Sunday Book Roundup

Jotwell has posted a review of Eliga H. Gould's Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard Univ. Press). In it Christina Duffy Ponsa writes "the book makes you feel like you’re looking at history through a 360-degree lens. A legal, diplomatic, and intellectual history spanning from the mid-18th century to the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the book situates the Revolution in the context of the evolving law of nations in a strikingly rich and detailed account. Everything, it seems, is in there."

The September issue of The Federal Lawyer is out and has reviewed several books of note: The Law of Armed Conflict: An Operational Approach (Wolters Kluwer Law & Business) by Geoffrey Corn, Victor Hansen, Chris Jenks, Richard Hackson, Eric Talbot Jenson, and Hames Schoettler Jr; Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America's First Women Lawyers (NYU Press) by Jill Norgren; Out of Order: Stores from the History of the Supreme Court (Random House) by Sandra Day O'Connor; as well as David O. Stewart's The Lincoln Deception (Kensington). Of the last book, reviewer JoAnn Baca provides an intriguing introduction:

"Lawyer and award-winning author David O. Stewart has written three nonfiction books—on Aaron Burr, Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, and the men who drafted the Constitution. But what happens when a historian comes across a story that cannot be proven by any fact he can uncover, yet it sparks his imagination? For Stewart, the answer is to leave his comfort zone and write a novel, allowing him to theorize and extrapolate, far from established facts, about a part of our history that fascinates many as much today as it did in 1865: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln Deception is the result of Stewart’s need to explore to his own satisfaction a vague suggestion of duplicity as yet undiscovered in the assassination of the President."

H-Net has added many reviews of interest to this week's roundup readers including several books that extend beyond the American context, such as David Lemmings's Crime, Courtrooms, and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700-1850 (Ashgate) here; and a review of two books including Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash's Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present (Oxford University Press) and Sean Scalmer's Gandhi in the West: The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest (Cambridge University Press). Elizabeth F. Thompson's Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Harvard University Press) is also reviewed. Seth Offenbach writes of Thompson's work:

"In the nearly three years since the Arab uprisings began, the expertise of Middle East historians has been in demand like almost never before, as observers attempt to understand the historical roots underlying the seemingly sudden popular challenges to long-standing authoritarian regimes. The result has been a surge in publications that are broad in their scope and appeal but limited in the depth of their analysis and historical insight. A strong exception to this trend is the recent work of historian Elizabeth F. Thompson, whose study on the rise of constitutionalism in the Middle East swiftly dispenses with the facile explanations of the Arab uprisings, instead offering readers a comprehensive yet nuanced look at the lasting impact of efforts to enshrine and institutionalize the language of justice across the region during the last two centuries. While the study is bookended by a discussion of the implications that these developments hold for the contemporary calls for universal rights, its substantive chapters provide a perceptive and deeply contextualized look at the common thread underlying a struggle that dates back to the premodern era."

For the Washington Post Johnathan Yardley reviews Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities by Craig Steven Wilder. Also in the Post is a review of Gerald R. Ford: An Honorable Life (University of Michigan) by James Cannon.

The Guardian reviews Churchill's Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race (Faber & Faber) by Graham Farmelo.

Maya Jasanoff reviews River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press) by Walter Johnson in the New York Review of Books. She finds:

"The artistry of River of Dark Dreams lies in the close-up—in Johnson’s mesmerizing attention to the “material” in historical-geographical materialism. In the pointillist style so dexterously displayed in his reconstruction of the New Orleans slave market, Soul by Soul, Johnson zooms in on the “nested set of abstractions” that made the Cotton Kingdom run: money, markets, maps, labor. “If you looked more closely,” he observes, “you would see that each abstraction stood at odds with the physical properties of the object it sought to represent.”River of Dark Dreams delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write “history from the bottom up”: from the soil tangy and pungent with manure, and the Petit Gulf cotton plants rooted into it, and the calloused fingers plucking its blooming, sharp-edged bolls. This is a history of how wilderness became plantations that became states, nations, and empires—of how an overseer’s lashes sliced into a slave’s back turned “into labor into bales into dollars” into visions of America’s future in the world."

This week readers can also listen to the New Books in History Podcast for a discussion with Tevi Troy, author of What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House (Regnery History).

On HNN, reviewer Bernard von Bothmer finds that American Umpire (Harvard University Press) by Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman "offers a sweeping, wide-ranging, and remarkably in-depth overview of the history of American foreign relations." HNN also reviews Thurston Clarke's JFK's Last Hundred Days (Penguin).

Salon has published an excerpt from Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (Hill and Wang) by Michael Stewart Foley.

Education in the US: Separate and Unequal

In a new study of 4,400 two and four year college and university systems by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW), "Separate and Unequal: How Higher Education Reinforces the Intergenerational Reproduction of White Racial Privilege,” it was found that the higher education system acts as a means of transferring White privilege from generation to generation. Further, the authors find that the percentage of White students at the 468 most well-funded and selective college and universities is increasing relative to the number of college age students of all races, while African American and Hispanic students are increasingly attending the 3,250 least well-funded, open-access two and four year colleges.

The top 468 colleges spend between two and five times more per student than open-access two and four year colleges leading to higher graduation rates giving their graduates a competitive advantage in the marketplace over equally qualified African American and Hispanic graduates of less well-funded institutions.

Anthony Carnevale, director of the center and coauthor, said, “The higher education system is color blind, in theory, but in fact operates, at least in part, as a systematic barrier to opportunity for many African-Americans and Hispanics, many of whom are college-qualified but tracked into overcrowded and underfunded colleges where they are less likely to develop fully or to graduate.”

Read more:
http://cew.georgetown.edu/separateandunequal/
http://cew.georgetown.edu/

Lebovic on "The World War II Origins of the Fulbright Program and the Foundations of American Cultural Globalism, 1945–1950"

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The latest issue of Diplomatic History includes an article by Sam Lebovic, an assistant professor at George Mason University and last year's winner of the ASLH's Paul Murphy Prize. The article is titled "From War Junk to Educational Exchange: The World War II Origins of the Fulbright Program and the Foundations of American Cultural Globalism, 1945–1950." Journal content is normally available only to subscribers, but for a limited time the publisher is providing open access to this piece. Here's the first paragraph:

This article uses a close history of the early years of the Fulbright program to explore the emergence of the global cultural program of the postwar U.S. state. While the Fulbright program has commonly been seen as either an exceptional example of U.S. global benevolence, or as part and parcel of the Cold War cultural offensive, I argue that the program emerged from a unique moment of cultural globalism in the liminal period between the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. Tracing the history of the exchange program to its curious origins in the foreign disposal of military surplus material, I show how both the practice and ideology of liberal educational exchange emerged from the global conflict with fascism, and reveal the nationalist assumptions and power-politics that underpinned the first U.S. state attempt to create a global flow of culture.

Lebovic has also blogged about this topic here, at the Oxford University Press blog.

Blokhuis to Lecture on Students Rights at the Kluge Center

On Thursday, June 27, at 12 p.m., Kluge Fellow J.C. Blokhuis discusses “Student Rights and the ‘Special Characteristic of the School Environment’ from a Jurisprudential Perspective” in the Woodrow Wilson Room (LJ-113), Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress. 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C.

Until 1966, constitutional rights were not for children. Minors and other legally incompetent persons had custodial interests, not liberty interests. Public educational authority in general and compulsory schooling laws in particular had been predicated on an expansive conception of the duty of the State as parens patriae to safeguard and promote the custodial interests of children.

The Supreme Court wrestled with the custodial implications until 1995, when the ‘special characteristics of the school environment’ were defined in a manner that explained why the constitutional rights of pupils could not be coextensive with those of adults. Professor Blokhuis addresses the difficulties associated with unqualified ascriptions of constitutional rights to minors, particularly in contexts designed to be custodial in the present and liberating in the future.

Webcasts of Kluge lectures go up approximately two months after the date of the program, here.

New Release: Shapiro, "Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools"

New from the University of Chicago Press, Adam R. Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (2013). Here's a description from the Press:

In Trying Biology, Adam R. Shapiro convincingly dispels many conventional assumptions about the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial. Most view it as an event driven primarily by a conflict between science and religion. Countering this, Shapiro shows the importance of timing: the Scopes trial occurred at a crucial moment in the history of biology textbook publishing, education reform in Tennessee, and progressive school reform across the country. He places the trial in this broad context—alongside American Protestant antievolution sentiment—and in doing so sheds new light on the trial and the historical relationship of science and religion in America.

For the first time we see how religious objections to evolution became a prevailing concern to the American textbook industry even before the Scopes trial began. Shapiro explores both the development of biology textbooks leading up to the trial and the ways in which the textbook industry created new books and presented them as “responses” to the trial. Today, the controversy continues over textbook warning labels, making Shapiro’s study—particularly as it plays out in one of America’s most famous trials—an original contribution to a timely discussion.

More information is available here.

Book Review Roundup

• Over at History Today, you'll find a review of Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and Why it Still Matters (Oxford University Press, 2013).

• From History News Network: a review of Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman's FDR and the Jews (Belknap, 2013)

• Subscribers to the Nation magazine will surely want to read Michael O'Donnell's review of The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution, by Marcia Coyle.

• From the New York Times: a review of Robert Kuttner, Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). 

• The NYT also covers two books on higher education: Is College Worth It? A Former United States Secretary of Education and a Liberal Arts Graduate Expose the Broken Promise of Higher Education (Thomas Nelson), by William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, and College (Un)bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students (New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by Jeffrey J. Selingo.

• From the Chronicle of Higher Education: check out Carlin Romano's thoughtful essay on "civility and sex speech," in which he spotlights Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate (Encounter Books, 2012), by Greg Lukianoff.   

The Book Review Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

New Release: Hadden & Minter, eds., "Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History"

This past weekend at OAH I had the pleasure of commenting on the panel "Race and Law: New Directions in Southern Legal History," chaired by David Lieberman (UC Berkeley) and featuring papers by Sally Hadden (Western Michigan University), Charles Zelden (Nova Southeastern University), and Patricia Minter (Western Kentucky University). The scholarship presented was terrific, but the real star of the show was Hadden and Minter's new edited collection, Signposts. According to the Acknowledgements, the "volume originated in a conversation many years ago, in the early morning hours before a long day at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting." It was fun to see the two editors, many conversations and conferences later, celebrating the product of their collaboration.

Here is a description of the book, from the University of Georgia Press website:

In Signposts, Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter have assembled seventeen essays, by both established and rising scholars, that showcase new directions in southern legal history across a wide range of topics, time periods, and locales. The essays will inspire today's scholars to dig even more deeply into the southern legal heritage, in much the same way that David Bodenhamer and James Ely's seminal 1984 work, Ambivalent Legacy, inspired an earlier generation to take up the study of southern legal history.

Contributors to Signposts explore a wide range of subjects related to southern constitutional and legal thought, including real and personal property, civil rights, higher education, gender, secession, reapportionment, prohibition, lynching, legal institutions such as the grand jury, and conflicts between bench and bar. A number of the essayists are concerned with transatlantic connections to southern law and with marginalized groups such as women and native peoples. Taken together, the essays in Signposts show us that understanding how law changes over time is essential to understanding the history of the South.

A few blurbs:

"Constitutional and legal history converge comfortably in this welcome rethinking of the southern legal heritage. Signposts is a milestone in the emergence of a more encompassing vision of the legal and constitutional history of the South."
—William M. Wiecek, author of The Birth of the Modern Constitution: The United States Supreme Court, 1941-1953 

"This collection is truly first rate, offering essays that plow new ground or offer fresh perspectives on more familiar topics. While the individual essays are more than worth the price of admission, together they offer rich insights into the ways law shaped and was shaped by southern society. Hadden and Minter have done an enormous service to the field of legal history by bringing this outstanding group of authors together in a volume that underscores the vitality of southern legal history and sets an ambitious agenda for future scholarship.—Donald G. Nieman, coeditor of Local Matters: Race, Crime, and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South

After the jump -- a table of contents. (I got a sneak peak through my OAH commenting gig):
Read more »

Marriage Still in Recession

The Pew Research Center released a new report detailing the continued decline of marriage in 2011.  Using data collected by the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, Pew reported on the 4.2 million Americans who tied the knot in 2011.  This continues the downward trend in marriage that began when the ACS began asking about marital status in 2008.

Half (51%) of all adults were married in 2011, as compared with 72% in 1960.  This downward trend occurred among all age and education groups, with the largest drop occurring among the less-educated.  Between 2008 and 2011, marriage among Americans without a high school or equivalent education fell by 14%, while those with a college degree only fell 10%.

More Chinese Women in Labor Force than Indian Women

Recent findings released by Gallupindicate that China’s female labor force participation rate (70%) is significantly greater than India’s (25%).  Not only are Indian women less likely to be present in their country’s labor force than Chinese women, women in India’s labor force are three times more likely to be unemployed (with an unemployment rate of 15%) than their Chinese counterparts (with an unemployment rate of 5%). Furthermore, women in China are nearly twice as likely to be employed full-time than women in India (21% verses 11%).  In addition, 53% of highly educated Chinese women reportedly hold a “good job” whereas only 17% of Indian women who received tertiary education maintain a “good job”.  There are also significant discrepancies in the literacy rates of Chinese females (91%) and the Indian females (50%).   In sum, Chinese women are much more likely to receive even a basic education than Indian women, and, among Chinese and Indian women who receive higher education, Chinese women are much more likely to find full-time employment. While the Chinese economy (with a 9% growth rate) is currently out-performing India’s economy, (with a 6.8% growth rate) China’s growth is expected to stall due to low fertility rates and an aging population. On the other hand, India’s population of working-aged citizens is expected to steadily increase until about 2030 and this can lead to major economic growth if India encourages greater female labor force participation.  

South Sudan Makes Strides in Education

A report recently released by the World Bank shows positive trends in the educational system of South Sudan. Between 2005 and 2009, roughly 700,000 more children were registered for school. The chances of a child going to school are also up by 20% compared to 10 years ago. Although there is reason to be optimistic about South Sudan’s educational system, it is evident that South Sudan is still struggling to catch up to other African countries. The country still faces the challenge of reaching children in poor rural areas and increasing the quality of the educational system since each salaried teacher, on average, has 80 children in their classroom. Additionally, the state also faces the challenge of evenly allocating the teachers to the states. Only about 32% of the teachers in Jonglei, the largest and most populous state in South Sudan, are government funded and 84% are government funded in Eastern Equatoria.

4th Graders Read for Fun Much More Than 8th Graders

According to the U.S. Department of Education, almost half (46%) of American 4^thgraders read for fun almost every day, and nearly three quarters read at least one to two times a week. Just 15 percent read never, or hardly ever.  8th graders on the other hand, read markedly less. Almost one in three (29%) report never or hardly ever reading, and just 21 percent read for fun almost every day. Female 8^thgraders read far more than male 8^th graders, with nearly a quarter reading every day compared to 40 percent of males. 4^th grade girls are also more likely to read frequently than boys. 

Obesity in America

Gallup’s assessment of obesity in America illustrates some interesting trends.  Blacks are more likely to be obese than any other race.  20.8% of Blacks received the distinction of falling into the obese class I.  8.8% were in obese class II and 6.0% in obese class III. The latter two categories are recognized as very obese.  Asians were the least likely to be obese with only 7.6% falling into obese class I, 2.1% in obese class II, and 1.0% in obese class III.  Overall, men are more likely than women to be obese, but a slightly higher percentage of women are categorized in obese class III (4.0% versus 2.9%).  Additionally, unemployed Americans are more likely to be obese than those who possess a job.  

Finally, both income and education are related to obesity levels.  As Americans obtain higher levels of education (the study tracks those with high school or less up to postgraduate degrees), they are less likely to be obese.  5.2% of those who earn less than $36,000 a year have BMIs high enough to be categorized in obese class III, compared to just 1.8% of Americans who earn greater than $90,000 a year.  

To be considered obese, one must have a body mass index (BMI) of over 30.  For a person who is 5 feet 9 inches, his/her weight would need to rise above 203 pounds to be classified as obese.  To fall under obese class III, that same person would need to weigh over 271 pounds.

American Indian Student Performance Suffers

The National Center for Education Statistics recently released its National Indian Education Study 2011, which tracks trends in American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) educational performance.  Schoolchildren in grades 4 and 8 across America take the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and their scores highlight the growing disparity in performance between AIAN and non-AIAN children.  While reading scores from 2005 to 2011 remained largely unchanged (AIAN students still lag behind non-AIAN in reading scores, however), the gap in scores on the mathematics portion of the test continues to widen.  In 2011, 4^th grade AIAN students scored 16 points lower than non-AIAN students, compared to 12 points lower in 2005.  8^th grade AIAN students scored 19 points less than non-AIAN students, a gap that has increased 4 points since 2005.  The study points to several factors that may influence these children’s educational performance.  83% of AIAN 8^th graders have a computer at home, compared to 93% of non-AIAN 8^th grade students, and only 50% of AIAN 8^th graders have over 25 books at home, 13 percentage points lower than the average non-AIAN 8^th grade student.

America at a Glance

The New York Times has extracted data from the Census Bureau's 2005-2009 American Community Survey in order to compose a map displaying the racial, socioeconomic, and educational composition of the U.S.  In terms of income distribution, there is a high density of Americans earning over $200,000 in the Northeast.  For instance, more than 15% of the population in Hunterdon, New Jersey, Fairfield, Connecticut, and Westchester, New York earn over $200,000.  Another map illustrating the percentage of foreign born residents shows a high concentration throughout much of California, southern Arizona, south and southwest Texas, and southern Florida.  Additionally,  New York City and the region surrounding it possesses a high percentage of foreign born residents. 

More Than 1 in 4 Fathers Live Apart From Their Children

Just in time for Father’s Day, the Pew Research Center released a study on children under the age of 18 living with their parents.  Since 1960, while the percentage of children living apart from their mothers has increased only marginally (from four to eight percent) the percentage of children living separately from their fathers has risen dramatically.  In 1960, 11% of children lived apart from their fathers, but in 2010, that figure has risen to more than 1 in 4 (27%).  Black and Hispanic fathers more likely to reside separately from their children at 44% and 35% respectively.  Educational attainment also plays a key role in predicting whether the father will live separately from the child, with only 7% of fathers with a college degree living apart from their children.  In the survey, 27% of fathers who live apart from their children say they had not seen their child once in the previous year, but 41% say they exchange calls and emails several times a week.

Internet Economy Expected To Grow Rapidly

As the world enters the information age, and the Internet continues to assimilate into the everyday lives of billions of people, the question begs: how impactful is the Internet to the economy?  The Economist has released a graph based on a recent report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) detailing the Internet’s contribution to the economies of the G20 countries.  The Internet economy in Britain is now larger than its construction and education sectors, comprising over 8% of GDP and forecasted to amount to over 12% by 2016.  BCG predicts that the Internet economy will grow at more than 10% annually, and by 2016, will comprise 5.3% of GDP in the G20 nations.  BCG also notes that as of now, the European Union has not capitalized on Internet revenues due to a lack of a single, all-encompassing digital market.

Disparity in Educational Attainment by Sex, Race Persists

A U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report on the educational attainment level of young adults shows that educational disparities among Americans of different races and sex continue to persist. Findings suggest that women are outpacing men in education: In October of the year they turned twenty-four years old, 19 percent of men had received a bachelor's degree, compared with 28 percent of women.

And the gap between whites and non-whites is also significant: "Non-Hispanic whites are nearly three times as likely as Hispanics or Latinos to have received their bachelor’s degree at age 24. Twenty-eight percent of non-Hispanic whites had received their bachelor’s degree, compared with 11 percent of non-Hispanic blacks and 10 percent of Hispanics or Latinos." The gap is apparent before college, too: "Non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanics or Latinos are about twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to be high school dropouts in the October they were age 24."

A Look at the Top 1% Shows Shift to Finance, Stability Within its Ranks and High Political Engagement

The Economist took a look at the top one percent and "the changing complexion of America’s rich." It highlighted Mitt Romney as a reflection of this change, because "the wealthiest 1% of Americans not only get more of the pie," but also because "they are increasingly creatures of finance." There have been wealthy presidential candidates before, but Romney represents "the first candidate from the world of high-octane finance."

The Economist writes of the shift to finance, "According to an analysis of tax returns by Jon Bakija of Williams College and two others, 16% of the top 1% were in medical professions and 8% were lawyers: shares that have changed little between 1979 and 2005, the latest year the authors examined (see chart). The most striking shift has been the growth of financial occupations, from just under 8% of the wealthy in 1979 to 13.9% in 2005. Their representation within the top 0.1% is even more pronounced: 18%, up from 11% in 1979." A graphic from the New York Times also focuses on the occupational distribution of the top one percent.

Also indicative of the shift to finance, it appears that the wealthiest of the wealthy are now employed in financial occupations, a change from years past. "[Steve] Kaplan [of the University of Chicago] and Joshua Rauh of Northwestern University note that investment bankers, corporate lawyers, hedge-fund and private-equity managers have displaced corporate executives at the top of the income ladder. In 2009 the richest 25 hedge-fund investors earned more than $25 billion, roughly six times as much as all the chief executives of companies in the S&P 500 stock index combined."

What does a household in the top one percent make? "The average household income of the 1% was $1.2m in 2008, according to federal tax data." But The Economist notes, "The ultra-rich skew that average upwards: admission to the 1% began at $380,000 in 2008." Of course, income is not the only measurement of wealth: "Measured by net worth, rather than income, the top 1% started at $6.9m in 2009, according to the Federal Reserve, down 23% from 2007."

The Economist cites Mr. Kaplan, who argues that the move to finance largely accounts for the growth in the wealth gap. "Updating a series developed by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, Mr Kaplan notes that the share of income going to the 1% reached an 80-year high of 23.5% in 2007, only to sink to 17.6% in 2009 as the financial markets deflated (see chart). The trend is even more pronounced for the top 0.1%, whose share of total income rose to 12.3% in 2007 but sank to a still disproportionate 8.1% in 2009."

Research indicates that inequality in the U.S., as measured by the share of total income that goes to the top one percent of earners, has grown faster than in other countries. The Economist surmises that among other factors, this development could be resulting from "the relatively large role of the financial sector in English-speaking countries...[as] even more of the top 1% work in finance in Britain than in America."

Chances are that if you are born wealthy, you are likely to retain your wealth as an adult: "Membership in America’s 1% is relatively stable; three-quarters of the households in the percentile one year will still be there the next. Although the proportion shrinks over time, one study found that the vast majority of the top 1% were still in the richest 10% a decade later." The reason for this is fairly straight-forward: "rich parents tend to produce rich kids." Their children go to college and graduate institutions at a disproportionately high rate; "According to Gallup, 72% of the 1% have a college degree, and half have a postgraduate degree; those are two to three times the proportion of the other 99%." Numbers also indicate, "The 1% are more likely to be married and to have children."

And if you're born wealthy, it's likely that you'll marry someone from a similar economic background. "The rich also increasingly marry people like themselves. Mr Bakija and his co-authors found that between 1979 and 2005, the share of spouses of the 1% who had blue-collar or 'miscellaneous' service-sector backgrounds declined slightly, from 7.9% to 6.4%. The share of spouses who worked in finance, property and law rose from 3.5% to 8.8%."

Individuals in the top one percent are likely to be politically active, and although their political preferences are somewhat "eclectic," they tend to lean toward the Republican party. "Politically, Gallup polls find that the 1% are more likely than the 99% to identify themselves as Republicans (33% to 28%) and less likely to be Democrats (26% to 33%)." They rate the budget deficit as their central concern, and unemployment as their second; the other 99 percent of Americans prioritize these concerns in the reverse order.  

The Economist writes that individuals in the top one percent "are far more politically engaged than the average 99-percenters," citing a study which showed that "68% make campaign contributions, nearly half had contacted a member of Congress and a fifth had solicited contributions on behalf of a candidate."

How would individuals in the top one percent describe themselves? Often, it is difficult to locate an answer: "Most of the 1% prefer not to talk about their good fortune."

New Study Shows Teachers--and Test Scores--Matter in the Long-Term

A new study by three economists suggests that elementary- and middle-school teachers who help increase their students' standardized-test scores have a significant, positive and lasting impact on those students' lives in the long term. Their influence extends beyond academics, as good teachers also mean "lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings," writes the New York Times. The study tracked the lives of 2.5 million students over 20 years, "allowing for a deeper look at how much the quality of individual teachers matters over the long term."

Although the economists set out to challenge the use of value-added ratings, which according to the Times "measure the impact individual teachers have on student test scores," researchers ultimately found that "controlling for numerous factors, including students’ backgrounds...the value-added scores consistently identified some teachers as better than others, even if individual teachers’ value-added scores varied from year to year." They concluded that "using value-added scores would lead to fewer mistakes, not more."

And the positive effect of teachers who increased student test scores was striking. The Times notes, "Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate. Multiply that by a career’s worth of classrooms." The researchers surmise that the same results would be obtained by replacing an average teacher with an excellent teacher: "Given the difficulty of finding, training and retaining outstanding teachers...the difference in long-term outcome between students who have average teachers and those with poor-performing ones is as significant as the difference between those who have excellent teachers and those with average ones."

The positive effect of an excellent teacher on one individual student is less impressive than that teacher's potential impact on the entire class taken together, of course. "All else equal, a student with one excellent teacher for one year between fourth and eighth grade would gain $4,600 in lifetime income, compared to a student of similar demographics who has an average teacher. The student with the excellent teacher would also be 0.5 percent more likely to attend college." Still, "students with top teachers are less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, more likely to enroll in college, and more likely to earn more money as adults."

The study will likely add fuel to the value-added score debate, as many people--and teachers' unions--"say that isolating the effect of a given teacher is harder than it seems, and might unfairly penalize some instructors." The researchers of this study are firmly on the other side: "The authors argue that school districts should use value-added measures in evaluations, and...remove the lowest performers." One of the researchers, Harvard Professor John N. Friedman, was quoted in the Times as saying, “The message is to fire people sooner rather than later.”

U.S. Poor Less Likely to Rise Ranks than Poor in Comparable Countries

Jason DeParle of the New York Times highlights a troubling development: The country of the frequently cited--and much lauded--American Dream is struggling to provide opportunities for economic mobility to its poorest citizens. America is falling behind comparable countries, and "Americans [today] enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe."


As Occupy Wall Street and the recession that helped bring about the movement's rise gain the public's attention, even the political right has started to acknowledge the seriousness of class differences. The Times comments: "Liberal commentators have long emphasized class, but the attention on the right is largely new."


DeParle identifies deep poverty and problems in the educational system as two central reasons for America's failure to sufficiently provide the necessary opportunities for social mobility. According to DeParle, the former "leaves poor children starting especially far behind," while "the unusually large premiums that American employers pay for college degrees...increases the importance of family background and stymies people with less schooling."

He cites a project led by Swedish economist Markus Jantti, one that DeParle says "found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) - a country famous for its class constraints."

Evidence that upward mobility is harder to come by may be especially bad news for the political right, which often responds to liberal complaints of economic inequality by pointing at the high mobility rate. DeParle writes: "While liberals often complain that the United States has unusually large income gaps, many conservatives have argued that the system is fair because mobility is especially high, too: everyone can climb the ladder." Now, however, "evidence suggests that America is not only less equal, but also less mobile."

A comparison with Canada, a country closer to the United States in its culture and demographics, is similarly discouraging. "Miles Corak, an economist at the University of Ottawa, found that just 16 percent of Canadian men raised in the bottom tenth of incomes stayed there as adults, compared with 22 percent of Americans. Similarly, 26 percent of American men raised at the top tenth stayed there, but just 18 percent of Canadians."