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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: January 4, 2005
Latest Update: January 4, 2005
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
The Wealth Gap, Education, and Competitive AccessThis lecture was prompted by Neoconomy By Bradford Plumer in Mother Jones Magazine.The concerns I would like you to notice are that as taxes on wealth, or non-earned money are disappearing, what is left to tax is wages and salaries. Now the theory is that all that non-earned worth will be saved and invested in job-producing efforts, leading to a better life for all. But the more wages and salaries are treated different from income-earning wealth, the greater the difficulty of amassing discretionary wealth to save and invest.
Two of the first areas hit hard by this approach are health and education. Steps are being taken to protect the "professionals" or "non-wage earners," like doctors by cutting back on tort suits and allowing them the freedom to operate with less accountability. But similar protections for the health-care seeker are not being enacted.
Support is being drawn continuously from education, in both the willingness of the government to support basic research, which supports, in turn, the academy engaged in that basic research, and in the support of students. Increasingly only those who can afford the discretionary income can afford the education, and in the place of supported education for all are cropping up privatized institutions that will "train" you for wages and salary-earning jobs.
Discussion Questions
- What is income-earning wealth? Wealth where the money earns through investment as opposed to the worker being paid for working. Some advertisements on TV today suggest you put your money to work. That's what it means.
- Does our system still support meritocracy?
Generally, no. As there are fewer and fewer jobs at the top, and as the wealthy seek better jobs for their own children, schools for the public deteriorate, and private school hold the ticket to those preparatory schools that afford the networking possibilities for competition in the job market. See the old Christopher Jencks literature on daddy paying for you to meet the "right people." This difference from pre-school upwards, means that the children of the poor will get fewer chances to enter the competitive market, since they will not have been given the early competitive skills that would get them there. In this sense we wonder how many Clarence Thomas' and Alberto Gonzalez' there will be in future generations. Oh, of course a few will always be allowed to slip through, but they will owe their success in every way to how well they play the game of slipping through and assimilating.
- Is this situation hopeless?
Absolutely not. But it is a different situation from the one faced by generations and cohorts before us. We must stay aware. And we must recognize the importance of discipline, as opposed to just getting by. Discipline doesn't take the best schools with the best equipment. It takes faith in one's self and one's teachers to guide us to the ability to weight auhtority effectively, to exploit the answerability that belongs to each of us, and to hold those in power accountable. It's not hopeless. But you gotta want to change the odds and the playing filed. You gotta want it bad enough to discipline yourself in the absence of an expensive school that'll do that for you.
