Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Here's A Thought
The Pew Charitable Trusts have announced a new project to study the state of the American Dream, or at least an important component of that dream.
We are all told that a great thing about America is that anyone, with hard work and dedication, can become anything he or she wishes to become--millionaire, celebrity, and even the President of the United States. But there is a countervailing force whereby a gap is growing between the "haves" and the "have nots," which has important implications. One of which is that if you start off in the "have not" category, it is not likely you will ever escape, particularly when you compare it to previous generations. Second, more and more people in the "have not" category start off convinced that the American Dream is not for them, and therefore there is not use in trying to escape. This adds to the problem of economic inequality.
The Project is called the "Economic Mobility Project," and one interesting component is to provide funding ($2.2 million) to partisan think tanks to see if they can work towards consensus on the state of the income gap and what realistic solutions exist to reduce it. The think tanks:
On the Left
The Brookings Institution
The Urban Institute
On the Right
The American Enterprise Institute
The Heritage Foundation
According to the Wall Street Journal, the four think tanks were chosen in order to build consensus between two very different political outlooks--"So much of public policy is people leading with their passions and partisanship rather than the facts. If we can get them to work together productively on a topic like this...it'll model the kind of behavior we think would be good. Coming together to solve problems rather than carving them up."
But it isn't clear why these four were chosen. First, Brookings is hardly the liberal counterpart to Heritage despite the fact that Heritage began under the claim that it would be an ideological counterbalance to Brookings. Yet it is much the same misleading rhetoric as Fox News serving as the counterbalance to CBS News. Second, for some groups such as Heritage or the Urban Institute, part of recruitment is to dispense with research that satisfy the partisans who are looking for confirmation. And if they are not getting it from Urban or Heritage, then they will go elsewhere, and there is no scarcity in the think tank market. Thus it will be a test for the four chosen to see whether they can set aside their differences in order to identify the problems that exist.
As the Genie in the old Warner Bros. cartoons said, "Three cheers and a tiger's tail for you."
|
We are all told that a great thing about America is that anyone, with hard work and dedication, can become anything he or she wishes to become--millionaire, celebrity, and even the President of the United States. But there is a countervailing force whereby a gap is growing between the "haves" and the "have nots," which has important implications. One of which is that if you start off in the "have not" category, it is not likely you will ever escape, particularly when you compare it to previous generations. Second, more and more people in the "have not" category start off convinced that the American Dream is not for them, and therefore there is not use in trying to escape. This adds to the problem of economic inequality.
The Project is called the "Economic Mobility Project," and one interesting component is to provide funding ($2.2 million) to partisan think tanks to see if they can work towards consensus on the state of the income gap and what realistic solutions exist to reduce it. The think tanks:
On the Left
The Brookings Institution
The Urban Institute
On the Right
The American Enterprise Institute
The Heritage Foundation
According to the Wall Street Journal, the four think tanks were chosen in order to build consensus between two very different political outlooks--"So much of public policy is people leading with their passions and partisanship rather than the facts. If we can get them to work together productively on a topic like this...it'll model the kind of behavior we think would be good. Coming together to solve problems rather than carving them up."
But it isn't clear why these four were chosen. First, Brookings is hardly the liberal counterpart to Heritage despite the fact that Heritage began under the claim that it would be an ideological counterbalance to Brookings. Yet it is much the same misleading rhetoric as Fox News serving as the counterbalance to CBS News. Second, for some groups such as Heritage or the Urban Institute, part of recruitment is to dispense with research that satisfy the partisans who are looking for confirmation. And if they are not getting it from Urban or Heritage, then they will go elsewhere, and there is no scarcity in the think tank market. Thus it will be a test for the four chosen to see whether they can set aside their differences in order to identify the problems that exist.
As the Genie in the old Warner Bros. cartoons said, "Three cheers and a tiger's tail for you."
