More bad news for millennials: College is actually making inequality worse

 SALON

Saturday, Mar 15, 2014 11:00 AM EDT

More bad news for millennials: College is actually making inequality worse

 

It might surprise you, but higher education is actually widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots

 
Suzanne Mettler

Topics: Books, College, Higher education, Income inequality, Editor's Picks, News, Politics News

 

(Credit: Reuters/Mario Anzuoni)

 

Excerpted with permission from "Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream."

 

 

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the United States experienced a meteoric rise in the rate of people earning four-year college degrees, as it soared from 6 percent of 25- to 29-year-olds in 1947 to 24 percent in 1977. During the next two decades, the percentage remained flat. In the mid-1990s, progress resumed but at a more modest rate; as of 2011, 32 percent of young adults had obtained bachelor’s degrees.

As recently as the 1980s, the nation was the undisputed international leader in the percentage of citizens graduating from college. The baby boomers, born in the decades immediately following World War II, pursued higher education in large numbers. Entering college during the late 1960s and 1970s, they swelled the ranks of college students and became the most educated members of their generation worldwide. In 2010, 32 percent of Americans between 55 and 64 held four-year college degrees, a higher percentage than citizens in the same age group in any other nation. (Norway claims a distant second place, with 25 percent of its citizens in that age group as college graduates.)

But among younger groups, the US lead has disappeared. In 2010 Americans between 25 and 34 had a college graduation rate of 33 percent, a mere one percentage point increase over the older generation. By contrast, young people in many other nations have catapulted over their American counterparts.

Those who claim that the United States is sending too many people to college discount these global historical trends, focusing instead on data points such as how recent college graduates have fared since the financial crisis in 2008. Yet in fact, while 6.8 percent of them suffered unemployment during this period, that figure pales in comparison to the 24 percent of recent high school graduates who were jobless. The recession accentuated a trend that has been under way for decades in the United States: the loss of good paying jobs for low-skilled workers and the increasing demand for highly skilled, well-educated workers. Since the early 1980s, this development has led to the so-called wage premium for those with college degrees. In 2010, among young adults between 25 and 40, those with four-year college degrees earned $40,000 on average compared to $25,000 for high school graduates. Moreover, the return from a college degree increases over an individual’s lifetime, with the gains in employment prospects and income being only the most obvious and easily measured benefits. one recent study focusing on income estimated that a four-year college degree pays an average return of 15.2 percent annually—far more than average returns in the stock market, at 6.8 percent since the 1950s; or corporate bonds, at 2.9 percent; or housing, at 0.4 percent. Those with higher rates of education enjoy better health and longevity. They participate in larger numbers in politics and civic life, making their voices heard in the public sphere and providing innumerable services to their communities. As economist Susan Dynarski testified to the US Senate Finance Committee in 2011, “A college education is one of the best investments a young person can make. even with record high tuition prices, a bachelor’s degree pays for itself several times over, in the form of higher income, lower unemployment, better health and enhanced civic engagement. Within ten years of college graduation, the typical BA will already have recouped the cost of her investment.”

However, not all college degrees offer these benefits. As we will see shortly, some institutions produce poor results for their students and interfere with what is otherwise a clear pattern of success. In the main, however, the evidence is quite unequivocal: the United States needs to increase the percentage of its citizens who attain college degrees.

If we look more closely to see who completes college today, we find that the ranks of college graduates reinforce income inequality. While we would expect that those from more affluent backgrounds are likely to attain more education than those who grow up poor, the extent of their advantage over the bottom three-quarters of the income distribution is striking. For those who grow up in high income families today, going to college is a routine part of life—like getting childhood immunizations—and the vast majority of  such individuals, 71 percent, complete their bachelor’s degree in early adulthood. Among those in the upper middle income quartile, this same achievement, though more than twice as common as it was forty years ago, is still relatively unusual, reaching just 30 percent. Among Americans who have grown up in households below median income, the gains since 1970 have been meager: those in the lower middle quartile have increased their graduation rates from just 11 to 15 percent, and among those in the poorest group, from 6 to 10 percent. All told, degree attainment among upper income households so dramatically outpaces that of low and middle income people that the percentage who obtain diplomas among the top income quartile is greater than that of the other three quartiles combined. Our system of higher education not only fails to mitigate inequality but it exacerbates it, creating a deeply stratified society.

The unimpressive gains in graduation rates for most Americans have occurred despite the fact that access to college being admitted and then enrolling has improved dramatically over time, including among the least advantaged. Increasing enrollment is in part attributable to sharp increases in high school graduation rates, particularly among lower income groups, as many more now possess the necessary qualifications for higher education. In 2010, 83 percent of all 18- to 24-year-olds had earned a high school diploma or equivalent certification, and this included 73 percent of those in the bottom quartile, a nearly 20 percent improvement since 1970. Once individuals graduate from high school, most of them now continue on to college, 75 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds as of 2010. Here again, the biggest recent gains have been made in low income groups. Among students who enroll, however, completion rates by age 24 hover at only 47 percent. In effect, more students are starting college but they not graduating. Here economic inequality becomes apparent: nearly all of those from the highest income group who start college, 97 percent gain diplomas by age 24, a stunning improvement of 42 percentage points since 1970, compared to just 23 percent of those in the bottom quartile, a mere one percentage point improvement over the same period. Those in the second quartile fared little better, with only 26 percent reaching graduation by age 24; and even in the third quartile, just over half (51 percent) completed degrees in a timely fashion.

In short, completing college, or at least doing so promptly, eludes most young people from low and moderate income backgrounds.

Such outcomes may appear, at first blush, to indicate that our societal emphasis on the importance of college is misplaced. Certainly college is not for everyone and it should not be viewed as the only acceptable path following high school. The United States could do a far better job of linking those who are not college bound with jobs, a point made by James E. Rosenbaum in his insightful book, ‘Beyond College for All.” But others who criticize calls for increased college attainment insinuate that those who fail to enroll or fail to complete college are simply not motivated. “School bores and bothers them,” writes Robert Samuelson.

Richard Vedder claims that “college graduates, on average, are smarter and more disciplined and dependable than high school graduates.” Without a doubt, the nation could do better by those who do not have an interest in or aptitude for college. however, the implication that less advantaged students fail to graduate owing to a lack of motivation or incompetence misses the mark. When we look closely at the link between income and college graduation, we find that more is at play.

Certainly young people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are typically better positioned to excel in the prerequisites for college admission and success. They are more likely to attend better primary and secondary schools. Their parents invest heavily in providing enriching extracurricular opportunities, including music lessons, travel, summer camps, and so forth. Not surprisingly, they earn higher grades and do better on standardized tests than those who grow up without such privileges. Yet scholars have found that even among individuals with the same academic credentials, those from less advantaged families are less likely to gain college degrees. Of students with high test scores, the vast majority from the highest income group graduate, while just over half of those in the middle income group and just a small majority of the rest manage to complete college. In fact, the college graduation rates of high-scoring low income individuals, at 30 percent, barely surpass those of low-scoring high income individuals, at 29 percent. Among students who enroll, attrition occurs most dramatically among those from families below median income. Clearly there must be something else going on here other than the weeding out of the unqualified and unmotivated.

In fact, ample evidence reveals that neither changes in college readiness nor shifts in the demographic characteristics of college students go very far to explain the unimpressive college graduation rates. A rigorous study by a group of economists, for example, found that rising tuition in public sector colleges bears most of the blame for this development. In addition, it shows that rising costs compel more students to work longer hours to finance their education, which makes it difficult for them to carry enough credits to graduate in a timely manner, if at all. Illustrating these trends, in 2013 students at Central Connecticut state university braced themselves for a 4.1 percent increase in tuition and fees—$19,897 per year for those who live on campus. Amber Pietrycha, a junior, already works two jobs per semester on average in order to make ends meet.

“Eight hundred bucks for me will bring it close to the line where I’m not entirely sure I could do it,” she said. Sophomore Salam Measho agreed, explaining that the increase “means I’m going to have to work more hours on weekends back home. That means less time studying. That’s too much of a strain on myself.” These developments are not inevitable, as demonstrated by a special program at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill that provided extra financial support to low income students, and significantly boosted their graduation rates.

Not long ago, the United States led the world in promoting higher education for its citizens, spurring social mobility in the process. Many who grew up during the middle decades of the twentieth century became the first in their families to go to college. Many were assisted by generous GI bill benefits or Pell grants, and all had access to public universities and colleges with affordable tuition. Their lives were often transformed as they gained jobs, income, and opportunities to participate in public life that had been beyond the reach of their parents.
Today, however, the United States has evolved into an international outlier for its lack of such mobility. A group of researchers compared ten countries in terms of the quality of children’s lives on multiple dimensions-economic status, educational attainment, socioemotional well-being, and so forth—and found that in the United States quality of life was more determined by parents’ level of education than in any of the other countries investigated. In fact, the single most powerful relationship they detected was between the educational level of American parents and the subsequent level of education attained by their children: more than anywhere else, the vast majority of children fortunate to be born to highly educated parents acquired high levels of education, and conversely, the children of those with little education were penalized by receiving little education. They concluded that the United States is “the country with the least intergenerational mobility and the least equal opportunity for children to advance.” For those who are left behind, the consequences are severe. As recently as 1980, a male with a college degree earned about 20 percent more on average than one with a high school degree; by 2011, the difference had grown to 45 percent.

Citizens of the United States cherish the ideals of social mobility and opportunity that are widely associated with the “American Dream.” Many consider the chance to attend and graduate from college as both an end in itself—a manifestation of that ideal—and a crucial means toward its fuller realization over the course of a lifetime. In the middle of the twentieth century, federal student aid policies and public support of state-run colleges and universities helped make a college education possible for growing numbers of individuals across the income spectrum.

Now, more individuals than ever from every income group pursue a college education. But for most of those who do from the bottom half of the income spectrum, the effort proves futile. Their greatest obstacle to completing a four-year degree is not lack of ability or motivation, but insufficient financial support. As nearly all of those in the most affluent quarter of the population earn their diplomas in short order and reap the benefits of doing so, social stratification becomes more deeply entrenched.

For those who born into modest means, the gaps that separate them from the upper echelon grow increasingly insurmountable.


Excerpted with permission from “Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream” by Suzanne Mettler. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2014.

There is no meritocracy: It’s just the 1 percent, and the game is rigged

SALON

Sunday, Mar 16, 2014 07:00 AM EDT

There is no meritocracy: It’s just the 1 percent, and the game is rigged

The game is rigged: We elected Obama to hold the 1 percent accountable. So why are they still running everything?

 
Thomas Frank

Topics: Barack Obama, Paul Begala, Chris Hayes, Inequality, Great Recession, Editor's Picks, Tyler Cowen, opportunity, John Boehner, Rahm Emanuel, Jack Lew, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Bill Black, John McCain, Al Gore, Bill Daley, Business News, News, Politics News

 

(Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin/Salon)

 

 

The big news after President Obama’s State of the Union address in January was that he didn’t really talk about the issues of inequality that everyone expected him to talk about. Instead, he shifted the “conversation,” as we call it, toward the subject of opportunity. He shied away from the extremely disturbing fact that when you work these days only your boss prospers, and brought us back to the infinitely less disturbing fact that sometimes poor people do get ahead despite it all. In a clever oratorical maneuver, Obama illustrated this comforting idea by referencing the success stories of both himself—“the son of a single mom”—and his arch-foe, Republican House Speaker John Boehner—“the son of a barkeep.” He spoke of building “new ladders of opportunity into the middle class,” a phrase that has become a trademark for his administration.

The problem, as Obama summed it up, is that Americans have ceased to believe they can rise from the ranks. “Opportunity is who we are,” he said. “And the defining project of our generation must be to restore that promise.”
The switcheroo was subtle, but if you’ve been paying attention you couldn’t miss it: These were almost precisely the words Obama had used the month before (“The defining challenge of our time”) to describe inequality itself.

Well, the Democratic apparat heard it, and as one body did they sway and swoon. This was a move of statesmanlike genius, they said. “Opportunity” and social mobility are what Americans have always liked to hear about, they declared; “inequality” sounds like a demand for entitlements—or something much worse. “What you want to do is focus on the aspirational side of this,” said Paul Begala in a typical remark, “lifting people up, not on just complaining about a lack of fairness or inequality.”

If you’re in the right mood, you might well agree with him. In the distant past, “opportunity” used to be something of a liberal buzzword, a way of selling welfare-state inventions of every description. The reason was simple: true equality of opportunity is not possible without achieving, well, greater equality, period. If we’re really serious about opportunity—if we’re going to ensure that every poor kid has a chance in life that is the equal of every rich kid—it’s going to require a gigantic investment in public schools, in housing, in food stamps, in infrastructure, in public projects of every description. It will necessarily mean taking on the broader problem of the One Percent along the way.

But that was what the word meant long ago. It’s different today. When people talk about opportunity nowadays, they’re often not trying to refine the debate over inequality, they’re trying to negate it. The social function of mobility-talk is usually to excuse inequality, not to change it; to persuade us that the system we have now is fair and even natural—or that it can be made so with a few more charter schools or student loans or something. Because everyone has a chance at making it into the One Percent, this version of “opportunity” tells us, there’s nothing wrong with letting the One Percent hog every dish at the banquet.

The well-known libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, for example, writes in his new book “Average is Over” that we increasingly inhabit a “hyper-meritocracy” in which “top earners” take home more than ever before because, duh, they’ve got the right skills and hence they deserve to take home more than top earners ever have before. The future might look bleak for less-than-top people like you, but if you fall off the ladder of opportunity there’s only one answer: Get used to it.

2. But let’s put all that aside for now. Let’s assume, for a moment, that a real meritocracy would be an awesome thing to have; that giving every person a chance to run the Race to the Top is a worthy goal of government policy.
Even with those assumptions it’s not so simple. Why should Americans work to ensure that everyone has a fair chance to join the ruling class, if the great principle of that ruling class is unfairness? Why should Americans compete on the level if what we’re trying to win is admission to a fraternity of thieves?

Let me explain. A meritocracy requires more than simply making it possible for people at the bottom to climb the ladder of opportunity. It also involves chutes of accountability for those at the top. These are two sides of the same coin: the skilled must be able to rise, but grandees caught with their snouts in the trough must also come tumbling down. “We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of the forgiveness to the powerful,” writes Chris Hayes in his sweeping meditation on meritocracy, “Twilight of the Elites.” And yet: “This is the America in which we currently reside.”

Is it ever. Recall for a moment the situation in which Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009. During the preceding decade, we had endured a tech bubble and a housing bubble; our accounting industry had been suborned in all sorts of ways; our prize stock analysts had been suborned in all sorts of different ways; our leaders and foreign-policy pundits had sold us a war in Iraq using completely bogus reasoning; our investment houses specialized in cooking up poisoned investments; our ratings agencies specialized in hanging blue ribbons on them; and the executives of our financial industry specialized in helping themselves to stupendous bonuses even as they lost billions—even as they blasted holes in the economy of the world.

What Americans understood when we looked over this panorama of fraud and incompetence and self-dealing was that expert authority had been corrupted at every point where it was exposed to organized money. The meritocracy was obviously broken.

Public revulsion against this incredible state of affairs is what delivered Barack Obama to the presidency, and we rightfully expected him to address the problem. His resounding failure to do so outweighs all his noble statements about studying hard and climbing ladders of opportunity.

The distressing fact is that Obama had perhaps the greatest chance of any president in recent years to smash the barriers that keep the talented from climbing the ladder, and he chose to do nothing. The sledgehammer was in the president’s hands, the nation was cheering for him to start pounding—and he walked away from the job.

Oh, he is ready to hold kids and teachers accountable, all right—to make sure they all take some Big Test and are sorted accordingly. There have been a few other bright spots as well. The people he has put in charge of the EPA and the Labor Department no longer try to subvert their own agencies, as they did in the Bush years. He appointed the capable Janet Yellen to run the Fed. And: He meted out a satisfying ass-kicking to upper-class twit Mitt Romney.

The other side of the ledger? Well. Obama continued virtually unchanged the Bush Administration’s bailout of the banks that were—let us never forget—the culprits in running up the housing bubble and vectoring its toxins into the economic flesh of the world. He declined to put obviously failed banks into receivership, as the standard practice has always been, and he didn’t remove incompetent bank management in any numbers, as was common with bank bailouts during the Roosevelt Administration. On the contrary, his officials seemed to forget how to negotiate when negotiating might turn out to be costly to bankers. They twisted themselves into pretzels to avoid wielding their ownership stakes in the various financial companies they rescued. In one infamous instance Obama’s team did the exact opposite of accountability, making sure that bonuses went out as scheduled to the AIG division responsible for the instruments that wrecked the company, thus rewarding the fuckups. After that they fanned out to the talk shows to insist on the sanctity of contract—a inviolability they find it easy to violate when it is autoworkers or homeowners on the other side of the table.

There was a mysterious inability to get “excessive pay” under control at bailed-out banks, and so few prosecutions of the banksters who did all this to us that Obama’s Justice Department made George W. Bush’s Justice Department look like an Everest of moral virtue. In a 2012 speech, the head of Obama’s Criminal Division even announced in a public speech that he was sometimes persuaded when banks and corporations asked him not to prosecute because that might cause the company in question to fail and thus hurt the economy—a courtesy that American prosecutors extend to no other group of professionals and that, by its nature, makes a joke of the idea of equality before the law. Obama can hand out full college scholarships to every single toddler deemed worthy, and he will never recover the faith in fair play that one speech destroyed.

It goes on to this day, even as the Wall Street bonuses mount to ever more dizzying heights. In a report issued last month, a Senate subcommittee tried to persuade the Justice Department to get off its ass and take action against American clients of certain Swiss banks, nearly six years after newspapers first reported that those banks had helped those ultra-wealthy clients to evade taxes. But it seems the Justice Department is just not that into the idea of getting tough with banks. Here is the first sentence of a story in Friday’s New York Times:

Four years after President Obama promised to crack down on mortgage fraud, his administration has quietly made the crime its lowest priority and has closed hundreds of cases after little or no investigation, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog said on Thursday.

And that’s the age of Obama: The standardized tests are for real, but the stress tests are often for show. Accountability for thee, but not for me.

3. In a 1984 book on the problem of inequality, the journalist Thomas Edsall wrote that one of the Democratic Party’s historical contributions to equality was its practice of promoting members of outsider groups to positions of political authority. He meant this as a description of the distant past and, indeed, I don’t know of any other commentator on the subject who mentions the practice at all. It is completely forgotten.

Well, it is worth thinking about again. Not because Democrats should revive the politicized hiring practices of one hundred years ago, but as a way of assessing Barack Obama’s record as a champion of opportunity. If the president truly believes that careers should be open to talent—the central idea of meritocracy—then surely he has always taken pains to apply that philosophy when choosing his own team. Surely he sought out the very best people for the momentous job at hand.


I confess here that believing Obama would act in this way was one of my reasons for supporting him back in 2008—the hope that this thoughtful and talented man would bring a completely new crowd to D.C. and break the grip of the Clinton-era centrists on the Democratic Party. After all, they were the ones who deregulated the banks in the first place—who did everything they could to get NAFTA passed, to cheer for the New Economy, to “reinvent government,” and so many other noxious things. Surely, with the world prostrate and gasping after a dose of their medicine, they would not simply be invited back to write another prescription.

I will also confess that Obama’s subsequent failure to follow these meritocratic rules astonished me in a way that we cynical types don’t like to be astonished. When Obama won, I figured it was opportunity time—let’s see who climbs the ladder. Instead, he brought Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers back as his chief economic adviser. Clinton enforcer Rahm Emanuel became Obama’s Chief of Staff. Timothy Geithner, architect of the disastrous AIG bailout, became the new Treasury Secretary. Clinton veteran Jack Lew eventually succeeded him. Gene Sperling came back too, to run the National Economic Council.

Five years later, I am now quite convinced that it doesn’t matter what the needs of the moment are; the personnel in this town will always be the same. Change the subject to inequality, or to poverty, even, and still—thanks to the magic of D.C.—the same crowd of former bankers and arch deregulators will emerge as the go-to guys. You’ll get Larry Summers, again! Robert Rubin—one more time! Hell, you could even announce an initiative on getting new people and new ideas into the federal government and when the music stopped it would turn out to be their protégés sitting in the distinguished chairs.

Another thing about this cozy crew: Many of them have worked in the banking sector for long enough to make them intimate members of the nation’s topmost class. Chris Hayes mentions this charming aspect of the Obama bunch in a memorable passage of “

“Consider the routine staffing changes in the Obama administration as it reached the midway point of its first term. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel left his position to run for mayor of Chicago. Emanuel got his start as a fund-raiser for Mayor Daley, moved to the Clinton White House, where he lasted nearly the entire eight years, eventually becoming a senior adviser to the President. After serving in the Clinton administration, at the age of thirty-nine he left to become an investment banker, spending two and a half years at Wasserstein Perella, where he amassed a fortune of more than $18 million. He then ran for Congress, became White House Chief of Staff, and left to run successfully for mayor of Chicago.

“To replace the multimillionaire Rahm Emanuel, the multimillionaire president Barack Obama . . . named multimillionaire William Daley, the brother of the mayor that Emanuel was hoping to replace. Daley’s resume included stints as commerce secretary in the Clinton administration and as campaign manager for Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, but at the time he was named chief of staff, he was Midwest chairman at JPMorgan Chase, making $8.7 million a year. . . . When Bill Daley later left his post as chief of staff in January 2012, he was replaced by Jack Lew, who spent four years at Citigroup and received a bonus of $950,000 in 2009, even after it was disclosed that his division made high-stakes bets on the housing market.”

What makes this infuriating is that Barack Obama seemed to have different ideas once. He was going to “Close the Revolving Door on Former and Future Employers,” declared his 2008 campaign website, Change-dot-gov. (It also promised—be still, my grinding teeth—to “Protect Whistleblowers.”)

It is even more infuriating to realize that the correct answers to the test have been available to Professor Obama all along. Back in September of 2008, when the financial crisis was gathering speed, I was writing a column for the ; in my efforts to comprehend the disaster, I learned that the nation’s foremost authority on the type of fraud that had wrecked the economy was a former S&L regulator named Bill Black. I went on to ask Bill Black’s opinion probably dozens of times; as the years passed and the crisis deepened, Bill Black went on to be quoted by just about everyone and to become probably the most famous former S&L regulator in the world. His doctrine of “control fraud” is today familiar to anyone trying to understand what went wrong in 2008.

Another group that sought out my friend Bill Black during the crisis year was the Obama campaign. For them he narrated a twelve-minute campaign video, describing at length the involvement of Republican candidate John McCain in the Keating Five scandal, and faulting McCain for choosing a zealous deregulator as his chief economic adviser—“he’s picked the worst possible source of advice.”

(You can watch the video here.)

When Obama won the presidency, I assumed that Bill Black would soon be moving to Washington to usher prominent bankers through their perp walks. That’s what opportunity and meritocracy meant, after all. You bring in the guy who understands the problem.

Of course it never happened. His phone never rang. There was no ladder of opportunity for him or anyone like him, precisely because they represented accountability. And Barack Obama, champion of meritocracy, went on instead to pick the second-worst-possible source of advice.

When I ask Bill Black now what these last few years tell us about fairness and meritocracy, he refers me to Gresham’s law. “If you gain a competitive advantage by cheating,” he says, “then you won’t get a meritocracy, you’ll get a system where cheaters prosper and bad ethics drive good ethics out of the market.” Is that what kept him out of Washington, I ask? Yes, in part. It’s “the international race to the bottom, which the administration has largely adopted. ‘We can’t crack down [on the banks, the administration thinks,] they’ll all move to the City of London. We need to have the JOBS bill,’ a godsend to fraudsters, ‘because too many IPOs are being done in China instead of the United States.’ ”
“People like me were moved out long ago,” Black concludes. To a government “trying to signal continuity and friendliness to the banks,” his presence would have been, he supposes, more than a little discordant.

So our generation gets to rediscover that “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill.” Because politics happeneth to them all. Or to the poor and the unconnected, anyway.

Thomas Frank's most recent book is "Pity the Billionaire." He is also the author of "One Market Under God" and the founding editor of "The Baffler" magazine.

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Conservative Myths About the Minimum Wage, Debunked

 

 

  Economy  

Moyers & Company / By Joshua Holland

Conservative Myths About the Minimum Wage, Debunked

 

Contrary to conservative myths, raising the minimum wage would boost the economy, benefit all workers, and won't hurt consumers.

Photo Credit: Sam72/Shutterstock.com

 

 

March 11, 2014  |  

 

 

Conservatives should be on the front line of the battle to raise the minimum wage. Work is supposed to make one independent, but with the inflation-adjusted federal minimum down by a third from its peak, low-wage workers depend on billions of dollars in public assistance just to make ends meet. Just this week, Rachel West and Michael Reich released a study conducted for the Center for American Progress that found raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would save taxpayers $4.6 billion in spending on food stamps.

And even if you break your back working in today’s low-wage economy, it’s exceedingly difficult to raise yourself up by the bootstraps; it’s all but impossible to put yourself through school or save enough money to start a business if you’re making anything close to $7.25 an hour.

But those predisposed to defending the interests of corporate America – including retailers and fast-food restaurants – oppose any increase. That’s tough given that 73 percent of Americans – including 53 percent of registered Republicans – favor hiking the minimum to $10.10 per hour, according to a Pew poll conducted in January.

So those opposed to giving low-income workers a raise offer a number of claims suggesting it would be a supposedly bad idea. Unfortunately for their cause, all of their arguments fall apart under close scrutiny. Here are the ones deployed most frequently.

“It’s a monstrous job-killer”

Big business conservatives crowed when a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that a hike to $10.10 might cost the economy 500,000 jobs – never mind that it would have raised the incomes of around 17 million Americans. But a number of economists disputed the CBO finding. One of them, John Schmitt from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, studied years of research on the question, and found that the “weight of that evidence points to little or no employment response to modest increases in the minimum wage.”

We also have real-world experience with higher minimums. In 1998, the citizens of Washington State voted to raise theirs and then link future increases to the rate of inflation. Today, at $9.32, the Evergreen State has the highest minimum wage in the country – not far from the $10.10 per hour proposed by Barack Obama. At the time it was passed, opponents promised it would kill jobs and ultimately hurt the workers it was designed to help.

But it didn’t turn out that way. This week, Bloomberg’s Victoria Stilwell, Peter Robison and William Selway reported: “In the 15 years that followed… job growth continued at an average 0.8 percent annual pace, 0.3 percentage point above the national rate. Payrolls at Washington’s restaurants and bars, portrayed as particularly vulnerable to higher wage costs, expanded by 21 percent. Poverty has trailed the U.S. level for at least seven years.”

“It will hurt mom-and-pop businesses”

Another argument is that it would disproportionately hurt small businesses – giving the Wal-Marts of the world an unfair advantage over mom and pop. But a poll of 500 small business owners from across the country released on Thursday undermines that talking point. The survey, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Small Business Majority, found that small business owners support a hike to $10.10 per hour by a 57-43 margin. Eighty-two percent of those surveyed say they already pay their employees more than the minimum and 52 percent agreed that if the wage floor is raised, “people will have a higher percentage of their income to spend on goods and services” and small businesses “will be able to grow and hire new workers.”

“Major costs will be passed along to consumers”

Opponents also claim that higher wages would mean significantly higher prices and that those cost increases would effectively eat up whatever extra earnings low-wage workers ended up taking home. But a 2011 study conducted by Ken Jacobs and Dave Graham-Squire at the UC-Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education and Stephanie Luce at CUNY’s Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies estimated that raising the minimum wage to $12 per hour – two bucks more than what’s currently on the table – would increase the cost of an average shopping trip to Wal-Mart by just 46 cents – or around $12 per year. And another paper published last September by economists Jeannette Wicks Lim and Robert Pollin estimated that a hike to $10.50 an hour would likely result in the price of a Big Mac increasing by only a dime, from $4.50 to $4.60, on average.

If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation since its inception in 1968, it would now stand at $10.74 per hour. With the share of our nation’s output going to workers’ wages at an all-time low — and inequality on the rise — it’s easy to understand why the idea of raising it to $10.10 is so popular. And despite opponents’ dire warnings, there’s really no good reason that we shouldn’t do so.
If you agree, you can here to let your representative know thatyou support a raise for the working poor.

Joshua Holland is Senior Digital Producer at BillMoyers.com, and host of Politics and Reality Radio. He's the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter. 

How the Booming Techtropolis of SF Has Created a Huge Homeless Problem — And Isn't Fixing It

  Hard Times USA  

AlterNet / By Evelyn Nieves

How the Booming Techtropolis of SF Has Created a Huge Homeless Problem — And Isn't Fixing It

 

 

Wealthy San Francisco is a city where elderly homeless women sit at bus stops all day waiting for shelter beds.

 

 

 

March 12, 2014  |  

 

 

 

The sanctuary at Saint Boniface Church looks like a Red Cross center after an earthquake. People are sleeping two to a pew, spread out on blankets on the ceramic floor in the back of the church, or slumped, chins on their chests, on chairs by the old confessionals.

It's noon, but that's like midnight in the upside-down world of the people who wait awake all night in alleys, under bridges, in doorways and, more and more, on the sidewalks, for somewhere they can sleep in peace. At 6am, when Saint Boniface opens its massive oak doors, a few dozen people are already waiting to get inside. They keep straggling in all morning, claiming their spot on hard benches designed to keep people awake. Some take a break late morning and get on the block-long lunch line across the street at the St. Anthony Foundation, which feeds 2,600 people a day. Others sleep the sleep of the dead until 3pm, when everyone has to leave to survive another day and night on the streets.

Yes, this is San Francisco, booming techtropolis of new brew pubs, fusion cuisines and $2,000-a-month studio apartments. It's also a city where elderly homeless women sit at bus stops all day waiting for shelter beds; where an encampment of 10 homeless men and women kicked out of a patch of dirt next to an overpass now live under that overpass; and where pup tents are popping up on leafy, tree-lined streets.

The city has been getting lots of attention since the Brookings Institution announced last month that San Francisco is the nation's capital of growing income inequality, with more haves next to more have-nots than anywhere else in the country, even New York. The culture war in neighborhoods like the Mission District, the heart of the heart of the high-tech bubble, has gotten fierce. Resentment over the big white buses that pick up and drop off workers from Apple, Google, Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies to the Mission, is so pervasive, it’s almost a cliche. Reporters hoping to document the divide keep dropping by, from all over. The other day, a Japanese news crew and a French freelance videographer jostled for position at a busy corner on Mission Street. Both wanted to film workers getting off a Google bus and an elderly couple peddling Mexican pastries on the corner at the same time. Haves, have-nots, bingo.

Lost in all the anguished discussions over the artists, working-class families and senior citizens getting forced out by landlords raising rents or startup millionaires buying buildings and evicting tenants is this glaring reality: thousands of people are living on the streets of San Francisco, the most in a decade.

Officially, the most current numbers of homeless people in San Francisco are between 6,436 and 7,350. (The city did two homeless counts, one of homeless adults, for the first figure, and a separate one, of homeless youth, which counted 914 teens and young adults on their own. City officials say some in the first count may have been counted in the second.) About half of the homeless people counted were in shelters, hospitals and jails.

Advocates for the homeless say the numbers may be much higher than the official count, since so many homeless people find temporary quarters, on friends' couches, in cheap hotels for a night or week, or doubled up with relatives. No matter the numbers, to anyone who has lived in the city for even five years, it is obvious that there are more people walking the streets carrying all they own than there used to be. People who are homeless say so, too. In talks with about a dozen people living in an encampment under a freeway ramp in the Mission, everyone said they are running into more people at the recycling center, sleeping in spots they thought no one else knew about and vying for the same odd jobs—like sweeping a gas station—for food money.

"It's like more competition for everything,"  a 43-year-old man who said his name was Jose—no last name, please—complained the other day. He was sweeping up trash by his camp, as he said he had promised a Department of Public Works employee.

Of course, the city is not alone. New York and Los Angeles have an exploding homeless population, and other large cities experiencing housing booms are in the same boat. But homelessness has been San Francisco's signature issue for 20 years at least. It has bedeviled mayors and caused the downfall of more than one. Its absence from the current gentrification debate is so striking that one city supervisor, Mark Farrell, publicly asked why last month. He also scheduled several hearings to discuss why homelessness remains intractable despite 50 different homeless programs costing $165 million a year. The first hearing, nearly three hours long, came and went, unnoticed by the public.

Tourists complain about homeless people all the time, as they have for years. Panhandlers, homeless or not, have long made the city's tourist hot-spots their hot-spots. The encampments of homeless people in the city's so-called mid-Market Street area, where companies like Twitter have set up headquarters in exchange for tax breaks and a commitment to invest in the community, have gotten City Hall's attention. Just not in the way advocates for the homeless would like.

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has been ordering the police department to increase patrols to crack down on drug-dealing and other illegal activities, including loitering, among people congregating on mid-Market. That has shifted more people to nearby neighborhoods, where merchants are complaining about people camped out on their stoops or storefronts. The San Francisco Public Library, which has been touted as a national model for how to humanely address the many homeless patrons in libraries, is also suffering repercussions from the crackdown. When the police started rousting people on Market Street, some moved over to the library, which is right nearby. After a rash of violent and bizarre incidents—a man smashing a glass table with a hammer, for one—the mayor ordered stepped-up security at the library and increased penalties for those who violate the library's code of conduct, which includes a ban on offensive body odor.

 

Other recent developments in the city have increased street camping. In November, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to close city parks overnight, where dozens of homeless people used to sleep. In December, a drop-in center in the Haight-Ashbury that provided showers, food, a place to sleep and other services for homeless youth lost its lease. Some of its clients, who used to sleep there or in Golden Gate Park, have ended up congregating at a Safeway parking lot. The supermarket recently installed sharp pointed iron railings around its decorative concrete planters to prevent people from sitting on them.

St. Boniface, which first opened its doors for homeless people to sleep 10 years ago, is hosting more people than ever before—more than 100 each day—in part because the city swept a large encampment out of a regional commuter terminal, the Transbay Terminal, in order to renovate it.

All this adds up to a lot of shuffling of the most downtrodden people in the city from here to there.

Bevan Dufty, who directs City Hall's homeless programs, called the situation "frustrating." "It costs more to mitigate the effects of homelessness," he said, "than it does to house people."

But there are bright spots in the city's homeless picture, Dufty added. Homelessness among veterans is down 30 percent in two years, thanks in part to federal funding for housing vouchers. Dufty said the city has also just opened new housing for 40 young adults and is set to open two more facilities for young adults this year.

If some of the city's deep-pocketed residents take notice, perhaps some real progress on homelessness could be made. As Dufty said, "Twitter has made a lot of millionaires."

Evelyn Nieves is a senior contributing writer and editor at AlterNet, living in San Francisco. She has been a reporter for both the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Evacuate the Economy (or By the Way, Your Home Is On Fire)

Published on Tuesday, March 11, 2014 by TomDispatch

Evacuate the Economy (or By the Way, Your Home Is On Fire)

 

The Climate of Change and the Dangers of Stasis

by Rebecca Solnit

 

As the San Francisco bureaucrats on the dais murmured about why they weren’t getting anywhere near what we in the audience passionately hoped for, asked for, and worked for, my mind began to wander. I began to think of another sunny day on the other side of the country 13 years earlier, when nothing happened the way anyone expected. I had met a survivor of that day who told me his story.




A high-powered financial executive, he had just arrived on the 66th floor of his office building and entered his office carrying his coffee, when he saw what looked like confetti falling everywhere -- not a typical 66th floor spectacle. Moments later, one of his friends ran out of a meeting room shouting, “They’re back.”

It was, of course, the morning of September 11th and his friend had seen a plane crash into the north tower of the World Trade Center. My interviewee and his colleagues in the south tower got on the elevator.  In another 15 minutes or so, that was going to be a fast way to die, but they managed to ride down to the 44th floor lobby safely. A guy with a bullhorn was there, telling people to go back to their offices.

Still holding his cup of coffee, he decided -- as did many others in that lobby -- to go down the stairs instead.  When he reached the 20th floor, a voice came on the public address system and told people to go back to their offices. My storyteller thought about obeying those instructions. Still holding his coffee, he decided to keep heading down. He even considered getting back on an elevator, but hit the stairs again instead. Which was a good thing, because when he was on the ninth floor, the second plane crashed into the south tower, filling the elevator shafts with flaming jet fuel. Two hundred to 400 elevator riders died horribly. He put down his coffee at last and lived to tell the tale.

The moral of this story: people in power and bureaucrats seem exceptionally obtuse when it comes to recognizing that the world has changed and the old rules no longer apply. The advisors in the towers were giving excellent instructions for a previous crisis that happened to be profoundly different from the one at hand. That many had the good sense to disobey and evacuated early meant the stairwells were less crowded when the second round of evacuations began. Amazingly, the vast majority of people below the levels of the impacts made it out of both buildings -- largely despite the advice of the building's management, not because of it.

Going Nowhere Fast

Sometimes the right thing to do in ordinary times is exactly the wrong thing to do in extraordinary times. That’s easy to understand when something dramatic has happened. It’s less easy to grasp when the change is incremental and even understanding it requires paying attention to a great deal of scientific data.

Right now, you can think of the way we’re living as an office tower and the fossil fuel economy as a plane crashing into it in very, very, very slow motion. Flaming jet fuel is a pretty good analogy, in its own way, for what the burning of fossil fuel is doing, although the death and destruction are mostly happening in slow motion, too -- except when people are drowning in Hurricane Sandy-style superstorms or burning in Australian firestorms or dying in European heat waves. The problem is: How do you convince someone who is stubbornly avoiding looking at the flames that the house is on fire? (Never mind those who deny the very existence of fire.)  How do you convince someone that what constitutes prudent behavior in ordinary times is now dangerous and that what might be considered reckless in other circumstances is now prudent?

That gathering in which I was daydreaming was a board meeting of the San Francisco Employees Retirement System. Ten months before, on April 23, 2013, in a thrilling and unanticipated unanimous vote, the city’s Board of Supervisors opted to ask the retirement board to divest their fund of fossil fuel stocks, $616,427,002 worth of them at last count -- a sum that nonetheless represents only 3.3% of its holdings. That vote came thanks to a growing climate change divestment movement that has been attempting to address the problem of fossil fuel corporations and their environmental depredations in a new way.

Divestment serves a number of direct and indirect causes, including awakening public opinion to the dangers we face and changing the economic/energy landscape. As is now widely recognized, preventing climate change from reaching its most catastrophic potential requires keeping four-fifths of known carbon reserves (coal, oil, and gas) in the ground. The owners of those reserves -- those giant energy corporations and states like Russia and Canada that might as well be -- have no intention of letting that happen.

Given a choice between the bottom line and the fate of the Earth, the corporations have chosen to deny the scientific facts (at least publicly), avoid the conversation, or insist that retrenching is so onerous as to be impossible. At the same time, they have been up-armoring political action committees, funding climate change disinformation campaigns, paying off politicians, and, in many cases, simply manipulating governments to serve the corporations and their shareholders rather than humanity or even voters. It’s been a largely one-sided war for a long time. Now, thanks to climate activists worldwide, it’s starting to be more two-sided.

The Things We Burned

An extraordinary new report tells us that 90 corporations and states are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all the carbon emissions that have changed our climate and our world since 1751. Chevron alone is responsible for 3.52% of that total, ExxonMobil for 3.22%, and BP for 2.24%. China since 1751 is responsible for 8.56% -- less, that is, than those three petroleum giants. It’s true that they produced that energy, rather than (for the most part) consuming it, but at this point we need to address the producers.

The most terrifying thing about the study by Richard Heede of Climate Mitigation Services in Colorado, and the chart of his data that Duncan Clark and Kiln, a data-visualization firm, made for the Guardian is that 63% of all human-generated carbon emissions have been produced in the past 25 years; that is, nearly two-thirds have been emitted since the first warnings were sounded about what was then called “global warming” and the need to stop or scale back.  We on Earth now, we who have been adults for at least 25 years, are the ones who have done more than all earlier human beings combined to unbalance the atmosphere of the planet, and thus its weather systems, oceans, and so much more.

It’s important to note, as so many have, that it’s we in the global north and the rich countries for whom most of that fuel has been burned. And it’s important to note as well (though fewer have) that, according to the opinion polls, a majority of individuals north and south, even in our own oil empire, are willing to change in response to this grim fact. It’s the giant energy corporations and the governments in their thrall (when they’re not outright oil regimes) that are stalling and refusing, as we saw when a meaningful climate compact was sabotaged in Copenhagen in late 2009.

The most stunning thing about that chart illustrating Heede’s study is that it makes what can seem like an overwhelming and amorphous problem specific and addressable: here are the 90 top entities pumping carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere. With its own list of the 200 biggest fossil fuel corporations, the divestment movement is doing something similar. Next comes the hard part: getting universities, cities, states, pension funds, and other financial entities to actually divest. They often like to suggest that it’s an impossible or crazy or wildly difficult and risky move, though fund managers shuffle their funds around all the time for other reasons.

Once upon a time, similar entities swore that it was inconceivable to end the institution of slavery, upend the profitable economics of southern plantations, and violate the laws of “property”; once upon another time, you couldn’t possibly give women the vote and change the whole face of democracy and public life, or require seatbelts and other extravagant safety devices, or limit the industrial processes that produce acid rain, or phase out the chlorofluorocarbons so useful for refrigeration and destructrive of the ozone layer. Except that this country did all of that, over the gradually declining protests that it was too radical and burdensome. When radical shifts become the status quo, most forget how and why it happened and come to see that status quo as inevitable and even eternal, though many of its best aspects were the fruit of activism and change.

We tend to think that sticking with something is a calmer and steadier way to go than jettisoning it, even though that rule obviously doesn’t apply to sinking ships. Sometimes, after the iceberg or the explosion, the lifeboat is safer than the luxury liner, though getting on it requires an urgent rearrangement of your body and your expectations. The value of fossil fuel corporations rests on their strategic reserves. Extracting and burning those reserves would devastate the climate, so keeping most of them in the ground is a key goal, maybe the key goal, in forestalling the worst versions of what is already unfolding.

The curious thing about fossil fuel divestment is that many highly qualified financial analysts and, as of last week, the British parliament’s environmental audit committee suggest that such investments are volatile, unsafe, and could crash in the fairly near future. They focus on the much discussed carbon bubble and its potential for creating stranded assets. So there’s a strong argument for divestment simply as a matter of fiscal (rather than planetary) prudence.
According to many scenarios, divesting energy company stocks will have no impact, or even a positive impact, on a portfolio. The biggest question, however, is what constitutes a good portfolio on a planet spiraling into chaos. The best way -- maybe the only way -- to manage a portfolio is to manage the planet, or at least to participate in trying. How will your stocks do as the oceans die? Or -- leaving out all humanitarian concerns -- as massive crop failures decimate markets and maybe populations? Is the fate of the Earth your responsibility or someone else’s?

For the People Who Will Be 86 in the Year 2100

In that pretty room, a few dozen activists and one San Francisco supervisor, John Avalos, a great leader on climate issues, faced off against the San Francisco Employees Retirement System board and its staff who talked interminably about how wild and reckless it would be to divest. And it was then that it struck me: inaction and caution may seem so much more rational than action, unless you’re in a burning building or on a sinking ship.  And that’s what made me think of the World Trade Center towers on the day they were hit by those hijacked airliners.

It was as though the people in that room were having different conversations in different languages in different worlds. And versions of that schizophrenic conversation are being had all over this continent and in Europe. Students at the University of California, Berkeley, and across the California system of higher education are launching this conversation with the university regents and I already dread the same foot-dragging performances I’ve been watching here for almost a year.

There’s already a long list of institutions that have committed to divestment, from the United Church of Christ and the San Francisco State University Foundation to the Sierra Club Foundation and 17 philanthropic foundations. Staff leadership at the Wallace Foundation, one of the 17 divesting, said, "Who in our community could proudly defend, today, a decision not to have divested from South Africa 30 years ago? In hindsight, the moral case seems too clear. How then might we envision defending, 20 years from now, keeping our millions invested in business-as-usual fossil energy, at precisely the moment scientists are telling us there is no time left to lose?"

In fact, many climate activists point to the divestment movement that focused on apartheid-era South Africa as a model. That was a highly successful campaign, but also a relatively easy one for many of the companies being pressured to withdraw from their investments, subsidiaries, and other involvements in that country. After all, many of them weren’t all that involved, financially speaking, to begin with. What worked then won’t work now, because the situations are so profoundly different.

The San Francisco Retirement Board finally voted to engage in shareholder activism, their first and most timorous step. This is the procedure whereby shareholders chastise a corporation and ask it to change its sorry ways. Such activism, which was meaningful when it came to South Africa, is meaningless when it comes to carbon. Politely asking ExxonMobil or Chevron to divest from fossil fuel is like asking McDonald’s to divest from burgers and fries or Ford to divest from cars. It's sort of like a mouse asking a lion to become vegetarian. The corporations are not going to quit their principal activity and raison d'être; it’s we who need to quit investing in them -- the step the board was balking at.

Climate activists speak the language of people who know that we’re in an emergency. The retirement board is speaking the language of people who don’t. The board members don’t deny the science of climate change, but as far as I can tell, they don’t realize what that means for everyone’s future, including that of members of their pension fund and their children and grandchildren. The words “fiduciary duty” kept coming up, which means the board’s and staff’s primary responsibility and commitment are to the wellbeing of the fund. It was implied that selling 3.3% of the portfolio for reasons of principle was a wild and irrational thing to support, no less do.

But it isn’t just principle. The pensioners receiving money from the board will be living on Earth, not some other planet. Exactly what that means in 10, 20, or 50 years depends on what we do now. That we, by the way, includes money managers, investors, and pension-holders, as well as politicians and activists, and you who are reading this. What, after all, does “fiduciary duty” mean in an emergency? Can you make sound investments on a planet that’s going haywire without addressing the causes of that crisis? In such circumstances, shouldn’t fiduciary duty include addressing the broader consequences of your investments?

What does the future look like for a person paying into the pension fund who will be 60 in 2050? One of my brothers is a city employee paying into that fund. What will the future look like for his younger son, who will be 87 in 2100? A retirement board fund manager spoke of emulating Warren Buffett, who recently bought Exxon shares. Buffett is 83. He won’t be around for the most serious consequences of his actions or Exxon’s. My sweet-natured, almost-walking, brown-eyed nephew Martin, who turned one on Sunday, will. I likely will, too, because it’s getting wilder on this destabilized planet, and even two decades hence is looking pretty grim.

Here’s what I wrote the board before the meeting:

“Not only prosperity but human health and food supplies depend on a stable climate, but it’s getting less stable all the time. How much we will lose, how much we will salvage depends on whether we act now. I get it that the board’s first responsibility is to the financial wellbeing of the fund. Even more so it’s to the pensioners, from those now receiving benefits to the youngest person paying in. But nothing exists in isolation: the stock market depends, whether or not Wall Street remembers, on weather, crops, strong markets for products, and the rest of what a stable world provides. And even a nice pension would not assuage the need of pensioners afflicted by tropical diseases moving northward, extreme heat that disproportionately affects the elderly, rising sea levels that take away billions of dollars of coastal California real estate -- including SFO runways and the city’s landfill areas. Crop failure and rising food prices, water shortages, dying oceans, climate refugees.”

Or as a leaked U.N. report recently put it, “The planet's crop production will decline by up to 2% every decade as rainfall patterns shift and droughts batter farmland, even as demand for food rises a projected 14%.”

I have great faith in the human ability to improvise, but there are limits to what can be done about a shrinking food supply and a growing population. The word not used in this cautious, conservative report is mass famine, which is very bad for your stocks. And infinitely worse for the people who are starving.

Another new report says, “Europe’s financial losses related to flooding, which now total about 4.9 billion euros a year, could increase almost 380% to 23.5 billion euros by 2050.” There are other versions of these dire projections about Asia, the Americas, and Africa. Studies about the future impact of climate change are one thing that’s not in short supply. You can focus on the oceans and fisheries, on polar ice, on species, on food supplies, floods, fires, hurricanes, and typhoons -- and in the language of the market, indicators are that catastrophe is going way, way up. How much depends on us.

Your House Is On Fire

A few weeks earlier, I went to a demonstration at the State Department’s San Francisco office with a NASA scientist friend who’s an expert on what makes planets habitable. She told me that we on Earth have been blessed by the remarkable stability of temperatures over the long haul and that for any planet the window of temperature in which life will thrive is pretty small. We’re already at the upper end of the viable temperature for an inhabitable planet, she told me. I’ve heard the news delivered a thousand ways about what we’re facing, but her version made me feel sick -- as if she’d told me my house was burning down. Which she had.

I was in Japan for the first anniversary of what they call the great Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that Americans often call Fukushima (a reference -- speaking of the unforeseen and of the failures of authorities -- to the six nuclear power plants trashed by the tsunami that began to fall apart in various highly radioactive ways). The country’s earthquake building codes worked well: hardly anyone was killed by the giant quake. Its tsunami alert system worked superbly, too: almost everyone was given plenty of time to evacuate.

But a lot of people didn’t move fast enough, or they trusted the sea walls and sea gates to protect them, or they evacuated to the right level for tsunamis in living memory. In many places, the waves were higher than any tsunami since 1896, and about 20,000 people died in the inundation, 90% by drowning. The most horrible story I heard as I toured the wreckage and talked to officials, survivors, and relief workers was about an elementary school. Its teachers argued about what to do: one of them took several students to safety; the rest of the school, teachers and small children alike, stayed put and drowned. Unnecessarily. Reacting strongly to a catastrophe is often seen as an overreaction, but the real danger is under-reaction.

During 9/11, survival meant evacuating the south tower of the World Trade Center. In 2011, survival on the northeast coast of Japan meant going uphill or far inland. Our climate crisis requires us to evacuate our normal ways of doing things. That will not always be cheap or easy, but divestment can be done now with no loss, even possibly with an upside, say many financial analysts. In any case, it’s the only honorable and sane thing to do -- for the young who will be alive in 2064, for the beauty and complexity of the world we have been given, including all the other living things on it, for the sake of the people who are already suffering and will suffer more because of the disruption of the elegant system that is the Earth we inherited.

© 2014 Rebecca Solnit

 

Rebecca Solnit is an activist, TomDispatch.com regular, and author of many books, the latest of which, The Faraway Nearby, was published in June, 2013. Her first essay for TomDispatch.com turned into the book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, since translated into eight languages.  Other previous books include: A Paradise Built in Hell, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, The Battle of The Story of the Battle in Seattle (with her brother David), and Storming The Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics.  She is a contributing editor to Harper's Magazine.