Bobo, in “The Next Culture War,” says the United States needs a revival of economic self-restraint to restore its financial values and make it a producer economy again, not a consumer economy. Bobo, honey, it’s hard to be a “producer economy” when most of the production jobs have been sent off shore. Just sayin’… Mr. Herbert, in “Peering at the Future,” says the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recognizes what some Americans do not: the importance of education as the pathway to personal and societal success. Here’s Bobo:
Centuries ago, historians came up with a classic theory to explain the rise and decline of nations. The theory was that great nations start out tough-minded and energetic. Toughness and energy lead to wealth and power. Wealth and power lead to affluence and luxury. Affluence and luxury lead to decadence, corruption and decline.
“Human nature, in no form of it, could ever bear prosperity,” John Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, warning against the coming corruption of his country.
Yet despite its amazing wealth, the United States has generally remained immune to this cycle. American living standards surpassed European living standards as early as 1740. But in the U.S., affluence did not lead to indulgence and decline.
That’s because despite the country’s notorious materialism, there has always been a countervailing stream of sound economic values. The early settlers believed in Calvinist restraint. The pioneers volunteered for brutal hardship during their treks out west. Waves of immigrant parents worked hard and practiced self-denial so their children could succeed. Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint.
When economic values did erode, the ruling establishment tried to restore balance. After the Gilded Age, Theodore Roosevelt (who ventured west to counteract the softness of his upbringing) led a crackdown on financial self-indulgence. The Protestant establishment had many failings, but it was not decadent. The old WASPs were notoriously cheap, sent their children to Spartan boarding schools, and insisted on financial sobriety.
Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, “Piss Christ” and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet.
Evidence of this shift in values is all around. Some of the signs are seemingly innocuous. States around the country began sponsoring lotteries: government-approved gambling that extracts its largest toll from the poor. Executives and hedge fund managers began bragging about compensation packages that would have been considered shameful a few decades before. Chain restaurants went into supersize mode, offering gigantic portions that would have been considered socially unacceptable to an earlier generation.
Other signs are bigger. As William Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, in the three decades between 1950 and 1980, personal consumption was remarkably stable, amounting to about 62 percent of G.D.P. In the next three decades, it shot upward, reaching 70 percent of G.D.P. in 2008.
During this period, debt exploded. In 1960, Americans’ personal debt amounted to about 55 percent of national income. By 2007, Americans’ personal debt had surged to 133 percent of national income.
Over the past few months, those debt levels have begun to come down. But that doesn’t mean we’ve re-established standards of personal restraint. We’ve simply shifted from private debt to public debt. By 2019, federal debt will amount to an amazing 83 percent of G.D.P. (before counting the costs of health reform and everything else). By that year, interest payments alone on the federal debt will cost $803 billion.
These may seem like dry numbers, mostly of concern to budget wonks. But these numbers are the outward sign of a values shift. If there is to be a correction, it will require a moral and cultural movement.
Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.
If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.
It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.
A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.
Here’s Mr. Herbert:
A whoop went up in the classroom and the teenagers became giddy when they realized that the man and woman being escorted to the front of the room were Bill and Melinda Gates.
“Ohmigod!” shrieked one girl, her eyes and mouth wide with astonishment.
“Are you the real Bill Gates?” asked another.
The Gateses were in the Algebra 1 class at West Charlotte High School (a venerable, mostly black institution that over the decades has reached academic highs and touched ignominious lows) to learn, not teach. They have been traveling the country trying to see for themselves what really works and what has gone haywire in public education in the United States.
Visiting classrooms is like peering into the nation’s future. Right now the view is somewhat frightening. American kids drop out of high school at an average of one every 26 seconds. Only about a third of those who graduate are prepared to move on to a four-year college. And in the savage economic downturn that has gripped the U.S. for the better part of the past two years, retrenchment in public schools and colleges is widespread.
For a country that once led the world in educating its citizens, we are now moving decidedly in the wrong direction. As Mr. Gates points out: “Our performance at every level — primary and secondary school achievement, high school graduation, college entry, college completion — is dropping against the rest of the world.”
This has consequences. As Melinda Gates notes: “America’s long history of upward mobility is in danger.”
The Gateses are co-chairs of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropic organization. They are investing billions of dollars and much of their considerable energy in an effort to spark not just change but a transformation in the way American youngsters are educated.
It’s an overwhelming challenge, and not all of their early efforts have borne fruit. Educating children in the U.S. means engaging issues like poverty and homelessness, racial and ethnic transformations and entrenched, outdated ways of doing things. But the Gateses seem determined to master this issue and do what they can to help reverse the current dismal trends.
As they met over two days with students, teachers, administrators and community college executives in Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, the intensity of their focus and concentration was striking.
“You can read about all of this stuff,” Bill Gates told me, “but it’s important to come out and see it, to spend time talking with the people involved, and to visit the bad schools as well as the good schools if you really want to understand and make a difference.”
The issues can be maddeningly complex. There are school districts in which much of the population is aging and predominantly white and the taxpayers are less than enthusiastic about supporting a school population that is largely poor and black or Hispanic. There are schools trying desperately to raise their test scores, an important measure of accountability, while at the same time trying to keep poor and struggling youngsters from dropping out — the very youngsters who are often a drag on overall test scores.
But the many challenges will have to be met and overcome if the U.S. is to maintain a successful society. The American work force is becoming increasingly black and Hispanic, and a two-year or four-year college credential has become a prerequisite to a middle-class standard of living. With that in mind, it’s not difficult to see how disastrous it is to have nearly 50 percent of minority kids dropping out of school before they even get a high school diploma.
“It is so important,” said Melinda Gates, “to get all of the children educated.”
The Gateses are committed, but they need so many more to follow their lead.
I’m not sure how or why so many Americans over the past few decades took their eyes off the critical importance of education as the pathway to personal and societal success. In their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz pointed out that educational attainment in the U.S. “was exceptionally rapid and continuous for the first three-quarters of the 20th century.” And then, foolishly, we applied the brakes and advancement “slowed considerably for young adults beginning in the 1970s and for the overall labor force by the early 1980s.”
If you don’t think we’re paying a price for this, just look around.
A student in the Algebra 1 class at West Charlotte High summed up the matter cogently when she said to the Gateses, in a voice that was not the least amused: “People seem to think it’s cool to be stupid. But it’s not.”
