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Issue #132 was published in April 2011.
bouncing around the income ladder: U.S. not so mobile, really • education spending & enrollment: U.S. not so good, really • the austerity drive intensifies • mythmaking about (un)employment
a little taste of each...
Right-wing types like to say that inequality isn't such a problem because American society is so fluid. Mobility over the long term compensates for polarization at any given moment. Because we're conditioned to look at yearly averages, we don't think about how things work out over the long term. Maybe people in poverty are just having a streak of bad luck. There's a cheery theory that goes along with this belief: since competitive markets ultimately reward talent and fervor, though there are ups and downs, over a lifetime people basically get what they deserve.
Is any of this true? How mobile is American society, and how does it stack up against the rest of the world? The answers: not very, and not well....
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It's remarkable how similar the U.S. educational system is to our health care system: by world standards, we spend gobs of money on both, and both yield underwhelming outcomes. With health, we're in a class by ourselves, spending a two-thirds higher share of GDP than the OECD average (a share bigger than any country in the world, by a long shot) to produce some of the worst health indicators in the First World. We're not so egregious on education. We spend just a third more than the OECD average, the second-highest of any country, to produce merely mediocre scores on internationally comparable tests. But there's a pattern there, don't you think?
We'll take a close look at educational outcomes in the next issue of LBO. For this first pass, let's examine the dimensions of spending, and the enrollment and attainment numbers.…
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The economic recovery persists, such as it is, with employment continuing to grow modestly and unemployment working its way down from the disastrous to the painful. But the real action now is in the massive hysteria to cut the deficit.
What is this hysteria based on? You can't find any basis for it in the projections for the next decade by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The strategy is instead to look at the current numbers and scream. But what about those current numbers?
Yes, the federal deficit has been big for the last few years...
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Con jobs? Doubts about the reliability of U.S. economic statistics are all over the Internet lately. A favorite claim is that the government has manipulated the employment statistics to make things look better than they are. That's not true.
A few words on how the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does its work are in order. Every month...
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