The Economist has a useful article on inequality in America, but even more useful is the collection of academic papers on that topic that the magazine has provided online. I picked a paper by Miles Corak entitled “Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults? Lessons from a Cross Country Comparison of Generational Earnings Mobility” (pdf).

Corak’s Table 2 tells a striking story. In the United States and the UK, half of a father’s economic advantage is transmitted (on average) to his son. (The data are limited to males for technical reasons.) There is a very high monetary return from investing in college education: 18.9 percent in the US. And there is a high correlation between fathers’ educational attainment and sons’ performance on a standardized test. In Scandinavia, by contrast, less than one fifth of a father’s economic advantage is transmitted to his son; there is a low rate of return to college (7.9% in Denmark) and not much of a correlation between fathers’ educational attainment and sons’ test scores. The other countries in the sample fall in between the US/UK and Scandinavia on all these measures.

Corak’s data are consistent with a picture of America as a highly competitive society in which those who perform well in school win great rewards. The best performers are the hardest working and smartest young people; thus the system feels like a meritocracy. However, high-performers usually have well educated and wealthy parents.

There cannot be law of nature that academic performance is heriditary, since the father/son correlations are much weaker in Canada and Europe. Instead, I suspect that American parents are able to effect their kids’ chances of success in the meritocracy by how they raise them.

For example, the size of a kid’s vocabulary is a valuable resource in school, yet Betty Hart and Todd Risley have found that three-year-old children of professionals have larger vocabularies than the parents of three-year-olds on welfare. There are profound differences in the way language is used, by social class. These differences are attenuated in European societies where the state is more likely to provide good daycare and where schools aim at equality.

I also wonder whether middle-class American parents work especially hard to give their children competitive advantages, because they realize the high stakes. Annette Lareau has found that suburban adults (without regard to race) try to use every second of the day in a “strategy of concerted cultivation,” to give their kids work- and school-related skills. Whereas working-class urban parents try to let their kids be kids–a strategy that would work much better in Sweden than in the USA.

We’re leaving today for a vacation in Venice. For the sake of my sanity, I’m not going to bring my laptop, and I’ll try to resist the temptation to open a browser if I see an Internet-equipped computer. So there will be no posts here until June 19.

I knew Zach Clayton back when. As a high school student, he was one of the two young people who contributed to the Civic Mission of Schools Report, a consensus document otherwise produced by 58 non-youth, including me. Now Zach is helping to organize Unity08, which proposes to field a bipartisan presidential ticket in 2008. David Broder writes in the Washington Post:

[Lindsay] Ullman and [Zach] Clayton, former presidents of the National Association of Student Councils, certainly are right when they say that many of their contemporaries are frustrated by the spectacle of both parties catering to entrenched interest groups and ideological extremes. Even though a senator from his home state, John Edwards, was on the Democratic ticket, Clayton said many of his friends ‘didn’t like the choices and didn’t vote’ in 2004.

Notwithstanding Zach’s personal experience, I have to disagree with his theory that partisan disagreement generally suppresses turnout. The ’04 election was a fierce competition between left and right, and voter participation was the highest since 1968–another year of political polarization. The increased competition seemed to have an especially beneficial effect on youth turnout, which was sharply up, above all in the “battleground” states.

I also disagree with the principle that we should avoid sharp disagreements between the national parties. On the contrary, voters deserve clearly defined choices. There are real disagreements in the population, not just in Congress. Politics is how we address those differences, and we shouldn’t paper them over.

However, there are reasons to favor a dose of bipartisanship at this particular moment. In Washington today, there is true partisan enmity: mutual hostility that prevents the parties from making progress even on those issues on which they happen to agree. Neither side is willing to make any sacrifices (e.g., to promote their own economic principles), because they know that the other will exact a political price for anything that causes short-term pain.

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There is obviously a hunger for politicians who speak from the heart. That’s the theme of Joe Klein’s new book, Politics Lost, which evokes the (supposed) sincerity of Bobby Kennedy in contrast to the falseness of today’s leaders. I have not read the book, but this excerpt is impressive.

I think Klein is exactly right that techniques for understanding audiences have become more sophisticated since 1968. The public “has been sliced and diced by … pollsters, their prejudices and policy priorities cross-tabbed, their favorite words discovered by carefully targeted focus groups.” People know that they are being analyzed, sorted, and manipulated (by politicians as by corporations), and they resent it.

At the same time, citizens have more information about politicians. All the public remarks of public officials are online and searchable, which makes them more cautious. In the name of “accountability,” pressure groups force candidates to sign pledges and then keep track of their votes. In this context, unscripted authenticity is especially dangerous.

But politicians have never been known for widespread sincerity. Lear, for example, imagines that Gloucester is a “scurvy politician” who “seem[s] to see the things thou dost not.” Politicians, whether in Shakespeare’s time or ours, are people who compete for favor. That competition is desirable in a democratic system. But it is abidingly difficult to win favor through straightforward honesty.

Furthermore, there are virtues of leadership that militate against sincerity. For instance, I think a full and honest appraisal of the alleged massacre in Haditha would be complex. It would recognize the extremely difficult position in which the Marines were placed, yet it would put moral responsibility on their shoulders (if they really massacred civilians). I’m not sure, however, that we want a president to lay out all these complexities. It may be better for him to state clearly that the United States has no tolerance, and makes no excuses, for murder.

Another example: I like rhetoric that calls us back to ostensibly traditional, American values of multilateralism and human rights. However, I couldn’t use such rhetoric myself in full sincerity. The United States has a long tradition of unilateral military adventures and human-rights violations. But saying so doesn’t call us to our best values, as good leaders do.

Klein uses Bobby Kennedy’s Indianapolis speech as an example of honesty and courage. Indeed, Kennedy took a huge risk when he broke the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination to an unsuspecting Black audience. As Klein notes, Kennedy couldn’t know in advance how they would react, and that uncertainty gave his speech an authenticity that is absent today. Klein is also correct that Kennedy respected his audience, which is the opposite of today’s manipulative campaigning.

However, consider statements like the following from the 1968 speech: “But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.” Was that literally true? Was it the whole story? Or was Kennedy trying to move his audience to support his ideals (and his candidacy) by appealing to their sense of their own virtue?

Kennedy quoted Aeschylus that night, calling him his “favorite poet.” If Kennedy really did prefer Aeschylus above all other poets, then he admired a pagan who believed that goodness lay beyond our control and that implacable fate was amoral. Yet Kennedy cited a passage from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in a translation that made it sound Christian. (“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”) Invoking divine “grace” was perfect for the occasion, but it was not what someone would believe who truly loved Aeschylus.

Obviously, that’s not a valid criticism of Kennedy’s speech. We ought to prize courageous moral leadership without making sincerity its hallmark. I suspect that we seek authenticity partly because of modern celebrity culture, with its public confessions and disclosures. We’re used to people who have nothing much to say but who are willing to expose their private lives and feelings. Most celebrities do not claim to be good, only to be candid; and the very fact that they are lying causes us to value sincerity. But candor is not the highest virtue for politicians. We ought to judge them on the content of their speech, not the fit between what they say and what they believe.

Otis White is nostalgic for the days of “strong and engaged local bankers,” men who worked their way up to become the “capi di tutti capi of civic leaders in most cities. … They ran important companies, but that wasn’t why they were powerful. Their power came from their continual involvement in civic work, an intimate knowledge of their communities and their occasional boldness.” (New York Times, June 1.)

I immediately thought: “redlining.” I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that those “civic bankers” of old helped to keep African Americans and Latinos confined to poor neighborhoods by refusing home loans. If that’s true, it should be part of the story.

Nevertheless, Otis is right that there was a positive side to the old banking industry–and all forms of commerce that are rooted in localities. As my colleague Stephen Elkin argues in a new book (Reconstructing the Commercial Republic: Constitutional Design after Madison), a free market always generates a politically powerful class. Perfect political equality is incompatible with the economic freedom that generates prosperity. However, it matters who holds disproportionate power because of their wealth. Madison counted on an agrarian elite, whose investments were tied up in land. Because they could not easily move their capital, they would have to worry about their communities and their reputations.

The same was true for banks in the 1950s-1980s. As Otis notes, “The law prohibited bank companies from owning banks outside their home states and sometimes even outside their home counties. So Citizens and Southern [National Bank] could grow only if Atlanta grew too.” Thus you could count on bankers for civic leadership, especially in dire situations like natural disasters. But today, “the top three banks in Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Washington and scores of other cities are owned by companies headquartered elsewhere. (In New Orleans, only one of the top three is owned locally.)”

Even the redlining example illustrates how incentives have changed. Discriminating against minority borrowers was completely immoral and indefensible. It was also economically irrational, but it supported a community norm (racial discrimination). Today’s international corporations, with their mobile investments, cannot advance any value–moral or immoral–other than maximum returns for their shareholders. When a Hurricane devastates New Orleans, the banks’ best response is to take their capital away, not to help rebuild the city.