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America divided – this concept increasingly graces political discourse in the U.S., pitting left against right, conservative thought against the liberal agenda. But for decades, Americans have been rearranging along another divide, one just as stark if not far more significant – a chasm once bridged by a flourishing middle class.
Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, believes the ongoing death of “middle America” has sparked the emergence of two countries within one, the hallmark of developing nations. In his new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, Temin paints a bleak picture where one country has a bounty of resources and power, and the other toils day after day with minimal access to the long-coveted American dream.
In his view, the United States is shifting toward an economic and political makeup more similar to developing nations than the wealthy, economically stable nation it has long been. Temin applied W. Arthur Lewis’s economic model – designed to understand the workings of developing countries – to the United States in an effort to document how inequality has grown in America.
The 2017 World Economic Forum had the answer: "The people who have not benefited from globalization need to try harder to emulate those who have succeeded," and, "'People have to take more ownership of upgrading themselves on a continuous basis.'"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:06PM (3 children)
I think the take away from the wikipedia article of this section :
Much like climate data people with an axe to grind can find numbers that support almost anything.
Yet, fundamentally, from a very high alititude view, the program has failed. It actually cost more like $15T not $1T and the result is we have about as many poor people as we always used to.
A successful program is you spend $155B to get an international space station, and if you have a medium to large telescope you can see it up there. Or a successful program is you pay an inflation adjusted $750M and you get Hoover Dam. Or you pay roughly $30M inflation adjusted dollars and you get a Washington Monument. Or the Manhattan project. Or the physical Pentagon building (not the pentagon as an abstract DoD analogy but the bricks and mortar). Or for that matter services. The cost of the regime change in Panama was $163M. Personally I think it would have been wiser to pay Noriega a bribe of half of that to leave, but whatever. Or services sometimes "fail" the regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq were miserable failures yet remarkably expensive.
The war on poverty was orders of magnitude more expensive. Now orders of magnitude more expensive than hoover dam would be an alaskan land bridge to Russia. Or order of magnitude more than the cost of the ISS would be colonies on Mars. Or order of magnitude more than the cost of the war on terror would be the cost of fighting Iran. The point is multiples of fabulous expenditures should be absolutely stupendous results.
So given the last paragraph, whats the stupendous earth shattering result of blowing $15T on "poverty"? Well, maybe, as long as the spigot keeps flowing probably the poverty rate is a small percentage lower in the very short term. But generally speaking, piling up the money and burning it would have had more effect. I'm not seeing much of a return on investment here. I'm not even talking about running a long term profit by "eradicating poverty" but I'm not seeing much of a result from the investment.
$15T should have more of a result. Well, it is helping destroy the middle class by trying to fund it... which might have been an original goal anyway.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday May 23 2017, @08:17PM (2 children)
Yes. Time progressed 5 decades, the world population doubled, the USA population increased, and the number of poor people in the USA remained roughly the same. Monetary power got consolidated into fewer and fewer hands. Yet the number of poor people in the USA remained roughly the same. The economy of other countries has shot up like a rocket, going from isolated enclave to world-dominant player (e.g. China) -- yet the number of poor people in the USA remained roughly the same.
Sounds like a pretty stupendous result to me.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 24 2017, @05:06AM
How again is poverty measured? There's usually two ways. The first is that we decide the poorest X% are poor. The second is that someone pulls a number out of their ass, calls it a "living wage" and uses that. The number is usually chosen relative to what people usually make and generally tends to a set fraction of the population making less than that number. End result is that the usual ways of defining poor people results in the same number of poor people no matter how wealthy the society is. So I believe you can't use number of poor people as a measure of how well a society is doing.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 24 2017, @12:54PM
Well, wait, that flat line is kinda my point, that the number was kinda flatline before the $15T spent, and kinda flatline after the $15T spent. So apparently we could spend anywhere from $0T to $150T and we'd get about the same flat line, so how about trying on $0T for a thought experiment?
For a similar comparison, the number of terrorists in the middle east is slightly higher after the trillions spent on the war on terror than before. Therefore it failed.
In practice welfare funding is exactly like public high school funding where any theat to the gravy train results in ridiculous threats of cuts "Oh well no more football team". Likewise probably 1% to maybe even 10% of the poverty spending is legit, but any threat to the program growth rate is met with threats to cut all the funding to the few deserving recipients.