Sunday, February 12, 2012 4:54:47 AM
Money and Morals
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 9, 2012
Lately inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.
So you knew what was going to happen next. Suddenly, conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals. Never mind wage stagnation and all that, the real problem is the collapse of working-class family values, which is somehow the fault of liberals.
But is it really all about morals? No, it’s mainly about money.
To be fair, the new book at the heart of the conservative pushback, Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” does highlight some striking trends. Among white Americans with a high school education or less, marriage rates and male labor force participation are down, while births out of wedlock are up. Clearly, white working-class society has changed in ways that don’t sound good.
But the first question one should ask is: Are things really that bad on the values front?
Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. This is, of course, a longstanding position. Reading Mr. Murray, I found myself thinking about an earlier diatribe, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1996 book, “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values,” which covered much of the same ground, claimed that our society was unraveling and predicted further unraveling as the Victorian virtues continued to erode.
Yet the truth is that some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?
Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.
Most of the numbers you see about income trends in America focus on households rather than individuals, which makes sense for some purposes. But when you see a modest rise in incomes for the lower tiers of the income distribution, you have to realize that all — yes, all — of this rise comes from the women, both because more women are in the paid labor force and because women’s wages aren’t as much below male wages as they used to be.
For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.
So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.
One more thought: The real winner in this controversy is the distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson.
Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, Mr. Wilson published “When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor,” in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.
So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.
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Related
Times Topic: Income Inequality
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/income/income_inequality/index.html
Paul Krugman Columnist Page
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html
Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
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© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/opinion/krugman-money-and-morals.html [with comments]
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Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: February 9, 2012
WASHINGTON — Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.
It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Yet the income divide has received far less attention from policy makers and government officials than gaps in student accomplishment by race.
Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.
“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown [ http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/widening-academic-achievement-gap-between-rich-and-poor-new-evidence-and-possible-explanations ] by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.
In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan [ http://www.nber.org/papers/w17633.pdf ], the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s.
The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades. The data from most of these studies end in 2007 and 2008, before the recession’s full impact was felt. Researchers said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn was likely to have aggravated the trend.
“With income declines more severe in the lower brackets, there’s a good chance the recession may have widened the gap,” Professor Reardon said. In the study he led, researchers analyzed 12 sets of standardized test scores starting in 1960 and ending in 2007. He compared children from families in the 90th percentile of income — the equivalent of around $160,000 in 2008, when the study was conducted — and children from the 10th percentile, $17,500 in 2008. By the end of that period, the achievement gap by income had grown by 40 percent, he said, while the gap between white and black students, regardless of income, had shrunk substantially.
Both studies were first published last fall in a book of research, “Whither Opportunity? [ https://www.russellsage.org/publications/whither-opportunity ]” compiled by the Russell Sage Foundation, a research center for social sciences, and the Spencer Foundation, which focuses on education. Their conclusions, while familiar to a small core of social sciences scholars, are now catching the attention of a broader audience, in part because income inequality [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/income/income_inequality/index.html ] has been a central theme this election season.
The connection between income inequality among parents and the social mobility of their children has been a focus of President Obama as well as some of the Republican presidential candidates.
One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children (in weekend sports, ballet, music lessons, math tutors, and in overall involvement in their children’s schools), while lower-income families, which are now more likely than ever to be headed by a single parent, are increasingly stretched for time and resources. This has been particularly true as more parents try to position their children for college, which has become ever more essential for success in today’s economy.
A study by Sabino Kornrich, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, and Frank F. Furstenberg, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography this year, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by 20 percent.
“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study, by Susan M. Dynarski and Martha J. Bailey, looked at two generations of students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from 1979 to 1982. By 1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5 percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989.
James J. Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, argues that parenting matters as much as, if not more than, income in forming a child’s cognitive ability and personality, particularly in the years before children start school.
“Early life conditions and how children are stimulated play a very important role,” he said. “The danger is we will revert back to the mindset of the war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that, it’s a mistake.”
Meredith Phillips, an associate professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, used survey data to show that affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers, or schools (anywhere from museums to shopping malls). By the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities, she found.
Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute whose book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” was published Jan. 31, described income inequality as “more of a symptom than a cause.”
The growing gap between the better educated and the less educated, he argued, has formed a kind of cultural divide that has its roots in natural social forces, like the tendency of educated people to marry other educated people, as well as in the social policies of the 1960s, like welfare and other government programs, which he contended provided incentives for staying single.
“When the economy recovers, you’ll still see all these problems persisting for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture,” he said.
There are no easy answers, in part because the problem is so complex, said Douglas J. Besharov, a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Blaming the problem on the richest of the rich ignores an equally important driver, he said: two-earner household wealth, which has lifted the upper middle class ever further from less educated Americans, who tend to be single parents.
The problem is a puzzle, he said. “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare.”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Occupy Kindergarten: The Rich-Poor Divide Starts With Education
Reuters
New research shows that a family's money matters ever more when it comes to their childrens' education
Jordan Weissmann
Feb 11 2012, 9:00 AM ET
Economic class is increasingly becoming the great dividing line of American education.
The New York Times has published a roundup [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html (above)] of recent research showing the growing academic achievement gap between rich and poor students. It prominently features a paper by Stanford sociologist Sean F. Reardon, which found that, since the 1960s, the difference in test scores between affluent and underprivileged students has grown 40%, and is now double gap between black and white students. (Graph courtesy of the Times.)
The children of the wealthy are pulling away from their lower-class peers -- the same way their parents are pulling away from their peers' parents. When it comes to college completion rates, the rich-poor gulf has grown by 50% since the 1980s. Upper income families are also spending vastly more on their children compared to the poor than they did 40 years ago, and spending more time as parents cultivating their intellectual development.
It may not simply be a matter of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer -- although that certainly is a part of it. The growing differences in student achievement don't strictly mimic the way income inequality has skyrocketed since the middle of the 20th century. It's actually worse than that. Today, there's a much stronger connection between income and a child's academic success than in the past. Having money is simply more important than it used to be when it comes to getting a good education. Or, as Reardon puts it, "a dollar of income...appears to buy more academic achievement than it did several decades a ago."
Even more discouraging: The differences start early in a child's life, then linger. Reardon notes another study which found that the rich-poor achievement gap between students is already big when they start kindergarden, and doesn't change much over time. His own analysis shows a similar pattern.
How come money is so much more important now than before, and so early in a child's development? Thank your local alpha-mom (or dad).
We don't have definitive evidence that can tell us why income matters so much more to a child's education now than it did four decades years ago. But like many other writers, including The Atlantic's own Megan McArdle, Reardon suggests it involves a complicated interplay between wealth and culture. Well-off parents today are more able and likely to invest in their child's early education. Like I mentioned, studies show wealthy parents are spending more on their young children and paying more attention to their academic development. One paper found that by the time an upper-income kid starts school, they've spent 400 more hours on "literacy activities" than their less fortunate peers.
We can also look at the way America now segregates itself by education. The greatest predictor of a child's academic success, even more than economic class, is still their parents' education level. But among adults, education and income are becoming more and more intertwined. College graduates couple off and use their resources to raise children who will also go on to succeed academically. When he ran the numbers, Reardon actually found that parental education couldn't explain the entire growth the academic gap between classes. But that doesn't mean it's not a factor.
Even if we still have to tease out the reasons why, we appear to have reached a point where the children of the rich end up better educated, and more likely to succeed, simply because they're children of the rich.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/occupy-kindergarten-the-rich-poor-divide-starts-with-education/252914/ [with comments]
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Living Very Large
The Anthony Pritzker home in Los Angeles is a 49,300-square-foot building designed by an architecture firm in Paris.
Mark Holtzman for The Wall Street Journal
Video [embedded]
Even as the size of the average American house shrinks after peaking during the boom, several of the wealthy are building gigantic homes of 20,000 square feet and more. Juliet Chung has details on Lunch Break.
Shooting ranges, an indoor tennis court, a bedroom bigger than many houses: For a small cadre of very wealthy owners, building big is back. A bird's-eye view of some of the mega mansions going up across the country.
By JULIET CHUNG
FEBRUARY 10, 2012
The latest project of Hyatt hotel heir Anthony Pritzker is a 49,300-square-foot building designed by an architecture firm in Paris. It involves a small army of specialized consultants and boasts amenities like a bowling alley, hairdressing area and gym.
The project, in the hills above Los Angeles, isn't a luxury hotel—it's a private home for Mr. Pritzker and his family.
Four years into the housing downturn, what little new-home construction remains is focused on downsized living. According to the Census Bureau, the average size of a newly completed single-family home peaked in 2007 at 2,521 square feet, capping nearly three decades of growth, falling to 2,392 square feet in 2010.
Then there are the exceptions, a small cadre of homeowners who are currently building mansions that are 10 times that size. Interviews with the small pool of luxury builders who handle such projects, and a perusal of permits in wealthy areas including parts of Connecticut and California, suggests that for some of the mega-wealthy, big is back.
In the fall of 2008, clients were saying, "It's not the right time to do the big house on the hill," says contractor John Sebastian, president of Dallas-based Sebastian Construction Group, whose current roster of projects in Dallas and Los Angeles spans 13,000 to 24,000 square feet. As those sentiments dried up, business has picked up, he says.
Hedge-fund manager Cliff Asness is building a 25,900-square-foot, Colonial-style home with an indoor swimming pool and tennis court in Greenwich, Conn., according to permits and other town records. Nearby, a 31,500-square-foot mansion is being built for Lee Weinstein, founder of data-center concern Xand, with 15 bathrooms (plus additional powder rooms), a 2,500-square-foot master suite and a basement with a theater, wine cellar, juice bar, dance studio and sauna, records show. Twenty miles away, in Westport, Conn., Melissa and Doug Bernstein, whose Melissa & Doug company makes educational children's toys, are creating a compound of more than 30,000 square feet with a stand-alone ice-cream parlor, plans show. The main house alone is 29,500 square feet and includes a gym partially covered by glass; there's also a guest cottage, pool cabana and rec-room-and-garage building. The property also has a pool, tennis court and playground. The town deemed the home complete last summer; the tax assessor in 2010 valued the property at $19.8 million.
In Silicon Valley, Jim Ellis, who co-founded a cellphone insurance provider, and his wife, Jenna, are building a 25,000-square-foot home on a single story. Plans show the home, which at 430 feet in length is longer than a football field, is expected to have multiple garages, including a showroom garage joined to a family room by a glass wall, allowing viewing of the car collection from inside the home.
In Incline Village, Nev., software mogul Larry Ellison's 18,000-square-foot-plus compound under construction will have competition from a neighbor's house down the street. Plans show a more than 50,000-square-foot lakefront home, including spaces such as decks; inside the home, plans show a half-basketball court, trampoline, climbing wall and indoor tennis court with a viewing area. The owner is Gene Pretti, who heads an investment-management firm. The owners of the homes identified in this story, some of whom own their property through limited-liability companies, declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.
At this rarefied stratum, luxury builders say emotion and desire often drive demand. "You don't need that much space," says a Dallas businessman who recently completed building a 28,000-square-foot home for himself and his family. He says he and his wife planned to build a roughly 13,000-square-foot home, but their plans just kept on growing. "The architect was a really good salesman, [and] we just kept dreaming, I guess." Builders say owners are building their dream home or building for more or older children, and renovating an existing property, even extensively, might not satisfy their checklist.
That checklist, permits and architectural plans filed with local municipalities show, can be long, and creative. Builders tick off other amenities like shooting ranges (good ventilation is key to avoid inhaling contaminants), underground tunnels (they allow easy access to other buildings on the property), underground garages (they don't obstruct views) and panic rooms. "You'd be amazed at what some creative minds come up with," says Peter McCoy, whose Los Angeles-based construction firm, Peter McCoy Construction, is building Mr. Pritzker's home. Mr. McCoy declines to discuss individual clients.
Mr. Brady and Ms. Bündchen
Associated Press
In Los Angeles's tony Brentwood neighborhood, the 18,300-square-foot limestone home of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and supermodel Gisele Bündchen is reached via bridge over a pond that separates it from the driveway, according to plans filed with the city of Los Angeles. The master suite has his-and-hers closets, both with skylights, and the master bath connects to an outdoor bath area with a saltwater plunge pool and shower; a covered walkway connects the rest of the home to a 1,590-square-foot gym with skylights over a garage. The first floor includes a playroom, service kitchen, library with terraces and a "morning bar." According to plans, the property also has a pool, spa, pool house and a playhouse.
One obvious drawback of building big: unwanted attention. Neighbors sometimes chafe at the idea of an edifice down the street the size of the White House. Reacting to McMansions that went up in the housing boom, some communities, like Chevy Chase, Md., passed rules that regulate more strictly how big houses can grow, says John McIlwain, a senior resident fellow specializing in housing issues at the Urban Land Institute.
Near where Mr. Pritzker's home is under construction, neighbors are up in arms over another of Mr. McCoy's projects, a roughly 70,000-square-foot compound (downsized from 85,000 square feet) awaiting permitting for Prince Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud, son of the king of Saudi Arabia. The compound is on three lots and would include a main home of 42,000 square feet—part of it underground—a guest house, pool cabana, gate house and another residence of up to 20,000 square feet. The prince's lawyer, Benjamin Reznik, notes other residences in the neighborhood are super-sized and says opposition has been "fomented" by neighbor Martha Karsh, the wife of Oaktree Capital Management founder Bruce Karsh. Ms. Karsh has hired publicists to attract attention to the project, he adds. "Newt Gingrich wishes he had that campaign going," says Mr. Reznik.
George Mihlsten, a lawyer for a community coalition and Ms. Karsh, says the coalition hired his firm and that Mr. Reznik has hired outside help too, including a community-relations firm (Mr. Reznik says that was in response to Ms. Karsh's campaign). "He likes to focus on Martha, but the truth is he and his client have created the controversy by proposing an outlandish plan and going behind the backs of the community to try to get it built," Mr. Mihlsten says in an email, likening the scope of the project to a small community shopping center. More than 1,500 residents of Benedict Canyon signed a petition expressing their opposition to the project as it was originally proposed, according to a representative of the coalition.
The scope of these projects makes them extremely complex to construct. Finding or assembling the property can take several years, and the design and construction of a super-size project can take up to five years or more, builders say. (These days, lower labor costs in some areas can mean quicker turnaround times or better value.) Just finding parking for the 100 to 200 tradespeople that can be on-site for a big job, compared with the eight to 20 people typically working on a 4,000-square-foot home, can require planning; commandeering church parking lots is one standby.
In addition to a general contractor, a 40,000-square-foot home construction might involve a design architect from out of town who comes up with the conceptual design; a local executive architect who deals with the builder; an owner's representative; a structural engineer; a landscape architect; a landscape attorney; an interior designer and acoustical, lighting and waterproofing consultants.
"Every 5,000-square-foot mark, a house becomes something different," says Scott Hobbs, president of New Canaan, Conn.-based Hobbs, Inc., whose firm is building Mr. Asness's home. (Mr. Hobbs declines to discuss individual clients.) At 20,000 square feet and above, he says, a house is more akin to a commercial than a residential project, requiring industrial components that are tucked away so the home still feels inviting. Builders say golf carts for traversing estates and elaborate security systems for keeping tabs on inhabitants are part of the picture, too, at this scale.
On a late Los Angeles afternoon last fall, up a steep and winding road in lower Benedict Canyon, a covered chain-link fence and a dense covering of trees and shrubs blocked most views of the mansion of Mr. Pritzker, part of the Chicago real-estate family and a billionaire co-founder of private-equity firm the Pritzker Group. Workers walked around the property and glimpses of windows, a staircase and materials like ladders and beams were visible. "All visitors much check in with security," a sign at the entrance to the property read.
Plans filed with the city of Los Angeles, which deemed the mansion finished in November, provide more details. The 49,300-square-foot, two-story home surrounds a courtyard and includes a two-level basement with amenities including a game room, bowling alley, bar and media library. Above ground, there's a gym with changing rooms, his-and-hers offices, an arts-and-crafts room and a hairdressing area. Other buildings on the property, including a detached recreation room and a guest house, bring the total square footage of the compound to just over 53,000 square feet.
The home has a large skylight, roof-mounted solar panels and a curving driveway. A lawn spreads around part of the home, with a "floating pool" and spa anchoring one end of the property.
Critics of such mega-mansions "want to penalize people for being successful," says Mr. McCoy, the builder of the estate. Referring to the scores of people large projects employ, he adds, "People have done this all along because they could, and aren't we lucky that they can?"
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Related
When 50,000 Square Feet Isn't Enough
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203889904577201420212119552.html
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Anthony Pritzker Home in Los Angeles
- 49,000 sq. ft.
- Owner: Hyatt hotel heir Anthony Pritzker
- Above Ground: A gym with changing rooms, 'floating pool' and spa, his-and-hers offices, arts-and-crafts room, hairdressing area, detached recreation room
- Underground: A two-level basement with a game room, two-lane bowling alley, entertainment foyer with bar, media library, staff rooms, a 'project room' and garage
- Neighborhood: Saudi Prince Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud is awaiting permits for a 70,000- square-foot compound, downsized from 85,000 square feet
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The White House
- 55,000 sq. ft.
- The White House was the largest house in the U.S. until after the Civil War
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Hearst Castle
- 68,500 sq. ft.
- Square footage is for the 38-bedroom main home, which has a beauty salon and staff dining room
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Graceland
- 10,300 sq. ft.
- Square footage is for the mansion; a racquetball building was added later
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—Sarah Tilton contributed to this article.
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203889904577201043455977600.html [with additional images, and comments]
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By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 9, 2012
Lately inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.
So you knew what was going to happen next. Suddenly, conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals. Never mind wage stagnation and all that, the real problem is the collapse of working-class family values, which is somehow the fault of liberals.
But is it really all about morals? No, it’s mainly about money.
To be fair, the new book at the heart of the conservative pushback, Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” does highlight some striking trends. Among white Americans with a high school education or less, marriage rates and male labor force participation are down, while births out of wedlock are up. Clearly, white working-class society has changed in ways that don’t sound good.
But the first question one should ask is: Are things really that bad on the values front?
Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. This is, of course, a longstanding position. Reading Mr. Murray, I found myself thinking about an earlier diatribe, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1996 book, “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values,” which covered much of the same ground, claimed that our society was unraveling and predicted further unraveling as the Victorian virtues continued to erode.
Yet the truth is that some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?
Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.
Most of the numbers you see about income trends in America focus on households rather than individuals, which makes sense for some purposes. But when you see a modest rise in incomes for the lower tiers of the income distribution, you have to realize that all — yes, all — of this rise comes from the women, both because more women are in the paid labor force and because women’s wages aren’t as much below male wages as they used to be.
For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.
So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.
One more thought: The real winner in this controversy is the distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson.
Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, Mr. Wilson published “When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor,” in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.
So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.
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Related
Times Topic: Income Inequality
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/income/income_inequality/index.html
Paul Krugman Columnist Page
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html
Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
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© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/opinion/krugman-money-and-morals.html [with comments]
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Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: February 9, 2012
WASHINGTON — Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.
It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Yet the income divide has received far less attention from policy makers and government officials than gaps in student accomplishment by race.
Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.
“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown [ http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/widening-academic-achievement-gap-between-rich-and-poor-new-evidence-and-possible-explanations ] by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.
In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan [ http://www.nber.org/papers/w17633.pdf ], the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s.
The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades. The data from most of these studies end in 2007 and 2008, before the recession’s full impact was felt. Researchers said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn was likely to have aggravated the trend.
“With income declines more severe in the lower brackets, there’s a good chance the recession may have widened the gap,” Professor Reardon said. In the study he led, researchers analyzed 12 sets of standardized test scores starting in 1960 and ending in 2007. He compared children from families in the 90th percentile of income — the equivalent of around $160,000 in 2008, when the study was conducted — and children from the 10th percentile, $17,500 in 2008. By the end of that period, the achievement gap by income had grown by 40 percent, he said, while the gap between white and black students, regardless of income, had shrunk substantially.
Both studies were first published last fall in a book of research, “Whither Opportunity? [ https://www.russellsage.org/publications/whither-opportunity ]” compiled by the Russell Sage Foundation, a research center for social sciences, and the Spencer Foundation, which focuses on education. Their conclusions, while familiar to a small core of social sciences scholars, are now catching the attention of a broader audience, in part because income inequality [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/income/income_inequality/index.html ] has been a central theme this election season.
The connection between income inequality among parents and the social mobility of their children has been a focus of President Obama as well as some of the Republican presidential candidates.
One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children (in weekend sports, ballet, music lessons, math tutors, and in overall involvement in their children’s schools), while lower-income families, which are now more likely than ever to be headed by a single parent, are increasingly stretched for time and resources. This has been particularly true as more parents try to position their children for college, which has become ever more essential for success in today’s economy.
A study by Sabino Kornrich, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, and Frank F. Furstenberg, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography this year, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by 20 percent.
“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study, by Susan M. Dynarski and Martha J. Bailey, looked at two generations of students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from 1979 to 1982. By 1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5 percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989.
James J. Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, argues that parenting matters as much as, if not more than, income in forming a child’s cognitive ability and personality, particularly in the years before children start school.
“Early life conditions and how children are stimulated play a very important role,” he said. “The danger is we will revert back to the mindset of the war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that, it’s a mistake.”
Meredith Phillips, an associate professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, used survey data to show that affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers, or schools (anywhere from museums to shopping malls). By the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities, she found.
Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute whose book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” was published Jan. 31, described income inequality as “more of a symptom than a cause.”
The growing gap between the better educated and the less educated, he argued, has formed a kind of cultural divide that has its roots in natural social forces, like the tendency of educated people to marry other educated people, as well as in the social policies of the 1960s, like welfare and other government programs, which he contended provided incentives for staying single.
“When the economy recovers, you’ll still see all these problems persisting for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture,” he said.
There are no easy answers, in part because the problem is so complex, said Douglas J. Besharov, a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Blaming the problem on the richest of the rich ignores an equally important driver, he said: two-earner household wealth, which has lifted the upper middle class ever further from less educated Americans, who tend to be single parents.
The problem is a puzzle, he said. “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare.”
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Occupy Kindergarten: The Rich-Poor Divide Starts With Education
Reuters
New research shows that a family's money matters ever more when it comes to their childrens' education
Jordan Weissmann
Feb 11 2012, 9:00 AM ET
Economic class is increasingly becoming the great dividing line of American education.
The New York Times has published a roundup [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html (above)] of recent research showing the growing academic achievement gap between rich and poor students. It prominently features a paper by Stanford sociologist Sean F. Reardon, which found that, since the 1960s, the difference in test scores between affluent and underprivileged students has grown 40%, and is now double gap between black and white students. (Graph courtesy of the Times.)
The children of the wealthy are pulling away from their lower-class peers -- the same way their parents are pulling away from their peers' parents. When it comes to college completion rates, the rich-poor gulf has grown by 50% since the 1980s. Upper income families are also spending vastly more on their children compared to the poor than they did 40 years ago, and spending more time as parents cultivating their intellectual development.
It may not simply be a matter of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer -- although that certainly is a part of it. The growing differences in student achievement don't strictly mimic the way income inequality has skyrocketed since the middle of the 20th century. It's actually worse than that. Today, there's a much stronger connection between income and a child's academic success than in the past. Having money is simply more important than it used to be when it comes to getting a good education. Or, as Reardon puts it, "a dollar of income...appears to buy more academic achievement than it did several decades a ago."
Even more discouraging: The differences start early in a child's life, then linger. Reardon notes another study which found that the rich-poor achievement gap between students is already big when they start kindergarden, and doesn't change much over time. His own analysis shows a similar pattern.
How come money is so much more important now than before, and so early in a child's development? Thank your local alpha-mom (or dad).
We don't have definitive evidence that can tell us why income matters so much more to a child's education now than it did four decades years ago. But like many other writers, including The Atlantic's own Megan McArdle, Reardon suggests it involves a complicated interplay between wealth and culture. Well-off parents today are more able and likely to invest in their child's early education. Like I mentioned, studies show wealthy parents are spending more on their young children and paying more attention to their academic development. One paper found that by the time an upper-income kid starts school, they've spent 400 more hours on "literacy activities" than their less fortunate peers.
We can also look at the way America now segregates itself by education. The greatest predictor of a child's academic success, even more than economic class, is still their parents' education level. But among adults, education and income are becoming more and more intertwined. College graduates couple off and use their resources to raise children who will also go on to succeed academically. When he ran the numbers, Reardon actually found that parental education couldn't explain the entire growth the academic gap between classes. But that doesn't mean it's not a factor.
Even if we still have to tease out the reasons why, we appear to have reached a point where the children of the rich end up better educated, and more likely to succeed, simply because they're children of the rich.
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/occupy-kindergarten-the-rich-poor-divide-starts-with-education/252914/ [with comments]
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Living Very Large
The Anthony Pritzker home in Los Angeles is a 49,300-square-foot building designed by an architecture firm in Paris.
Mark Holtzman for The Wall Street Journal
Video [embedded]
Even as the size of the average American house shrinks after peaking during the boom, several of the wealthy are building gigantic homes of 20,000 square feet and more. Juliet Chung has details on Lunch Break.
Shooting ranges, an indoor tennis court, a bedroom bigger than many houses: For a small cadre of very wealthy owners, building big is back. A bird's-eye view of some of the mega mansions going up across the country.
By JULIET CHUNG
FEBRUARY 10, 2012
The latest project of Hyatt hotel heir Anthony Pritzker is a 49,300-square-foot building designed by an architecture firm in Paris. It involves a small army of specialized consultants and boasts amenities like a bowling alley, hairdressing area and gym.
The project, in the hills above Los Angeles, isn't a luxury hotel—it's a private home for Mr. Pritzker and his family.
Four years into the housing downturn, what little new-home construction remains is focused on downsized living. According to the Census Bureau, the average size of a newly completed single-family home peaked in 2007 at 2,521 square feet, capping nearly three decades of growth, falling to 2,392 square feet in 2010.
Then there are the exceptions, a small cadre of homeowners who are currently building mansions that are 10 times that size. Interviews with the small pool of luxury builders who handle such projects, and a perusal of permits in wealthy areas including parts of Connecticut and California, suggests that for some of the mega-wealthy, big is back.
In the fall of 2008, clients were saying, "It's not the right time to do the big house on the hill," says contractor John Sebastian, president of Dallas-based Sebastian Construction Group, whose current roster of projects in Dallas and Los Angeles spans 13,000 to 24,000 square feet. As those sentiments dried up, business has picked up, he says.
Hedge-fund manager Cliff Asness is building a 25,900-square-foot, Colonial-style home with an indoor swimming pool and tennis court in Greenwich, Conn., according to permits and other town records. Nearby, a 31,500-square-foot mansion is being built for Lee Weinstein, founder of data-center concern Xand, with 15 bathrooms (plus additional powder rooms), a 2,500-square-foot master suite and a basement with a theater, wine cellar, juice bar, dance studio and sauna, records show. Twenty miles away, in Westport, Conn., Melissa and Doug Bernstein, whose Melissa & Doug company makes educational children's toys, are creating a compound of more than 30,000 square feet with a stand-alone ice-cream parlor, plans show. The main house alone is 29,500 square feet and includes a gym partially covered by glass; there's also a guest cottage, pool cabana and rec-room-and-garage building. The property also has a pool, tennis court and playground. The town deemed the home complete last summer; the tax assessor in 2010 valued the property at $19.8 million.
In Silicon Valley, Jim Ellis, who co-founded a cellphone insurance provider, and his wife, Jenna, are building a 25,000-square-foot home on a single story. Plans show the home, which at 430 feet in length is longer than a football field, is expected to have multiple garages, including a showroom garage joined to a family room by a glass wall, allowing viewing of the car collection from inside the home.
In Incline Village, Nev., software mogul Larry Ellison's 18,000-square-foot-plus compound under construction will have competition from a neighbor's house down the street. Plans show a more than 50,000-square-foot lakefront home, including spaces such as decks; inside the home, plans show a half-basketball court, trampoline, climbing wall and indoor tennis court with a viewing area. The owner is Gene Pretti, who heads an investment-management firm. The owners of the homes identified in this story, some of whom own their property through limited-liability companies, declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.
At this rarefied stratum, luxury builders say emotion and desire often drive demand. "You don't need that much space," says a Dallas businessman who recently completed building a 28,000-square-foot home for himself and his family. He says he and his wife planned to build a roughly 13,000-square-foot home, but their plans just kept on growing. "The architect was a really good salesman, [and] we just kept dreaming, I guess." Builders say owners are building their dream home or building for more or older children, and renovating an existing property, even extensively, might not satisfy their checklist.
That checklist, permits and architectural plans filed with local municipalities show, can be long, and creative. Builders tick off other amenities like shooting ranges (good ventilation is key to avoid inhaling contaminants), underground tunnels (they allow easy access to other buildings on the property), underground garages (they don't obstruct views) and panic rooms. "You'd be amazed at what some creative minds come up with," says Peter McCoy, whose Los Angeles-based construction firm, Peter McCoy Construction, is building Mr. Pritzker's home. Mr. McCoy declines to discuss individual clients.
Mr. Brady and Ms. Bündchen
Associated Press
In Los Angeles's tony Brentwood neighborhood, the 18,300-square-foot limestone home of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and supermodel Gisele Bündchen is reached via bridge over a pond that separates it from the driveway, according to plans filed with the city of Los Angeles. The master suite has his-and-hers closets, both with skylights, and the master bath connects to an outdoor bath area with a saltwater plunge pool and shower; a covered walkway connects the rest of the home to a 1,590-square-foot gym with skylights over a garage. The first floor includes a playroom, service kitchen, library with terraces and a "morning bar." According to plans, the property also has a pool, spa, pool house and a playhouse.
One obvious drawback of building big: unwanted attention. Neighbors sometimes chafe at the idea of an edifice down the street the size of the White House. Reacting to McMansions that went up in the housing boom, some communities, like Chevy Chase, Md., passed rules that regulate more strictly how big houses can grow, says John McIlwain, a senior resident fellow specializing in housing issues at the Urban Land Institute.
Near where Mr. Pritzker's home is under construction, neighbors are up in arms over another of Mr. McCoy's projects, a roughly 70,000-square-foot compound (downsized from 85,000 square feet) awaiting permitting for Prince Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud, son of the king of Saudi Arabia. The compound is on three lots and would include a main home of 42,000 square feet—part of it underground—a guest house, pool cabana, gate house and another residence of up to 20,000 square feet. The prince's lawyer, Benjamin Reznik, notes other residences in the neighborhood are super-sized and says opposition has been "fomented" by neighbor Martha Karsh, the wife of Oaktree Capital Management founder Bruce Karsh. Ms. Karsh has hired publicists to attract attention to the project, he adds. "Newt Gingrich wishes he had that campaign going," says Mr. Reznik.
George Mihlsten, a lawyer for a community coalition and Ms. Karsh, says the coalition hired his firm and that Mr. Reznik has hired outside help too, including a community-relations firm (Mr. Reznik says that was in response to Ms. Karsh's campaign). "He likes to focus on Martha, but the truth is he and his client have created the controversy by proposing an outlandish plan and going behind the backs of the community to try to get it built," Mr. Mihlsten says in an email, likening the scope of the project to a small community shopping center. More than 1,500 residents of Benedict Canyon signed a petition expressing their opposition to the project as it was originally proposed, according to a representative of the coalition.
The scope of these projects makes them extremely complex to construct. Finding or assembling the property can take several years, and the design and construction of a super-size project can take up to five years or more, builders say. (These days, lower labor costs in some areas can mean quicker turnaround times or better value.) Just finding parking for the 100 to 200 tradespeople that can be on-site for a big job, compared with the eight to 20 people typically working on a 4,000-square-foot home, can require planning; commandeering church parking lots is one standby.
In addition to a general contractor, a 40,000-square-foot home construction might involve a design architect from out of town who comes up with the conceptual design; a local executive architect who deals with the builder; an owner's representative; a structural engineer; a landscape architect; a landscape attorney; an interior designer and acoustical, lighting and waterproofing consultants.
"Every 5,000-square-foot mark, a house becomes something different," says Scott Hobbs, president of New Canaan, Conn.-based Hobbs, Inc., whose firm is building Mr. Asness's home. (Mr. Hobbs declines to discuss individual clients.) At 20,000 square feet and above, he says, a house is more akin to a commercial than a residential project, requiring industrial components that are tucked away so the home still feels inviting. Builders say golf carts for traversing estates and elaborate security systems for keeping tabs on inhabitants are part of the picture, too, at this scale.
On a late Los Angeles afternoon last fall, up a steep and winding road in lower Benedict Canyon, a covered chain-link fence and a dense covering of trees and shrubs blocked most views of the mansion of Mr. Pritzker, part of the Chicago real-estate family and a billionaire co-founder of private-equity firm the Pritzker Group. Workers walked around the property and glimpses of windows, a staircase and materials like ladders and beams were visible. "All visitors much check in with security," a sign at the entrance to the property read.
Plans filed with the city of Los Angeles, which deemed the mansion finished in November, provide more details. The 49,300-square-foot, two-story home surrounds a courtyard and includes a two-level basement with amenities including a game room, bowling alley, bar and media library. Above ground, there's a gym with changing rooms, his-and-hers offices, an arts-and-crafts room and a hairdressing area. Other buildings on the property, including a detached recreation room and a guest house, bring the total square footage of the compound to just over 53,000 square feet.
The home has a large skylight, roof-mounted solar panels and a curving driveway. A lawn spreads around part of the home, with a "floating pool" and spa anchoring one end of the property.
Critics of such mega-mansions "want to penalize people for being successful," says Mr. McCoy, the builder of the estate. Referring to the scores of people large projects employ, he adds, "People have done this all along because they could, and aren't we lucky that they can?"
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Related
When 50,000 Square Feet Isn't Enough
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203889904577201420212119552.html
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Anthony Pritzker Home in Los Angeles
- 49,000 sq. ft.
- Owner: Hyatt hotel heir Anthony Pritzker
- Above Ground: A gym with changing rooms, 'floating pool' and spa, his-and-hers offices, arts-and-crafts room, hairdressing area, detached recreation room
- Underground: A two-level basement with a game room, two-lane bowling alley, entertainment foyer with bar, media library, staff rooms, a 'project room' and garage
- Neighborhood: Saudi Prince Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud is awaiting permits for a 70,000- square-foot compound, downsized from 85,000 square feet
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The White House
- 55,000 sq. ft.
- The White House was the largest house in the U.S. until after the Civil War
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Hearst Castle
- 68,500 sq. ft.
- Square footage is for the 38-bedroom main home, which has a beauty salon and staff dining room
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Graceland
- 10,300 sq. ft.
- Square footage is for the mansion; a racquetball building was added later
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—Sarah Tilton contributed to this article.
Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203889904577201043455977600.html [with additional images, and comments]
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