Very effective argument Ian...

(and I hate to use the word "values" to attach to it)- is having working-class parents who value education (which they didn't get) highly -not just as 4 years of filler on a resume but as learning the whole family could boast about and be proud of.

My mom had to leave school in Ireland at 15 to
come to America to work as a maid. But she never forgot how much
she loved school- though she didn't get the chance herself to go back, education both as a good in itself and as a way to get out of the "working poor" was something she would never stop pushing me on.
Irish immigrants as a whole at that time valued education,though there was no group support system,unlike the Chinese.

I never paid a cent for my high school or college education(I went to NYU on a union scholarship from the BSEIU and Regents scholarship from New York State), but at that time I could have gone to City COllege for free if I could get in.

There was also no immediate economic requirement for me to stop school in order to provide for my family.

This mobility of the next generation you talk about is much more difficult today because of the outrageous cost of higher education, and the lack of the US valuing it highly enough as a right for all qualified to subsidize it.

Nothing new in what I am saying. As the fees go up and up, I keep
wondering how long the right to education other than at some job-training mill and the valuing of education by parents and kids will survive.

It is true, as you have pointed out, that you can learn what you learn in college other ways (as you did) if you are motivated.

The usual college years, however, are generally a good time in life to be open to learning, and lack of a higher education does serve as a professional barrier, as does an MBA, though that one's day is waning.

At the other end of life, as one who has had to retire early, the prospect of being pushed back into the class my mother and father were in, without the capability to work hard to stay out of it looms if the safety nets disappear. The "aging poor" in the US , without any strong familial/ social bonding to support them are another pocket to discuss.

_{1."George Washington did not cross the Delaware for Capitalism," -Shmuley Boteach.
2.The Dems haven't punished the GOP enough, so you're going to reward the Republicans?}

The same trap holds true nation to nation. The trap for poor countries is that each incremental benefit provided by whatever outside contribution (whether it is food, education, healthcare, immunization) is eaten up by a growing population. Said another way population growth overtakes any technological innovation brought into the country to help them, keeping people at subsistence levels per person. The difference is that the rich poor gap is much wider between nations, than it is within. The poor in the United States are poor, but broadly speaking they have access to immunizations, public education, indoor restrooms, sanitation, etc. A child born in a Uganda refuge camp has none of those things, and no likely opportunity to break free in the absence of any access to education, healthcare, or basic nutrition. THIS trap has ensnared nearly 3 billion souls, compared with the 13 million identified as poor in the United States. The global poor truly live in a hell on earth.

the micro-lending community have developed would do any good in the community of former felons?

If you have a long rap sheet, a judge will take that into consideration when sentencing and give you a more severe sentence. So comparing crimes committed by different races and the subsequent sentences is not an apples to apples comparison. At least in state courts. I don't know about federal, I think federal sentencing guidelines are a lot more standardized. The real disparity in the US justice system is rich vs. the poor. High profile cases like OJ and Frank Blake illustrate this. If those men were not millionaires they would probably be on death row right now. Money plays the most significant role in american justice.

The correlations do not reflect causation. Are they getting sentances because they are poor, or did poverty lead to multiple run ins with the law. Even the 'millionaire' examples were individuals who grew up in poverty.

A really interesting study I cannot source right now, showed that wealthy individuals who grew up in an impoverished environment had criminal histories more closely related to their impoverished backgrounds than their current wealth status. In other words poor people who become wealthy by whatever means have a criminal history that matches a poverty background.

Interesting way to look at it Scotjen61. I wonder if people like Charles Keatting or the Enron executives had an impoverished background ? The street ways can stay with a man and manifest themselves when the timing is right.

I love your arguments, but get a proofreedur...

LBJ tried to solve this situation with his "Great Society" programs, but the problem proved to be more intractable than he realized. Moreover, the solutions put it place were rejected by the voters later, when the GOP successfully convinced the middle class that social welfare programs were taking money out of their pockets and frittering it away on problems that were intractable because the poor people were either incapable or unwilling to help themselves, given the opportunity. Moreover, the programs were cast in terms of "give-aways" that encouraged bad behavior. That verdict is now in, and it isn't going to change soon with the middle class now worried about slipping into poverty themselves and the wealthy characteristically disinclined.

In order to understand politics in relation to sociology it is nec necessary to recognize that policy is guided by economics and the marginal value of another person in the labor force is low at the bottom. It is just not worth it economically speaking to underwrite reducing the social margins. The economic fact is that the threshold of wage inflation is considered to be employment at below 6%. There is therefore an economic value in maintaining an unemployed pool of labor to fill low skill jobs at subsistence wages in good times, doling out subsistence as welfare in bad.

This is a characteristic of a capitalistic system. The opposite is a socialistic system in which there is a central planning and decision-making authority for allocating resources "fairly." However, in practice this has never worked successfully owing to corruption.

The middle ground proposed by some economists is called "The Third Way," which combines element of both systems. Bill Clinton's triangulation strategy was an example of tempering the neoliberalism of Rubinomics with some of Reich's liberal ideas. See Henry C. K. Liu's assessment of Reich's new book, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Alfred A Knopf) in Liu's two part series in Asia Times Online, entitled Super Capitalism, Super Imperialism.

The real problem facing global capitalism is the situation that Marx set forth articulately in Das Kapital, which pictures social unrest as the outcome of unbridled capitalism. For example, a great deal of OBL's and Qaeda's success is due chiefly to economics rather than religious fervor as the masses of oppressed people in the Islamic world become increasingly restless. Chinese authorities are also worried about the growing income divide and increasing inflation for the same reason.

Until recently, that prospect has been a threat. However, the security focus has turned to urban control through non-lethal means. This is the focus of Nick Turse's article entitled Masters of War Plan for the Next 100 Years. Apparently, the thinking is that it's more efficient and effective to control the poor and disadvantage by developing mans to suppress dissent and neutralize social unrest instead of commit the necessary funds for solving the problem through education and equal opportunity programs, as well as providing a subsistence safety net for those who slip through the cracks.

This cannot be dismissed as the necessary outcome of capitalism, however, any more than can pollution leading to global warming. It makes good sense economically to have an equitable distribution of income since this increases demand for products and services and encourages investment and entrepreneurship. It also makes good economic sense to have an educated and well-trained work force and to devise ways to support that work force at the margins. It would certainly be more efficient and cost-effective than the present levels of spending on military, security and confinement, the qualitative aspects aside.

The real problem the US is now facing is the whipsaw of inflation/deflation. The tail end of the 25 year boom is now upon us, and the Fed is attempting to stave off the inevitable correction by increasing liquidity again. This time, however, it is leading to a bubble in energy, metals, agricultural products and other commodities, which will be felt by the society as a whole in the form of price inflation. Simultaneously, there will be a deflation in asset prices, notably in housing, adding up to the perfect storm that is going to impoverish many formerly middle class people and be ruinous for the elderly living on fixed incomes.

This will produce an increasing level of social unrest and fuel a populist backlash. However, all the levers are in place for the government to suppress dissent and "maintain order" through surveillance and an "enhanced security apparatus."

let's put aside the PC talk for a second and try to reason. Do you think there are genetic components in this? Seriously, perhaps some individuals don't have brains that function well in the current society. And their kids do too. Not a moral statement, just a statement about how organisms function in certain environments. These same people might be very successful in a different society.

I would suggest a fifth (if narrower), massively underacknowledged, element in the mix. Only recently are we seeing investigations into the prevalence and generationally-cyclic incidence of Fetal Alchohol Syndrome, especially below the poverty line. And it's much larger than we tend to think. An example paper on the subject would be this one.

The relevant end of this isn't the visible one - it's the invisible one, where the children look fine (except, maybe, to a specialist who's called to formally measure the subtle physiological indicators), but simply function at a substantially lower level of competence, patience, logical & ethical reasoning, and flexibility, for the rest of their lives. Stolen chances.

You excellently describe several of the "gears" which transfer the momentum of poverty from generation to generation, but it's quite possible that one day we'll look back and see that this was in all truth the biggest one. Like the other "gears", though, what matters isn't any one of them in isolation - what matters is the way they all feed into one another, over and over.

Note - some medical terminology substitutes Effect (FAE or FAS/E) for Syndrome (FAS or FASD), partially in an attempt to communicate that this is a spectrum, not a binary on/off thing. This is a big deal, because it underlines that "I had a drink, so what, my kids turned out fine" is - to put it bluntly - a lie, spoken out of ignorance. Given a single glass of wine or three lines of coke, while pregnant, if you must - do the coke. Every time. </soapbox> Trust me - I've adopted both kinds.

Oh, and maybe Ian doesn't need proofing after all - maybe he just reads xkcd.

About the Fetal Alchohol Syndrome.

Man Your Battle Stations

Ka-ching

When John D. Rockerfeller, one of the richest men on this planet was interviewed what he wanted from life, he said, “Just a little more!” How sad is that!

Did you know that the Chinese nation predicts totalitarian regimes will not last because it's counter to everything their country values?

Chinese philosophy believes in:

co-operation
wisdom
depth
mildness and compassion
a way to perpetuate their customs
a belief that the whole world is like one family and that one day, mankind will eventually become one and undivided.

Seems China's civilization is much, much older and the west could profit from understanding more about their beliefs. They are modernizing but reject capitalism as a valid way for mankind to prosper.

Race may not be as much a limiting factor as class or the combination of race and class. I know plenty of middle-class and upper-middle-class blacks who have had no problem with economic achievement because they had access to good schools etc. on account of being from families that had already reached that rung of the ladder. There is the risk of regression due to the academic achievement gap with respect to young black males, but that is another issue.

Poor whites face similar disadvantages as poor blacks on account of their class despite ostensibly being part of the dominant group if race alone was the determining factor. They look different from and act differently than their more affluent white neighbors and are thus treated differently (and not for the better). Add to Ian's list of the "terms of endearment" used to describe poor people of color, the words white trash, redneck and yahoo and you get the picture. While on a percentage basis whites are clearly more affluent than blacks in the US, in absolute numbers there are more poor whites than poor blacks in this country and they face many if not most of the same hurdles as the poor blacks do.

As foster parents we were taught that FAS referred to children with certain typical facial characteristics. Since the brain continues to organize long after the face, alcohol exposure later in the pregnancy distorts the brain without distorting the features, causing FAE. They wanted us to understand that fetal alcohol exposure with appearance changes(FAS), was not necessarily better than fetal alcohol exposure without appearance changes(FAE).

Eric, I appreciate your comments about FAS, but have to disagree somewhat with your suggestion to take the line of coke over the cocktail. I worked for 16 years with kids ranging from the front end of child welfare investigations to the back end of incarceration of delinquents in the adult system. The use of drugs during pregnancy has a tremendous impact on childrens' ability to learn. As with FAS kids, it seems to affect how they're wired, making the world a confusing and difficult place even given the best of upbringings.

Having worked that entire system, I will add that the system in my state ~ Oklahoma ~ is biased against African Americans. It is evident in the kid system from front to back, from child welfare to delinquent adjudication. It is more punitive, less helpful, more aggressive with AA families than with white families.

The military has long been a way disadvantaged youth could lift themselves up and out of poverty. I recently read that the enlistment of African American youth in the military is dropping rapidly; that this traditional means of moving ahead sans college degree is not being replaced by alternate methods of accomplishing the same goal; that the expectation is a rise in crime and related social problems as the result of more young people left without viable alternatives to street life. And of course the lost of industry in this country essentially leaves those without advanced education without any hope at all in most instances.

I don't mean to belittle the effects of drug use in pregnancy, Lynette. That particular line, however, has served its purpose several times for me... its shock value is enough to stimulate conversation. One could still make the strong argument that the effects of drug use are generally more limited to infancy, whereas the effects of alchohol use are more permanent. But nonetheless, even if the conclusion is that they are equally bad... that's a very large step for most folks to grasp, starting from the "just one drink" mentality.

We're vaulting an ignorance pit. That line is perhaps an overly long pole, but it does the job. ;)

as an education professional, i've seen the hard data that backs up its status as the Elephant in this discussion. basically, when you start looking at things like test scores and income levels and various other things that can be controlled statistically, you have two choices. either you believe that blacks and latinas are genetically inferior (and only americans, not people of the same skin color from other nations) or you believe that racism has a persistant and endemic effect on class status. also- go talk to some folks in the hood, a real "urban ghetto" some time. ask them about the number of times the police or state have stepped in an ruined their lives. it will shock you, esp if you're a middle class white person and have never experienced the full, predatory force of the state. if the state locked up 25-50% of white men from white communities, prevented them from voting, or participating in their chosen economic endeavors, you'd see some attitudes change really quickly.

anyway, i wanted to add that ian didn't mention the other horrible truth of the underclass: it's a giant, sucking black hole under the middle class. that is, not only is it impossible for many to move up, it's becoming increasing difficult for people in the working and middle classes not to fall down.

as the housing crash is showing, and as is only going to be more true as the economic consequences of bushism are manifest, many families are only one crisis away from falling out of the middle class permanently. one health care crisis, or unemployment, however temporary, a credit card bill that got out of hand...there are so many ways to find yourself down on the economic bottom, regardless of your "deservedness." and thanks to bushist policies, even people with "good" families and 'hoods will find themselves living the harsh life of the underclass. personally, i'm convinced most republicans and not a few democrats in the "leadership" prefer it this way. a healthy middle class expects and fights for actual democracy.