The result, as Edward Luce says, is that “studies show that an eighth grade (14-year-old) child from a lower income bracket who achieves maths results in the top quarter is less likely to graduate than a kid in the upper income bracket scored in the bottom quarter.
By weakening government, America has also taken away equality of opportunity. The slide began with Ronald Reagan saying that “government is not the solution government is the problem.” In most countries, especially in Europe, governments play a critical role in counter-balancing market forces and ensuring a level playing field for all citizens. How did the 1 percent seize both greater political and economic control in America? The answer is complex. Hence, they sadly conclude “in the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule – at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.” Two Princeton University political scientists, Gilens and Page, have documented in detail how political outcomes in America reflect the interests of the wealthy, not the mass voters. Anand Giridharadas, a former New York Times columnist, has observed that in terms of income increase since 1980, “that of the top 1 percent has more than tripled and that of the top 0.001 percent has risen more than seven-fold – even as the average pretax income of the bottom half of Americans has stayed almost precisely the same.” But the wealthy are not satisfied with seizing more wealth. The wealthy have seized most of the new wealth. What’s the evidence for this claim? It’s massive. Teddy Roosevelt also warned, “of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.” Yet despite these warnings, America has gone from a democracy towards becoming, for all practical purposes, a plutocracy, moving away from a government of the people, by the people and for the people to a government “of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%,” as noted by the Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates warned of the dangers of selecting captains of ships by their wealth. Throughout human history, wise men have warned of the dangers of plutocracy.
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