Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

by Nicholas D. Kristof

Alan Krueger noted that income in America is approximately as heritable as height. “The chance of a person who was born to a family in the bottom ten percent of the income distribution rising to the top ten percent as an adult is about the same as the chance that a dad who is five feet six inches tall has of having a son

In retrospect, the school had shown irresponsibility in expelling Clayton and in failing to provide speech therapy, and he then responded with his own irresponsibility in cooking meth, but to think that an obese ninth-grade dropout with an outdated blue-collar skill set could lift himself up by his bootstraps is magical thinking.

Dee had never acquired the middle-class skill set to negotiate with a bureaucracy like a school. “They said they didn’t have the manpower to help the kids that were slow learners,” Dee recalled, and she didn’t know how to push back.

FCPS is a study in this

America’s military also is remarkable as a bureaucracy that offers much more support for those at the bottom than is typical in, say, large companies. The pay ratio between a general and a private is about tenfold, compared to three-hundred-fold between a bank CEO and a bank teller—and in the military both have access to the same insurance benefits.

One of the most infuriating elements of American myopia about investing in at-risk kids is that politicians often insist that they don’t have the funds to pay for social services—but they somehow find the resources to pay for prisons later on.

“As an economist, I am always asked: Can we afford to provide this middle-class life for most, let alone all, Americans?” notes Joseph Stiglitz. “Somehow, we did when we were a much poorer country in the years after World War II.” Our answer is, yes, as a nation, we can recover our footing.