A couple days ago I read an interesting comment in the New York Times by Thomas Friedman, who is a bit less distinguished than those two high falutin professors: “The Wall Street bonus pool in 2014 was roughly twice the total annual earnings of all Americans working full time at the federal minimum wage. You read that right: Just the annual bonuses for just the sliver of Americans who work just in finance just in New York City dwarfed the combined year-round earnings of all Americans earning the federal minimum wage.”
In the USA, 94 of the top 100 feeder schools for Harvard are private and have very high tuitions average people cannot afford. Even with scholarships and efforts to be diverse, the class system that orients children toward these schools remains intact. Students from the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution comprise just 14 percent of the undergraduate population at the United States’ most competitive universities, and the ratio has barely changed for the last 30 years. These schools thus help perpetuate a class oriented, educational system. And worse, a class system that is racially informed.
It’s thus difficult not to see a certain hypocrisy in this smug and self-satisfied discussion between two professors about the injustices of income inequality, when they work in an educational system that is one of the strongest social forces maintaining it.
It doesn’t have to be so. In continental Europe, private schools are almost universally forbidden by law since they are seen as perpetuating class systems and other social problems. There is nothing like our class oriented system of private universities in any other developed country, except of course, the UK, that highly classist motherland that gave us so many of our values.
I wonder when Sachs and Krugman will let us know that places like Columbia and Princeton where they teach play a major role in maintaining social inequality in America. They make some good observations, but when it comes to the actual practice of progressive thought, they are pontificating phonies living high on a system of injustice they only selectively analyze.
A couple days ago I read an interesting comment in the New York Times by Thomas Friedman, who is a bit less distinguished than those two high falutin professors: “The Wall Street bonus pool in 2014 was roughly twice the total annual earnings of all Americans working full time at the federal minimum wage. You read that right: Just the annual bonuses for just the sliver of Americans who work just in finance just in New York City dwarfed the combined year-round earnings of all Americans earning the federal minimum wage.”
In the USA, 94 of the top 100 feeder schools for Harvard are private and have very high tuitions average people cannot afford. Even with scholarships and efforts to be diverse, the class system that orients children toward these schools remains intact. Students from the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution comprise just 14 percent of the undergraduate population at the United States’ most competitive universities, and the ratio has barely changed for the last 30 years. These schools thus help perpetuate a class oriented, educational system. And worse, a class system that is racially informed.
It’s thus difficult not to see a certain hypocrisy in this smug and self-satisfied discussion between two professors about the injustices of income inequality, when they work in an educational system that is one of the strongest social forces maintaining it.
It doesn’t have to be so. In continental Europe, private schools are almost universally forbidden by law since they are seen as perpetuating class systems and other social problems. There is nothing like our class oriented system of private universities in any other developed country, except of course, the UK, that highly classist motherland that gave us so many of our values.
I wonder when Sachs and Krugman will let us know that places like Columbia and Princeton where they teach play a major role in maintaining social inequality in America. They make some good observations, but when it comes to the actual practice of progressive thought, they are pontificating phonies living high on a system of injustice they only selectively analyze.