Supreme Court may think, it is not a person. Why would a company give up a penny for the common good if it is not required to by enforced regulation or unless it looked like that penny might be returned with profit in the future because having a good image might be good for business? Ethical CEOs can drag a company along for a while, but this is an undependable and temporary fix. Ethical humans can also impose their will on corporations singly or en masse by withholding purchases or bestowing them, and companies can anticipate this and even influence it through clever brand advertising, "clean coal" being my favorite. But that is quite different from corporate altruism. Thus, we can roast our planet and firms may offer marvelous and profitable energy-saving equipment, but it will be for profit today, not planet saving tomorrow. 

It gets worse, for what capitalism has always had is money with which to try to buy influence. Today's version of U.S. capitalism has died and gone to heaven on this issue. A company is now free to spend money to influence political outcomes and need tell no one, least of all its own shareholders, the technical owners. So, rich industries can exert so much political influence that they now have a dangerous degree of influence over Congress. And the issues they most influence are precisely the ones that matter most, the ones that are most important to society's long-term well-being, indeed its very existence. Thus, taking huge benefits from Nature and damaging it in return is completely free and all attempts at government control are fought with costly lobbying and advertising. And one of the first victims in this campaign has been the truth. If scientific evidence suggests costs and limits be imposed on industry to protect the long-term environment, then science will be opposed by clever disinformation. It's now getting to be an old and obvious story, but because their propaganda is good and despite the solidness of the data, half of the people believe the problem is a government run wild, mad to control everything. So the "industrial complex" (or parts of it) fights to increase the inherent weaknesses of capitalism. They deliberately make it ever harder to reach the very long-term decisions that will serve us all. The influence of the Tobacco companies in deliberately obscuring the science to protect profits at a huge cost to society in health costs and lives is a perfect analogy to the energy industries that work hard to confuse the public on scientific measures of damage to health and the environment. Yet it is one that is surprisingly forgotten. 

Of all the technical weaknesses in capitalism, though, probably the most immediately dangerous is its absolute inability to process the finiteness of resources and the mathematical impossibility of maintaining rapid growth in physical output. You can have steady increases in the quality of goods and services and, I hope, the quality of life, but you can't have sustainable growth in physical output. You can have "growth" – for now – or you can have "sustainable" forever, but not both. This is a message brought to you by the laws of compound interest and the laws of nature. However, you can try to have both. But many, when given the choice, select "Growth, and to hell with the consequences." Alternatively they adopt a hear-no-evil approach to life and listen exclusively to good news. The good news for such people is that there are always a few experts lacking in long-horizon vision, simple common sense, or whose co-operation has been rented, like "expert" witnesses at a murder trial, who can be dragged out to reliably say that everything will always work out fine. (One famous professor went seamlessly from saying tobacco smoking was just fine to saying continuously pumping out greenhouse gases would also be without consequences). The optimists offer as evidence that we will always be in the best of all possible worlds, not our species' tough million or so years of trial and painful error, but only the last 200 years, when hydrocarbon and other resources have given us a temporary reprieve. This reprieve does not make the finite magically infinite, but the 250 years of the hydrocarbon intermission can feel like forever. Capitalism certainly acts as if it believes that rapid growth in physical wealth can go on forever. It appears to be hooked on high growth and avoids any suggestion that it might be slowed down by limits. Thus, it exhibits horror at the thought (and occasional reality) of declining population when in fact such a decline is an absolute necessity in order for us to end up gracefully, rather than painfully, at a fully sustainable world economy. Similarly with natural resources, capitalism wants to eat into these precious, limited resources at an accelerating rate with the subtext that everyone on the planet has the right to live like the wasteful polluting developed countries do today. You don't have to be a PhD mathematician to work out that if the average Chinese and Indian were to catch up with (the theoretically moving target of) the average American, then our planet's goose is cooked, along with most other things. Indeed, scientists calculate that if they caught up, we would need at least three planets to be fully sustainable. But few listen to scientists these days. So, do you know how many economic theories treat resources as if they are finite? Well, the researchers at the O.E.C.D say "none" – that no such theory exists. Economic theory either ignores this little problem or assumes you reach out and take the needed resources given the normal workings of supply and demand and you can do it indefinitely. This is a lack of common sense on a par with "rational expectations," that elegant theory that encouraged the ludicrous faith in deregulation and the wisdom of free markets, which brought us our recent financial fiascos. But this failure in economic theory – ignoring natural limits – risks far more dangerous outcomes than temporary financial crashes. 

Let me pose a simple question. If there were an extra thousand years of oil supply – of onshore traditional oil – available at, say, a production cost of $200 a barrel in addition to the actual 40 years of mixed-cost reserves that we have today, what difference would it make in today's price? Remarkably, the answer is "none." Today's price is concerned only with the intermediate-term workings of current costs of current barrels and current demand. Yet every rational reader knows that this should not be the case: that the existence of huge reserves (or the lack thereof) should indeed influence today's price in a world concerned about its very long-term well-being. In addition to ignoring the depleting supplies of high quality materials, no concern at all is shown for our current devastatingly erosive and resource-intensive global farming practices. 

As described above, the current U.S. capitalist system appears to contain some potentially fatal flaws. Therefore, we should ask what it would take for our system to evolve in time to save our bacon. Clearly, a better balance with regulations would be a help. This requires reasonably enlightened regulations, which are unlikely to be produced until big money's influence in Congress, and particularly in elections, decreases. This would necessitate legal changes all the way up to the Supreme Court. It's a long haul, but a handful of other democratic countries in northern Europe have been successful, and with the stakes so high we have little alternative but to change our ways. 

It would certainly help if the general public were better educated, especially in science. The same applies, unfortunately, to Congress itself. This body is desperately short of scientists and basic familiarity with things scientific. Our key problems need to be addressed by people very familiar and comfortable with science. It is said that eight of the nine senior leaders in China's government are scientists. At that high a level, of our 535 Congressmen and the President and Vice President, less than a handful – arguably only two or three – would pass the test. (I suppose you could throw in the Supreme Court Justices if you wanted to.) It is said, on the other hand, that about 100 Congressmen do not believe in evolution. Without a respect for science in Congress and with science in the general public declining as an interest, some of the painful new issues are going to be hard to address. (The percentage of students graduating with degrees in science as a proportion of total U.S. graduates is the 60th highest by country these days!) This lack of scientific familiarity is made worse by the fact that everyone loves to hear good news, Americans more than most. 

The tough news we must sooner or later grasp is made tougher by the skilled, energetic denials, well-funded by powerful industries that fear their profits would be threatened. Libertarians seem to feel that even if the bad news were true, the necessary regulations would be so distasteful that they would really prefer that the science were different, and they deem it so, putting desired political theory over science. 

Meanwhile, China gets on with it and science is accepted in what used to be our normal way until the last decade or two. And I suppose they have some unfair advantages, among them leaders with scientific backgrounds and higher science scores for the general public, but they also have the luxury of a leadership that does not face election campaigns. Lucky them. The critical consequences are that they waste no time in challenging climate problems (the same is true of India) and, even more importantly perhaps, they begin to really worry, almost panic, about their long-term access to crucial resources. In contrast to our political log jam and failure to face long-term issues, they have moved rapidly to exploit new sustainable energy sources, to tie down resource deals, and to promote improved resource efficiency. 

The U.S. and Canada are blessed with natural advantages that are unrivaled (at least if you include security, which, in a desperate, resource-constrained, warming world might hurt New Zealand, that otherwise would look hard to beat). Yet the relatively uncontrolled variety of capitalism that exists in the U.S. today may negate many of our advantages. Solutions to these issues – far more important than any others – need a delicate mix of capitalism and wise, democratically-controlled government regulation. That might sound like an oxymoron to far too many people. If we can't make it sound, plausible, and acceptable in the next few decades, then we are in deep trouble for the world really, really needs U.S. leadership on these critical issues. 

Karl Marx went on and on about the tendency of capitalism to so fixate on growth that in time it would forget the need to put on a friendly face for society and would drive home too clearly and brutally its advantage over labor. Ironically, in some way he and Engels looked forward to globalization and the supranational company because they argued it would make capitalism even more powerful, over reaching, and eventually reckless. It would, they claimed, offer the capitalists more rope to hang themselves with or, rather, to be hung with, in the workers' revolution. The rope for the job, they suggested with black humor, would be bought from briskly competing capitalists, eager till the end for a good deal. Well, time marches on and it's going to be hard to have a workers' revolution with no workers. Organizing robotic machine tools will not be easy. However, Marx and Engels certainly got the part right about globalization and the supranational company increasing the power of capital at the expense of labor. To interfere with Marx's apocalyptic vision, we need some enlightened governmental moderation of the new globalized Juggernaut (even slightly enlightened would be encouraging) before capitalism gets so cocky that we have some serious social reaction. 

But for me capitalism's complete fixation on growth at all cost that Marx concentrated on is not as important as the other issues discussed here. Capitalism, by ignoring the finite nature of resources and by neglecting the long-term well-being of the planet and its potentially crucial biodiversity, threatens our existence. Fifty and one-hundred-year horizons are important despite the "tyranny of the discount rate," and grandchildren do have value. My conclusion is that capitalism does admittedly do a thousand things better than other systems: it only currently fails in two or three. Unfortunately for us all, even a single one of these failings may bring capitalism down and us with it.

There are some of course who exude optimism about science's ability to grow into technologies and solutions that will successfully address today's and tomorrow's seemingly insoluble resource and environmental problems. And there has been just enough of that kind of scientific advancement in our recent history--taking understandings, technology and solutions to a whole new level--that it provides a convenient basis for false confidence, or at least hopefulness. But many of these advancements in new technologies have been on the table of wishful thinking for a long time, but show no basis for hopefulness in the time horizon contemplated by dramaticly increasing global population, consumption, and resource depletion.

In closing, I share another sentiment of Mary Oliver, one as much a matter of wishful thinking as anything the technology optimists may embrace. Mary Oliver:

What is the Greatest Gift?

What is the greatest gift?

Could it be the world itself--the oceans, the meadowlark,

 the patience of the trees in the wind?

Could it be love, with its sweet clamour of passion?

Something else--something else entirely

 holds me in thrall.

That you have a life that I wonder about

 more than I wonder about my own.

That you have a soul--your own, no one else's--

 that I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.

So that I find my soul clapping its hands for yours

 more than my own. 

--From Thirst (2008)

 Would that it were more universally true.

Merton & Hafiz: Into Darkness to Light, to Love

Sometimes it's hard to separate one's love of God from love of life, love of creation, love of people, and love of truth, whether spiritual, scientific or historical. Sometimes it all seems to merge into one gestalt, one encompassing perception that defies description. Sometimes we may even start to lose some of our sense of identity in that broader, deeper sense of creation, existence and reality. Further, we may have to acknowledge a different sense of purpose, a growing sense of shared relationship and identity--and it seems to transcend that which changes and passes, and finds more identity with that which endures, perhaps even a timeless shared identity in the infinite and eternal.

But, at some point in that process there necessarily comes many challenges to orthodox thinking and understandings in faith practice and life. The doors get blown off some protected safe havens and refuges from personal change and growth, places too often created by cultural and faith organizations, and even the faithful themselves, because they cannot fully risk following God and truth into the unknown, the unsettling places that cause us to question who we are, what we believe, and what that means for our lives and our speculations about the real and eternal. This is an unnerving, identity-questioning and changing place that most would rather avoid, or escape if they find themselves led there.

I've often talked of the 20th-century Cistercian (Trappist) monk, Thomas Merton, and shared from his writings. I will share more here, along with some poetry by the 14th-century Sufi master, Hafiz. These quotes are excerpted from Merton's book on contemplative prayer. Thomas Merton:

It is natural for one in [certain circumstances] to dread the loss of his faith, indeed of his own integrity and religious identity, and to cling desperately to whatever will seem to preserve the last shreds of belief. So he struggles, sometimes frantically, to recover a sense of comfort and conviction in formulated truths or familiar religious practices. His meditation becomes the scene of his agonia, this wrestling with nothingness and doubt. But the more he struggles the less comfort and assurance he has, and the more powerless he sees himself to be. Finally he loses even the power to struggle. He feels himself ready to sink and drown in doubt and despair. 

This is not the moment for arrogance or proud thrusts of will. The arrogant man will break in the agony of darkness. His meditation will be intolerable, and he will either revolt or despair. We must also recognize that one of the causes of mental or emotional breakdown of novices or young monks is...a lack of identity and spiritual maturity. 

The man of today is more and more vulnerable in this respect. His efforts to seek peace and light are carried on not in a realm of relative security, in a geography of certitude, but over the face of a thinly-veiled abyss of disorienting nothingness, into which he quickly falls when he finds himself without the total support of reassuring and familiar ideas of himself and of his world. Nevertheless, it is precisely this support that we must learn to sacrifice. 

This is the genuine climate of serious meditation, in which, without light and apparently without strength, even seemingly without hope...we drop our arrogance, we submit to the incomprehensible reality of our situation and we are content with it because, senseless though it may seem, it makes more sense than anything else... Here then, we make not the confident and conspicuously generous resolutions of our moment of light, but we abandon ourselves in submission, colorlessness, hiddenness, humility and distress to the will of God. We see there is no hope but in Him, and we leave everything, finally, in His hands. "Take heed, said Jakob Biehme, "of putting on the Christ's purple mantle without a resigned will." 

Dread is an expression of our insecurity in this earthly life, a realization that we are never and can never be completely "sure" in the sense of possessing a definitive and established spiritual status. It means that we cannot any longer hope in ourselves, in our wisdom, our virtues, our fidelity. We see too clearly that all that is "ours" is nothing, and can completely fail us. In other words, we no longer rely on what we "have," what has been given by our past, what has been required. We are open to God and to His mercy in the inscrutable future and our trust is entirely in His grace, which will support our liberty in the emptiness where we confront unforeseen decisions. Only when we have descended in dread to the center of of our own nothingness...can we be led by Him, in His own time, to find Him in losing ourselves. 

[...] The whole mystery of simple contemplative prayer is a mystery of divine love... 

[...] But true [contemplation] is that which transcends all things, and yet is immanent in all...The character of [this Christian contemplation] is pure love, pure freedom. Love that is free of everything, not determined my anything, or held down by any special relationship. It is love for love's sake. It is a sharing, through the Holy Spirit, in the infinite charity [and love] of God. And so when Jesus told his disciples to love, he told them to love as universally as the Father who sends his rain alike on the just and unjust. 

---From Contemplative Prayer, Chs. 15 & 16, by Thomas Merton (1996, 1966)

 That so-called "dark-night" experience is a daunting abyss to stand at the edge of and look into, never mind casting yourself faithfully, trustingly, headlong into it. But, in their faith and contemplative walk, that is just what many are called to do, if they would find shared identity in the light and love of God. We are advised that some do it with greater faith and trust than others, and some cannot do it at all. Some keep taking two steps forward and one step back; and some go just so far and stop, living as their situation provides for them in the new light and understandings of their spiritual way station.

The Sufi poet Hafiz offers this poem that affirms shared experiences and understandings of the contemplatives of different faith traditions. Hafiz:

Love is the Funeral Pyre*

Love is

The funeral pyre

Where I have laid my living body. 

All the false notions of myself

That once caused fear, pain,

Have turned to ash

As I neared God.  

What has risen 
From the tangled web of thought and sinew

Now shines with jubilation
Through the eyes of angels

And screams from the guts of

Infinite existence itself. 

Love is the funeral pyre

Where the heart must lay

It's body.

So then, to what place or what end this most challenging and difficult of divine dances, this spiritual totentanz. Hafiz offers us perspective, if not understanding, in more of his poetry, perspectives and understandings embraced by Merton and spiritual contemplatives of other stripes as well. Again, Hafiz:

In Need of The Breath* 

My heart
Is an unset jewel
Upon the tender night
Yearning for its dear old friend
The Moon.

When the Nameless One debuts again

Ten thousand facets of my being unfurl wings

And reveal such a radiance inside

I enter a realm divine--

I too begin to so sweetly cast light,

Like a lamp,

Through the streets of this

World.  

My heart is an unset jewel
Upon existence
Waiting for the Friend's touch. 

Tonight

My heart is an unset ruby

Offered bowed and weeping to the Sky.   

I am dying in these cold hours
For the resplendent glance of God. 

I am dying 
Because of a divine remembrance
Of who I really am. 

Hafiz, tonight,

Your soul

is a brilliant reed instrument 

In need of the breath of the

Christ.

*From The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master (1999), as rendered in English by Daniel Ladinsky.

Warren Buffett, On a Stronger, More Accountable America

Warren Buffet has always commanded my admiration and respect, a man whose views and values extend well beyond his personal interest to what is good, fair and effective economic and social policy for America. I suppose it helps that my own views and values often track closely to his. 

In a recent Time article, Warren Buffett Is On a Radical Track, by Rana Foroohar, he is profiled and quoted liberally about his prescriptions and preferences for a better, fairer, stronger America. Rather than summarize or paraphrase, I feel it best to let the the author and Mr. Buffett speak for themselves. But, it is a lengthy article, so I've selected a number of quotes from both that resonated most with me.

• Warren Buffett believes in making money. He believes in fairness. He believes in the ability of government to make people's lives better. But most of all, he believes in luck. 

"I've had all this good fortune," Buffett says. "It starts with being born in this country, though. It starts with being born male in 1930.

Genes, luck and birthplace may have helped make Buffett the world's third richest man. But in the past year, his good fortune has also turned him into one of America's most unexpected radicals. He's an ardent capitalist who is demanding higher taxes on the rich and more government spending on the rest to solve our economic problems. Although he is giving away 99% of his $45 billion fortune, he operates less out of a sense of noblesse oblige than noblesse outrage. The country that made him rich is lousy with bailout billionaires, a culture of selfishness and a loss of opportunities. "We can rise to any challenge but not if people feel we're in a plutocracy," he says. "We have to get serious about shared sacrifice."

• Shared sacrifice, to Buffett, means not just higher taxes for the rich--who often pay extremely low rates on money made by moving money around--but also curbs on short-termism. He'd like to see speculative-trading gains taxed at much higher rates. He believes CEOs of publicly bailed-out institutions should be on the hook for everything they own if their institutions go bust. He's only half joking when he says he'd like to see private schools banned so that rich families would be forced to invest in the public K--12 system. (No Buffett in Omaha has ever gone to a private school, he notes proudly.) And he's for a complete overhaul of health care, which he calls "a tapeworm in America," one that cuts corporate competitiveness far more than taxes do.

It's the opposite of the Darwinian capitalism embraced by many prominent conservatives who believe the market is the only means to distribute the economy's assets. "The market system rewards me outlandishly for what I do," Buffett says, "but that doesn't mean I'm any more deserving of a good life than a teacher or a doctor or someone who fights in Afghanistan."

He doesn't want to stop bond traders from making their billions: "Capitalism has unleashed more human potential than any other system in history." But, he says, "we need a tax system that essentially takes very good care of the people who just really aren't as well adapted to the market system but are nevertheless doing useful things in society." Bond traders and corporate raiders of the world, take note: your higher taxes should subsidize bridge builders and child-care workers.

• At 81, Buffett says he's in a unique position to speak out. "If you are a CEO or you have to deal with a conservative board or you have a boss that might get upset by what you say, you can't do what I do. But I don't have a boss. It's hard to hurt me. If you don't speak up now, when are you going to? As my partner Charlie told me, it's like saving up sex for your old age!"

• The reason people listen to Buffett, at a time when being the 0.001% may not seem like the best public relations asset, is that in matters of finance he's very often right. But it's also that he's not like other billionaires.

Buffett lives not on an isolated island of wealth but in Omaha, in a shingle-roofed five-bedroom house on an unpretentious street that looks as if it might belong to a successful dentist. He bought it for $31,500 in 1958. The corporation he runs, Berkshire Hathaway, owns 76 businesses--from a candy company to an electric utility--that throw off $1 billion a month in free cash, and he holds major stakes in many of the country's biggest blue-chip firms, including Coca-Cola, American Express, IBM and Procter & Gamble. Yet aside from his indulgence in private air travel (he named his first jet the Indefensible), he estimates his personal yearly expenses to be no more than $150,000. The company canteen in his small office suite, where he has a habit of walking around turning off lights in empty rooms, features a beat-up wooden table, a faux-leather sectional couch and Formica countertops.

His investment habits are as austere as the decor. In an age of leverage, he likes to steer clear of debt, preferring to keep from $10 billion to $20 billion of liquid assets on hand at all times--"so that I can sleep better," he says. In a world of high-frequency traders with two-hour sell windows, Buffett's investment horizon is somewhere between 10 years and forever.

He grew up in Omaha and Washington as the son of a U.S. Congressman and was once president of the University of Pennsylvania's Young Republicans Club. Now he's President Obama's highest-profile supporter, a crusader for higher taxes on the millionaires' club. As he wrote in an op-ed article for the New York Times last summer, in which he noted that his personal tax rate was lower than that of his office staff, Washington needs to "stop coddling the superrich." Millionaires, says Buffett, should pay more taxes--a lot more. And companies certainly shouldn't pay any less.

• His worry is that in this era of late-stage capitalism, the next generations won't be as lucky as he has been. The problem of inequality is likely, he says, to get worse. When people can't climb up the ladder, it's bad for the economy--and for his companies. He doesn't believe that the U.S. can innovate its way quickly back to a 1950s level of shared prosperity, nor does he think education will entirely close the gap. "The truth is that there will always be a bottom 10% in terms of capacity," he says. "Someone in America who has a 90-point IQ is qualified for many fewer jobs today than he was 100 years ago."

The solution, to him, is obvious. "People who make withdrawals from societies' resources--like me with my plane--should have to pay a lot for it." That means not only higher taxes for the rich and an extremely progressive European-style consumption tax but also fewer loopholes for corporations. Buffett says it's "baloney" that corporate America's tax rates are too high and says companies should not be allowed to repatriate profits tax-free. (It'll just encourage more investment to flow overseas.) In general, he says, "I find the argument that we need lower taxes to create more jobs mystifying, because we've had the lowest taxes in this decade and about the worst job creation ever."

• But [his first wife, Susie] was also responsible for deeper transformations, like Warren's conversion from Republican to Democrat. A civil rights supporter, Susie was involved in helping integrate Omaha in the 1960s, going so far as to front for blacks who wanted to buy houses in white neighborhoods. She took Warren to hear people like Martin Luther King Jr. speak. One speech in particular, given at Iowa's Grinnell College, became a turning point for Buffett. The topic was "Remaining Awake During a Revolution," and one line in particular chimed deeply with the young investor: "It may be true that the law can't change the heart," said King, "but it can restrain the heartless." It was something that Buffett began to think deeply about. Led by Susie, he became more involved in liberal politics, helping overturn anti-Semitic membership rules at the Omaha Club and doing Democratic fundraising at a national level.

• As anyone who reads the financial press knows, Buffett is a "value investor," which means that he seeks to buy companies and stocks that are selling for less than they are fundamentally worth. It's a skill he learned from his Columbia Business School professor Benjamin Graham, whose book The Intelligent Investor Buffett memorized early in his career. Value investing is a task that involves forensic examination of a company's balance sheet. It was one to which Buffett, a numbers geek who'd read every book in the Omaha public library by the age of 11 and who enjoys poring over Moody's Manuals in his spare time while eating potato chips, was well suited. Even now, he can call to mind prodigious amounts of data, from the value of the Dow in 1932 to the number of housing starts needed to equal 2006 rates.

Buffett believes that once the housing market recovers, the U.S. economy will be back on track. "Once we get back to a million housing starts per year"--the current tally is 685,000--"I think pundits will be surprised just how fast unemployment will come down in this country," he says. "There are 4 million people hitting age 22 every year in this country. Sure, you can double up on households for a while, but at some point, hormones kick in, and living with your in-laws loses its allure." Buffett notes that nearly every one of his major nonhousing businesses has had several strong quarters, and Berkshire companies are making a record number of investments, the vast majority of which are in the U.S. "I am 100% sure that people in this country will be doing more business 10 years from now than they are today.

• But Buffett insists his optimism isn't emotional but quantitative: he focuses not on media headlines about America's inevitable decline or cheerleading about innovation and education but on the underlying data. Basic demographics favor the U.S. over nearly every other rich country in the world. And with corporate America so lean and inventories so low, the growth engine, in his view, has to kick in soon.

The numbers over the past few months have been good: jobless claims are ticking down, and consumer confidence is up. That's great news for Berkshire, since Buffett's portfolio is made up almost exclusively of large U.S. companies and American blue-chip multinationals. Even in the midst of the financial crisis and recession that followed, he remained a U.S. bull. Berkshire spent $15.6 billion in the 25 days after Lehman Brothers' September 2008 collapse, buying up many assets on the cheap. Although Berkshire lost 9.6% of its net worth in 2008, Buffett did better than most everyone else and came across as a stabilizing influence during the financial crisis, speaking out on behalf of the government's management efforts. (He wrote a "Dear Uncle Sam" thank-you letter for the bailouts to the Obama Administration in the New York Times.) "You can see what happens when you have a Plan B, as you have had in Europe, where people have dithered and been unable to come together," he notes. "I think Paulson, Bernanke, Geithner, Sheila Bair, President Bush and Obama--they all behaved magnificently.

• I ask Buffett if, when he started, his aim was to be the richest man in the world. "I knew I wanted to make a lot of money. But that's because I knew I wanted to be independent. That was very important to me. The money itself is all going to charity," says Buffett, who in 2006 pledged 99% of his personal wealth to charity, with the bulk going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "I'm really just a steward of it for now." Supply siders like Arthur Laffer have tried to paint him as a hypocrite for his giving. A recent Laffer opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal bashed Buffett for, among other things, shielded income like unrealized capital gains (taxed at 0%) and charitable contributions (which are tax-deductible). "Well, I had a net unrealized loss last year," notes Buffett. "But if Arthur has a plan for how he wants to tax unrealized gains, I'd love to hear it. It's an interesting thing for a Republican to put forward!When Buffett isn't giving, he's teaching. Many of the rich and famous seek his counsel about business and philanthropy. Recent visitors include Fiat scion John Elkann and the Baroness de Rothschild, whom Buffett took to Piccolo's, the modest family-owned Italian steak house where we sit eating dinner. "She loved it here," Buffett says. "She had a root-beer float for dessert."

• When Buffett isn't giving, he's teaching. Many of the rich and famous seek his counsel about business and philanthropy. Recent visitors include Fiat scion John Elkann and the Baroness de Rothschild, whom Buffett took to Piccolo's, the modest family-owned Italian steak house where we sit eating dinner. "She loved it here," Buffett says. "She had a root-beer float for dessert."

• But on taxes and the debilitating growth of partisan politics, he doesn't mince words. He was horrified by the debt-ceiling debacle this summer and shocked that Republicans were willing to play a game of political chicken with the goodwill and faith put in the world's reserve currency. He was disappointed that so many financiers who'd supported Obama and received the benefits of the financial bailouts were unwilling to support higher taxes to help close the deficit.

• He's also got a few choice words about the Republican presidential candidates and their ideas about bootstrapping and "merit" economies. "This whole business about Newt Gingrich going down to Occupy and saying, 'They ought to be getting a job,' that's just--you know, maybe they can be historians for Freddie Mac too and make $600,000 a year." When I ask whether Mitt Romney is a job creator or destroyer, Buffett says that while businesses shouldn't hang on to people they don't need, "I don't like what private-equity firms do in terms of taking out every dime they can and leveraging [companies] up so that they really aren't equipped, in some cases, for the future." 

• As for President Obama--should he win re-election--Buffett would like to see him lay out the truth about the road ahead to the American people. "I think that the American people would be pretty responsive to shared sacrifice if it was really shared and they knew what to expect," says Buffett. "I've always thought that part of my job at Berkshire is telling people what they should expect and what they shouldn't expect from us. I don't want to be held to things I can't do. On the other hand, I shouldn't totally downplay what can be done just to create a phony target."

Buffett feels the President missed an opportunity to do that right after he took office. But he's optimistic that it can still be done. "We need to tell people that the road is going to be long. We've got too many damn houses. They're not going to go away. This recovery is going to take a long time. And the financial crisis has exposed a lot of flaws in our system." But the flaws can be fixed. With the right rules, says Buffett, our system can work again. "It's like Martin Luther King said. We aren't trying to change the heart. We're trying to restrain the heartless.

"Isn't that," he asks, "what government is all about?

W.S. Merwin: Self Understanding, Duty, Identity

Merwin reflects on some challenges and life factors influencing our understandings and expressions of identity. First, in "To Waiting," he explores our inclination to more often be looking forward and to change--sometime seeking escape from ourselves--than to understand, accept and respect who we are today. 

Then, in "To Duty," he acknowledges the power of an inborn or developed sense of duty in or on who we are and how we face life. And though he treats it as a force unto itself, he leaves each of us to sort out whether this sometimes dominating sense of duty is a quality or product of our inborn personality, or the influence of life-learning and training in shaping it. That's what I hear and feel in his verse today, but tomorrow, perhaps more. From W.S. Merwin:


To Waiting

You spend so much of your time

expecting to become

someone else

always someone

who will be different

someone to whom a moment

whatever moment it may be

at last has come

and who has been

met and transformed

into no longer being you

and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life

you hardly notice

the world around you

lights changing

sirens dying along the buildings

your eyes intent

on a sight you do not see yet

not yet there

as long as you

are only yourself

with whom as you

recall you were

never happy

to be left alone for long


To Duty

Oh dear

Where do you keep yourself

whose least footstep wakens

all those sentences

that begin I thought

what makes you so sure

as you lay claim

to the cloudless sky of morning

assuming the grammar of the hours

and whatever they

are supposed to be saying

even if we try

to imagine what life

would be like without you

you who do not

seem to listen

you who insist

without a sound

you who know better

even better you say

than nature herself

you who tell us

over and over

who we are

  

American Dream Easier to Realize Elsewhere: The Failings of Education, Government Investment & Upward Mobility

Those headlines and feature stories confront us more often. We don't want to hear it, we don't. We certainly don't want to believe it. After all, through all generations, the vast majority of Americans came here from many other places for that best opportunity to get ahead, the highest probability of being upwardly mobile. But now, not so much. The reports are true: America's upward mobility has been stalled, then jammed into reverse, and our vaunted middle class is shrinking. And most of those formerly enjoying middle-class life have become poorer, not richer.

If we read a little further, we are also informed that the gap in economic opportunity and mobility between America's "haves" and "have-nots" is steadily increasing.There are many factors, but a more dominant financial sector, more a winner-take-all social and economic environment, globalization and, particularly, the failures of American K-12 education, all loom large. What is less often reported, certainly less often heard and understood, is that other countries, at least seven of them have moved past us and now offer more accomodating access to a comfortable middle-class income and lifestyle. The American dream is now more easily realized elsewhere.

The US is now 8th in economic mobility behind Denmark, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany and France. Yes, France. And yes, there are those more ideological American's who have long flogged some of these countries as "socialist" countries--mixed economies to the extent that they place social support and services on a level of priority commensurate with the values of an advanced society, and supported by effective, open markets, regulated to protect consumers, the economy, and society as a whole. Some of us would just call them more balanced, effective and civilized societies.

But there are differences to be considered and reasons to be understood. Let's look at some recent articles that make these understandings quite clear.

From a recent article in Time Magazine:

The Pew Charitable Trusts' Economic Mobility Project has found that if you were born in 1970 in the bottom one-fifth of the socioeconomic spectrum in the U.S., you had only about a 17% chance of making it into the upper two-fifths. That's not good by international standards. A spate of new reports from groups such as Brookings, Pew and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development show that it's easier to climb the socioeconomic ladder in many parts of Europe than it is in the U.S. It's hard to imagine a bigger hit to the American Dream than that: you'd have an easier time getting a leg up in many parts of sclerotic, debt-ridden, class-riven old Europe than you would in the U.S.A. "The simple truth," says Sawhill, "is that we have a belief system about ourselves that no longer aligns with the facts." 

[...] Yet it is important to understand that when you compare Europe and America, you are comparing very different societies. High-growth Nordic nations with good social safety nets, which have the greatest leads in social mobility over the U.S., are small and homogeneous. On average, only about 7% of their populations are ethnic minorities (who are more often poorer and less mobile than the overall population), compared with 28% in the U.S. Even bigger nations like Germany don't have to deal with populations as socially and economically diverse as America's. 

Still, Europe does more to encourage equality. That's a key point because high inequality--meaning a large gap between the richest and poorest in society--has a strong correlation to lower mobility. As Sawhill put it, "When the rungs on the ladder are further apart, it is harder to climb them." Indeed, in order to understand why social mobility in the U.S. is falling, it's important to understand why inequality is rising, now reaching levels not seen since the Gilded Age. 

There are many reasons for the huge and growing wealth divide in our country. The rise of the money culture and bank deregulation in the 1980s and '90s certainly contributed to it. As the financial sector grew in relation to the rest of the country (it is now at historic highs of about 8%) a winner-take-all economy emerged. Wall Street was less about creating new businesses--entrepreneurship has stalled as finance has become a bigger industry--but it did help set a new pay band for top talent. In the 1970s, corporate chiefs earned about 40 times as much as their lowest paid worker (still closer to the norm in many parts of Europe). Now they earn more than 400 times as much.  

The most recent blows to economic equality, of course have been the real estate and credit crises, which wiped out housing prices and thus erased the largest chunk of middle-class wealth, while stocks where most the rich hold much of their money, have largely recovered. 

---"Whatever Happened to Upward Mobility?" by Rana Foroohar, Time (11.14.11)

We're not really that surprised by these reports, are we? In fact, we've all come to better understand these troubling realities as the financial crisis and housing crisis stubbornly refuse to give way to a return to economic normalcy. But what of the underlying systemic and structural changes? More from the Foroohar article in Time:

[...] [T]he causes of inequality and any resulting decrease in social mobility are also very much about two megatrends that have been reshapng the global economy since the 1970s: the effects of technology and the rise of the emerging markets. Some 2 billion people have joined the global workforce since the 1970s. According to Goldman Sachs, the majority of them are middle class by global standards and can do many of the jobs that were once done by American workers, at lower labor costs.... 

While there is no clear formula for ascribing the rise in inequality (via wage compression) and subsequent loss of mobility to the rise of China and India, one key study stands out. Nobel Laureate Michael Spense's recent examination...found that since the 1980s, companies that operated in the tradable sector--meaning they made things or provided services that could be traded between nations--have created no new jobs. The study is especially illustrative of the hollowing out of the American manufacturing sector in that period as middle-wage jobs moved abroad. The only major job creation was in more geographically protected categories  like retail and health care (another reason wages are shrinking, since many of the fastest-growing jobs in the U.S., like home health care aide and sales clerk, are low-paying. 

[...] Many of the jobs that have disappeared from the U.S. economy have done so not only because they were outsourced but also because they are now done by computer or robots... Advocates of technology-driven economic growth...argue that the creative destruction wrought by such innovations creates more and better jobs in the future... The problem is that those jobs tend to be skewed toward toward the very top (software engineer) or bottom (sales clerk).... 

While there's no doubt that so far, technology has been a net plus in terms of the number of jobs in the economy, a growing group of experts believe that link is being broken... The result, they say, is that technology may soon be a net job destroyer.

But what role education in delaying or reversing this trend? And how might that play out? Ms. Foroohar:

The best hope in fighting the machines is to improve education, the factor that is more closely correlated with upward mobility than any other. Research has shown that as long as educational achievement keeps up with technological gains, more jobs are created. But in the late 1970s that link was broken in the U.S. as educational gains slowed.  

That's likely an important reason that Europeans have passed the U.S. in various measures of mobility. They've been exposed to the same Malthusian forces of globalization, but they've been better at using public money to buffer them. By funding ost-secondary education and keeping public primary and secondary schools as good as if not better than private ones, Europeans have made sure that the best and brightest can rise.

In the same issue of Time, the always insightful Fareed Zakaria reports that the American K-12 educational system has now fallen to a ranking of 26th in the world, and offers some well-informed thoughts on America's failing education system. Mr. Zakaria:

In 1972, the year [Steven] Jobs graduated, California's public schools were the envy of the world. They were generally rated the finest in the country, well funded and well run, with excellent teachers. These schools were engines of social mobility that took people like Jobs and Wozniak and gave them an educational grounding that helped them rise. 

Today, California's public schools are a disaster, beset by dysfunction and disrepair. They rank at the bottom of the country, just as the U.S. now sits at the bottom of the industrialized world by most measures of educational achievement. The World Economic Forum ranks the U.S.'s educational system 26th in the world, well behind those of countries like Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Canada and Singapore. In science and math, we score even worse. 

We've been talking about America's education decline for three decades now, so much so that we are numbed by the discussion. But the consequences of that crisis are only just becoming fully apparent. As American education has collapsed, the median wages of the American worker have stagnated, and social mobility--the beating heart of the American dream--has slowed to a standstill. Education is and always has been the fastest way up the socioeconomic ladder. And the payoff from a good education remains evident even in this weak recovery. The unemployment rate for college graduates is just 4%, but for high school dropouts it is 14%. If you drop out of high school--and the U.S. has a 25% dropout rate--you will have a depressed standard of living for the rest of your life. 

The need for better education for most Americans has never been more urgent. While we have been sleeping, the rest of the world has been upgrading its skills. Countries in Europe and Asia have worked hard to increase their college-graduation rates, while the U.S.'s--once the world's highest--has flatlined. Other countries have focused on math and science, while in America degrees have proliferated in "fields" like sports exercise and leisure studies. 

Bill Gross, the head of Pimco, the world's largest bond fund, sums it up in no uncertain terms: "Our labor force is too expensive and poorly educated for today's marketplace." There are two variables here: our educational levels, which are low, and our wages, which are high. Either we will raise our educational level or markets will lower our wages. 

[...] How to do it? Well, there is one simple, time-tested method. Work harder. Thomas Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Malcolm Gladwell found that behind many supposedly natural-born talents like musical ability lay lots of practice--by his calculations, about 10,000 hours of practice. U.S. schoolchildren spend less time in school than their peers abroad. They have shorter school days and a shorter school year. Children in South Korea will spend almost two years more in school than Americans by the end of high school. Is it really so strange that they score higher on tests? 

If South Korea teaches the importance of hard work, Finland teaches another lesson. Finnish students score near the very top on international tests, yet they do not follow the Asian model of study, study and more study. Instead they start school a year later than in most countries, emphasize creative work and shun tests for most of the year. But Finland has great teachers, who are paid well and treated with the same professional respect that is accorded to doctors and lawyers. They are found and developed through an extremely competitive and rigorous process. All teachers are required to have master's degrees, and only 1 in 10 applicants is accepted to the country's teacher-training programs. The contrast with the U.S. is stark. Half of America's teachers graduated in the bottom third of their college class. 

Bill Gates has spent about $5 billion trying to research and reform American education. I asked him, if he were running a school district and could wave a magic wand, what he would do. His response: hire the best teachers. That's what produces the best results for students, more than class size or money or curriculum. "So the basic research into great teaching, that's now become our biggest investment," he says. One study estimates that if black students had a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row, that would be enough to close the black-white test-score gap. 

[...] I went through the Asian educational system, which is now so admired. It gave me an impressive base of knowledge and taught me how to study hard and fast. But when I got to the U.S. for college, I found that it had not trained me that well to think. American education at its best teaches you how to solve problems, truly understand the material, question authority, think for yourself and be creative. It teaches you to learn what you love and to love learning. These are incredibly important values, and they are why the U.S. has been able to maintain an edge in creative industries and innovation in general. 

The U.S. should truly fix its educational system by emphasizing the basics--like hard work--again but also by renewing its distinctly American character. We will succeed not by becoming more Asian but by becoming, as the writer James Fallows put it once, "more like us." That's what made America the world's most dynamic society--and it can make it so again. 

---"When Will We Learn?" Fareed Zakaria, Time (11.14.11)

Now lets return to the Rana Foorahar article for some insights on the role of health care, government support of employment and training, and tax policy.

There are many other lessons to be learned from the most mobile nations. Funding universal health care without tying it to jobs can increase labor flexibility and reduce the chance that people will fall into poverty because of medical emergencies--a common occurrence in the U.S., where such medical crises are a big reason a third of the population cycles in and out of poverty every year. Focusing more on less-expensive preventive care (including family planning, since high teen birthrates correlate with lack of mobility) rather than on expensive procedures can increase the general health levels in a society, which is also correlated to mobility. 

Europe's higher spending on social safety nets has certainly bolstered the middle and working classes. (Indeed, you could argue that some of America's great social programs, including Social Security and Medicaid, enabled us to become a middle-class nation.) Countries like Germany and Denmark that have invested in youth-employment programs and technical schools where young people can learn a high-paying trade have done well, which is not surprising given that in many studies, including the Opportunity Nation index, there's a high correlation between the number of teenagers who are not in school or not working and lowered mobility. 

[...] Germans, for example, made a command decision after the financial downturn in 2008 not to let unemployment rise because it would ultimately be more expensive to put people back to work than to pay to keep them in their jobs. The government subsidized companies to keep workers (as many as 1.4 million in 2009) on the payroll, even part time. Once the economy began to pick up, companies were ready to capitalize on it quickly. Unemployment is now 6%--lower than before the recession--and growth has stayed relatively high. 

The Nordic nations, too, have figured out clever ways to combine strong economic growth with a decent amount of security. As in Germany, labor and corporate relations are collaborative rather than contentious. Union reps often sit on company boards, which makes it easier to curb excessive executive pay and negotiate compromises over working hours. Worker retraining is a high priority. Danish adults spend a lot of time in on-the-job training. That's one reason they also enjoy high real wages and relatively low unemployment. 

The final lesson that might be learned is in tax policy. The more-mobile European nations have fewer corporate loopholes, more redistribution to the poor and middle class via consumption taxes and far less complication. France's tax code, for example, is 12% as long as the U.S.'s. Tax levels are also higher, something that the enlightened rich in the U.S. are very publicly advocating. 

No wonder. A large body of academic research shows that inequality and lack of social mobility hurt not just those at the bottom; they hurt everyone. Unequal societies have lower levels of trust, higher levels of anxiety and more illness. They have arguably less stable economies: International Monetary Fund research shows that countries like the U.S. and the U.K. are more prone to boom-and-bust cycles. And they are ultimately at risk for social instability. 

That's the inflection point that we are at right now. The mythology of the American Dream has made it difficult to start a serious conversation about how to create more opportunity in our society, since many of us still believe that our mobility is the result of our elbow grease and nothing more. But there is a growing truth, seen in the numbers and in the protests that are spreading across our nation, that this isn't so. We can no longer blame the individual. We have to acknowledge that climbing the ladder often means getting some support and a boost.

Many other articles have offered examples and perspectives on America's declining upward mobility, it's slide toward a smaller middle class and a bigger gap between rich and poor. One study reports that in 2007 only 44% of American families lived in middle-income neighborhoods, down from 65% in 1970. ("Middle-class areas shrink as America divides into "two-tiered society of rich and poor," by Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times (11.16.11)). That's a lot of damage in a relatively short time to our middle-class strength, and a threat to our economic and social stability. And it won't be reversed overnight.

The reality and the implications are clear enough. We are just now experiencing the unwelcome results of policies and circumstances long in their development. We cannot further delay a national corrective that will move us back on the upward path we've always so proudly claimed. The failings of our education system must be reversed. Germany's approach to the economic effects of the financial crisis reflected sound thinking: to fail to provide for social needs and training would just result in worse conditions that would exact greater social and economic costs in the end. That is thinking that will not come naturally or easy to America's anti-government spending advocates. It's not just the stimulative economic effect--although that is important--but also the reduction of national stress and pain, and reduced volatility of economic cycles.

We have to get past our misguided notions that America is by virtue of its very existence and nature a more advanced, better functioning and economically stronger country than all others. We have to get past this baseless nationalistic hubris and outmoded thinking, too often misled my misguided ideologues and populist demogogues. We must reclaim America's historical pragmatism, education leadership, hard work, and boldness of government investment in our future, a future which threatens to quickly and globally leave us behind. We can and must learn from other countries, many of which we once considered lesser lights. We will require a stronger partnership among government, education, business, and our citizenry, one built on the old foundations of American vision, innovation and hard work, but combined with a respectful view of the new, global, governmental, economic, and educational realities. Amen.