A new study undercuts Occupy-style rhetoric and adds nuance to a key public-policy debate.

A massive statistical analysis of upward and downward economic mobility in the United States that is getting big play on The New York Times website is loaded with fodder for interesting comments about American life. Here are the key conclusions drawn by David Leonhardt, the NYT’s often-excellent economics columnist/reporter:

“The study — based on millions of anonymous earnings records and being released this week by a team of top academic economists — is the first with enough data to compare upward mobility across metropolitan areas. These comparisons provide some of the most powerful evidence so far about the factors that seem to drive people’s chances of rising beyond the station of their birth, including education, family structure and the economic layout of metropolitan areas.

“Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. By contrast, some of the highest rates occur in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota.”

Not just Silicon Valley — San Diego, Sacramento and L.A., too

But Leonhardt doesn’t make enough of California’s singularity in this latter category. Included in the NYT package is a chart showing the likeliness of sharp upward economic mobility by city. The chances of a child who grew up in the bottom fifth of family income (less than $25,000 a year) ending up in the top fifth of family income (more than $107,000 a year) are better in California than anywhere in the U.S. Here are the Top 10 cities for sharp upward mobility:

1. San Jose

2. San Francisco

3. Seattle

4. San Diego

5. Pittsburgh

6. Sacramento

7. Boston

8. New York

9. Los Angeles

10. Washington D.C.

Six of the top nine cities are in California. In every one, at least one in 10 really poor kids ends up in the top fifth of income.

That certainly counters the Occupy-style rhetoric one encounters in the Golden State’s faculty  lounges and, too often, in newsrooms.

The value of impulse control — and the rise of ‘assortative mating’

But then the whole debate over income inequality in the U.S. has always been full of straw men, vapid class warfare and extreme rhetoric. The most significant gap in the U.S. isn’t between the wealthiest 1 percent and everyone else. As Charles Murray has documented, it’s between the 30 percent of people who tend to get married, avoid getting in trouble, value education and who have impulse control and the 70 percent of people who are less likely to have consistently positive habits and behavior.

There’s also assortative mating. The doctor no longer marries the nurse, the lawyer no longer marries the secretary. The doctor marries another doctor, the lawyer another lawyer, etc. Here’s a snippet of  The Economist’s excellent 2011 take on the rise of the “cognitive elite,” changing marriage patterns and other underemphasized facts about U.S. life.

“’Assortative mating’ further entrenches inequality. Highly educated men are much more likely to marry highly educated women than they were a generation ago. In 1970 only 9% of those with bachelors’ degrees in America were women, so the vast majority of men with such degrees married women who lacked them. Now the numbers are roughly even (in fact women are earning more degrees) and people tend to pair up with mates of a similar educational background.”

This is a profoundly important finding that shows more than anything else why Murray’s 30-70 gap is what matters, not the Occupy palaver. But it’s not nearly as good TV as saying the richest of the rich are out to subvert 99 percent of Americans for their own benefit.

]]> https://calwatchdog.com/2013/07/25/ca-residents-most-likely-to-go-from-poor-to-rich/feed/ 8 46581 https://calwatchdog.com/2012/05/07/legislators-more-misguided-than-occupiers/ Mon, 07 May 2012 15:31:58 +0000 http://www.calwatchdog.com/?p=28310 May 7, 2012

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — Occupy Wall Street protesters are reminiscent of writer R. Emmett Tyrrell’s criticism of radical feminists: They don’t know what they want, but they want it very badly.

On May Day, the protesters tied up the streets of Oakland, San Francisco and elsewhere. They are mad as hell and they are not going to take it any more, although it remains unclear what, specifically, they are angry about.

I am not particularly annoyed by the overall protests. It’s an American tradition to take to the streets. These folks need an economic lesson, at the very least, and none of us should tolerate violence or destruction. But many of the Occupiers appear more open to ideas than our state legislators, who continually express similar ill-defined anti-corporate sentiments.

To those who run California’s grotesquely large and bumbling state government, the problem always is the same: the private sector, a good bit of which is fleeing to other states.

A new ad on a major Bay Area radio station is recruiting high-tech employees for positions in Detroit. Talk about insults. San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and wretched, cold Detroit is going to seed, literally.

Michiganders talk about rural sprawl rather than urban sprawl — so many neighborhoods have been abandoned and bulldozed that farms are sprouting within the city limits. But despite the fantasies of Gov. Jerry Brown and his fellow Democrats, people will indeed leave this magnificent place for less-desirable locales to pursue better economic opportunities.

Not everyone lives on a trust fund or works for, or is retired from, the government, which these days is more lucrative than having such a fund.

Government elite

A recent San Francisco Chronicle column explained, “When it comes to city worker payouts, forget the old $100,000 club or even the $250,000 club — the new elite among San Francisco’s civic workforce are those who got more than $500,000 in pay last year.”

Apparently, it’s impossible to exaggerate how wasteful California governments have become.

I heard that radio ad after returning from Austin, Texas, where the locals talk about the sea of Californians moving to their pro-growth (but attractive, friendly and hip) locale. California officials remain in denial. They promote bills that shift more money from the private economy to the state, which promptly squanders it as quickly as possible. They mock Texas, which lures our most energetic workers and laughs all the way to the state treasury.

As an example of misplaced priorities, California’s Democratic legislators say they have no time to deal with the pension crisis, busy as they are creating new rules, regulations and programs.

Their big idea was to create a new mini-Social Security system. In their view, the problem isn’t an unaffordable and unsustainable public system that lavishes huge payouts on union members, but a too-stingy private one. That’s almost too goofy to mock, given that the private system isn’t destroying public budgets. That proposal epitomizes the thinking in Sacramento.

There is nothing perfect in this world, so the private sector will always be afflicted with imperfections borne of the human condition. In the private world, we have to pay our own way —- there is no mechanism to live off of the fruits of others, which upsets those who are frustrated that they cannot have everything they want as quickly as they want it.

All great advancements in affluence have come from the private realm, although some government is necessary to provide the backdrop to all of this through the administration of a legal system and construction of infrastructure.

We know the wretchedness found in government-dominated societies. Most of what American governments do these days strays far outside those boundaries, but I’ve sensed no area of our economic life that our state’s leaders would not subject to government control.

Entrepreneurs take risks. They often fail, but they sometimes make great strides forward.

Government employees go to jobs where they cannot be fired except in the most extreme circumstances. They regulate us and provide “services” few of us want. They retire at young ages with pensions that make them the envy of their neighbors. They consume an ever-larger share of the money earned by those who take risks and create growth. Then their unions lobby for more government. And our fellow citizens willingly vote for the politicians who perpetuate this system.

Forgotten lessons

These lessons should be obvious in the world following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But they seem forgotten, and not just in California.

The unions protesting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s reforms have been shockingly bold in their hard-left rhetoric and clenched-fist symbolism. Whereas the Occupy protesters are a straggly group of powerless young people and vagrants, the radicalization of the union movement is something that should cause worry.

Every day, we read the stories of malfunctioning government agencies, of government waste, fraud and abuse. Journalist H.L. Mencken quipped that all government is evil and efforts to improve it therefore are a waste of time. Maybe he exaggerated, but there is little hope in reforming government — the only solution is cutting it back. Yet legislators believe in this magical thing called government. They provide new funds and create new agencies to solve problems.

Then out of nowhere a newspaper will expose how that agency really works, and everyone pretends to be shocked.

For instance, the Sacramento Bee recently reported how the federal Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services really operates, which “has accidentally killed more than 50,000 animals since 2000 that were not problems, including federally protected golden and bald eagles; more than 1,100 dogs, including family pets.”

The problem is not with one agency, but with the vast expansion of federal and state government, which takes our money and freedoms and leaves a path of destruction wherever it goes.

Sure the Occupy protesters are annoying. But the real surprise is why the rest of us aren’t at least as angry as they are.

Does anyone still believe that these are just frustrated, misunderstood ’99 percenter’ college students who fear they won’t be able to find employment upon graduation? Or that the protests and demonstrations are being orchestrated by “a cadre of infiltrators hired by Wall Street or some shadowy right wing cabal to discredit the Occupy movement?”

Columnist Peter Schrag, retired edititorial page editor of The Sacramento Bee does. In an op ed Wednesday, he stated that his theory may be a stretch, but then said, “but the real events amount to nearly the same thing.

Many in the media have provided cover to the occupiers since the movement began, and even have attempted to explain-away Occupiers’ bad behavior by saying that they are just a bunch of dumb kids who don’t know what they are doing.  The movement only seemed to sustain because of the media coverage, and media support. And then it grew legs.

If you think they are not a serious movement, I have some swamp land to sell you. The media not only gave cover to the movement, they gave credence to Occupiers’ demands.

“The demonstrators’ anger is understandable, but the more intense it is, the more carefully it has to be directed,” Schrag wrote in Wednesday’s Bee.

Scrag neglects to mention in his column that Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, initially encouraged the occupiers, despite their muck, looting and arson. And Quan wasn’t alone. Prominent Democrats all over America stepped forward with support. Only in the new media were there reports of the Occupy movement being funded by labor unions, left wing financier George Soros, and even the Democratic National Committee.

However, after Saturday’s destruction derby inside Oakland City Hall, Quan appeared fed up with the pernicious protesting brats, and their leftist, nihilist friends. “People in the community and people in the Occupy movement have to stop making excuses for this behavior,” Quan said.

Quan might have included the media in her statement.

The Left’s Stale Playbook

Standard operating procedure for the far left is to use violence when they are losing the intellectual battle – it’s in the playbook, and taught at most public universities. Where the media provided cover for the Occupiers was in how the story was told from the outset; Occupy Wall Street and the subsequent groups made no secret of the fact that they wanted to force businesses to close. They tried to interrupt commerce with the Port of Oakland closure, an event Mayor Jean Quan said she was powerless to stop.

Spreading filth in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, disrupting and disturbing commuters was all part of the plan. Read the Occupy Wall Street website – none of this is a secret.

Media Responsibility

Where this gets weird is when news organizations overstep their responsibility and stop reporting the news, and stories are peppered with opinion. Or only part of the story is told.

Schrag however, is a columnist, and expected to opine, however off base he is.

“Why close the port, one of the city’s few major sources of income and a source of jobs to hundreds of truckers, dockers and countless other blue-collar workers?” Schrag asks. “Why trash little downtown shops and eateries as some did last fall? These surely are not the 1 percent symbolized by Wall Street. Why shut down the airport, as some are now threatening to do? What message is being conveyed there? How is Oakland preferable to Piedmont or Newport Beach where the rich actually live?”

After reading Schrag’s encouragement to the occupy protestors to “go where the rich actually live,” I fully expect to see ‘Occupy Laguna Niguel,’ or ‘Occupy Pacific Heights’ groups created.

It’s All About ME

Many of the middle class whiners doing the protesting are college students upset that they will have to work for less than $100,000 a year when they graduate. They say they shouldn’t have to repay student loans or mortgages. Where does thinking like this come from?

They’ve been told all of their lives how great they are, and how everything they do is wonderful. But who would hire them with such narcissistic, self-absorbed senses of self-worth.

And now the kids are angry.

The students who are protesting should be turning on the teachers and ‘educators’ who passed them every year to the next grade when they couldn’t read and speak English, or do basic math… and the coaches and parent volunteers who handed out first place trophies and blue ribbons to overweight kids with two left feet… and the parents wouldn’t dish out some tough love and discipline, fearing their children wouldn’t like them… In the world of the Occupier, everyone is a winner, except those who work for a living.

The rest of the occupiers, save for a few ideologues in every crowd, are the sloths of American society who believe that instead of working hard to make themselves successful, they are entitled to the things they want, and that it is the responsibility of the government to take care of them and provide for them.

The Occupy movement is playing right into the political left’s class warfare campaign. It’s a tired, hackneyed play, right out of the pages of famous leftists’ writings.

“Occupy, lacking a defined agenda, has become more about itself than about the nation’s paralyzing economic inefficiency and injustice,” Schrag wrote, and the only thing he does get right.

Ultimately, leftists are about selfishness, not selflessness. They are about control, not inclusion. They are about secrecy, not transparency. Leftists are agitators, and have been identified in history as socialists, communists and radicals, not moderates or conservatives.

Conservative by definition, is stable, sober, traditional, orthodox and steady.

Leftists are theorists and perpetual students, not teachers. And as Dennis Miller so aptly said, “They’re squatters who don’t know squat.”

FEB. 2, 2012

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

The recent capsizing of the Carnival Cruise Lines ship Costa Concordia off the coast of Italy is symbolic of both Italy’s and California’s inability to continue to fund welfare states.  A lack of “social capital,” not income or taxes, is tearing at the social superstructure of California from within.

The Costa Concordia departed from “Civitavecchia,” an ancient second-century port of the Roman Empire near Rome.  In Italian, “civita” means civilized or civic society.  “Vecchia” refers to old age, as in, “you’ll support me in my old age” (sara il bastone della mia vecchiaia).

The initial reports of the shipwreck indicate that the captain may have abandoned ship in violation of maritime laws.  If the media reports are correct, it was not the ship’s officers but the Filipino cooks, maids and rank and file crew who saved passengers during the chaos to abandon the ship.  Plausibly, they had enough social capital from a Catholic-Asian-influenced social culture to save 4,000 passengers.

The capsizing of the Costa Concordia is symbolic of what is slowly happening to the government cruise ship “Costa California.”

Cruise Ship ‘Costa California’ Coming Apart

The metaphorical cruise ship “Costa California” is listing to port. It can’t find a way to plug a structural $20 billion annual state budget deficit.  But contrary to Gov. Jerry Brown, who proposes to raise taxes, Costa California isn’t leaking taxes from its ballast tanks.  Rather, it is leaking social capital.  There aren’t enough young, intact families to take out mortgages to support the pensions of public or private retirees.  Thus, the economy is coming apart.  But it is really the social fabric that is fraying.  It doesn’t matter how much money you have if you are trying to escape going down with a sinking ship.

According to the Occupy Wall Street movement, California is divided along social class lines with the rich comprising 1 percent and the not-rich comprising the other 99 percent. But libertarian sociologist Charles Murray says the reason for California’s social class divide is not primarily due to an income gap but due to a gap in social capital.

By American social capital, Murray means those institutions that bring about industriousness, neighborliness and lack of class envy; and which promote marriage and family formations along with a culture of entrepreneurialism.

Murray’s soon-to-be-published book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960 to 2010,” says it is the lack of marriage and religious institutions that is resulting in greater social division, fewer liberties and a declining economy.  A synopsis by Murray of the book can be found online in an article titled, “Belmont and Fishtown: On Diverging Classes in the United States.” The article is a comparison of two fictional neighborhoods in upscale Boston and working-class Philadelphia, respectively.  An audio of Murray stating the evidence for the thesis of his book can also be found here.

Although similar divisions exist among other races and groups, Murray concentrated on whites because other groups are more influenced by racial discrimination and recent immigration. By isolating whites in his study, Murray more easily can focus his analysis on class divisions.

The focus of Murray’s book is not the middle class.  Instead, he compares the top 20 percent and the bottom 30 percent on the social class ladder.  What he finds is a growing social class divide.   The Tea Party’s focus is on the preservation of the middle class. And the Occupy Movement’s focus is on the growing social divide.  Both are misdirected social movements when it comes to rescuing California.

Social Divisions

To Murray, the origins for the divide are social and not due to the “greed” of Wall Street.  In 1960, about 88 percent of the “upper class” and 83 percent of the “lower class” in the U.S. were married.  Today, 83 percent of the upper class still are married, but only 48 percent of the lower class.  The result is that there aren’t enough intact families to take out mortgages and start new businesses to support the pensions of the elderly.  Thus, the inter-generational financial structure of the economy is coming apart.  But it is really the social superstructure that has self-destructed with the “nudging” of government.

What Murray is concerned about nationally has also taken place in California. California saw a leveling off of intact nuclear families from 2000 to 2007. The number of two-parent families with children grew from 4,117,036 in 2000 to only 4,218,469 in 2007.  This reflects a minus half percent (-0.5%) decline relative to total population growth. Two parent families with children constituted 35.8 percent of all state households in 2000 and 34.7 percent in 2007. This reflects a 1.1 percentage-point decline. Meanwhile, state population grew 8.1 percent over the same seven-year period.

What apparently has grown in California are the number of single-parent families due to divorce and out-of-wedlock births, not childless households. Unmarried partner households (same-sex) only represented 0.9 percent of all households in 2007.

Virtue Gap

What is causing this is the lack of socially institutionalized “virtues” that foster family formations, the work ethic and social responsibility.   This can only be derived from religion that is separate from the state.  It can’t be manufactured by government funded non-profit clones, academia, some faddish therapy or churches captured by politicized extremes.

In California, “occupying” Wall Street will not fix the state.  Nor will increased public school expenditures per student.  Fully funding state and local government budgets so that pension obligations can be met is not the long-term answer, either.  Figuratively speaking, that would just take on more water to the Costa California cruise ship.

Repealing Proposition 13 would not close the social class divide.  It would just widen the divide, as the widow and small business person couldn’t withstand the tax shock.

Neither would restoring redevelopment or imposing Obamacare make a difference.  Such discussions are like trying to pick a chair in a game of musical chairs on a sinking ship.  But the band plays on.

Restoring the Sacramento Delta and curtailing urban sprawl would be of no consequence either.  Global warming may or may not become a problem in our lifetimes or ever.

But the cooling off of marriage has, within one generation, wreaked structural devastation on the economy and compelled California to look to rampant immigration to offer a partial solution.  But immigration hasn’t brought enough intact two-parent families with entrepreneurial values to plug the gap.

For that matter, reducing the size of government alone would also not produce the social capital needed to keep the family and the economy from eventually declining.  However, Murray nonetheless says that reducing the size of government is a necessary pre-condition for social and economic regeneration.

Civil Society, Not Social Authoritarianism

Murray is not considered a “social conservative” but a libertarian.  Social conservatism is associated with a form of authoritarianism that wants government to have a greater role in the supporting of morally correct choices.

This is the kind of subtle social authoritarianism that Obama has adopted with the “nudging” policies of technocratic guru Cass Sunstein.  Only these policies are secular, so they are considered politically correct. Sunstein is opposed to free markets and believes that elite policy experts know what is best for the public.  But “nudging” policies can’t replace the family, free religious institutions, neighborhoods and other voluntary associations.  Because they reflect government coercion, they add to social alienation.

That is not what Murray is driving at.  Murray is interested in purely voluntary associations cultivating social capital for the public good.

Murray attends a Quaker church, not one that’s Evangelical, fundamentalist or liberal Christian.

Murray says non-religious people are as moral as those who are religious.  But the irreligious don’t leave behind primary social institutions that continue their social values.  Free religious institutions are, if I may say so, California’s original “Think Long Committees.” 

Such free institutions cannot be cloned by the state or by wealthy philanthropic organizations created by social elites.  There is no DNA from which to copy truly voluntary religious associations into the secular world.

In the language of the new genetics, the family and religion are “epigenomes” that self-program DNA by diet or behavior.  The epigenetic code can be inherited by succeeding generations. For example, it was found that binge eating in years of abundant agricultural harvests in Sweden cut 32 years off the life spans of the next two generations of farmers due to a single year of gluttony. By analogy, California government has experienced two decades of budgetary gluttony and thus has several years of self-inherited problems to solve.

Social institutions are like epigenomes that reprogram DNA code in the human cell.  Their effects are long-lasting.

De Tocqueville Libertarianism

Murray might be called a “de Tocqueville” libertarian because he believes that primary social institutions, such as the family and religion, are the creators of social capital that generates political liberties.  Alexis de Tocqueville was a famous French writer who visited America in the early 19th Century.  His famous book, “Democracy in America,” found that the American brand of democracy and business enterprise, and the work ethic, came from participation in voluntary associations not controlled or subsidized by the state.

The ideal of most libertarians is the naked individual with “inalienable” rights facing huge bureaucracies.  This is the image portrayed in Ayn Rand novels. Consider the fictional architect Howard Roark battling the bureaucracy in the novel, “The Fountainhead.”  But Roark is an “unarmed prophet” with no social capital.

Libertarianism can lead to an alienated individual who is part of the “lonely crowd” and who “bowls alone.”  Murray’s libertarianism sees the need for primary social institutions to serve as a buffer from the huge Wall Street corporations on the one hand, and the Federal Reserve and predatory eminent domain for redevelopment by the elites on the other hand.  “Wall Street,” “Big Corporations,” and “Too Big to Fail Banks” reflect icons of social alienation to the political Left.  “Fannie and Freddie Mac,” “the Federal Reserve,” “Redevelopment” and “Eminent Domain” reflect alienation on the Right.

People who are religious tend to become Little League organizers.  They fight for installing traffic signals at dangerous intersections.  They want a better world for their children and the children of others.  They are politically involved in more than a self-interested way.  They create lasting social capital that can be transferred to bigger issues.

The Maligning of ‘Prop. 8 as Hate’

In California, Proposition 8 to ban gay marriage is seen by liberal cognitive elites as just another form of social authoritarianism.  Libertarians just want “government out of the family.”

But Jennifer Roback Morse of the Hoover Institution has made a libertarian case for the exclusiveness of the “traditional” nuclear family.  This does not necessarily mean that gays should be prohibited from “civil unions” or other legal protections.

How to Re-float the Cruise Ship ‘Costa California’

According to social scientist Charles Murray, California can refloat the cruise ship “Costa California” if it can right-size government to allow voluntary associations to fulfill their irreplaceable role without resorting to social authoritarianism.

This even extends into an alternative to Obamacare.  Health has a social basis, as even liberal policy makers know.  Using “civil society” to form self-care and mutual aid groups focusing on health care is a viable alternative or complement to either socialized, privatized or “single payer” health care.

Murray points out that his findings are contrary to the stereotype that the working class is more religious and thus has more social capital than the upper class.  To the contrary, it is the lower classes that are sinking as the welfare state has replaced free religious and social institutions.  Moreover, upper class elites do not socialize with the lower classes anymore and have limited the pathways for social mobility in a high-tech society.

Murray writes: “Encompassing these specific ways in which declines in the Founding virtues diminish civic culture are the class divisions that have emerged in the raising of the next generation. In Belmont, the intact two-parent family is still the norm—about 90 percent of all Belmont children are still living with both biological parents when the mother turns forty. In Fishtown, that figure has fallen below 30 percent. The socialization of children in Belmont and Fishtown has become radically different, and everything we have learned about the problems associated with single parenthood forces us to expect that the consequences for the transmission of industriousness, marriage, honesty, and religiosity to the next generation will be profound.”

Translated to California’s current situation: the CalPERS pension fund may depend as much or more on the revival of civil society than on endless higher taxes. And your civita vecchia  — your civilian retirement — may depend on it too.