Kevin Scanlon for The New York Times

“How come these people like us?” asked Mr. Malkmus, who at 45 has some distinguished gray hairs mixing it up in his tousled brown locks. “It’s just because they’re used to us,” said Mr. Hansen, a boyish 41, whose wide eyes were ringed by tan lines suggesting the perennial wearing of sunglasses. “Their resistance has been broken down.”

By DAVE ITZKOFF
NY Times Published: August 18, 2011

IF Stephen Malkmus and Beck Hansen ever gave up the rock-music thing — and after roughly 40 twisty-turny years in their combined careers, neither of them is contemplating it — there might be a future for them as a low-key comedy team.

Recently reunited here for the first time since Mr. Hansen (better known simply as Beck) produced “Mirror Traffic,” a new record by Mr. Malkmus and his band the Jicks, these two musicians, stalwarts of the 1990s alternative-indie-hey-whatever scene, were not immediately inclined to discuss this album or what it represents to listeners realizing that two whole decades have elapsed since the age of insincerity, flannel and insincerely worn flannel.

Instead they were cracking wise, mocking themselves and wondering how their fans could stand their speaking voices.

“How come these people like us?” asked Mr. Malkmus, who at 45 has some distinguished gray hairs mixing it up in his tousled brown locks.

“It’s just because they’re used to us,” said Mr. Hansen, a boyish 41, whose wide eyes were ringed by tan lines suggesting the perennial wearing of sunglasses. “Their resistance has been broken down.”

Far removed from the era when Mr. Hansen broke through with his best-selling, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink albums “Mellow Gold” and “Odelay,” and Mr. Malkmus and his band Pavement briefly flirted with the mainstream before they turned more idiosyncratic and then broke up, the two men had taken divergent routes to, as Mr. Hansen said, “ultimately end up in a pretty similar place.”

In the Hollywood office of Mr. Hansen’s managers, decorated with Sonic Youth posters, “Ghost World” action figures and framed portraits of Donna Summer and Valerie Bertinelli, they were longtime peers turned improbable elder statesmen. Once alt-rock upstarts, both are now married and fathers of young children, each with a kid named after a day of the week. (Mr. Malkmus has a daughter named Sunday, and Mr. Hansen’s daughter is named Tuesday.)

It seems fitting that their first collaboration should arrive at a moment when nostalgia for the pop culture of the 1990s — witness the 20th anniversary reissue of Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” the planned MTV revival of “Beavis and Butt-Head” and yes, the recent Pavement reunion tour — is approaching peak capacity faster than you can say “Reality Bites.”

And it is in keeping with both artists’ unpredictable, against-the-grain styles that the sonically accessible, lyrically elliptical “Mirror Traffic,” which Matador Records will release on Tuesday, is not an attempt to mash up or cash in on their best known work but to keep moving beyond it. Having made their names in a music scene where nothing seemed more important than being on the right side of some clearly drawn battle lines, they now understand those distinctions matter less than the dignity that comes with simply sticking to their craft.

As Mr. Malkmus said: “Nirvana’s not a punk band when it’s popular. It’s a pop band. The songs are all three minutes long. They have choruses.”

The tall, lean Mr. Malkmus has a not-undeserved reputation for straight-faced sarcasm and the more diminutive Mr. Hansen for peculiarity. (His contributions to the conversation included the occasional, ruminative “hurm.”) But in each other’s presence they bantered about good singers whose speaking voices did not grate (Tom Waits and Bjork were mentioned) and whether British accents were more likely to reel in the ladies than American ones. Mr. Malkmus gently needled Mr. Hansen for his cultivated technophobia (“I bet you never sent an e-mail in your life,” he said; “I did once but I felt guilty about it,” came the reply), then praised him for his musical memory skills.

“That’s a testament,” Mr. Malkmus said, “to your not using the e-mail, and keeping your mind free.”

Mr. Malkmus recalled what was probably his first encounter with Mr. Hansen, in the early 1990s at the Trocadero Theater in Philadelphia. Pavement, which was about to have a rare radio hit with its exuberant single “Cut Your Hair,” was playing the theater’s main stage, while Mr. Hansen, who was still riding the momentum of his novelty anthem “Loser,” was booked somewhere smaller. (“I was probably playing at a deli,” he said.)

Mr. Hansen went on to become the eccentric experimentalist who dabbled in hip-hop, funk and even Tropicália on seven more major-label studio albums released over the next decade and a half. Pavement, which never seemed fully comfortable in the spotlight, released five full-length albums of cryptic, intellectual rock before parting ways in 1999.

Though they were not “close bros,” as Mr. Malkmus said, he and Mr. Hansen often crossed paths on tour and held each other’s work in high esteem. Mr. Malkmus praised Mr. Hansen for the care that went into his albums and “the attention to how it actually sounds — if it sounds bad, it was intentionally so.” (Mr. Hansen said, chuckling, “I don’t think it was intentional.”)

And Mr. Hansen said Pavement was “the band that 40 other bands were emulating.” He added, “From the outside it looked like fun.” (Mr. Malkmus replied: “Yeah, it looked fun. It was fun, for a while.”)

Most crucially they shared a creative solidarity as nu-metal bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit became commercially dominant, ushering in, Mr. Malkmus said, an era of “the rage rock and the testosterone” and “fishing lures in your face.”

The two men lost touch with each other in the 2000s, as Mr. Malkmus moved to Portland, Ore., and formed the Jicks, and Mr. Hansen expanded his horizons, producing music for Marianne Faithfull and Charlotte Gainsbourg and contributing songs to the soundtracks of “True Blood” and “Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World.”

Then, just over a year ago, Mr. Hansen called Mr. Malkmus, wondering if he might be interested in his services. “You realize at one point, oh, we never did anything together,” Mr. Hansen explained. “It seems like an obvious idea but it takes 15 years.”

Mr. Malkmus and his band mates, who had not worked with an outside producer on their four previous albums (and whose 2008 release, “Real Emotional Trash,” peaked at No. 64 on the Billboard chart), the call came at a time when they were looking for a jolt of energy.

“It’s our fifth record,” said Mike Clark, a guitarist and keyboardist for the Jicks. “It’s either going to be the rebirth, redirection, of a band that’s hitting their stride and has got fresh wind in their sails, or it’ll be, this is the band that’s grinding things into the ground and becoming tedious.”

Though the band had spitballed the names of producers like Dave Fridmann, who has worked with the Flaming Lips, and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, it was irresistibly drawn to Mr. Hansen’s offer, even if that passion did not seem to register on its frontman.

“I don’t think Steve Malkmus gets wildly excited about much except fantasy sports,” said Janet Weiss, the former drummer for Sleater-Kinney who performs on “Real Emotional Trash” and “Mirror Traffic. “He did invent slacker.”

Mr. Hansen, who worked with Mr. Malkmus and the Jicks at the studio Sunset Sound in Hollywood, was oblique about his contributions to “Mirror Traffic.” “We tried to make it sound as cool as we can, without it being too overdone,” he said.

But the members of the Jicks said Mr. Hansen had a distinct impact on nearly every aspect of the album, including its clean, sunny spirit; the choice and sound of its instruments; and even the selection of songs the band might have otherwise abandoned.

“A lot of it was throwaway stuff that Beck just fell in love with,” Ms. Weiss said. “ ‘No, this is the real stuff. This is the stuff I want to get at.’ ”

During the rapid sessions, in which 15 tracks were recorded in a couple of days, Ms. Weiss said, “there were some uncomfortable moments of, wow, we have no control over anything that’s happening.” She added that this uncertainty yielded favorable results: “It’s like, what is my snare going to sound like when it’s covered with a T-shirt? And it sounded really awesome.”

Mr. Malkmus generally stuck to his songwriting strategy of creating riffs inspired by favorite or recently heard songs and improvising his lyrics on the spot. (This accounts for tracks like “No One Is (As I Are Be),” which combines the gentle acoustic guitar of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” with the Malkmusian line “I cannot even do one sit-up, sit-ups are so bourgeoise.”) Mr. Hansen said he tried not to put his thumb on the scale too much, though he was sorry to see Mr. Malkmus lose a lyric that rhymed “Vietnam” with “lip balm.”

The decision to write and record “Mirror Traffic” before last year’s Pavement reunion tour, Mr. Malkmus acknowledged, was his, though he could not say for certain if that impending commitment had an effect on the album.

“I knew that it was coming,” he said, “so if people try to say it’s somehow Pavement-y, it could be in my mind, that I had to do that tour.” He corrected himself. “Or wanted to do that tour.”

Neither Mr. Malkmus nor Mr. Hansen was particularly committal about future plans. Mr. Malkmus is moving his family to Europe, a transition he explained as “change for the sake of change.” (Ms. Weiss, meanwhile, has left the Jicks for the band Wild Flag, saying she “could not sit around for a year and not play music” while Mr. Malkmus was performing with Pavement.)

Mr. Hansen, who has not released a full-length album since his somber “Modern Guilt” in 2008, gave no indication about whether he might resume making music, though he recently produced the Thurston Moore record “Demolished Thoughts,” and has been producing tracks for the country musician Dwight Yoakam.

Mr. Yoakam eagerly endorsed the idea that Mr. Hansen could become a great producer, saying he was a “great enabler” of music. “He can appear to some folks as, perhaps, in a moment, detached,” Mr. Yoakam said, “but I realized he’s actually taking all of it in on a variety of levels.” He added that his “introspective demeanor belies how enthusiastically he’s going to have an effect on what you’re doing.”

Mr. Hansen and Mr. Malkmus were not averse to a little 1990s nostalgia of their own, and said the lingering good feelings for the decade were understandable.

While the 1960s and ’70s were defined by cultural and political upheaval, Mr. Malkmus said: “The ’90s had the Internet, great. I don’t know what really traumatic thing happened in the ’90s. It’s probably going to seem like this ideal time to a lot of people, eventually.”

Mr. Hansen recalled that decade as a “weird dead zone” — he meant this affectionately — in which “we weren’t competing with a bunch of Britney Spears and superstar-type people. You could do some other things.”

But if their work, together or apart, made listeners even more wistful for the heyday of that self-aware demographic group called Generation X, “it’s not really our fault,” Mr. Malkmus said with a shrug. “All we can do is do what we do.”

Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

Campers touring a materials testing lab watched as a rose dipped in liquid nitrogen was crushed.

By MOTOKO RICH
NY Times Published: August 18, 2011

RIVER GROVE, Ill. — Forget tie-dyed shirts, lanyards and water games. At summer camp this year, Nautika Kotero, 13, learned to use a drill press, solder electrical wires and build a lamp.

Though the slim, 5-foot-5 teenager dreams of becoming a basketball star, Nautika now has a backup plan after her weeklong immersion course: a career in manufacturing.

Just over a quarter of the 11.7 million workers in manufacturing are women. But Gadget Camp, a workshop for girls in this suburb west of Chicago, is part of an effort to change that.

Although the economy is wobbling and nearly 14 million people are looking for work, some employers are still having a hard time finding skilled workers for certain positions. Manufacturers in particular complain that few applicants can operate computerized equipment, read blueprints and solve production problems. And with the baby boomers starting to retire, these and other employers worry there will be few young workers willing or able to replace them.

Gadget Camp, sponsored in part by a foundation affiliated with the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association, which provided financing to nine other camps this summer, is intended to help over the long haul by exposing girls to an occupation they might previously have considered unappealing, if they considered it at all.

By the last day of camp, Nautika had told her parents that manufacturing was “cool.” Fashioning a lamp shade out of a thin piece of cardboard, she mused, “I have two good careers ahead of me.” Since the fragile recovery began, manufacturing is one of the few sectors that have added jobs. But the image of manufacturing as an occupation of the future has been tarnished by the exodus of factory jobs to foreign sites and the use of machinery to replace workers. Younger people, especially, see more alluring opportunities in digital technology, finance or health care.

“The perception is that there are no jobs in manufacturing,” said Susan H. Palisano, director of education and training at the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology, a nonprofit group in East Hartford that promotes manufacturing employment and has run summer programs for middle-school students for the last three years. “It seems that everybody had an uncle or grandfather that got laid off.”

Across the country, a handful of companies, nonprofit groups, public educational agencies and even science museums are trying to make manufacturing seem, well, fun. Focusing mainly on children aged 10 to 17, organizations including the Da Vinci Science Center in Allentown, Pa.; and Stihl, a maker of chain saws and other outdoor power equipment in Virginia Beach, Va., run camps that let students operate basic machinery, meet workers and make things.

Nuts, Bolts & Thingamajigs, the foundation that helped sponsor the Gadget camp in River Grove, has awarded $2,500 grants to 112 manufacturing-themed camps — most of them for boys and girls — around the country since 2004. “It’s not easy getting people into the career field,” said Marcia Arndt, a board member of the foundation. “I think there’s a myth out there that manufacturing is dirty and undesirable, but it’s really highly technological.”

Impressions also persist that manufacturing is a man’s job. Technical fields in general, and those that require scientific or mathematical backgrounds, are indeed dominated by men. Yet a Commerce Department report released early this month showed that women in such fields earn 33 percent more, on average, than women working outside of scientific and technical fields, a higher premium than men enjoy in similar occupations.

Antigone Sharris, who came up with the idea for the all-girls Gadget camp, had worked extensively in manufacturing before becoming an instructor in electronics, welding and computer-aided machinery at Triton College, a two-year public school here that provided some funding for the camp.

Ms. Sharris is a mentor to high school robotics teams and wants to encourage young women to consider a range of technically oriented careers. “Girls don’t naturally gravitate toward engineering,” said Ms. Sharris, a jolly and patient instructor who interspersed practical tips on using a band saw or a drill press with casual explanations of fractions, the concept of leverage and Newton’s laws.

In a windowless classroom and shop on Triton’s scruffy campus, 16 girls aged 11 to 15 designed and constructed a cat feeder, a candy dispenser and various pieces of jewelry and music boxes, using foam board, wood, metal, fiberglass and PVC pipe.

“Not letting your children learn the hands-on component of the theory of science is killing us as a nation,” Ms. Sharris said. “You have to stop giving kids books and start giving them tools.”

To give the girls a concrete sense of what such skills could mean in the workplace, Ms. Sharris invited a human resources coordinator from a local manufacturer to tell them about salaries — starting in the $40,000 range and moving up to six digits, including overtime.

Several of the campers came from low-income and minority communities near the college. Only five of the 16 girls at the camp had paid the $99 fee; the rest were subsidized.

While Ms. Sharris focused mostly on basic technical skills, factory tours aimed at introducing the girls to modern manufacturing work brought out talk that might have fit at a nationalist rally.

During a tour of Tru-Way, which produces precision metal parts, Stan Mastalerz, the company’s president, showed the girls a tiny component used in electronic circuit boards.

Ms. Sharris jumped in. “See that?” she asked. “This is something that might be in your Game Boy that you don’t even know about. The game may be made in China, but there are pieces that are made right here in your backyard.”

The reality of factory life gave a few girls pause. Visiting Tru-Way on a scorching summer afternoon, they noted the extreme heat and noise of the shop floor.

Brittany Orr, 15, who asked questions and jotted notes, said she liked the tasks that involved some thought and analysis. But “I would not want to do a job where you just do the same thing again,” she said. “It seems tedious.”

A tour of MSi Testing & Engineering, a small company in Melrose Park, Ill., that evaluates the strength and quality of metal materials used by manufacturers, showed that it offered more of the work she preferred.

In the end, the campers learned lessons in persistence and problem-solving as well as technical skills. When Nautika began building the lamp she had designed, she wanted to install a rotating shade.

Ms. Sharris brought out a tiny motor. “What you are trying to figure out is what to use to make your lampshade so that it will spin,” she said.

Ms. Sharris rejected Nautika’s first suggestion of foam board: too heavy. Ms. Sharris recommended a simple piece of copier paper, then spied a paper plate on a table. “Humor me,” she said, showing Nautika how to affix the motor to the plate with generous daubs from a glue gun.

Next came wiring a battery. To tutor Nautika in basic electronics, Ms. Sharris recruited Ariana Vargas, a 17-year-old counselor who has competed on her robotics team. Ariana demonstrated how to strip the green coating from the electrical wires with pliers. On Nautika’s first try, the whole tip broke off.

A few fumbles later, Nautika was frustrated. “I don’t know how you did it!” she said.

Ariana replied, “Practice, practice and more practice.”

Finally, the coating came off, exposing bare wire. Her confidence building, Nautika stripped another wire and slid both ends through a PVC pipe and connected them to the battery.

The plate began to spin.

“Yea!” Nautika exclaimed. “I did it.”

NY Times Published August 18, 2011

Benjamin Shute is the co-owner and manager of Hearty Roots Community Farm, where he grows vegetables on 23 acres in New York’s Hudson River Valley. He is a co-founder of the National Young Farmers’ Coalition.

If farmers lose access to some of the skilled workers who pick fruit, plant vegetables and care for crops, food prices will certainly rise. However, this will not be a basic supply-and-demand equation, in which farmers simply would need to offer higher wages to attract American workers to the fields. In fact, many farmers already advertise jobs — with competitive wages, housing and transportation — to U.S. citizens to no avail, as part of the required process for then legally hiring skilled foreign guest workers through the U.S. government’s H-2A program.

The reality is that right now there are simply not enough trained and willing American agricultural workers to get these jobs done. By removing some of the current skilled but undocumented workers from the equation, food prices would rise not because worker pay would improve, but rather because jobs would go unfilled, apples would go unpicked and food would be in short supply.

If our lawmakers decide that American farmers should hire only American workers, then we as a country have a lot more work to do than just enforcing rules against illegal labor. We need to set a national priority to encourage a new generation of young farmers, and we must adjust our system of agriculture to make farms into places where Americans want to work.

On my vegetable farm, we overcome the odds and succeed in attracting young Americans who are enthusiastic about working in agriculture. The 10 people who plant, pick and weed with me put in long and strenuous days, motivated because they are gaining skills that will help them in their missions to steward their own land someday. Our farm attracts young people because we embrace innovations in farming. We follow the community-supported agriculture model, in which we grow a wide variety of vegetables, rather than picking one single crop all day, and then provide the harvest directly to our farm’s members, who have “subscribed” for the season. This direct-marketing strategy helps us to obtain a fair price for our produce, and to pay a fair wage. We use organic practices that ensure the safety of our workers, and our diversified approach attracts problem solvers and creative thinkers who are eager to engage in the challenge of managing a farm ecosystem, not a monoculture.

There is renewed interest among young people in farms like mine, but unfortunately the larger trend is an increase in the average age of the American farmer, currently 57 years old. To reverse this course, our country must take bold action to ensure that aspiring farmers have access to land, health care, capital, education and training. Congress should invest now in a farm bill that helps young Americans enter into and succeed in farming, and that creates incentives for diversified and sustainable agriculture. As we build a new generation of American farmers, we should also provide legal guest worker and citizenship opportunities for the skilled immigrant farm workers needed to grow our food right now, by passing legislation like the AgJOBS bill currently being considered by Congress.

My customers are proud to invest in my farm and to pay a fair price for food, because they share this vision for strong, sustainable agriculture in America. However, if food prices rise simply because Congress is pushing skilled undocumented workers off of farms, with no plan for the future, consumers are not likely to be so accepting.

via

This article replicates blog postings made by Glenn Adamson, one of the exhibition curators of Postmodernism 1970 – 1990 at the V&A in September

Eat Meat
1973
cast bronze
24 x 80 x 54 in.

Through October 10, 2011

MOCA

Kelly Blair

By WARREN E. BUFFETT
NY Times Published: August 14, 2011

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

The taxes I refer to here include only federal income tax, but you can be sure that any payroll tax for the 400 was inconsequential compared to income. In fact, 88 of the 400 in 2008 reported no wages at all, though every one of them reported capital gains. Some of my brethren may shun work but they all like to invest. (I can relate to that.)

I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.

Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances. They’ve been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.

Job one for the 12 is to pare down some future promises that even a rich America can’t fulfill. Big money must be saved here. The 12 should then turn to the issue of revenues. I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.

But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

Braun 4776, ET66

August 27 through February 20, 2011

SFMOMA

By Don Peck
The Atlantic

In October 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was “no such animal as the U.S. consumer,” and that concepts such as “average” consumer debt and “average” consumer spending were highly misleading.

In fact, they said, America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns. The analysts, Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, had coined a term for this state of affairs: plutonomy.

In a plutonomy, Kapur and his co-authors wrote, “economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” America had been in this state twice before, they noted—during the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. In each case, the concentration of wealth was the result of rapid technological change, global integration, laissez-faire government policy, and “creative financial innovation.” In 2005, the rich were nearing the heights they’d reached in those previous eras, and Citigroup saw no good reason to think that, this time around, they wouldn’t keep on climbing. “The earth is being held up by the muscular arms of its entrepreneur-plutocrats,” the report said. The “great complexity” of a global economy in rapid transformation would be “exploited best by the rich and educated” of our time.
The Great Recession and the Middle Class

Kapur and his co-authors were wrong in some of their specific predictions about the plutonomy’s ramifications—they argued, for instance, that since spending was dominated by the rich, and since the rich had very healthy balance sheets, the odds of a stock-market downturn were slight, despite the rising indebtedness of the “average” U.S. consumer. And their division of America into only two classes is ultimately too simple. Nonetheless, their overall characterization of the economy remains resonant. According to Gallup, from May 2009 to May 2011, daily consumer spending rose by 16 percent among Americans earning more than $90,000 a year; among all other Americans, spending was completely flat. The consumer recovery, such as it is, appears to be driven by the affluent, not by the masses. Three years after the crash of 2008, the rich and well educated are putting the recession behind them. The rest of America is stuck in neutral or reverse.

Income inequality usually shrinks during a recession, but in the Great Recession, it didn’t. From 2007 to 2009, the most-recent years for which data are available, it widened a little. The top 1 percent of earners did see their incomes drop more than those of other Americans in 2008. But that fall was due almost entirely to the stock-market crash, and with it a 50 percent reduction in realized capital gains. Excluding capital gains, top earners saw their share of national income rise even in 2008. And in any case, the stock market has since rallied. Corporate profits have marched smartly upward, quarter after quarter, since the beginning of 2009.

Even in the financial sector, high earners have come back strong. In 2009, the country’s top 25 hedge-fund managers earned $25 billion among them—more than they had made in 2007, before the crash. And while the crisis may have begun with mass layoffs on Wall Street, the financial industry has remained well shielded compared with other sectors; from the first quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2010, finance shed 8 percent of its jobs, compared with 27 percent in construction and 17 percent in manufacturing. Throughout the recession, the unemployment rate in finance and insurance has been substantially below that of the nation overall.

It’s hard to miss just how unevenly the Great Recession has affected different classes of people in different places. From 2009 to 2010, wages were essentially flat nationwide—but they grew by 11.9 percent in Manhattan and 8.7 percent in Silicon Valley. In the Washington, D.C., and San Jose (Silicon Valley) metro areas—both primary habitats for America’s meritocratic winners—job postings in February of this year were almost as numerous as job candidates. In Miami and Detroit, by contrast, for every job posting, six people were unemployed. In March, the national unemployment rate was 12 percent for people with only a high-school diploma, 4.5 percent for college grads, and 2 percent for those with a professional degree.

Housing crashed hardest in the exurbs and in more-affordable, once fast-growing areas like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and much of Florida—all meccas for aspiring middle-class families with limited savings and education. The professional class, clustered most densely in the closer suburbs of expensive but resilient cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Chicago, has lost little in comparison. And indeed, because the stock market has rebounded while housing values have not, the middle class as a whole has seen more of its wealth erased than the rich, who hold more-diverse portfolios. A 2010 Pew study showed that the typical middle-class family had lost 23 percent of its wealth since the recession began, versus just 12 percent in the upper class.

The ease with which the rich and well educated have shrugged off the recession shouldn’t be surprising; strong winds have been at their backs for many years. The recession, meanwhile, has restrained wage growth and enabled faster restructuring and offshoring, leaving many corporations with lower production costs and higher profits—and their executives with higher pay.

Anthony Atkinson, an economist at Oxford University, has studied how several recent financial crises affected income distribution—and found that in their wake, the rich have usually strengthened their economic position. Atkinson examined the financial crises that swept Asia in the 1990s as well as those that afflicted several Nordic countries in the same decade. In most cases, he says, the middle class suffered depressed income for a long time after the crisis, while the top 1 percent were able to protect themselves—using their cash reserves to buy up assets very cheaply once the market crashed, and emerging from crisis with a significantly higher share of assets and income than they’d had before. “I think we’ve seen the same thing, to some extent, in the United States” since the 2008 crash, he told me. “Mr. Buffet has been investing.”

“The rich seem to be on the road to recovery,” says Emmanuel Saez, an economist at Berkeley, while those in the middle, especially those who’ve lost their jobs, “might be permanently hit.” Coming out of the deep recession of the early 1980s, Saez notes, “you saw an increase in inequality … as the rich bounced back, and unionized labor never again found jobs that paid as well as the ones they’d had. And now I fear we’re going to see the same phenomenon, but more dramatic.” Middle-paying jobs in the U.S., in which some workers have been overpaid relative to the cost of labor overseas or technological substitution, “are being wiped out. And what will be left is a hard and a pure market,” with the many paid less than before, and the few paid even better—a plutonomy strengthened in the crucible of the post-crash years.

The Culling of the Middle Class

One of the most salient features of severe downturns is that they tend to accelerate deep economic shifts that are already under way. Declining industries and companies fail, spurring workers and capital toward rising sectors; declining cities shrink faster, leaving blight; workers whose roles have been partly usurped by technology are pushed out en masse and never asked to return. Some economists have argued that in one sense, periods like these do nations a service by clearing the way for new innovation, more-efficient production, and faster growth. Whether or not that’s true, they typically allow us to see, with rare and brutal clarity, where society is heading—and what sorts of people and places it is leaving behind.

Arguably, the most important economic trend in the United States over the past couple of generations has been the ever more distinct sorting of Americans into winners and losers, and the slow hollowing-out of the middle class. Median incomes declined outright from 1999 to 2009. For most of the aughts, that trend was masked by the housing bubble, which allowed working-class and middle-class families to raise their standard of living despite income stagnation or downward job mobility. But that fig leaf has since blown away. And the recession has pressed hard on the broad center of American society.

“The Great Recession has quantitatively but not qualitatively changed the trend toward employment polarization” in the United States, wrote the MIT economist David Autor in a 2010 white paper. Job losses have been “far more severe in middle-skilled white- and blue-collar jobs than in either high-skill, white-collar jobs or in low-skill service occupations.” Indeed, from 2007 through 2009, total employment in professional, managerial, and highly skilled technical positions was essentially unchanged. Jobs in low-skill service occupations such as food preparation, personal care, and house cleaning were also fairly stable. Overwhelmingly, the recession has destroyed the jobs in between. Almost one of every 12 white-collar jobs in sales, administrative support, and nonmanagerial office work vanished in the first two years of the recession; one of every six blue-collar jobs in production, craft, repair, and machine operation did the same.

Autor isolates the winnowing of middle-skill, middle-class jobs as one of several labor-market developments that are profoundly reshaping U.S. society. The others are rising pay at the top, falling wages for the less educated, and “lagging labor market gains for males.” “All,” he writes, “predate the Great Recession. But the available data suggest that the Great Recession has reinforced these trends.”

For more than 30 years, the American economy has been in the midst of a sea change, shifting from industry to services and information, and integrating itself far more tightly into a single, global market for goods, labor, and capital. To some degree, this transformation has felt disruptive all along. But the pace of the change has quickened since the turn of the millennium, and even more so since the crash. Companies have figured out how to harness exponential increases in computing power better and faster. Global supply chains, meanwhile, have grown both tighter and more supple since the late 1990s—the result of improving information technology and of freer trade—making routine work easier to relocate. And of course China, India, and other developing countries have fully emerged as economic powerhouses, capable of producing large volumes of high-value goods and services.

Some parts of America’s transformation may now be nearing completion. For decades, manufacturing has become continually less important to the economy, as other business sectors have grown. But the popular narrative—rapid decline in the 1970s and ’80s, followed by slow erosion thereafter—isn’t quite right, at least as far as employment goes. In fact, the total number of people employed in industry remained quite stable from the late 1960s through about 2000, at roughly 17 million to 19 million. To be sure, manufacturing wasn’t providing many new jobs for a growing population, but for decades, rising output essentially offset the impact of labor-saving technology and offshoring.

But since 2000, U.S. manufacturing has shed about a third of its jobs. Some of that decline reflects losses to China. Still, industry isn’t about to vanish from America, any more than agriculture did as the number of farm workers plummeted during the 20th century. As of 2010, the United States was the second-largest manufacturer in the world, and the No. 3 agricultural nation. But agriculture is now so mechanized that only about 2 percent of American workers make a living as farmers. American manufacturing looks to be heading down the same path.

Meanwhile, another phase of the economy’s transformation—one more squarely involving the white-collar workforce—is really just beginning. “The thing about information technology,” Autor told me, “is that it’s extremely broadly applicable, it’s getting cheaper all the time, and we’re getting better and better at it.” Computer software can now do boilerplate legal work, for instance, and make a first pass at reading X-rays and other medical scans. Likewise, thanks to technology, we can now easily have those scans read and interpreted by professionals half a world away.

In 2007, the economist Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, estimated that between 22 and 29 percent of all jobs in the United States had the potential to be moved overseas within the next couple of decades. With the recession, the offshoring of jobs only seems to have gained steam. The financial crisis of 2008 was global, but job losses hit America especially hard. According to the International Monetary Fund, one of every four jobs lost worldwide was lost in the United States. And while unemployment remains high in America, it has come back down to (or below) pre-recession levels in countries like China and Brazil.

Anxiety Creeps Upward

Over time, both trade and technology have increased the number of low-cost substitutes for American workers with only moderate cognitive or manual skills—people who perform routine tasks such as product assembly, process monitoring, record keeping, basic information brokering, simple software coding, and so on. As machines and low-paid foreign workers have taken on these functions, the skills associated with them have become less valuable, and workers lacking higher education have suffered.

For the most part, these same forces have been a boon, so far, to Americans who have a good education and exceptional creative talents or analytic skills. Information technology has complemented the work of people who do complex research, sophisticated analysis, high-end deal-making, and many forms of design and artistic creation, rather than replacing that work. And global integration has meant wider markets for new American products and high-value services—and higher incomes for the people who create or provide them.

The return on education has risen in recent decades, producing more-severe income stratification. But even among the meritocratic elite, the economy’s evolution has produced a startling divergence. Since 1993, more than half of the nation’s income growth has been captured by the top 1 percent of earners, and the gains have grown larger over time: from 2002 to 2007, out of every three dollars of national income growth, the top 1 percent of earners captured two. Nearly 2 million people started college in 2002—1,630 of them at Harvard—but among them only Mark Zuckerberg is worth more than $10 billion today; the rise of the super-elite is not a product of educational differences. In part, it is a natural outcome of widening markets and technological revolution, which are creating much bigger winners much faster than ever before—a result that’s not even close to being fully played out, and one reinforced strongly by the political influence that great wealth brings.

Recently, as technology has improved and emerging-market countries have sent more people to college, economic pressures have been moving up the educational ladder in the United States. “It’s useful to make a distinction between college and post-college,” Autor told me. “Among people with professional and even doctoral [degrees], in general the job market has been very good for a very long time, including recently. The group of highly educated individuals who have not done so well recently would be people who have a four-year college degree but nothing beyond that. Opportunities have been less good, wage growth has been less good, the recession has been more damaging. They’ve been displaced from mid-managerial or organizational positions where they don’t have extremely specialized, hard-to-find skills.”

College graduates may be losing some of their luster for reasons beyond technology and trade. As more Americans have gone to college, Autor notes, the quality of college education has become arguably more inconsistent, and the signaling value of a degree from a nonselective school has perhaps diminished. Whatever the causes, “a college degree is not the kind of protection against job loss or wage loss that it used to be.”

Without doubt, it is vastly better to have a college degree than to lack one. Indeed, on a relative basis, the return on a four-year degree is near its historic high. But that’s largely because the prospects facing people without a college degree have been flat or falling. Throughout the aughts, incomes for college graduates barely budged. In a decade defined by setbacks, perhaps that should occasion a sort of wan celebration. “College graduates aren’t doing badly,” says Timothy Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on inequality. But “all the action in earnings is above the B.A. level.”

America’s classes are separating and changing. A tiny elite continues to float up and away from everyone else. Below it, suspended, sits what might be thought of as the professional middle class—unexceptional college graduates for whom the arrow of fortune points mostly sideways, and an upper tier of college graduates and postgraduates for whom it points progressively upward, but not spectacularly so. The professional middle class has grown anxious since the crash, and not without reason. Yet these anxieties should not distract us from a second, more important, cleavage in American society—the one between college graduates and everyone else.

If you live and work in the professional communities of Boston or Seattle or Washington, D.C., it is easy to forget that nationwide, even among people ages 25 to 34, college graduates make up only about 30 percent of the population. And it is easy to forget that a family income of $113,000 in 2009 would have put you in the 80th income percentile nationally. The true center of American society has always been its nonprofessionals—high-school graduates who didn’t go on to get a bachelor’s degree make up 58 percent of the adult population. And as manufacturing jobs and semiskilled office positions disappear, much of this vast, nonprofessional middle class is drifting downward.

The Bottom 70 Percent

The troubles of the nonprofessional middle class are inseparable from the economic troubles of men. Consistently, men without higher education have been the biggest losers in the economy’s long transformation (according to Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, real median wages of men have fallen by 32 percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have washed out of the workforce altogether). And the struggles of men have amplified the many problems—not just economic, but social and cultural—facing the country today.

Just as the housing bubble papered over the troubles of the middle class, it also hid, for a time, the declining prospects of many men. According to the Harvard economist Lawrence Katz, since the mid-1980s, the labor market has been placing a higher premium on creative, analytic, and interpersonal skills, and the wages of men without a college degree have been under particular pressure. “And I think this downturn exacerbates” the problem, Katz told me. During the aughts, construction provided an outlet for the young men who would have gone into manufacturing a generation ago. Men without higher education “didn’t do as badly as you might have expected, on long-run trends, because of the housing bubble.” But it’s hard to imagine another such construction boom coming to their rescue.

One of the great puzzles of the past 30 years has been the way that men, as a group, have responded to the declining market for blue-collar jobs. Opportunities have expanded for college graduates over that span, and for nongraduates, jobs have proliferated within the service sector (at wages ranging from rock-bottom to middling). Yet in the main, men have pursued neither higher education nor service jobs. The proportion of young men with a bachelor’s degree today is about the same as it was in 1980. And as the sociologists Maria Charles and David Grusky noted in their 2004 book, Occupational Ghettos, while men and women now mix more easily on different rungs of the career ladder, many industries and occupations have remained astonishingly segregated, with men continuing to seek work in a dwindling number of manual jobs, and women “crowding into nonmanual occupations that, on average, confer more pay and prestige.”

As recently as 2001, U.S. manufacturing still employed about as many people as did health and educational services combined (roughly 16 million). But since then, those latter, female-dominated sectors have added about 4 million jobs, while manufacturing has lost about the same number. Men made no inroads into health care or education during the aughts; in 2009, they held only about one in four jobs in those rising sectors, just as they had at the beginning of the decade. They did, however, consolidate their hold on manufacturing—those dwindling jobs, along with jobs in construction, transportation, and utilities, were more heavily dominated by men in 2009 than they’d been nine years earlier.

“I’m deeply concerned” about the prospects of less-skilled men, says Bruce Weinberg, an economist at Ohio State. In 1967, 97 percent of 30-to-50-year-old American men with only a high-school diploma were working; in 2010, just 76 percent were. Declining male employment is not unique to the United States. It’s been happening in almost all rich nations, as they’ve put the industrial age behind them. Weinberg’s research has shown that in occupations in which “people skills” are becoming more important, jobs are skewing toward women. And that category is large indeed. In his working paper “People People,” Weinberg and two co-authors found that interpersonal skills typically become more highly valued in occupations in which computer use is prevalent and growing, and in which teamwork is important. Both computer use and teamwork are becoming ever more central to the American workplace, of course; the restructuring that accompanied the Great Recession has only hastened that trend.

Needless to say, a great many men have excellent people skills, just as a great many men do well in school. As a group, men still make more money than women, in part due to lingering discrimination. And many of the differences we observe between the genders may be the result of culture rather than genetics. All of that notwithstanding, a meaningful number of men have struggled badly as the economy has evolved, and have shown few signs of successful adaptation. Men’s difficulties are hardly evident in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. But they’re hard to miss in foundering blue-collar and low-end service communities across the country. It is in these less affluent places that gender roles, family dynamics, and community character are changing in the wake of the crash.

A Cultural Separation

In the March 2010 issue of this magazine, I discussed the wide-ranging social consequences of male economic problems, once they become chronic. Women tend not to marry (or stay married to) jobless or economically insecure men—though they do have children with them. And those children usually struggle when, as typically happens, their parents separate and their lives are unsettled. The Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson has connected the loss of manufacturing jobs from inner cities in the 1970s—and the resulting economic struggles of inner-city men—to many of the social ills that cropped up afterward. Those social ills eventually became self-reinforcing, passing from one generation to the next. In less privileged parts of the country, a larger, predominantly male underclass may now be forming, and with it, more-widespread cultural problems.

What I didn’t emphasize in that story is the extent to which these sorts of social problems—the kind that can trap families and communities in a cycle of disarray and disappointment—have been seeping into the nonprofessional middle class. In a national study of the American family released late last year, the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox wrote that among “Middle Americans”—people with a high-school diploma but not a college degree—an array of signals of family dysfunction have begun to blink red. “The family lives of today’s moderately educated Americans,” which in the 1970s closely resembled those of college graduates, now “increasingly resemble those of high-school dropouts, too often burdened by financial stress, partner conflict, single parenting, and troubled children.”

“The speed of change,” wrote Wilcox, “is astonishing.” By the late 1990s, 37 percent of moderately educated couples were divorcing or separating less than 10 years into their first marriage, roughly the same rate as among couples who didn’t finish high school and more than three times that of college graduates. By the 2000s, the percentage in “very happy” marriages—identical to that of college graduates in the 1970s—was also nearing that of high-school dropouts. Between 2006 and 2008, among moderately educated women, 44 percent of all births occurred outside marriage, not far off the rate (54 percent) among high-school dropouts; among college-educated women, that proportion was just 6 percent.

The same pattern—families of middle-class nonprofessionals now resembling those of high-school dropouts more than those of college graduates—emerges with norm after norm: the percentage of 14-year-old girls living with both their mother and father; the percentage of adolescents wanting to attend college “very much”; the percentage of adolescents who say they’d be embarrassed if they got (or got someone) pregnant; the percentage of never-married young adults using birth control all the time.

One stubborn stereotype in the United States is that religious roots are deepest in blue-collar communities and small towns, and, more generally, among Americans who do not have college degrees. That was true in the 1970s. Yet since then, attendance at religious services has plummeted among moderately educated Americans, and is now much more common among college grads. So, too, is participation in civic groups. High-school seniors from affluent households are more likely to volunteer, join groups, go to church, and have strong academic ambitions than seniors used to be, and are as trusting of other people as seniors a generation ago; their peers from less affluent households have become less engaged on each of those fronts. A cultural chasm—which did not exist 40 years ago and which was still relatively small 20 years ago—has developed between the traditional middle class and the top 30 percent of society.

The interplay of economic and cultural forces is complex, and changes in cultural norms cannot be ascribed exclusively to the economy. Wilcox has tried to statistically parse the causes of the changes he has documented, concluding that about a third of the class-based changes in marriage patterns, for instance, are directly attributable to wage stagnation, increased job insecurity, or bouts of unemployment; the rest he attributes to changes in civic and religious participation and broader changes in attitudes among the middle class.

In fact, all of these variables seem to reinforce each other. Nonetheless, some of the most significant cultural changes within the middle class have accelerated in the past decade, as the prospects of the nonprofessional middle class have dimmed. The number of couples who live together but are not married, for instance, has been rising briskly since the 1970s, but it really took off in the aughts—nearly doubling, from 3.8 million to 6.7 million, from 2000 to 2009. From 2009 to 2010, that number jumped by nearly a million more. In six out of 10 of the newly cohabitating couples, at least one person was not working, a much higher proportion than in the past.

Ultimately, the evolution of the meritocracy itself appears to be at least partly responsible for the growing cultural gulf between highly educated Americans and the rest of society. As the journalist Bill Bishop showed in his 2008 book, The Big Sort, American communities have become ever more finely sorted by affluence and educational attainment over the past 30 years, and this sorting has in turn reinforced the divergence in the personal habits and lifestyle of Americans who lack a college degree from those of Americans who have one. In highly educated communities, families are largely intact, educational ideals strong, and good role models abundant. None of those things is a given anymore in communities where college-degree attainment is low. The natural leaders of such communities—the meritocratic winners who do well in school, go off to selective colleges, and get their degrees—generally leave them for good in their early 20s.

In their 2009 book, Creating an Opportunity Society, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill write that while most Americans believe that opportunity is widespread in the United States, and that success is primarily a matter of individual intelligence and skill, the reality is more complicated. In recent decades, people born into the middle class have indeed moved up and down the class ladder readily. Near the turn of the millennium, for instance, middle-aged people who’d been born to middle-class parents had widely varied incomes. But class was stickier among those born to parents who were either rich or poor. Thirty-nine percent of children born to parents in the top fifth of earners stayed in that same bracket as adults. Likewise, 42 percent of those whose parents were in the bottom fifth remained there themselves. Only 6 percent reached the top fifth: rags-to-riches stories were extremely rare.

A thinner middle class, in itself, means fewer stepping stones available to people born into low-income families. If the economic and cultural trends under way continue unabated, class mobility will likely decrease in the future, and class divides may eventually grow beyond our ability to bridge them.

What is most worrying is that all of the most powerful forces pushing on the nonprofessional middle class—economic and cultural—seem to be pushing in the same direction. We cannot know the future, and over time, some of these forces may dissipate of their own accord. Further advances in technology may be less punishing to middle-skill workers than recent advances have been; men may adapt better to a post-industrial economy, as the alternative to doing so becomes more stark; nonprofessional families may find a new stability as they accommodate themselves to changing norms of work, income, and parental roles. Yet such changes are unlikely to occur overnight, if they happen at all. Momentum alone suggests years of trouble for the middle class.

Changing the Path of the American Economy

True recovery from the Great Recession is not simply a matter of jolting the economy back onto its former path; it’s about changing the path. No single action or policy prescription can fix the varied problems facing the middle class today, but through a combination of approaches—some aimed at increasing the growth rate of the economy itself, and some at ensuring that more people are able to benefit from that growth—we can ameliorate them. Many of the deepest economic trends that the recession has highlighted and temporarily sped up will take decades to fully play out. We can adapt, but we have to start now.

The rest of this article suggests how we might do so. The measures that I propose are not comprehensive, nor are they without drawbacks. But they are emblematic of the types of proposals we will need to weigh in the coming years, and of the nature of the national conversation we need to have. That conversation must begin with a reassessment of how globalization is affecting American society, and of what it will take for the U.S. to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

In 2010, the McKinsey Global Institute released a report detailing just how mighty America’s multinational companies are—and how essential they have become to the U.S. economy. Multinationals headquartered in the U.S. employed 19 percent of all private-sector workers in 2007, earned 25 percent of gross private-sector profits, and paid out 25 percent of all private-sector wages. They also accounted for nearly three-quarters of the nation’s private-sector R&D spending. Since 1990, they’ve been responsible for 31 percent of the growth in real GDP.

Yet for all their outsize presence, multinationals have been puny as engines of job creation. Over the past 20 years, they have accounted for 41 percent of all gains in U.S. labor productivity—but just 11 percent of private-sector job gains. And in the latter half of that period, the picture grew uglier: according to the economist Martin Sullivan, from 1999 through 2008, U.S. multinationals actually shrank their domestic workforce by about 1.9 million people, while increasing foreign employment by about 2.4 million.

The heavy footprint of multinational companies is merely one sign of how inseparable the U.S. economy has become from the larger global economy—and these figures neatly illustrate two larger points. First, we can’t wish away globalization or turn our backs on trade; to try to do so would be crippling and impoverishing. And second, although American prosperity is tied to globalization, something has nonetheless gone wrong with the way America’s economy has evolved in response to increasingly dense global connections.

Particularly since the 1970s, the United States has placed its bets on continuous innovation, accepting the rapid transfer of production to other countries as soon as goods mature and their manufacture becomes routine, all with the idea that the creation of even newer products and services at home will more than make up for that outflow. At times, this strategy has paid off big. Rapid innovation in the 1990s allowed the economy to grow quickly and create good, new jobs up and down the ladder to replace those that were becoming obsolete or moving overseas, and enabled strong income growth for most Americans. Yet in recent years, that process has broken down.

One reason, writes the economist Michael Mandel, is that America no longer enjoys the economic fruits of its innovations for as long as it used to. Knowledge, R&D, and business know-how depreciate more quickly now than they did even 15 years ago, because global communication is faster, connections are more seamless, and human capital is more broadly diffused than in the past.

As a result, domestic production booms have ended sooner than they used to. IT-hardware production, for instance, which in 1999 the Bureau of Labor Statistics projected would create about 155,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the following decade, actually shrank by nearly 500,000 jobs in that time. Jobs in data processing also fell, presumably as a result of both offshoring and technological advance. Because innovations now depreciate faster, we need more of them than we used to in order to sustain the same rate of economic growth.

Yet in the aughts, as an array of prominent economists and entrepreneurs have recently pointed out, the rate of big innovations actually slowed considerably; with the housing bubble fueling easy growth for much of that time, we just didn’t notice. This slowdown may have been merely the result of bad luck—big breakthroughs of the sort that create whole categories of products or services are difficult to predict, and long droughts are not unknown. Overregulation in certain areas may also have played a role. The economist Tyler Cowen, in his recent book, The Great Stagnation, argues that the scientific frontier itself—or at least that portion of it leading to commercial innovation—has been moving outward more slowly, and requiring ever more resources to do so, for many decades.

Process innovation has been quite rapid in recent years. U.S. multinationals and other companies are very good at continually improving their operational efficiency by investing in information technology, restructuring operations, and shifting work around the globe. Some of these activities benefit some U.S. workers, by making the jobs that stay in the country more productive. But absent big breakthroughs that lead to new products or services—and given the vast reserves of low-wage but increasingly educated labor in China, India, and elsewhere—rising operational efficiency hasn’t been a recipe for strong growth in either jobs or wages in the United States.

America has huge advantages as an innovator. Places like Silicon Valley, North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and the Massachusetts high-tech corridor are difficult to replicate, and the United States has many of them. Foreign students still flock here, and foreign engineers and scientists who get their doctorates here have been staying on for longer and longer over the past 15 years. When you compare apples to apples, the United States still leads the world, handily, in the number of skilled engineers, scientists, and business professionals in residence.

But we need to better harness those advantages to speed the pace of innovation, in part by putting a much higher national priority on investment—rather than consumption—in the coming years. That means, among other things, substantially raising and broadening both national and private investment in basic scientific progress and in later-stage R&D—through a combination of more federal investment in scientific research, perhaps bigger tax breaks for private R&D spending, and a much lower corporate tax rate (and a simpler corporate tax code) overall.

Edmund Phelps and Leo Tilman, professors at Columbia University, have proposed the creation of a National Innovation Bank that would invest in, or lend to, innovative start-ups—bringing more money to bear than venture-capital funds could, and at a lower cost of capital, which would promote more investment and enable the funding of somewhat riskier ventures. The broader idea behind such a bank is that because innovation carries so many ambient benefits—from job creation to the experience gained by even failed entrepreneurs and the people around them—we should be willing to fund it more liberally as a society than private actors would individually.

Removing bureaucratic obstacles to innovation is as important as pushing more public funds toward it. As Wall Street has amply demonstrated, not every industry was overregulated in the aughts. Nonetheless, the decade did see the accretion of a number of regulatory measures that may have chilled the investment climate (the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reforms and a proliferation of costly security regulations following the creation of the Department of Homeland Security are two prominent examples).

Regulatory balance is always difficult in practice, but Michael Mandel has suggested a useful rule of thumb: where new and emerging industries are concerned—industries that are at the forefront of the economy and could provide big bursts of growth—our bias should be toward light regulation, allowing creative experimentation and encouraging fast growth. The rapid expansion of the Internet in the 1990s is a good example of the benefit that can come from a light regulatory hand early in an industry’s development; green technology, wireless platforms, and social-networking technologies are perhaps worthy of similar treatment today.

Any serious effort to accelerate innovation would mean taking many other actions as well—from redoubling our commitment to improving U.S. schools, to letting in a much larger number of creative, highly skilled immigrants each year. Few such measures will be without costs or drawbacks. Among other problems, a mandate of light regulation on high-potential industries requires the government to “pick winners.” Tilting government spending toward investment and innovation probably means tilting it away from defense and programs aimed at senior citizens. And because the benefits of innovation diffuse more quickly now, the return on national investment in scientific research and commercial innovation may be lower than it was in previous decades. Despite these drawbacks and trade-offs, the alternative to heavier investment and a higher priority on national innovation is dismal to contemplate.

As we strive toward faster innovation, we also need to keep the production of new, high-value goods within American borders for a longer period of time. Protectionist measures are generally self-defeating, and while vigilance against the theft of intellectual property and strong sanctions when such theft is discovered are sensible, they are unlikely to alter the basic trends of technological and knowledge diffusion. (Much of that diffusion is entirely legal, and the long history of industrialization and globalization suggests that attempts to halt it will fail.) What can really matter is a fair exchange rate. Throughout much of the aughts and continuing to the present day, China, in particular, has taken extraordinary measures to keep its currency undervalued relative to the dollar, and this has harmed U.S. industry. We must press China on currency realignment, putting sanctions on the table if necessary.

Given some of the workforce trends of the past decade, doubling down on technology, innovation, and globalization may seem wrongheaded. And indeed, this strategy is no cure-all. But without a vibrant, innovative economy, all other prospects dim. For the professional middle class in particular, an uptick in innovation and a return to faster economic growth would solve many problems, and likely reignite income growth. While technology is eating into the work that some college graduates do, their general skills show little sign of losing value. Recent analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute, for instance, indicates that demand for college grads by American businesses is likely to grow quickly over the next decade even if the economy grows very slowly; rapid economic growth would cause demand for college grads to far exceed supply.

Still, even in boom times, many more people than we would care to acknowledge won’t have the education, skills, or abilities to prosper in a pure and globalized market, shaped by enormous labor reserves in China, India, and other developing countries. Over the next decade or more, even if national economic growth is strong, what we do to help and support moderately educated Americans may well determine whether the United States remains a middle-class country.

Filling the Hole in the Middle Class

In The Race Between Education and Technology, the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz write that throughout roughly the first three-quarters of the 20th century, most Americans prospered and inequality fell because, although technological advance was rapid—and mostly biased toward people with relatively high skills—educational advance was faster still; the pool of people who could take advantage of new technologies kept growing larger, while the pool of those who could not stayed relatively small.

There would be no better tonic for the country’s recent ills than a resumption of the rapid advance of skills and abilities throughout the population. Clearly there is room for improvement. About 30 percent of young adults finish college today, yet that figure is 50 percent among those with affluent parents. It follows that with improvements in the K–12 school system, more-stable home environments, and widespread financial access to college, we eventually could move to a 50 percent college graduation rate overall. And because IQ worldwide has been slowly increasing from generation to generation—a somewhat mysterious development known as the “Flynn effect”—higher rates still may eventually come within reach.

Yet the past three decades of experience suggest that this upward migration, even to, say, 40 percent, will be slow and difficult. (From 1979 to 2009, the percentage of people ages 25 to 29 with a four-year college degree rose from 23.1 percent to 30.6 percent—or roughly 1 percentage point every four years.) And ultimately, of course, the college graduation rate is likely to hit a substantially lower ceiling than that for high school or elementary school. For a time, elementary school was the answer to the question of how to build a broad middle class in America. And for a time after that, the answer was high school. College may never provide as comprehensive an answer. At the very least, over the next decade or two, college education simply cannot be the whole answer to the woes of the middle class, since even under the rosiest of assumptions, most of the middle of society will not have a four-year college degree.

Among the more pernicious aspects of the meritocracy as we now understand it in the United States is the equation of merit with test-taking success, and the corresponding belief that those who struggle in the classroom should expect to achieve little outside it. Progress along the meritocratic path has become measurable from a very early age. This is a narrow way of looking at human potential, and it badly underserves a large portion of the population. We have beaten the drum so loudly and for so long about the centrality of a college education that we should not be surprised when people who don’t attend college—or those who start but do not finish—go adrift at age 18 or 20. Grants, loans, and tax credits to undergraduate and graduate students total roughly $160 billion each year; by contrast, in 2004, federal, state, and local spending on employment and training programs (which commonly assist people without a college education) totaled $7 billion—an inflation-adjusted decline of about 75 percent since 1978.

As we continue to push for better K–12 schooling and wider college access, we also need to build more paths into the middle class that do not depend on a four-year college degree. One promising approach, as noted by Haskins and Sawhill, is the development of “career academies”—schools of 100 to 150 students, within larger high schools, offering a curriculum that mixes academic coursework with hands-on technical courses designed to build work skills. Some 2,500 career academies are already in operation nationwide. Students attend classes together and have the same guidance counselors; local employers partner with the academies and provide work experience while the students are still in school.

“Vocational training” programs have a bad name in the United States, in part because many people assume they close off the possibility of higher education. But in fact, career-academy students go on to earn a postsecondary credential at the same rate as other high-school students. What’s more, they develop firmer roots in the job market, whether or not they go on to college or community college. One recent major study showed that on average, men who attended career academies were earning significantly more than those who attended regular high schools, both four and eight years after graduation. They were also 33 percent more likely to be married and 36 percent less likely to be absentee fathers.

Career-academy programs should be expanded, as should apprenticeship programs (often affiliated with community colleges) and other, similar programs that are designed to build an ethic of hard work; to allow young people to develop skills and achieve goals outside the traditional classroom as well as inside it; and ultimately to provide more, clearer pathways into real careers. By giving young people more information about career possibilities and a tangible sense of where they can go in life and what it takes to get there, these types of programs are likely to lead to more-motivated learning, better career starts, and a more highly skilled workforce. Their effect on boys in particular is highly encouraging. And to the extent that they can expose boys to opportunities within growing fields like health care (and also expose them to male role models within those fields), these programs might even help weaken the grip of the various stereotypes that seem to be keeping some boys locked into declining parts of the economy.

Even in the worst of scenarios, “middle skill” jobs are not about to vanish altogether. Many construction jobs and some manufacturing jobs will return. And there are many, many middle-income occupations—from EMTs, lower-level nurses, and X-ray technicians, to plumbers and home remodelers—that trade and technology cannot readily replace, and these fields are likely to grow. A more highly skilled workforce will allow faster, more efficient growth; produce better-quality goods and services; and earn higher pay.

All of that said, the overall pattern of change in the U.S. labor market suggests that in the next decade or more, a larger proportion of Americans may need to take work in occupations that have historically required little skill and paid low wages. Analysis by David Autor indicates that from 1999 to 2007, low-skill jobs grew substantially as a share of all jobs in the United States. And while the lion’s share of jobs lost during the recession were middle-skill jobs, job growth since then has been tilted steeply toward the bottom of the economy; according to a survey by the National Employment Law Project, three-quarters of American job growth in 2010 came within industries paying, on average, less than $15 an hour. One of the largest challenges that Americans will face in the coming years will be doing what we can to make the jobs that have traditionally been near the bottom of the economy better, more secure, and more fulfilling—in other words, more like middle-class jobs.

As the urban theorist Richard Florida writes in The Great Reset, part of that process may be under way already. A growing number of companies have been rethinking retail-workforce development, to improve productivity and enhance the customer experience, leading to more-enjoyable jobs and, in some cases, higher pay. Whole Foods Markets, for instance, one of Fortune magazine’s “Best Companies to Work For,” organizes its workers into teams and gives them substantial freedom as to how they go about their work; after a new worker has been on the job for 30 days, the team members vote on whether the new employee has embraced the job and the culture, and hence whether he or she should be kept on. Best Buy actively encourages all its employees to suggest improvements to the company’s work processes, much as Toyota does, and favors promotion from within. Trader Joe’s sets wages so that full-time employees earn at least a median income within their community; store captains, most of them promoted from within, can earn six figures.

The natural evolution of the economy will surely make some service jobs more productive, independent, and enjoyable over time. Yet productivity improvements at the bottom of the economy seem unlikely to be a sufficient answer to the problems of the lower and middle classes, at least for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the relative decline of middle-skill jobs, combined with slow increases in college completion, suggests a larger pool of workers chasing jobs in retail, food preparation, personal care, and the like—and hence downward pressure on wages.

Whatever the unemployment rate over the next several years, the long-term problem facing American society is not that employers will literally run out of work for people to do—it’s that the market value of much low-skill and some middle-skill work, and hence the wages employers can offer, may be so low that few American workers will strongly commit to that work. Bad jobs at rock-bottom wages are a primary reason why so many people at the lower end of the economy drift in and out of work, and this job instability in turn creates highly toxic social and family problems.

American economists on both the right and the left have long advocated subsidizing low-wage work as a means of social inclusion—offering an economic compact with everyone who embraces work, no matter their level of skill. The Earned Income Tax Credit, begun in 1975 and expanded several times since then, does just that, and has been the country’s best anti-poverty program. Yet by and large, the EITC helps only families with children. In 2008, it provided a maximum credit of nearly $5,000 to families with two children, with the credit slowly phasing out for incomes above $15,740 and disappearing altogether at $38,646. The maximum credit for workers without children (or without custody of children) was only $438. We should at least moderately increase both the level of support offered to families by the EITC and the maximum income to which it applies. Perhaps more important, we should offer much fuller support for workers without custody of children. That’s a matter of basic fairness. But it’s also a measure that would directly target some of the biggest budding social problems in the United States today. A stronger reward for work would encourage young, less-skilled workers—men in particular—to develop solid, early connections to the workforce, improving their prospects. And better financial footing for young, less-skilled workers would increase their marriageability.

A continued push for better schooling, the creation of clearer paths into careers for people who don’t immediately go to college, and stronger support for low-wage workers—together, these measures can help mitigate the economic cleavage of U.S. society, strengthening the middle. They would hardly solve all of society’s problems, but they would create the conditions for more-predictable and more-comfortable lives—all harnessed to continuing rewards for work and education. These, ultimately, are the most-critical preconditions for middle-class life and a healthy society.

The Limits of Meritocracy

As a society, we should be far more concerned about whether most Americans are getting ahead than about the size of the gains at the top. Yet extreme income inequality causes a cultural separation that is unhealthy on its face and corrosive over time. And the most-powerful economic forces of our times will likely continue to concentrate wealth at the top of society and to put more pressure on the middle. It is hard to imagine an adequate answer to the problems we face that doesn’t involve greater redistribution of wealth.

Soaking the rich would hardly solve all of America’s problems. Holding all else equal, we would need to raise the top two tax rates to roughly 90 percent, then unrealistically assume no change in the work habits of the people in those brackets, merely to bring the deficit in a typical year down to 2 percent of GDP. But even with strong budget discipline and a reduction in the growth of Medicare costs, somewhat higher taxes for most Americans—in one form or another—seem inevitable. If we aim to increase our national investment in innovation, and to provide more assistance to people who are falling out of the middle class (or who can’t step up into it), that’s even more true. The professional middle class in particular should not expect exemption from tax increases.

Over time, the United States has expected less and less of its elite, even as society has oriented itself in a way that is most likely to maximize their income. The top income-tax rate was 91 percent in 1960, 70 percent in 1980, 50 percent in 1986, and 39.6 percent in 2000, and is now 35 percent. Income from investments is taxed at a rate of 15 percent. The estate tax has been gutted.

High earners should pay considerably more in taxes than they do now. Top tax rates of even 50 percent for incomes in the seven-figure range would still be considerably lower than their level throughout the boom years of the post-war era, and should not be out of the question—nor should an estate-tax rate of similar size, for large estates.

The rich have not become that way while living in a vacuum. Technological advance, freer trade, and wider markets—along with the policies that promote them—always benefit some people and harm others. Economic theory is quite clear that the winners gain more than the losers lose, and therefore the people who suffer as a result of these forces can be fully compensated for their losses—society as a whole still gains. This precept has guided U.S. government policy for 30 years. Yet in practice, the losers are seldom compensated, not fully and not for long. And while many of the gains from trade and technological progress are widely spread among consumers, the pressures on wages that result from these same forces have been felt very differently by different classes of Americans.

What’s more, some of the policies that have most benefited the rich have little to do with greater competition or economic efficiency. Fortunes on Wall Street have grown so large in part because of implicit government protection against catastrophic losses, combined with the steady elimination of government measures to limit excessive risk-taking, from the 1980s right on through the crash of 2008.

As America’s winners have been separated more starkly from its losers, the idea of compensating the latter out of the pockets of the former has met stiff resistance: that would run afoul of another economic theory, dulling the winners’ incentives and squashing their entrepreneurial spirit; some, we are reminded, might even leave the country. And so, in a neat and perhaps unconscious two-step, many elites have pushed policies that benefit them, by touting theoretical gains to society—then ruled out measures that would distribute those gains widely.

Even as we continue to strive to perfect the meritocracy, signs that things may be moving in the other direction are proliferating. The increasing segregation of Americans by education and income, and the widening cultural divide between families with college-educated parents and those without them, suggests that built-in advantages and disadvantages may be growing. And the concentration of wealth in relatively few hands opens the possibility that much of the next generation’s elite might achieve their status through inheritance, not hard or innovative work.

America remains a magnet for talent, for reasons that go beyond the tax code; and by international standards, none of the tax changes recommended here would create an excessive tax burden on high earners. If a few financiers choose to decamp for some small island-state in search of the smallest possible tax bill, we should wish them good luck.

In political speeches and in the media, the future of the middle class is often used as a stand-in for the future of America. Yet of course the two are not identical. The size of the middle class has waxed and waned throughout U.S. history, as has income inequality. The post-war decades of the 20th century were unusually hospitable to the American middle class—the result of strong growth, rapid gains in education, progressive tax policy, limited free agency at work, a limited pool of competing workers overseas, and other supportive factors. Such serendipity is anomalous in American history, and unlikely to be repeated.

Yet if that period was unusually kind to the middle class, the one we are now in the midst of appears unusually cruel. The strongest forces of our time are naturally divisive; absent a wide-ranging effort to constrain them, economic and cultural polarization will almost surely continue. Perhaps the nonprofessional middle class is rich enough today to absorb its blows with equanimity. Perhaps plutonomy, in the 21st century, will prove stable over the long run.

But few Americans, no matter their class, will be eager for that outcome.

The Atlantic

Thanks Kelvin

Quarterback Haircuts
Illustrations By CHRISTINA CHRISTOFOROU
NY Times Published: August 12, 2011

Gravestone of Peter the Wild Boy at St Mary’s Church, Northchurch, Hertfordshire

By Roger Moorhouse |
Published in History Today Volume: 60 Issue: 4

In the summer of 1725 a peculiar youth was found in the forest of Hertswold near Hameln in northern Germany. Aged about 12, he walked on all fours and fed on grass and leaves. ‘A naked, brownish, blackhaired creature’, he would run up trees when approached and could utter no intelligible sound. The latest in a long line of feral children – in turn celebrated, shunned and cursed through the ages – ‘The Wild Boy of Hameln’ would be the first to achieve real fame.

After a spell in the House of Correction in Celle, the boy was taken to the court of George, Duke of Hanover and King of the United Kingdom, at Herrenhausen. There the young curiosity was initially treated as an honoured guest. Seated at table with the king, dressed in a suit of clothes with a napkin at his neck, he repelled his host with his complete lack of manners. He refused bread, but gorged himself on vegetables, fruit and rare meat, greedily grasping at the dishes and eating noisily from his hands, until he was ordered to be taken away. He was given the name of Peter, but was variously known as ‘Wild Peter’, ‘Peter of Hanover’, or, most famously, ‘Peter the Wild Boy’.

In the spring of 1726, after briefly escaping back to the forest, Peter was brought to London where his tale had aroused particular interest. As in Hanover, he caused a sensation and his carefree nature provided an amusing antidote to the stultifying boredom and decorum of court life. He appealed especially to Caroline, Princess of Wales, who persuaded the king to allow Peter to move to her residence in the West End, where he was kept virtually as a pet. Though he insisted on sleeping on the floor, he was dressed carefully each morning in a tailor-made suit of green and red. He was also appointed a tutor, who had him baptised and taught him to bow and kiss the hands of the ladies at court.

Peter quickly became a celebrity. On one level, tales of his antics busied the London gazettes. Jonathan Swift, whose fictional ‘Yahoos’ Peter appeared to personify, noted sourly that ‘there is scarcely talk of anything else’. He was soon the ‘talk of the town’, his portrait graced the walls of the King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace and an effigy of him was erected in a waxworks on the Strand. In 1727 a premature report of his death gave rise to a mocking epitaph in the British Journal. His resemblance to Swift’s fantastical characters had clearly not been missed:

Ye Yahoos mourn, for in this Place
Lies dead the Glory of your Race,
One, who from Adam had Descent,
Yet ne’er did what he might repent;
But liv’d, unblemish’d, to fifteen,
And yet, O strange, a Court had seen,
Was solely rul’d by Nature’s Laws,
And dy’d a Martyr in her Cause!
Now reign, ye Houynhnms, for Mankind,
Have no such Peter left behind,
None like the dear departed Youth,
Renown’d for Purity and Truth,
He was your Rival, and our Boast,
For ever, ever, ever lost!

But Peter could not to live up to the popular interest invested in him and a fickle public quickly abandoned him in favour of the next unfortunate. His academic progress also failed to match his earlier promise. He was declared ‘unable to receive instruction’, despite the attentions of ‘the ablest masters’. He could say nothing beyond his own name and a garbled form of ‘King George’. By 1728, his tutor had given up his efforts and Peter was retired to the country. A home was found for him on a farm near Northchurch in Hertfordshire and a generous crown pension of £35 per annum was supplied for his upkeep. The ‘talk of the town’ became a humble farm hand.

Though still only an adolescent, Peter faded into provincial obscurity and thereafter rarely troubled the gossip columns. He developed a taste for gin and loved music, reportedly swaying and clapping with glee and dancing until he was exhausted. But he never learned to speak and his lack of any sense of direction gave cause for concern. In 1745, the year of the Jacobite Rebellion, he was arrested as a suspected Highlander and, six years later, he wandered as far as Norwich, where he was thought to be a Spanish subversive. As a result he was fitted with a heavy leather collar bearing the inscription: ‘Peter, the Wild Man of Hanover. Whoever will bring him to Mr Fenn at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, shall be paid for their trouble.’ He finally died, aged around 72, in 1785.

Though Peter’s life is remarkable enough, what is most astounding is the sheer scale of scientific and philosophical interest that his case aroused. While wits opined that the boy might be corrupted by the sybaritic life of London high society, others saw in him an ideal test case for the nascent sciences of anthropology and psychology.

To the thinkers of the Age of Reason, Peter represented a blank slate. As humanity in its ‘raw’ state, he was what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called ‘the noble savage’, man ‘unspoilt’ by society and civilisation. He was indeed a fascinating subject, but he provoked further, disquieting, enquiry. He was undoubtedly human but, lacking speech and socialisation, could he be classed as a man? Could he have a soul? Could he possess the power of thought?

Of the numerous thinkers and writers who addressed the subject, Daniel Defoe did so with the most clarity in his pamphlet Mere Nature Delineated, published in 1726. He described Peter as an ‘object of pity’ but cast doubt on the story of his origins, dismissing it as a ‘Fib’. On the issue of Peter’s soul, he was more charitable. Possessed of the gift of laughter and thought, Peter clearly had a soul, he wrote, but its powers did not yet act within him. He was, in sum, ‘in a state of Mere Nature … a ship without a Rudder’. And it was the task of his tutors to bring him to ‘the Use of his Reason’. He deferred the final verdict on Peter, therefore, until the results of his education became apparent. If he could receive instruction – if he could be taught to heed his soul – then he would become a man. And, what was more, he would be a lesson to us all, especially, wrote Defoe, ‘those who think nobody so wise as themselves’.

Defoe wrestled manfully with the uncomfortable question that Peter posed: what was it that divided ‘us’ from ‘them’, man from the animals? Different minds arrived at different conclusions. But the habitual tidier of nature Carl Linnaeus was typical. He reassured mankind by creating a separate species of ‘wild men’ or homo ferens. Peter was still clearly an outsider – one of ‘them’.

Peter’s example was later used in numerous theories of child development, socialisation and the role of language. Many thinkers dwelt on his inability to learn to speak. The philosopher James Burnett (Lord Monboddo), whose ideas anticipated some of Darwin’s, presented him as an illustration of his theory of the evolution of language in the human species. He saw Peter as evidence that ‘man was born mute, and that articulation is altogether … a habit acquired by custom and exercise’. To others, Peter was thought to demonstrate the existence of a ‘critical window’ in which language and other skills are developed in the child. Having missed the ‘window’, Peter could never learn such skills again. Hence the apparent failure of his esteemed tutors.

Other scientists concentrated on the role of ‘socialisation’ in child development. After a childhood supposedly devoid of parental care and nurture, Peter was considered to have developed a ‘mental indifference’ and a lack of empathy, reflection and memory. In common with other feral children, it was argued, he ‘lived solely to survive’, satisfying only his base desires for food and sleep. In other interpretations, Peter’s mental shortcomings were attributed primarily to his lack of language. Having never learned to speak, it was suggested, how could he comprehend his own ‘inner voice’? How could he order and make sense of his world? The result was that he was virtually unable to display higher mental functions. He was trapped in the mind of a toddler.

The 19th-century German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) then rather spoiled the intellectual party. Examining contemporary accounts, which suggested that Peter had been tonguetied (hence his inability to speak) and had webbed fingers on one hand (a common corollary to mental impairment), he concluded that ‘the Wild Boy’ was most probably mentally retarded. If this was the case, he argued, it would help to explain Peter’s peculiar origins – a point that had also bothered Defoe.

Rather than being a genuine ‘feral child’ then, Peter was most probably abandoned, possibly only weeks before his discovery. Most importantly, however, if he had been mentally disabled, then all the noble theories of development and socialisation which relied on his example were rendered lame. The ‘noble savage’ had been a simple charity case, worthy of pity certainly, but not philosophical enquiry.

Feral children have always aroused man’s fascination. But when Peter stumbled out of the forest in 1725 he encountered a world in intellectual ferment. Inspired by the Light of Reason and the Scientific Revolution, Europe’s new secular intelligentsia was examining the world anew after centuries of obscurantism and superstition. An army of frustrated empiricists, they submitted everything and everyone to rational investigation. To them, Peter was a godsend: ‘the very Creature which the learned World have … pretended to wish for’. They pamphleteered, polemicised and pontificated. But, like their subject, they were stumbling into the unknown, often lacking the words to pose the right questions and the knowledge to interpret their observations correctly. As a mute, Peter was unable to disabuse them of their wilder conjectures and his mystery only deepened, fuelling the debate and spurring the theorists. In a sense, the philosophers of the Age of Reason had met their match. They were faced with a man who did not make sense. But, for all their theories, it did not occur to them that he could not make sense – that there was no ‘sense’ to make. As Defoe had suggested, it is quite possible that they brought ‘an Ideot upon the Stage, and made a great Something out of Nothing’.

Whatever his ailments, Peter was not forgotten by the royal court. His keep was paid by the crown for nearly 60 years through three reigns and when he died a brass tablet was erected to his memory at royal expense. But Peter was no more loquacious in death than he had been in life. He was given a prime spot in the graveyard at Northchurch, close to the south porch, and his rough-hewn stone, now shaded by an unruly dog rose, reads simply: ‘Peter the Wild Boy – 1785’.

via

Editorial
NY Times Published: August 12, 2011

There was nothing particularly surprising about the shrill skirmishing at the ideological edges of Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate in Iowa. What was shocking were the antics in the center.

In full public view, the party’s mainstream jumped the tracks of reality on issues of spending and taxes, brightly illustrating the ruinous magical thinking that has led to a downgrade of the nation’s credit and invited a double-dip recession. When asked if they would reject a deal to cut the deficit that had 10 times the amount of spending cuts as it had tax increases, the hands of all eight candidates went up. Even a tincture of new revenue, though mixed with huge cuts in government spending, would be too much for the modern Republican Party.

The raised hands included those of Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney, two former governors who have proved that they know better. Mr. Huntsman was the only one on the stage who said he would have accepted last week’s budget deal and the only one to point out that Washington should never even consider defaulting.

Saying as much is already Tea Party heresy, so why not take the next logical step and admit that the nation’s finances are unsustainable in the long term without some tax increases? Even Mr. Huntsman was unwilling to take the slightest risk of offending the rigid and unforgiving Republican Party primary electorate.

Mr. Romney derided the budget deal as “Mr. Obama’s dog food” and said he would not eat it, perhaps hoping the public has already forgotten that it was really the deal demanded by the Congressional leaders of his party. (Speaker John Boehner said last week the deal was “98 percent of what I wanted.” We’d love to know what the remaining 2 percent is.)

Rejecting compromise was not the way Mr. Romney governed. He balanced the Massachusetts budget with new income from $269 million in closed tax loopholes, and $271 million in increased fees. He has claimed unconvincingly that those were not taxes, but it turns out that his administration boasted about them to the bond rating agencies in 2004 and 2005, and his state won an upgrade by demonstrating fiscal prudence. Now he is repudiating that approach at the federal level.

That has been the nature of every Republican debate this cycle: deny the truth or tell an outrageous lie with such bellicosity that no one dares to challenge it.

Representative Michele Bachmann, for example, said the credit downgrade was because the government could not pay its debt. Standard and Poor’s actually said it was because lawmakers like her did not take a default seriously. Representative Ron Paul ridiculously claimed that the United States is bankrupt. Tim Pawlenty said President Obama had no plan to reduce social insurance spending, conveniently forgetting that Mr. Boehner walked away from the president’s overly generous offer to reduce that spending in exchange for revenue increases.

The Republican Party has been led into its current cul-de-sac by manipulative officials who would not tell voters the truth about the government’s finances. It will remain there if even its “moderate” leaders refuse to break the pattern.

California Grapeskins
2009
Acrylic on canvas. Overall: 38 1/8 x 64 1/8 in

Through October 2, 2011

Hammer

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: August 11, 2011

Has market turmoil left you feeling afraid? Well, it should. Clearly, the economic crisis that began in 2008 is by no means over.

But there’s another emotion you should feel: anger. For what we’re seeing now is what happens when influential people exploit a crisis rather than try to solve it.

For more than a year and a half — ever since President Obama chose to make deficits, not jobs, the central focus of the 2010 State of the Union address — we’ve had a public conversation that has been dominated by budget concerns, while almost ignoring unemployment. The supposedly urgent need to reduce deficits has so dominated the discourse that on Monday, in the midst of a market panic, Mr. Obama devoted most of his remarks to the deficit rather than to the clear and present danger of renewed recession.

What made this so bizarre was the fact that markets were signaling, as clearly as anyone could ask, that unemployment rather than deficits is our biggest problem. Bear in mind that deficit hawks have been warning for years that interest rates on U.S. government debt would soar any day now; the threat from the bond market was supposed to be the reason that we must slash the deficit now now now. But that threat keeps not materializing. And, this week, on the heels of a downgrade that was supposed to scare bond investors, those interest rates actually plunged to record lows.

What the market was saying — almost shouting — was, “We’re not worried about the deficit! We’re worried about the weak economy!” For a weak economy means both low interest rates and a lack of business opportunities, which, in turn, means that government bonds become an attractive investment even at very low yields. If the downgrade of U.S. debt had any effect at all, it was to reinforce fears of austerity policies that will make the economy even weaker.

So how did Washington discourse come to be dominated by the wrong issue?

Hard-line Republicans have, of course, played a role. Although they don’t seem to truly care about deficits — try suggesting any rise in taxes on the rich — they have found harping on deficits a useful way to attack government programs.

But our discourse wouldn’t have gone so far off-track if other influential people hadn’t been eager to change the subject away from jobs, even in the face of 9 percent unemployment, and to hijack the crisis on behalf of their pre-existing agendas.

Check out the opinion page of any major newspaper, or listen to any news-discussion program, and you’re likely to encounter some self-proclaimed centrist declaring that there are no short-run fixes for our economic difficulties, that the responsible thing is to focus on long-run solutions and, in particular, on “entitlement reform” — that is, cuts in Social Security and Medicare. And when you do encounter such a person, you should be aware that people like that are a major reason we’re in so much trouble.

For the fact is that right now the economy desperately needs a short-run fix. When you’re bleeding profusely from an open wound, you want a doctor who binds that wound up, not a doctor who lectures you on the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle as you get older. When millions of willing and able workers are unemployed, and economic potential is going to waste to the tune of almost $1 trillion a year, you want policy makers who work on a fast recovery, not people who lecture you on the need for long-run fiscal sustainability.

Unfortunately, giving lectures on long-run fiscal sustainability is a fashionable Washington pastime; it’s what people who want to sound serious do to demonstrate their seriousness. So when the crisis struck and led to big budget deficits — because that’s what happens when the economy shrinks and revenue plunges — many members of our policy elite were all too eager to seize on those deficits as an excuse to change the subject from jobs to their favorite hobbyhorse. And the economy continued to bleed.

What would a real response to our problems involve? First of all, it would involve more, not less, government spending for the time being — with mass unemployment and incredibly low borrowing costs, we should be rebuilding our schools, our roads, our water systems and more. It would involve aggressive moves to reduce household debt via mortgage forgiveness and refinancing. And it would involve an all-out effort by the Federal Reserve to get the economy moving, with the deliberate goal of generating higher inflation to help alleviate debt problems.

The usual suspects will, of course, denounce such ideas as irresponsible. But you know what’s really irresponsible? Hijacking the debate over a crisis to push for the same things you were advocating before the crisis, and letting the economy continue to bleed.

森山大道 《いつも後ろ髪を引かれた街》 1976年
島根県立美術館蔵 Daido Moriyama

Through September 19, 2011

The National Museum of Art, Osaka

Rachel Beckwith’s fund-raiser for charity:water has received donations from all over the world.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: August 10, 2011

Perhaps every generation of geezers since Adam and Eve has whined about young people, and today is no different. Isn’t it clear that in contrast to our glorious selves, kids these days are self-absorbed Facebook junkies just a pixel deep?

No, actually that’s wrong at every level. This has been a depressing time to watch today’s “adults,” whose talent for self-absorption and political paralysis makes it difficult to solve big problems. But many young people haven’t yet learned to be cynical. They believe, in a wonderfully earnest way, in creating a better world.

In the midst of this grim summer, my faith in humanity has been restored by the saga of Rachel Beckwith. She could teach my generation a great deal about maturity and unselfishness — even though she’s just 9 years old, or was when she died on July 23.

Rachel lived outside Seattle and early on showed a desire to give back. At age 5, she learned at school about an organization called Locks of Love, which uses hair donations to make wigs for children who have lost their own hair because of cancer or other diseases. Rachel then asked to have her long hair shorn off and sent to Locks of Love.

“She said she wanted to help the cancer kids,” her mother, Samantha Paul, told me. After the haircut, Rachel announced that she would grow her hair long again and donate it again after a few years to Locks of Love. And that’s what she did.

Then when she was 8 years old, her church began raising money to build wells in Africa through an organization called charity:water. Rachel was aghast when she learned that other children had no clean water, so she asked to skip having a ninth birthday party. In lieu of presents, she asked her friends to donate $9 each to charity:water for water projects in Africa.

Rachel’s ninth birthday was on June 12, and she had set up a birthday page on the charity:water Web site with a target of $300. Alas, Rachel was able to raise only $220 — which had left her just a bit disappointed.

Then, on July 20, as Rachel was riding with her family on the highway, two trucks collided and created a 13-car pileup. Rachel’s car was hit by one of the trucks, and although the rest of her family was unhurt, Rachel was left critically injured.

Church members and friends, seeking some way of showing support, began donating on Rachel’s birthday page — charitywater.org/Rachel — and donations surged past her $300 goal, and kept mounting. As family and friends gathered around Rachel’s bedside, they were able to tell her — even not knowing whether she couldn’t hear them — that she had exceeded the $47,544 that the singer Justin Bieber had raised for charity:water on his 17th birthday.

“I think she secretly had a crush on him, but she would never admit it,” her mom said. “I think she would have been ecstatic.”

When it was clear that Rachel would never regain consciousness, the family decided to remove life support. Her parents donated her hair a final time to Locks of Love, and her organs to other children. Word spread about Rachel’s last fund-raiser.

Contributions poured in, often in $9 increments, although one 5-year-old girl sent in the savings in her piggy bank of $2.27. The total donations soon topped $100,000, then $300,000. Like others, I was moved and donated. As I write this, more than $850,000 has been raised from all over the world, including donations from Africans awed by a little American girl who cared about their continent.

“What has been so inspiring about Rachel is that she has taught the adults,” said Scott Harrison, the founder of charity:water. “Adults are humbled by the unselfishness of this little girl.”

Yet this is a story not just of one girl, but of a generation of young people working creatively to make this a better world. Mr. Harrison is emblematic of these young people. Now 35, he established charity:water when he was 30, and it has taken off partly because of his mastery at social media. (He’s not as experienced in well-drilling, so the wells are actually dug by expert groups like International Rescue Committee.)

Youth activism has a long history, but this ethos of public service is on the ascendant today — and today’s kids don’t just protest against injustices, as my contemporaries did, but many are also remarkable problem-solvers.

As for Ms. Paul, she’s planning a trip on the anniversary of her daughter’s death next year to see some of the wells being drilled in Africa in her daughter’s name. “It’ll be overwhelming to see Rachel’s wells,” she said, “to see what my 9-year-old daughter has done for people all over the world, to meet the people she has touched.”

Rachel Beckwith, R.I.P., and may our generation learn from yours.

In all 15 loafing black bears hung out with Gravier inside the house and on her deck, and lumbered around the compound like kings at a feast. Brant Ward / The Chronicle

By: Peter Fimrite
San Francisco Chronicle, August 10, 2011

A Mendocino County woman who transformed her home into a bear bohemia with wading pools and specially prepared banquets of corn meal and peanut butter sandwiches will not do jail time for doting on her hairy friends, but she will remain exiled from her property.

Lynne Gravier, 77, of Laytonville, pleaded guilty Monday in Mendocino County Superior Court to a misdemeanor for feeding big game, but prosecutors agreed to drop all the charges in three years if she stops communing with her Bunyanesque buddies.

Superior Court Judge Richard Henderson delayed sentencing until Aug. 8, 2014, when the case – described last year by California Department of Fish and Game wardens as the worst example of bear feeding they had ever encountered – will be re-evaluated.

“The end result to me was very positive,” said Gravier, whose house was condemned last year after she was caught rubbing elbows with the burly bruins on 40 acres of woodland that she owns east of Laytonville. “I’m glad that it is over and I can go on.”

Gravier, known to almost everyone as the “Bear Woman,” has been feeding bruins and other animals for decades, but nobody realized the extent of her devotion until neighbors began complaining. Last Aug. 24, seven fish and game wardens raided Gravier’s home. They stumbled on what was essentially an animal hippie commune and shack-out pad.

In all 15 loafing black bears hung out with Gravier inside the house and on her deck, and lumbered around the compound like kings at a feast. Gravier named her oafish friends things like Smiley, Goofy, Connie, Biggie and Wombat. She admitted setting up a kiddie pool for wallowing. She fixed peanut butter sandwiches for her guests, sometimes mixing in glucosamine to ease the arthritis pain in older bears.

Some 6,000 pounds of rolled and cracked corn was delivered every month from a ranch supply house. Gravier stored the food in a 40-foot-long shipping container that she used as an ursine food dispensary.

Knight-errantry was not in evidence among the hulking chowhounds, who turned Gravier’s home into a reeking outhouse. The cabin-style home was piled high with filth by the time of the raid and immediately condemned by county authorities.

Gravier also fed 18 cats, three dogs, 40 peacocks and a steady stream of visiting turkeys and deer.

The prosecution of Gravier led to protests in front of the courthouse, where demonstrators castigated prosecutors for harassing a kind, caring animal lover. Angry neighbors countered that Gravier’s bears had ransacked feed sheds, broken into their homes and chased sheep and other livestock. One neighbor estimated that 50 to 60 problem bears had to be killed over the years as a result of her feeding.

Bothersome bears are a particularly volatile issue in this cattle- and pot-growing town of 1,300 near the South Fork of the Eel River, in the heart of redwood country. This is a place where hunting is popular, apparently even when it is out of season.

Gravier claims gun-toting locals have illegally killed bears and even pet dogs. She has taken photographs of dead bears near her property with their paws and gall bladders missing. The poaching is possible, she said, because many pot growers will not report illegal activity out of fear their crops will be discovered.

The bloodshed, Gravier said, is what made her feel like she had to protect the bears.

“This lady may have thought she was doing a good thing,” said David Eyster, the district attorney in Mendocino County. “We don’t want to bash her, but we have to get her attention and get her to recognize that her feeding the bears was causing a problem for the neighbors and, frankly, is dangerous.”

Gravier is now living in a family-owned dwelling miles away, where she intends to continue advocating for her “babies,” minus the shipping containers of food.

“She certainly had a moral agenda that I’m not sure she wants to completely abandon,” said Geordie Duckler, the animal law attorney who represented Gravier.

Stack of Books and Magazines, 2011

Shop Exhibit #3
David Korty, “New Ceramics”
August 10 – September 10, 2011

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