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Social mobility in the USA

An excellent comment left on a Clipmarks post

Amplify’d from clipmarks.com
Social mobility in the United States is lower today than it was in 1850
In the early years of the Republic
where inherited wealth or social position was rare, an equality of opportunity that allowed the hard-working or the talented to get ahead happened almost by itself. But as the United States grew richer, wealth began to accumulate in a few hands and the United States began its drift towards what it is today, one of the most economically inegalitarian of all the advanced industrial societies. In an inegalitarian society equality of opportunity
must be created - by high taxation on inherited wealth or social programs to boost the economically less fortunate. Yet the principles inherited from the egalitarian age, of hands-off government, self-reliance and the protected status of personal wealth, remain sacred
Policies that in an egalitarian society were beneficial to all, in an inegalitarian society become beneficial only to the already-richRead more at clipmarks.com
 

Economist: Wealth inequality leads to “guard labor”

“This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin”

Amplify’d from www.good.is
The economist Samuel Bowles has an interesting theory about why it’s good to keep wealth inequality in check. When there’s lots of wealth inequality, he says, more and more people have to be employed as “guard labor”—as protectors of the rich peoples’ stuff and defenders of their interests. From the Santa Fe Reporter:
Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth
—think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online—to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.

The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin.
states with more wealth inequality (measured by the Gini coefficient)
have more guards per worker
guardlabor
See more at www.good.is
 

Wealth of the 400 richest Americans increased by $30B during recession

We have our 400 billionaires, and we have 29 million unemployed and underemployed Americans. We have an infrastructure in shambles. We have an environment in crisis. We have a health care system that would make Rube Goldberg proud. And we have the worst income distribution since 1929.

Amplify’d from www.huffingtonpost.com
Collectively, those 400 have $1.57 trillion in wealth

It’s more than enough to insure the uninsured for the next twenty years or more.

It’s more than enough to create a Manhattan Project to solve global warming by developing renewable energy and a green, sustainable manufacturing sector.

And here’s my favorite: It’s more than enough to endow every public college and university in the country so that all of our children could gain access to higher education for free, forever!

We have our 400 billionaires, and we have 29 million unemployed and underemployed Americans. We have an infrastructure in shambles. We have an environment in crisis. We have a health care system that would make Rube Goldberg proud. And we have the worst income distribution since 1929.
during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans, according to Forbes, actually increased by $30 billion
And $30 billion is enough to provide 500,000 school teacher jobs at $60k per year.Read more at www.huffingtonpost.com